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Events On Our Mind: IBM Connect and Enterprise 2.0 Summit

February 5, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Winter is a great time to plan to be away from snowy (very snowy today) Massachusetts. Our co-founder Rachel did just that and spent last week at IBM Connect 2014 in sunny Orlando, FL, and will be jetting off to Paris (which might not be balmy, but it’s Paris) next week for the Enterprise 2.0 Summit.

These are two very different events and I wanted to get the scoop from Rachel on what drove her interest in each. Below is a short interview with Rachel – highlighting her views on both events and recommendations for conference goers in general.

The focus of this year’s IBM Connect was “Energizing Life’s Work,” – how did you see that theme play out through your experience there?

There were literally hundreds of events – from panels like “Avoid Being a Social Zombie in a Global World” to multi-day innovation and design labs; the event definitely had a hands on feel. I got to take part in several interactive events, really targeted at applying expertise and case studies to real-life challenges. Personally, I walked away energized by the number of interactions I had that are already lending themselves to collaboration. One quick example – I took part in a great lunch roundtable celebrating Community Manager Advancement Day and walked away already discussing the possibility for an ebook. Everyone there was focused on applying the discussions and interactions back to their life and their work immediately, and it was exciting to see – and energizing!

Seeing a large enterprise like IBM shine a spotlight on social business is refreshing. What do you think was the key social take-away for attendees?

The event was so large I don’t feel like I can pinpoint the key take-away, but there was a sense of “this is now” in every meeting I had and every session I attended. Enterprises are focusing of social business as a vital component of a successful strategy – certainly a shift from where they were five or even three years ago.

Worth noting is the Social Business Symposium – an education package for undergrad and grad students.  I took part in an interview focused on internal collaboration that will be distributed on the Social Business Symposium platform (a newly launched website) with interviewer/host Peter Cardon, Professor at USC. I haven’t seen the finished product yet but I love that the discussion of social business and community management is making its way into the curriculum of both undergraduate and graduate programs.

You interacted with a lot of new faces through some of the events you took part in. Can you share a highlight?

I was lucky enough to host the CMAD roundtable and a “Social Buzz chat” in the IBM Connect Social Cafe. But as with many events, a lot of the conversations came from one-on-one discussions as part of bigger events. At lunch we had fun discussing what creature our communities reminded us of – and what creature we would prefer it reminding us of. My favorite response was that one community culture was like a bunch of monkeys – very intelligent but just wanting to have fun – and the community manager said their preferred creature would be ants – individuals working in concert to do something they could not do alone.

I also got the opportunity to catch up with some of our members and clients and dig more deeply into their challenges and opportunities, which I can never get enough of as I find the process of transforming businesses and cultures to be fascinating.

I’m already looking forward to Connect 2015 – and thinking about trying to plan my calendar to fit even more in. There were so many sessions that I would have loved to take part in and want to take advantage of next year.

The Enterprise 2.0 Summit is next week in Paris. Can you give us an overview for anyone not familiar with the event? 

The Enterprise 2.0 Summit is held in Paris and is primarily focused on enterprise and social business practitioners in Europe. This year the main theme is “Getting Social Enterprise Ready” which I think will include how organizations adopt and adapt technology solutions, as well as how companies implement social business across the organization. As part of that, I will be running a workshop on internal community management training – something I’m very excited to deliver as we recently finished developing this course with a client and I believe it is the first of its kind focused on addressing the needs of community managers focused on internal employees.

You’ll be speaking on a panel “Driving the Engagement & Adoption” can you give us a sneak peek on the discussion? 

In an interview with Rogier Noort on the Enterprise 2.0 blog I share that the three hashtags that best describe my talk are #motivation, #ability and #triggers. I’ve found that  striking the right balance between those things will increase engagement and they are part of a template we’ve built called an “Engagement Recipe” which uses the research of B.J. Fogg, founder of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab.

The panel also includes some great social business names – Björn Negelmann,  Claire Flanagan, Guillaume Guerin and Laurent Pantanacce. More than anything I’m looking forward to the different perspectives on engagement that each person brings to the discussion.

