The LeFever's (Lee and Sachi) of commoncraft have done it again. Check out "Twitter in Plain English"



Do you tweet? Follow me on twitter, and I'll follow you back:
http://twitter.com/redplasticmonke

The Wall Street Journal published an article today on adverting and social media titled "Social Sites Don't Deliver Big Ad Gains".

The article offer a pretty good overview of the current state of online advertising with the backdrop of Microsoft's hostile takeover bid of Yahoo.

As Microsoft Corp. makes a $44.6 billion bet on Internet advertising with its unsolicited offer for Yahoo Inc., there are signs that some of the biggest new places where consumers are flocking on the Web -- social networking and video-sharing sites -- are yielding advertising revenue slower than some Internet companies had hoped.

Here is the thing: ADVERTISERS ARE STILL TRYING TO USE THE SAME WEB 1.0 ADS FOR THESE SITES. I doesn't surprise me at all that social networks are slow to take on advertising, and that those that do are finding "crude" tools like adwords more effective than simply shoving the same dated banner ads down community member's throats.

The secret sauce for success (I believe) lies in adhering to general good community building techniques.

- Know your member (consumer)
- Offer them something of value
- Craft the offer in a human voice
- Be transparent about your intentions
- Be respectful of the member (privacy, needs, wishes, intelligence)
- Accept feedback
- Have thick skin
- Continue to innovate (i.e. try, try again)

We have some early examples of attempts at innovation, including Facebook's beacon, but there are still miles to go in this race.

INTRODUCTION:
This post is targeted at folks just getting started with online community activities at their organization. It is written with the brand or product-specific corporate communities in mind, but is somewhat applicable to independent communities and non profit organizations.

A few key points to begin with:

First, the working assumption here is that most of you reading are engaged in some sort of initial community building activity, but do not have a comprehensive community strategy guiding your efforts.

Second, keep in mind one of the key decisions you will need to make is the mix of attention, energy and dollars you spend hosting a community, vs participating in external community sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Third, (particularly for marketers) engaging and building relationships with your community is a bit of a mind-shift from thinking "quarterly-driven campaigns". We have heard this as a recurring theme in our research and the conference we host on Marketing & Online communities. You won't have the same criteria for success with community building efforts as you do with a print campaign. You won't retain control of messaging. You have to be willing to invest the time to build relationships with members (yes, even one on one). This isn't a quick in and out.

So, how does one start to evaluate the opportunity with online communities? Research! The following 4 step framework describes my typical community strategy development exercise we use for our clients:


Step 1. Define Business Goals and Objectives
This first step establishes a baseline definition of the organization's goals and potential objectives for engaging in community building activities. These goals and objectives will serve as guidance throughout the project to ensure that the final strategy reflects a direction that creates value back to the organization. This process varies by organization type, the number and role of stakeholders, and the maturity (or existence) of the community team. The research in this step includes identification of the stakeholders for community within an organization, interviews with the stakeholders, and an initial brainstorm with members of the stakeholder's team to discuss objectives for community. Themes and business goals for a community strategy will emerge.

Step 2. Community Ecosystem Review
During this second phase the goal is to do an audit of the current community ecosystem, including customer, prospect, partner and competitor touch points. This information will help establish a baseline of market-oriented sites and activity, which will be important to understand the opportunities for new community activity by your (or your client's) brand.

Using tools like BlogPulse, Technorati, Delicious, and Google Blog search, conduct searches for brand mentions in the blogosphere and on smaller niche communities. You will quickly come up a list of the communities hosting conversations about your organization, products or brand, and the members (often time bloggers) engaging in those conversations.

It's also important to research activity on the "walled garden" communities, and larger social media sites that some times don't surface in search results. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Ning, Flickr, Satisfaction, etc. In particular, look for ad-hoc groups that have sprung up around your brand, or content tagged with your brand and/or products.

Step 3. Member Needs Analysis
This phase will establish a baseline for potential community member’s needs, as well as their expectations of your organization. This critical phase will also guide decision-making on the types of activities to engage in, and the approach (offline / online, hosted / independent).

