Launching a New Community: An Interview with Navigating Cancer’s Community Manager

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Customer Communities, Marketing Musings

Customer communities and health care are a natural fit—we need connections most when we’re dealing with complicated, scary things. Whether for care providers or for patients, online resources can provide support, perspective, and knowledge to help manage treatment.

A new health community is launching today that aims to do exactly that: Navigating Cancer, a Seattle-based company, will offer information, tools, and connections to support users’ journeys through diagnosis and treatment. We got a chance to sit down with (or at least email with) Marika Burkhart, Navigating Cancer’s Community Manager.

What skills have you found are most important as a community manager?

Good communication skills, empathy; being flexible but consistent. An online community finds its own voice – as a community manager, it’s my job to witness, facilitate, and support that voice.

What has been the biggest challenge so far in launching a new community at Navigating Cancer?

Keeping people happy from beta to launch is no small task; they have to stick with you through bugs, error pages, and website changes. Luckily, we have a loyal community – along with an amazing group of engineers who make technical miracles happen every day.

Starting a new online community from scratch is obviously difficult; what have you found to be most effective in bringing people into the community as participants?

Highlighting the practicality (and differences) of our website has been key. We offer more than just online emotional support – patients can create and manage a secure patient health record, keep a daily record of their well being and side effects, and create summary reports that can be shared with their healthcare team. The community has responded positively to these features and have spread the word of their own volition. That’s an ideal way to build a community: through positive feedback and word-of-mouth recommendations.

How is the Navigating Cancer community moderated or guided? How do you maintain a balance between positivity and open speech, or does the community regulate itself?

The community connects with each other through Groups, Discussions, and Shared Experiences. Our community managers are there to answer questions, introduce topics, join discussions, and provide site support to our patients and their supporters. As more people join, we’ll have a better idea of how to regulate as the site is shaped by participants. As always, staying open to feedback and being willing to implement changes will be instrumental in the growth of our community.

What are you most excited about and most worried about as you see it launch?

I’m excited about: seeing the community unfold and surprises along the way. I’m worried about: surprises along the way!

Marika is a veteran blogger with experience in the client service industry, community development, and social media.

Pass it along: sharing, filtering, engaging

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Customer Communities, Marketing Musings, Social Media

Last weekend, as I wandered through the farmer’s market, I discovered a storefront I’d never been inside before. Just inside the door was a gorgeous display; of course, I pulled out my phone to take a picture. As soon as I got the picture, a man rushed over to me and asked me—brusquely, but politely—to please ask before taking pictures. “Of course!” I said, “I can delete it right away! So sorry.” He assured me that I needn’t delete it and explained they’d had trouble with people copying some of the designs for sale. I asked for a business card, apologized for my thoughtlessness, and left (with permission to post the picture).

The experience of being personally chided for the very possibility that I might steal designs without giving credit reminded me of the recent etiquette and culture debates I’ve seen on Tumblr, Twitter, and Delicious (the 3 networks I’m most active in personally). It feels like everyone is worried about attribution. As things get easier to pass around and pass along, our reputations (as organizations and individuals) depend on what we share as much as what we create.

Interestingly, this can also offer a new model of customer engagement. Newsweek, for instance, has a Tumblr blog that links to Newsweek and external content, provides an easy way for readers to share Newsweek articles, and—last but not least—enables Newsweek to reblog readers’ best content and suggestions. On websites and traditional blogs (like this one), user-generated content is often relegated to the wilds of comment sections or discussion boards. Newsweek’s Tumblr interacts with users as equals (while maintaining order through careful curation). Suddenly, an organization that seemed faceless and one-sided is a potential reader or partner in conversation; to me, this seems like the very heart of customer engagement.

Pop quiz:

  • What kind of attribution do you expect from your network?
  • What makes you trust re-tweets (RT), reblogs, or links? What makes something worth passing along?
  • How do you think Twitter’s new RT feature (currently in limited rollout) will affect attribution and engagement?

Customer Engagement lessons from the gaming world

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

Last week, two apparently unrelated things conspired to get me thinking about community, customer feedback, and how to turn customer engagement into smarter, better-informed products.

First, Projectline’s book club gathered to chat about Clay Shirky‘s Here Comes Everybody, which does a great job of explaining the social and organizational changes we’re seeing as the internet enables rapid sharing and easy communication. In our conversation, we spent a lot of time trying to puzzle out what new ways of organizing will mean for everyone doing business online (and offline). Shirky’s examples compellingly illustrated that traditional organizations are often terrible at predicting just how users will wind up using what they make. We didn’t quite solve the question of how to balance the need to monetize (which sometimes takes the form of restricting use) with the desire to provide the flexibility to let customers determine the use of the product (which often makes it much more widely used).

