This a great slideshare from Olivier Blanchard (AKA the Brand Builder). I’ve never seen him present in person, but he has an awesome ability to make interesting slide decks that provide stand-alone value.
Here is something you should print out and put on your wall, The Air Force Web Posting Response Assessment.
This is one of those “ah-ha” charts that I simply love to share with everyone.
After giving this to front-line employees engaged in social media, I almost always see a decrease in the amount of “how should I respond?” emails I receive.
The biggest lesson this teaches people is that you don’t always have to respond to criticism about your organization.
and in fact, sometimes not responding is exactly the best course of action.
Chances are the Air Force sees more frequent and complex online criticism than your organization. So if this works for them, then I’d be willing to bet it can work for you too.
Shout out to the great peep’s at Room214 for originally bringing this to my attention.
Twitter can be a great tool to use in support of your online community building efforts.
Here are 3 different online communities I’ve seen leverage twitter to facilitate success:
The Community Roundtable leverages twitter through the use of an account created specifically for their community @TheCR. I love the variety of ways they use this account to support their efforts
Recruitment
Welcoming new members
The Business Exchange community uses the twitter account @BXBW to support its Featured User program. In association with displaying the Featured User on the homepage, they do a tweet encouraging their followers to connect.
As a member of the Business Exchange, I can speak first hand on the value of this program. I had discontinued being active and nearly abandoned my account, and becoming the Featured User provided me with an influx of traffic to my blog and effectively re-engaged me.
What other examples have you seen of online communities using twitter to support their building efforts?
Strong online communities are built on strong interactions. Here are some things you can do today to humanize your interactions and strengthen the bond between your community and its members.
Often, someone with a username like LakersFan246 will end their post or comment with their real first name. If this happens begin your response with “Hi Kevin” rather than – “Hi LakersFan246“. your user is showing a subtle sign of trust in the community and will feel good about having that sign engaged.
Many times when people are asking a question from a community, it’s related to a timely event.
(i.e. I’m preparing for a presentation… My son’s birthday party is next week,…I’m training for a marathon.)
Even after the original question is answered, it’s great to follow up with a comment asking how their event turned out. This shows that you are listening and care about the happenings of your members.
Add a panel to your community homepage that displays the names and/or avatars of your most recent members. this will (1) help those users feel welcomed and (2) encourage seasoned members to warmly welcome new users into the community.
This is a trick I’ve used a bunch of times over the years, and to be honest it’s something that doesn’t get done nearly enough.
When you see someone who is making strong contributions – send them a private message thanking them for being a part of your community.
This simple act of appreciation goes a long way and almost always solidify continued engagement from your active users.
Perhaps the best way to reward your active user base is to set up a user of the month program, or by a “10 questions with…” series. (here is a good example from the community associated with hip-hop artist Tonedeff.) These actions help expose the commonalities between your users and are great ways to facilitate personal interaction.
What other suggestions do you have for humanizing your community interactions?
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Contrary to what you may think, posts that are short and to the point tend to garner the longest Time on Site. That’s not to say that a long post is never merited, but I often encourage authors to break up long posts into multiple entries. Though we’d all like to believe that everyone is closely reading every detail in our posts, the fact is that most people will quickly scan through blog content.
Which brings me to my next point…
Tip: try the 15 second test with a friend. Are they able to get the gist of your post through a quick 15 second scan? if not, you may want to make further edits to add clarity.
Use a Blogroll:A blogroll is a great networking tool that should be leveraged by all bloggers. I recommend starting off linking to 3 prominent bloggers & 2 peers in your niche. As you grow, continue adding the names of frequent commenters, guest posters, customers and active re-tweeters etc. This is an easy way to reward those who take the time to engage with you and your blog.
The 1st thing I want to read on an About Page is a 1-2 sentence pitch for why I should care about your blog.
The 2nd thing I look for is some links to your strongest entries.
Have a Subscribe Section at the Top of Every Page.I recommend having the option to subscribe by RSS, email & Twitter. Most blogs include an RSS feed, but often neglect to include these other two options. Even if your readers are a highly technical audience, you will be surprised to see how many of them choose to subscribe by email over all other options (over 33% based on my experience).
Also many people are spending less time in their RSS reader’s in favor of finding new content via their twitter followers.
For Email: use a tool like Feedburner to create an email subscription option via your RSS feed.
For Twitter: set up a unique account specifically for your blog, and use a tool like TwitterFeed to automatically tweet out your new posts. This is a one-and-done activity that is well worth the effort.
“The Most important thing you will ever market is yourself”
For two semesters of Marketing courses, these were the first words out of Professor Peter Miller’s mouth .
Peter was my absolute favorite college professor, and was the closest thing I had to a mentor at CU.
His approach to teaching was so refreshing.
Rather than solely focusing on course content, he would throw in exercises asking us to outline our life goals. He even had a prominent recruiter give us a lecture and slideshow on how to successfully interview. While things like this had nothing to do with the actual course work, they were some of the most valuable activities I engaged in throughout all of my college experience.