This research is ideally done in person, or on the phone, but in a pinch you can also use a web-based survey tool like surveymonkey. Recruit research candidates from the list that you made during the Ecosystem Review. Develop an interview script that really probes their needs and expectations of your brand. Ask what types of marketing and advertising the members would find acceptable, and which types they won't. Ask if they would be willing to help shape programs and advertisements (if you choose to go that route), Themes of member need, expectation of conduct from your organization, and tolerance of advertising / marketing messages should emerge from this research.

Step 4. Community Strategy Development
This final phase will combine the inputs of business goals, user needs and the existing community audit to form a community strategy. Evaluating member need and business goals side by side should provide you with direction on the types of community opportunities to engage in. The ecosystem audit will provide direction on where to participate, and if there is an opportunity for your organization to host part of that conversation by building a destination site, hosting discussion groups, etc. Based on the content of the previous phases, the team should be able to pull together the following key areas of strategy:

Business goals: 3-5 points of value or reasons the organization is engaging in community-building activities
Member needs summary: 3-5 key needs community members have of your organization that can be fulfilled or supported via online community
Community ecosystem map: A list (or diagram) of the key communities and community members that are currently discussing your organization and/ or brand
Recommended community tactics: A list of key tactics that meet the business goals as well as member needs
Metrics / ROI strategy: Specific metrics to evaluate community-building efforts by, and an ROI model that articulates dimensions of value (loyalty, affinity, time engaged, etc)
Engagement plan / calendar: Key tactics mapped to specific dates

As with anything, you mileage may vary

Jake McKee has a great post about hiring a community manager.

Clearly people are looking for smart community people, and hopefully we look back on 2008 as the year community management because “standard”.

2008 is the year we "Work It". That will be a recurring theme this year

In the spirit of the new year, I wanted to encourage community managers, strategists and teams to do a bit of self-reflection on the old (2007) and planning for the new (2008).

The following are five key questions you and your team might explore in the coming weeks.

1. How are your members feeling?
This is a great time of year to put out a quick satisfaction survey. Conduct a web-based survey to ask members about the quality of the user experience, how they feel about the community, and if they would they recommend your community to their peers? Finally, ask about additional features or community touch-points members would like to see from you. 50 to 100 responses to this survey would be a great baseline. As I've mentioned before, tying this survey into any sort of customer satisfaction, loyalty or brand-tracking research you are doing will be quite insightful.

Web-based surveys are a great tool, but if you can get community members together in-person for a roundtable session, even better. If a Survey or in person Roundtable are too much overhead, pick up the phone and call 5-10 active members.

2. How is your staff?
The first of the year is also a great time to gather staff (or, if you are just one, to do some self-reflection) to think about what went well, and what didn't in 2007. What were the key learnings? Were your policies and guidelines clear, and did they address most issues. Were members generally happy and active? Did your key metrics grow / improve? Most importantly, how are your front line community managers feeling? Are they enthusiastic about another year participating in your community, or dreading it? If it is the latter, you have some work to do. This is also a good time to start looking around for talent on other teams. The demand for community managers, strategists and executives is only going to get worse in 2008, as more companies engage in online community building and social media activities. Hiring is one option, but growing / grooming internal candidates is another option, especially if your current community staff feels squeezed.

3. Who is sponsoring / how do budgets look?
Does you have a sponsoring executive that has a seat at the C table (or your orgs equivalent)? If not, find one! Or better, convert everyone! Seriously, this is also a great time of year for a community roadshow, to "tell the story of 2007". All the great conversations that happened, all the key wins, key points of friction. Community and social media has a lot of visibility with most organizations senior management right now, so take advantage. Also, most of you have your 08 community budgets planned, start thinking about 09. Seriously.

4. Got Goals?
Community metrics, and in particular, ROI are going to come under scrutiny this year. 06-07 were about convincing the unconverted that it was OK to say "community" again. A lot of efforts were funded on good faith. This year, many senior managers will want to see return. One of the biggest challenges community managers and executives will face is weaving together a "tapestry of value" that contains both quantitative and qualitative information. It is key to have a set of your community goals aligned with some of your overall organizational goals. On the other hand, it is also critical to convince executives that community features, like discussion groups and blogs, are now expected by the market.