Final question, a softball. Besides the great conversations and connections at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit what are you looking forward to in Paris? 

I truly am most excited about connecting with new and old friends in Paris – Enterprise 2.0 Summit is chock full of experts and peers that now have lots of experience to share. However, our team member Maggie has spent a lot of time in France and she’s been psyching me up with the talk of macarons and wine bars – I’ve already planned a number of fun dinners with clients and partners that will be a little bit business but more than a little bit fun.

Thanks Rachel! Have a great time in Paris – we’ll post a recap when you’re back! 

Jay Batson on Open-Source Communities

April 28, 2011 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management. Our series continues with episode #24, featuring Jay Batson, VP and Founder at Acquia, a provider of commercial services around the Drupal open-source web platform.

Podcast highlights include:

  • Considering long-term health of an open-source community hen launching a commercial enterprise from within it
  • The kinds of companies adopting open-source community platforms
  • Can developer communities provide examples for other types of communities

Download this episode

Subscribe to this podcast series

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

https://media.blubrry.com/608862/communityroundtable.com/podcasts/CwCM_jaybatson.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Christopher Barger on the “Immerse and Disperse” Method

December 9, 2010 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management. Our podcast series, Conversations with Community Managers (a co-production with The Community Roundtable), continues with episode #16, featuring Christopher Barger, Global Director of Social Media at General Motors. Highlights include:
  • The “immerse and disperse” method of cross-training social media staff; immersing them via a consistent training program, then dispersing them to represent different divisions of the company
  • Using internal communities to identify creative thinkers who might not otherwise surface
  • Why a Fortune 500 company would bother sponsoring small events
  • Measuring results, both long- and short-term, using GM’s participation in SXSW as an example

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

PHOTO CREDIT: Becky Johns

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

https://media.blubrry.com/608862/thecr-podcasts.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/CwCM_chrisbarger.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Alcoa Case Study – Social Business and Observable Work

November 18, 2010 By Rachel Happe

One of the sessions at the Enterprise 2.0 conference was lead by Brian Tullis and Joe Crumpler of Alcoa Fastening Systems (yes, Alcoa uses social processes and tools which means you can too…) and they spoke about how social tools make work ‘observable’ and its implications. One direct implication for them is that they no longer need to hold daily status meetings which means a 30% increase in the amount of time people have to actually DO work (and I would surmise an increase in work satisfaction since few people I know enjoy status meetings). Instead, managers watch the work streams of their teams and intervene only when they can help or when there is an issue. Sounds refreshing, doesn’t it? As a manager I know that generally speaking I like to leave my team members alone and I only tend to jump in if I don’t know if work is being completed or if the work needs more support or resources to be completed. One of the ways I’ve annoyed team members is by repeatedly asking if things have been done because if I can’t see it, I don’t know. Making that work observable makes many of those interactions (and the time spent doing it) go away.

Culturally at Alcoa, this has taken some work to make individuals comfortable with sharing ‘in process’ work rather than completed work. For more traditional cultures this is a big transition and can feel at the individual level like you are opening yourself up to criticism when you haven’t even finished something.  I don’t know when my own perspective on this changed but these days, I will hardly ever even send a draft of something for review out before getting feedback on an outline.  Once I have an agreed upon outline, I will do a draft and then send that out for review and then the final or – if collaborating internally – use shared Google docs or a wiki.  For me, it is all about efficiency and setting the right expectations so I get the right feedback at the right time.  If I send a completed document out for review without any prior reviews and then someone takes issue with the document’s structure, it requires a lot of of tearing apart and rebuilding (i.e. wasted work). I’ve come to greatly appreciate having input throughout the process.  However, I have also had interactions with clients or partners that work in more traditional ways and have had confusion about a pre-deliverable review process so I know I need to work on being more explicit about my own expectations.