Second, Ars Technica reported on the PC release of popular video game Modern Warfare 2, which has been (and continues to be) wildly successful as a console game. In what looked like an effort at customer engagement, Best Buy hosted a question-and-answer session between Infinity Ward (the game developer) representatives and PC gamers. But instead of fostering real engagement, the conversation wound up highlighting the game’s fundamental disregard for PC gamers’ myriad ways of playing.

Continue reading →

Lessons from the Summit on Customer Engagement

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

Eric and Anika at the Summit on Customer EngagementFellow Projectliner Anika and I attended the 2009 Summit on Customer Engagement in Quincy, MA on October 19-21. We’ve finally managed to recover and really process all the great presentations on using customer input to drive corporate decisions.

Tim Thorsteinson (President of the Harris Corporation) and Sean Geehan (@seangeehan and Founder of the Geehan Group) started off The Summit by talking about how Harris drives corporate strategy through their Executive Advisory Board. Great presenters from AT&T, National Instruments, Microsoft Interoperability Council, and Intel followed with stories and advice about using advisory boards comprised of influential customers to guide and inform business decisions.

What’s stuck with me longest?

It was exciting to hear from Citrix’s Chris Fleck (@chrisfleck) about how customers’ voices can directly sway new product development. In his presentation, he mentioned that Citrix had intended to build a new Blackberry application. But, suspecting they needed more info, he blogged the question, “Do you want Citrix XenApp to run Windows apps on the iPhone?” When his post got more than 500,000 views, he used the interest to get resources assigned to building an iPhone app. By tuning into customer needs, they were able to prioritize the app that customer wanted most.

So, what’s next?

There seems to be a movement to integrate broader community-based engagement plans, like Citrix’s, with more narrowly focused advisory boards. As companies engage with customer communities, they have the chance to use community input alongside feedback from advisory boards and other councils. By posing questions to both the community and to advisory boards or internal leadership, you can find out whether there’s a single clear direction. Even when there isn’t a straightforward consensus, clear, genuine communication will let your community members and advisory board know you’re listening. Open lines of communication also mean that, if you change your mind based on the reaction from an advisory board or community, you can admit you’re wrong and amend your decision.

The big takeaway:

We came back ready to start working on coordinating advisory boards, communities, and all the other ways of engaging customers. With transparency and responsiveness, they can work together to strengthen your customer relationships—which is always the top priority around here.

Why the new FTC Guides are good for you (we promise).

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Customer Communities, Customer Evidence, Marketing Musings, Social Media

In about a month, the FTC’s new Guides for using endorsements and testimonials in advertising will go into effect (read the press release or the full text in PDF). It can be easy to get sidetracked by a narrow understanding of endorsements, but these guidelines have implications for all kinds of marketers.

So, what’s the big deal? How will this affect customer engagement marketers?

(Keep in mind: we’re not lawyers, and we’re not giving you legal advice.)

  • The new Guides throw out the old loophole that let advertisers get away with putting a cursory disclaimer next to an exaggerated claim (i.e. “Results not typical”). They stress that one way to avoid implying typicality is by providing the details of the situation—we think the best way to do that is a thorough, detailed case study!
  • The revisions explicitly address new and social media, stressing that “consumers’ willingness to trust social media depends on the ability of those media to retain their credibility as reliable sources of information” (see page 11). Arguing for transparency and honesty, they make clear that both advertisers and endorsers can be liable for obfuscation or dishonesty.
  • The Guides expand potential liability to the endorser, which makes sense in the context of blogs and customer communities. The key to avoiding the pitfalls of consumer-generated endorsement-confusion? Clear policies and processes.

So, are the new guidelines good or bad?

Of course, there are some tricky things about the Guides. You’ll want to make sure you have someone monitoring or managing your social media presence, blogs about your products, and customer communities. You’ll need to double-check that you have solid processes in place for reviewing and approving consumer-generated content. You’ll have to make sure that final editorial pass has legal and ethical issues in mind.

But ultimately, we think the revisions are pretty great. Social media, testimonials, and customer stories are only as powerful as the trust between companies and their clients. The FTC’s choice to weigh in (relatively) early, rather than in a few years, is only a good thing for those of us who know the real value of customers’ trust.