5. Where else can you participate?
One of the things that really surprised me when working on community strategy project in 2007 was the tendency for community managers and strategists to just focus on properties they "owned", as opposed to reaching out to other adjacent community sites, social networks and bloggers. The metaphor I encourage folks to use is that of an ecosystem. There are many places your community members like to play, and your organization can potentially add value in many (but certainly not all) of those places.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the set of questions I asked. Did i miss something? Please drop me an email or leave a comment.

I had the pleasure of participating in a webinar yesterday with George Jaquette of Intuit and Aaron Strout of Shared Insights.

Aaron just posted the webinar archive and transcript on the Wearesmarter.com site.

Additionally, I wanted to post my notes from the event, which more or less sum up what I said (or meant to say: ) ).

Question 1: How do I create a value-driven community strategy?
It is important to remember that value is relative to your organization and also to your community. As an organization, you need to do some research (and soul searching) on why you want to host a community, what value you need to get out of the activity, and most importantly, what value YOU can bring to the table.
Hint: making your customers happy is generally a path to growth.


Question 2: Which metrics should I be measuring? (Measuring value in traditional and non-traditional ways)
The short answer? It depends on your community goals. It should be a mix of quantitative and qualitative.

Traditional Web Metrics ( a few examples)
Page views, time on site, referring sites, referring search engines, referring search terms

New Community / Social Media Metrics ( a few examples)
Member engagement: activity and "investment" in community
Member Loyalty & Satisfaction
Membership Growth and Attrition
Member referrals (also a sign of engagement),
Quality of content and exchange: For instance, resolution time, days thread was active, ratio of validated responses. Support communities are leading the way on best practices and reporting.
Tracking the brand through the “Community ecosystem”: Tracking brands and community members as they travel through the larger community ecosystem that spans sites, technologies and devices.
Impact of the community on revenue: Particular attention is being paid to the value of members, both to the host communities’ revenue, and the organization’s sales or fundraising.
Mobile interactions with the community: including views and posts from mobiles.

This question is explored more thoroughly in our Online Community Metrics 2007 report, which can be downloaded for free here.


Question 3: How do I manage my community, and how can I enlist my community to help?
First, you don't "manage" a community. You host. If your intention in engaging in community building activities is to manipulate the community in some way, don't bother. Members will run away in droves.
With that said, there is a role in every community for a manager or moderator that ensures that the community is a "clean, well lit place", or at least keeps to the culture and values expressed in the community policies. Policies and norms of expected behavior should be clearly articulated and easily accessible. This leaves the community moderator / manager to more interesting activities than deleting all the posts with "f@ck" in them, like actually participating in the community.

Give your community the tools to help manage the community , including the ability to rate and flag content, escalate issues to the moderator, and provide feedback on the user experience.

Find your influences and evangelists (typically, the most active (and positive) members), and put them on a pedestal. Sean O'Driscoll of MS has a lot of great things to say about the topic of engaging influencers.


Question 4: How do I grow my community without losing intimacy?
I'll be honest, I didn't exactly get this question. If you design a community UX poorly, event one with 100 members will feel anonymous.
My feedback was to basically grow from your base, and stick to your values and culture. Give members the ability to create subgroups, and allow members to create rich profiles.

Question 5: Within our company, who should blog and who shouldn’t?
Those with a point of view, subject matter expertise and a PERSONALITY should be blogging. I made the point that good blogging candidates in a company are likely already blogging outside of the company. Good corporate blogging often times feels like corporate "reality TV", providing access inside the corporate membrane in an informal, interesting and (hopefully) lighthearted way.

There were great questions via the phone, and a great back channel chat happening during the call. Again, the transcript can be found here.

You have probably been hearing the term "social graph" a lot in recent weeks.