Brian and Joe brought up the issues around perfection and trust that this process requires.  Collaborating colleagues must trust each other in order to effectively review and use in-process work without assuming that the information is bad because the presentation is not perfect.  In this new environment a lot of work is never ‘complete’ in the way we used to understand it – it is just one of many versions and as new information/understanding is discovered, it is woven in to the document. I might argue that the term document is also a bit obsolete because of this – with a wiki page it is a knowledge flow or a knowledge repository rather than a static ‘document’.  Because these knowledge stores are never ‘complete’ or ‘perfect’ and the trust factor becomes more pronounced, building strong relationships between colleagues that are interested in a particular knowledge area becomes critical – what we often refer to as communities of practice. Documents and knowledge become much harder to separate from their sources which also create more awareness of individual employees and their contributions.  All of these trends are positive:

  • The speed of knowledge exchange increases
  • Some of the administrative annoyances of work go away
  • New knowledge can be incorporated quickly
  • There is less wasted work due to in-process feedback
  • Individuals get more recognition for the contributions they make

However, the shift is profound. The whole way we think of completed work product and management changes and it is an unsettling change because, like all big change, it requires a leap of faith on the part of each individual. Individuals need plenty of assurances that they won’t be exposed or criticized and that requires that they trust their colleagues – many of whom they may have never met in person.  There are some good ways to start given the trust factor:

  • Start with a group small enough to have some collective trust but big enough to see some network effects
  • Start with a wide group but a topic/knowledge area that is neutral – an example might be employee charitable or social activities
  • Start with a new business area vs. an established product/service delivery process because often the risk is seen as inherent for new innovations but often an unwelcome addition to existing revenue streams.

Learning from others is also an important aspect. See more about how Alcoa thinks about this problem:

In the Flow: Patterns of Observable Work (e2conf preso w/speaker notes)

View more presentations from btullis.

The Inextricable Link Between Social Media and Enterprise 2.0

October 25, 2010 By Rachel Happe

Social media and enterprise 2.0 are largely thought of separately these days, in large part because social media primarily affects communications and relationships with constituent groups outside of the organization and enterprise 2.0 addresses collaboration and innovation behind the firewall.  In reality, organizations will find that by doing one they must address the other. Why?  Social technologies significantly reduce the cost of content creation, distribution and discovery, thereby significantly increasing the speed of information and value transfer.  If implemented on one side of the corporate firewall but not the other, it creates an imbalance that grows quickly, increasing tension and strain felt in other parts of the organization.

In most cases, the information environment outside the organization is changing far more rapidly than the information environment internally. Customers, partners, prospects, and employees can find, access, and share information in a way that corporate infrastructure, security, culture, and policies inhibit.  Organizations are having a hard time keeping up with – never mind responding to or taking advantage of – these new environments. As organization do adapt, the external environment is continuing to speed up and become more efficient at arbitraging information and value. In a particular market that means the advantages go to people and organizations that are first to see the opportunity. If as an organization, you have built a robust social media ecosystem for marketing and customer support, but have ignored applying social and networked communications technology internally, new opportunities will be found quickly in the market only to hit a brick wall once introduced internally.  On the flip side, if you’ve applied internal social technologies that enable rapid innovation and collaboration, but you have no external channels by which to inform your market and gather feedback rapidly, that innovation will have limited value to the organization.

Those companies that have been at this a little longer than others realize this and we are starting to see how radically it is affecting their entire enterprise – Dell, SAP, EMC, CSC and many others now understand that this is not about a Facebook or blogging strategy, it’s about increasing the speed of business and increasing their competitive advantage. It’s no longer a question of if, but when.

Is your organization the one hitting the gas pedal or are you still riding the brakes?

If you are interested in sharing and collaborating with other professional in charge of enterprise social initiatives, come explore what membership in The Community Roundtable has to offer.

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Assessing Social Business Maturity – Getting to Stage 2/Emergent Community

July 14, 2010 By Rachel Happe

When we originally developed the Community Maturity Model, we thought of it as a tool that organizations of all sizes could use in creating a baseline understanding of where they were on the path to becoming a ‘social’ organization.  Additionally, it was designed to provide organizations with a general roadmap of the competencies and milestones needed to operationalize a social layer within their organization.