I was thinking of Peter’s quote the other day and it really is an important lesson.
When you boil it down, your name and reputation are of fundamental importance to your success. As you navigate throughout this world, never let the achievement of your business priorities undercut your personal ethics and compromise the respect you show to others.
While for the most part I’ve lived by Peter’s lesson, I’ve definitely seen some areas where I’ve fallen short in how I represent my personal brand. So for me, this is a good reminder to stay humble and be true to myself as I continue forth in life.
We are now at a time where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are a regular and expected component of successful business operations. Companies like RightNow, Salesforce and NetSuite have helped rapidly advance this industry over the last 10 years.
and 2010 is the year when these tools are going to see some of the coolest improvements to date.
Why?
Because this is the year when activity in social media and branded customer communities will be truly integrated with the advanced contact management capabilities of CRM tools.
We already began to see movement in this direction in 2009 – though in a relatively basic manner that was just scratching the surface.
Soon we are going to see some extremely useful information coming from this integration.
For example, by automatically tracking who is making positive referrals about your business – you will be able to easily find great candidates for customer loyalty programs and customer marketing efforts (like case studies, regional user group participation etc).
Similarly, if you can automatically flag customers who are complaining via social media – you can improve the immediacy in which you identify and manage at-risk relationships.
All this while improving your ability to accurately forecast non-renewals.
Now the integration I am most excited about (largely because of my experience managing Agile Commons) is that between branded customer communities and CRM tools. Customer communities contain a wealth of candid and valuable information – information that is often underutilized in business intelligence.
There is huge value in easily knowing who is submitting support cases so you can prioritize appropriately for your most important customers.
And by providing quick access to the desired feature improvements associated with a given contact, Account Managers will have the ability to easily speak to the unique priorities of each customer. How helpful will it be to see all the contacts who voted for a newly delivered feature request – and easily reach out to them with some welcomed news?
I’m just touching on a few of the benefits, but hopefully this gives you a glimpse into how social integration is beginning to strongly improve the effectiveness of CRM tools.
Keep your eye out for some significant moves on this front from all of the main CRM tool vendors.
With personal wi-fi technology now becoming affordable and common place, look out for the next big boom,
According to ISuppli Corp, an estimated 62.3 million consumers will have Internet access in their automobiles by 2016, a sharp increase from the 970,000 at the end of 2009.
Wow! that’s some serious growth – and a potential game changer for many current industries.
I’m just scratching the surface, but I think you get the idea about how this change in internet consumption will disrupt many existing industries. With such large growth likely – I predict many big business opportunities for the companies who are quick to identify, embrace and facilitate this shift in consumer behavior.
Even if this forecast is inflated, It’s going to be interesting to see how this growth pans out over the next 5 years.
Today’s Lesson – Never let a contribution to your community go unanswered.
Case in Point – Kelly Barratt.
Kelly Joined Agile Commons in December 07 – and in retrospect – was perhaps one of the strongest contributors we had back then.
We had other active users – but Kelly took it a step further than most by creating her own blog/discussion area in our community; Kelly’s Agile Journal. Just the act of navigating our community’s admin settings to create her blog was an investment larger than that made by most of our users.
As a community we did okay for a little while, with our company founder even responding to a few of her posts. But as the engagement stopped, so did her activity.
Kelly hasn’t logged into the community since March 2008 – which was 2 months after her final contribution.
Walking in her shoes, I can see how I too would become disinterested if I was putting hours of effort into a community that didn’t engage my contributions. I bet if we had continued to engage her posts, and had gone even further and highlighted her work to the broader community, we would have been privileged to many more of Kelly’s thoughtful entries.
As a takeaway from this, I encourage you to take the extra effort to give acknowledgment to all contributions to your community (or life for that matter).
And if you notice in retrospect that you dropped the ball by not engaging one of your own users, why not reach out to them and let them know your appreciation and regret?
Last October I read a blog post from colleague Ben Carey that continues to resonate with me:
In it Ben makes the astute observation that as creators, humans often get caught up in expanding and adding more – even though as consumers we generally get the most pleasure out of the simple and focused (i.e. Flip video camera, Garmen GPS).
When Ben started at Rally, I noticed pretty quickly that he has an awesome ability to make very simple hand drawlings that clearly represent complex subjects. What I didn’t realize then was that this is just a manifestation of how he approaches his entire life process.
As Ben suggests in his post:
The next time you are faced with an opportunity to improve or modify your process, or your software, or your life – think about what you can remove instead of what you can add.
Take a little extra time to remove root causes instead of adding workarounds. Think about how to communicate more clearly instead of how to communicate more. Think about the things that you can stop doing instead of the things that you can start doing.
I think he’s really onto something here.
If we all make a conscious effort to regularly evaluate how we can improve our many life processes , good things will happen. We will become more focused, productive and intelligent – all while creating products that become the same.
I for one am going to make a conscious effort to approach both my work and life wearing a lense of thoughtful reduction