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook describes the concept in a recent Business Week article:

As he (Zuckerberg) describes it, this is a mathematical construct that maps the real-life connections between every human on the planet. Each of us is a node radiating links to the people we know. "We don't own the social graph," he says. "The social graph is this thing that exists in the world, and it always has and it always will. It's really most natural for people to communicate through it, because it's with the people around you, friends and business connections or whatever. What [Facebook] needed to do was construct as accurate of a model as possible of the way the social graph looks in the world. So once Facebook knows who you care about, you can upload a photo album and we can send it to all those people automatically."

Since the Business Week interview, it seems (at least to me) like the concept of the "Social Graph" has taken on a life of its own. The definitions of social graph (at least from what I've seen) range from the mathematical construct Zuckerburg describes, to a mapping of relationships in a particular network. Others have suggested that the social graph maps relationships as well as contains activity streams, semantic data, and more.

I'm trying to get my head around this, as I think many are. I tried to think of the smartest person I know who regularly studies social network theory, and Marc Smith from Microsoft Research immediately came to mind. Marc was kind enough to answer my questions via email, and a transcript of that conversation follows.

Q. What is your definition of the "Social Graph"? Can this concept be discussed outside the context of social network theory?

I do not think you can get away from the ideas in social network theory and still make any sense of the concept “social graph”.

Computer Mediated Communication systems are social networks.

“The Social Graph” just means that since Joseph Moreno’s 1934 work on sociograms, we recognize that [1] all entities are tied to other entities through relationships and [2] all relationships can be represented as directed graphs, node lists, and matrices, and that each of these data structures is amenable to further analysis. The current fad is just the ever growing awareness of these facts combined with a very real change in the costs of authoring, collecting, and analyzing these structures in digital media. In a social network nodes are people and edges or lines that connect the nodes are relationships.

Our social network research focuses on relationships in older forms of computer-mediated social network services like email lists, newsgroups, web boards and other repositories of threaded conversation. We found interesting “roles” like “answer person” (seen below).


We documented this “answer person role: in a paper we recently published in the Journal of Social Structure: “Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups” which is available from: http://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume8/Welser/

Some of the tools we used to do this study along with others are available from our website (http://www.research.microsoft.com/community/projects).

Our research points to the way to move from “page rank” to “people rank” by generating “social accounting metadata”. These measures of author behavior capture the structure of conversations and populations of community participants; the results can provide useful relevance ranking features for improving community search. Eric Brill published on the topic of making use of Netscan metadata as a feature of relevance ranking algorithms:

W. Xi, J. Lind and E. Brill, “Learning Effective Ranking Functions for Newsgroup Search,” SIGIR’04, Sheffield, UK, July 2004.

We have published a series of papers in which we demonstrate the value of social accounting metadata to identify authors who display behaviors that are clearly associated with a particular role or function, such as the relatively few “answer people” who provide much of the support in online discussions.

Tammara Turner, Marc Smith, Danyel Fisher and Howard Ted Welser, Picturing Usenet: Mapping computer-mediated collective action, Journal of Computer mediated Communication, September 2005.
Viégas, Fernanda B., Marc Smith. "Newsgroup Crowds and AuthorLines: Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cyberspaces", Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on Software and Systems (HICSS) 2004.

'Answer people,' the folks who contribute much of the value in the Internet, are a small minority of all online users. Our paper reports that less than 2% of authors in Usenet newsgroups are likely to be the helpful 'answer person' type — authors who reply to many other people with brief replies. Information visualizations highlight the difference between these helpful folks and other types of contributors. Of course, the remarkable things is that so few can provide so much to so many.

Q: Does the concept of the social graph deserve the media attention it's been getting of late?
Yes. Yes. A critical social structure is suddenly becoming very visible and computable in ways that are novel. I am impressed!

Q: Besides Facebook, what other sites or companies are doing interesting things with the "social graph"?
Everything that is about bringing people into contact with people creates a social graph, so all sorts of things are in this space. Email is about social graphs, it just often lacks the UI for the data structures it generates. That is changing, of course. Now there are applications that natively focus on the directed graph as their data structure. That is new as wellFor example, have you noticed that most email clients let you create contact records for each person you know but almost no email clients allow those contacts to have relationships to one another. Applications that generate one data structure do not always have mechanisms to read or analyze that data structure, or only gain those features as they mature.