Recently we had a large corporate client take the Community Maturity Model and build out an organizational gap analysis using both the model and the best practice research that was published in The State of Community Management report. We’ve taken that work and created a template for our other members – giving them a huge jump start in creating a document that is easy to understand and communicate to other organizational stakeholders. In addition, we have created baseline assessment criteria to help organizations better understand where they fit on the model and identify the milestones and deliverables that are typically associated with the next stage of maturity. These criteria were developed based on our work with many companies and our understanding of the typical pathways to becoming a social organization.

In Stage 1/Hierarchy, where there is no organized initiative around social business, community management, or social media use it is easy to assess – there are no identifiable artifacts of an emergent community management discipline – no policies, no people responsible for it, no planning – although there may be a lot of ad hoc or informal use of social tools by employees.

Stage 2/Emergent Community defines an organization that is actively pursuing a social business strategy and has begun to lay the operational groundwork to support that, but has not yet realized full deployment and scale. Moving in to Stage 2/Emergent Community, there are standard indicators of organizational evolution, including:

  • A documented active listening strategy
  • One or more people explicitly responsible for social listening
  • One or more social business leads have been identified
  • There are some places where constituents (customers/partners/employees) can comment and/or contribute to a company sponsored conversations. (this might be a Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn account, a blog, or a support forum)
  • A centralized ‘social’ team has a documented roadmap and identified gaps
  • Corporate accounts are established on the major social networking sites – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
  • A basic listening toolset has been identified and is actively used
  • Basic metrics – number of participants (members/fans/followers), pageviews, and number of comments – are tracked and reported to functional managers

The above indicators are those we feel are required elements to be  in the Emergent Community stage, but there are additional elements that very likely exist in this stage as well, including a documented social media policy, and active social media presence, an executive sponsor, a dedicated social media or community manager, and an internal social software pilot – among many other possible initiatives that may exist in this early stage of maturity.

Are there early milestones that we missed that you feel are required elements for companies that are seriously pursuing a social business approach? We’d love to hear from you.

Find this interesting? We use the Community Maturity Model to organize content and programming in TheCR Network and to advise clients. Consider joining TheCR Network as a member to discuss this an many other topics with peers and industry experts.

Alex Plant on B2B Social Media

June 10, 2010 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management.

Episode #11 features Alex Plant, head of social media for NetApp. Among his overall social media duties, Alex oversees a video studio and a staff of videographers and editors.

Podcast highlights include:

  • The effective use of video for social media content in a B2B setting
  • While the technical audience for B2B social media is strong, the real growth is expected in the business-level audience
  • The intersection of social media and traditional marketing; including calls to action as a crucial part of engagement
  • Measurement- tying awareness building measurements such as share of voice and sentiment to traffic generation
  • Blogs are very powerful tools for capturing people’s attention (still!)
  • The effectiveness of feeding ideas to bloggers and other influencers to keep a constant flow of external content
  • Determining whether or not to have separate subject channels for separate audience to maintain high levels of relevance, interest and engagement, while maintaining control over the overall content direction
  • Internal culture; the value of support from the top
https://media.blubrry.com/608862/thecr-podcasts.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/CwCM_alexplant.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Enteprise 2.0 Conference 2010: You Say Social Media, I Say Community – Does It Matter?

June 9, 2010 By Rachel Happe

Enterprise 2.0 is coming up next week and it is one of the events I look forward to every year for a wide variety of reasons – the programming, the people it attracts, and the innovative use of technologies they use as part of the conference all make it stand out.  Over the past few years that I’ve attended it has also evolved from a relatively IT-centric view of social technologies to a more balanced perspective and the issues of use, optimization, and management have become more prominent.

Programming – the Enterprise 2.0 board works hard to deliver a lot of cases studies and practitioner voices. To me this is critical to understanding not just the theory of what could be but the reality of what is being accomplished which provides a much better guide for others in setting their own objectives.  Enterprise-wide social initiatives are one of the more complex undertakings because they almost always include some element of cultural and behavioral change which is much harder to accomplish than basic software adoption alone.