Marc's suggestions for further reading & listening:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory
http://www.insna.org/
Audio: Listen to Marc Smith's portion of the OCLC Symposium

The topic of online community team organizational structures seems to be getting increasingly hot.

The two main questions seem to be:

• Where does the community team "belong" in a corporate structure?
• What are the roles on that team?

I've explored the former a couple of times, so I thought I would spend some time on the roles of the team, and in particular, the community manager. I would really love to hear what you think about this. I know leaving comments on this blog can be a bit of a pain (working on it), so if you have any issues, please email me.

The role of Community Manager seems to be evolving in the following ways:

• The role is less about moderation and more about product management.
Most thriving communities need little action by the moderators. Management tools are (in general) sufficient enough to combat spam, and most communities have empowered the members with tools to flag abusive or inappropriate posts. Simply put: with adequate and findable community guidelines, active moderation can (and should) be in the hands of the members. strategy, features, UX, platform, budgets, marketing (and a hundred other things). In short, very much like the role of a product manager.

• An expectation of communicating value (ROI) rather than stats
Community managers are now expected to not just report stats (page views, membership growth), but also to report on other points of value, and to contextualize that value, at least in part, in terms of progress on business goals.

• Community managers are expected to grow relationships with the influencers in the community
Community managers are increasingly expected to know who their lead members are, and what effect their influence has on other community members.

• Community managers should be thinking about "portability" of their team
In some companies, sources of community funding, and even the reporting structure of the community team is changing every few quarters. We live in evolutionary times, so it is good for community managers to reach out to senior staff on teams outside their immediate reporting structures.

In some cases, seasoned community managers are evolving into the Community Director, with several functions reporting in to him / her. My Community dream team would look something like this (YMMV):
• Moderators
• UX
• Analytics
• Content Manager / Community Editor
• Marketing
• Developer / Ops

I'd like to hear from the community managers out there. What are you experiencing in your day to day work? What am I missing here?

If you are currently developing your company's online community strategy, and are struggling with all of the options available to you, a project to benchmark your discussion group experience is a great place to start. The members of your discussion groups will likely not only contain your most ardent evangelists (and probably most vocal critics), but will also contain the DNA to a more mature community strategy.

The intention of the benchmark is to look at the following areas:

1. Member Experience: Do members feel like they are getting what they need, in a way only your organization can deliver?
2. Community Strategy and Management: Does your organization have clear goals around your discussion groups? Is the community being managed to these goals?
3. Technology: Is your technology platform supporting member needs and community goals? Is it capable of evolving?

Community Strategy and Management could arguably be broken out into 2 separate sections, but based on several conversations I've had of late, the role of community management, and specifically, the community manager is evolving. It's not just about moderation anymore. The new role of the community manager is to actually manage all dimensions of the community experience (moderation, UX, funding, metrics, etc).

The benchmarking project would be made up of several smaller sub projects and data gather exercises, specifically:

1. Benchmarking User Experience
- Member Satisfaction: Conduct a web-based survey to ask members about the quality of the user experience, feedback on the quality of message exchange, the level and appropriateness of moderation, the level of participation by members of your organization, and finally, would they recommend your discussion groups to their peers? Finally, ask about additional features or community touch-points members would like to see from you, including blogs and social networking. 50 to 100 responses to this survey would be a great baseline. For more sophisticated organizations, tying this survey into any sort of customer satisfaction, loyalty or brand-tracking research you are doing will be quite insightful. At Autodesk, we found that are Discussion GRoup members were more loyal customers than non-members.
- Usability: Gather 5-6 members from your community and have them walk you through the main interactions points they use on your discussion groups. This can be done in person, or over a web conference like WebEx or ReadyTalk.
- Find-ability: Gathering this data is very straightforward. You want to answer the following questions: Is your discussion group content showing up in google? Available from you site via RSS? How many clicks from the main flows of your corporate site?