People – The Enterprise 2.0 community is made up of a rich stew of enthusiastic professionals attacking the issues from a variety of perspectives. One thing that I am happy to see is more merging between the discussion of internal and external deployments of social technologies.  While the social media and the Enterprise 2.0 crowd has been fairly separate, having some cross-pollination is great. Speaking with a number of large organizations – many of which started with either internal or external initiatives – they are now looking at how to cross their own corporate boundaries and integrate internal and external conversations at some level making it critical that as an industry we address both ends of the spectrum.

Innovation – Enterprise 2.0 was the first conference that I attended, which not only had a back channel conversation going on via Twitter but also had hosted chat rooms for participants that encouraged attendees to participate in that way.  It made for some interesting event issues in that the presentations and panels that had a lively back channel incented attendees in other presentations to move mid-presentation – essentially voting with their feet. This past year, the Enterprise 2.0 team has used crowdsourcing to help identify and select presentations and there were some predictable hick-ups there as well in that not every presentation that got high crowd marks was selected for the final agenda because the crowdsourced selections were balanced with track agendas.  Both the use of innovative technologies and the issues it uncovers are extremely valuable for attendees to experience because it mirrors the challenges they will be faced with in their own organizations. It is not perfect or seemless but it is the reality of where the technology is today and I for one, appreciate the fact that the Enterprise 2.0 team pushes forward despite some of the issues – the benefits have far outweighed the issues.

This year, I was flattered to be asked to co-chair the Social Media & Community track with Mike Gotta. While a small part of the conference, it represents a move to bring the social media and social enterprise conversation closer together.  I am also lucky to be moderating a panel bursting with social media and community management expertise – You Say Social Media, I Say Community – Does It Matter? – where we will be discussing the operational similarities and differences that exist between different business use cases and different strategic contexts.  I’m thrilled to be joined by Eran Barak, Global Head of Community Strategy, Thomson Reuters; Matt Johnston, VP of Marketing and Community, uTest; Megan Murray, Community Manager/Project Coordinator, Booz Allen Hamilton; and Michael Petillo, Enterprise Sales & Marketing Systems Leader, W.L. Gore.   Each panelist represents a different business context and use case – B2B marketing & support, the community as the company, B2B internal collaboration, and B2C marketing – and we will be discussing how that affects their strategies, the configuration and management of their communities, how they measure value, and what tools they use.  It should be a fascinating discussion for anyone working on how to best operationalize a social business approach.  Join us at #e20conf on Tuesday afternoon at 3:30pm.

And, if you plan to attend or are in the Boston area, please join The Community Roundtable and Awareness for the Bon Voyage Tweetup on Tuesday evening, June 15th before the harbor cruise – RSVP here.

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Shwen Gwee on using Social Media Tools to Grow Community

April 29, 2010 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management.

Our fifth episode is an interview Shwen Gwee, who works in the health care and pharma industries, and heads up a network called SocialPharmer* and the blog Med 2.0.

Highlights of the conversation include:

  • Taking a community cultivated at a conference and continuing to grow it online with social media tools
  • Conversely, how online groups (like Twitter chats) can be used to lead to more substantial offline events
  • The reluctance in highly-regulated industries like pharmaceuticals to using social media, and how to counter those
  • How growth in industry participation has actually taken off in some areas, particularly Twitter, and Facebook, which has seen many popular Fan Pages grow up around support for people with certain diseases
  • Lessons learned from live events, including: the ability for people to talk across different verticals, the opportunity to speak with patients in an informal setting, and in-depth discussions of the mutual trust needed to keep social media use growing in pharma

Download this episode.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

* Note: SocialPharmer is currently a Ning group, but with the announcement that Ning will stop support for free groups, Shwen has told us that he is working on moving the network to a new platform, to be determined soon.

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

https://media.blubrry.com/608862/communityroundtable.com/podcasts/CwCM_shwengwee.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

The Secret Sauce of Communities

February 25, 2010 By Rachel Happe

A lot of people might say that the secret sauce of communities is conversion, lower cost of advocacy, lowered support costs, faster information discovery, etc and they would not be wrong.  Communities – done well – can drive a lot of specific business outcomes in a sustainable way while reducing the long-term costs. And for the most part, that is how they are currently being planned and deployed but there is a much bigger, larger value communities can provide to enterprises. Real-time data. And I’m not just talking about traditional market research which also can benefit from a community approach – see Forrester’s take or this overveiw.