2. Benchmarking Community Strategy and Management
- Budget: What is your total cost for hosting discussion groups? This includes staff time, moderation, license fees, hosting fees, bandwidth and any marketing you do. The other side of the coin? Who's paying? Do you have a defined sponsor for the program, or are you asking for money quarter over quarter? Identifying additional potential sponsors helps smooth out quarterly-based funding, and also gives you a bigger checkbook for updates and platform extensions.
- Moderation: Review your moderation program. Do you have lead members assisting the moderator(s)? You should. Do you have clear and available discussion guidelines? Do your moderators have to directly intervene in the groups several times a week? A high level of moderator intervention is a big red flag that something is not working.
- Metrics & Reporting: What data are you reporting back to management? A big red flag here is "none". That means you aren't doing a good job of communicating value (bad), or your management team doesn't care (even worse). What types of metrics are you reporting? Unique visitors and page views are great. Membership growth and attrition is better. Showing engagement via member participation numbers is really good. It's also possible to do a rudimentary level of "word of mouth" reporting by highlighting key threads that net out the key issues for the period of time you are reporting against.
- Internal participation: What is the current level of participation by your organization in your groups? If it is low, you are going to hear about it loud and clear in the Member Satisfaction survey mentioned above.
- Member outreach: Do you have any sort of program in place to highlight, reward or otherwise engage your most active participants? Some call this an MVP or Lead User program.

3. Assessing Technology
Caveat: I'm not a technologist, so I would recommend getting very friendly with your web team or operations staff to help you with this part of the project
- Performance: The 2 things you are looking for here are 1. Are the groups available 99% of the time? Significant downtime because of maintenance or database issues can wreak havoc on a communities health. 2. How fast do the pages load? Ideally you are getting sub 5 seconds (at least).
- Scalability: If your traffic and participation doubled tomorrow, could your current system handle it? Again, take your favorite systems geek out to lunch and get their opinion.
- Cost: The platform market has become VERY competitive. There are a number of vendors that have evolved their platforms beyond just discussions over the last few years. Now is an excellent time to review your existing contracts, and to re-shop your platform provider.

Once you make it to this point, you will have a massive amount of data. Because of the nature of this exercise, you will also have checked in with your membership base to guide any additional augmentations to your community, as well as the folks internally who can help fund and participate in the next generation of your community.

Now the fun starts.
You will have almost certainly uncovered opportunities to refine your existing discussion groups presence, and you likely tapped into unmet needs your members are expressing. You will almost certainly have uncovered ways in which your organization is coming up short by the amount or type of participation in your community. Lastly, you will have a good idea of current vendor capabilities with regard to their platforms. In short, you will likely have all the data you need to plan and sell a project to your management team that entails extending your current discussion group-based community experience.

The two most logical and easiest ways to extend your discussion group-base community presence are blogs and social networking.

Blogging: Corporate blogs have been in the mainstream for a good while now, but I'm still surprised by the lack of product and industry-based blogs with some of our clients. Blogs tie in nicely with discussion groups when staff that are currently participating in discussions start blogs to highlight trends in the groups, or to give members of the groups deeper insight into that persons role at the host organization, and also that persons personality and day to day life.

Social Networking: Another great way to extend a discussion group-based experience is to add social networking to the groups. This option is available in most of the latest versions of discussion software, and essentially involves creating a richer member profile, allowing members to expose their profile page, and allowing other members to browse, find and connect with them. Not only does adding social networking features add a dimension of personality to the groups, at can also support offline analogs, like in person user groups.

The takeaway: most companies could be doing a better job with their discussion groups, and could be providing and receiving more value from the current investment. Further, discussion groups provide a logical path towards engaging in more sophisticated online community building activities.

The folks at Common Craft have put together another great "in plain English" video. This time, it is on Social Bookmarking.

Enjoy!

Sean O'Driscoll has posted a really great POV on Online Community ROI on his Community Group Therapy blog.

Sean runs the MVP program at Microsoft, and has created on of the most mature influencer programs I've seen.