What I’m talking about is using communities to make the interface between the discussions going on within the organization much more permeable to the conversations going on outside of the organization. One of the biggest risks to medium and large organizations is they become relatively self-absorbed – there are so many people with functional roles that never even speak to external audiences and are so focused on the internal processes and politics that it is quite easy to miss the forest for the trees.

My background is in product management and I’ve done it for both enterprise and consumer oriented technologies and both have large cost barriers to customer input.  With enterprise customers, customer input often involved visits with our largest customers where I spoke with the business owners and a few of end users. In terms of time and cost I couldn’t visit all my customers or speak to even a good fraction of the end users of the product. That meant my job involved a lot of inferencing to define priorities based on a small sample size. Once the research/input phase was over we typically didn’t go back to customers until we had a working beta product. At that point we could adjust functionality but unless the product was a complete disaster (luckily that never happened), major features were not changed.  On the consumer end of things, there were so many customers that we got our input in two ways – testing mocked-up product designs with a random sampling of end users and aggregating issues that came through our customer support and online forums.  That too required a lot of infrencing to fill in the gaps and to notice issues that were not even being brought up.  In my own way, I tried to ask customers as often as possible when I had a decision to make but I did not have a standing group that I could reliably go to on a daily basis. The result is that there were often long-winded internal debates between marketing, product management, and engineering about what was the best solution and none of us were using anything more than our experience and opinion to argue our position. Some of that will never change – one thing you learn in product management is that people have a difficult time self-reporting and imaging solutions that don’t exist so that will always be part of the role of product management. However, the transactional mode of input is expensive and not just for organizations. Once we identified a customer willing to talk to us, they were often barraged by questions marketing, support, product management and executives. The process was costly on both ends. And this is just an example of how product management suffers because of the high cost of customer input.

Robust customer/prospect/partner communities which are available and can be accessed by all functional areas of a company can bring huge benefits:

  • Employees who may not otherwise talk to customers directly or are restricted in which customers they speak with and when, can lurk and in so doing get a much better sense of the customers’ perspectives and context which ultimately allows each employee to make better informed decisions.
  • Employees that need customer input for a decision can ask the community in a way that allows customers to opt-in rather than be asked directly again and again.  While this dynamic has some risks to be aware of it does broaden out access to more customers and respects customers’ time and interests.
  • An organization’s content creators – in marketing, support, engineering – can get almost immediate feedback as to whether their approach resonates.  This can reduce an incalculable amount of wasted effort and expense.
  • If a good percentage of customers and prospects are in the community, behavioral and conversational data will enable early warning of market changes whether that is change in demand or change in need. This benefit will go primarily to the first mover in every market if they are able to aggregate the market conversation.
  • Inviting in partners and giving them tools to market and transact business within the community will provide organizations a much better understanding of affiliated demand in their ecosystem which is often another way to get early information about market direction.

We are hearing from companies that have dramatically improved their products, reduced excess inventories, and reduced waste at the end of the supply chain simply by using relatively small customer communities to provide real-time insights at every step in the process – it’s as simple and as complex as integrating customers into the process.

It will require a number of things:

  • Broad employee training on listening, empathizing, how to ask questions, and on corporate policies and boundaries.
  • The trust of executives in their employees judgment in speaking with prospects and customers (this in turn, over time, will shape hiring priorities and practices significantly).
  • A rethinking of major operational processes. Really listening to customer feedback requires making changes that disrupt predictability which is the primary tenant of many corporate processes. How can you incorporate some flexibility while still managing complex and expensive corporate processes?
  • A change to corporate incentive structures to something more collaborative is needed. All functional areas should primarily be oriented toward customer success and renewals vs. more myopic functional-specific targets.

The first step, however, is aggregating and reporting on the current information coming out of communities in a way that is useful to a variety of employees. We’ve got a long way to go but strategically, if you are not considering real-time data integration from the external market into your organization’s daily decisions as your ultimate goal, you will be limiting your vision of value communities can generate.

 

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