Sean's post breaks down ROI into three categories:
- Sales & Marketing
- Support
- Product /Program development

In particular, I found his thoughts on Affinity, Loyalty and Satisfaction interesting:

# Affinity / Loyalty / Satisfaction: Most companies of some size run some sort of annual broad customer satisfaction survey/research methodology. Most surveys are trying to get at driver analysis and correlation data. This might tell you obvious things like product quality is the #1 driver of Satisfaction, but how much does support contribute? What about content? other indicators. Most of us do this stuff. The relevant issue here is whether you embedded community participation questions into your satisfaction measurement process. Can you correlate any of the following to your users who participate in community verses those that do not? (If you don’t have the “verses” part, you have nothing!!). So do your users who participate in community have…

Higher overall satisfaction with your company? or particular product/service.
Higher likelihood to recommend?
Higher likelihood to repurchase? or purchase companion/related products/services.
Higher satisfaction with support?
Higher perception of Image or Brand?
hint: I didn’t just invent this list as random examples

I can attest to the fact that "If you don’t have the “verses” part, you have nothing". At Autodesk, when we presented data to senior staff, we were generally asked "compared to what"?

The ROI conversation is a much larger, and frankly, ongoing discussion that really needs to be set in the context of a particular business to have true value to that organization. With that said, I think Sean's observations are valuable, and I for one appreciate his perspective.

Jeremiah Owyang had a great new post that points to a presentation made at the Silicon Valley WebBuild last week.

Download the presentation here.

From Jeremiah:

The speakers included; Safa Rashtchy, Managing Director & Senior Research Analyst, Piper Jaffray, Brian Schmidt, Manager, National Agency Team, Online Sales & Operations, Google, Inc, Brian Kaminski, Managing Director, iProspect, Chris Wallace, Vice President, Media, iCrossing, and Bennett Zucker, Vice President, Right Media Inc.

Interesting how the growth of social media has created a significant pie of the web now, and the advertising dollars should double over the next few years online.

To me, it's especially interesting how community and community-generated content are displacing and transforming traditional media. I also find it fascinating that traditional "push" marketers are accepting the fact that the consumer really "owns" the brand.

From the presentation:

“Consumers are beginning in a very real sense to own our brands and participate in their creation...We need to learn to begin to let go.”
-A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble

I received some great responses via email and comments on my previous post: Where does the community team belong in a commercial organization?

My point of view in the post was that the Marketing team probably makes the most sense, but I had serious concerns that most marketing teams can't really put their own agenda aside in order to have an honest dialog with the company's customers, prospects and partners.

Most responses I received gravitated towards the marketing organization, with Product Development and Product Support running close behind. A couple of folks recommended cross-organizational teams.

Joi Podgorny's comment was very encouraging in that she had made a decision to have her community team function as as a stand -alone organization.

We ended up having the online community live as an autonomous unit within the company. This was done for a variety or reasons, but especially:

- representation on the executive level - the only team that could voice the unique needs that the online community team had was the online community team themselves

- innovation - having to get approval for new plans/ideas, etc for the community and then seek approval from dept heads that didn't understand our core goals began to hinder the innovation possible on the team

Once our team had autonomy, the morale and inventiveness of our team soared.

After thinking about this a bit more, and mulling over all the great feedback and ideas that my original post spawned, I feel like the best options are:

- Stand Alone Team: The community team (off and online) has a seat at the C-level table and is empowered to run more or less autonomously.

- Part of Marketing: The community team has a director-level lead, and reports in to the CMO or VP of marketing. This would be a bit of culture shock, because a lot of senior marketing staff just aren't willing to give up control and the methods and tools they are comfortable with.

- Cross-functional Organization: The Community team is made up of folks from Product Support, Marketing, Product and the Web Team. A director or VP "owns" the virtual team and the budget. I like this option the least because of the likelihood of bureaucracy and the potential for team members to be serving two masters.

What do you think? If you have a point of view that you don't want to express in comments, or would prefer to have a conversation, please email me: bjohnston@forumone.com.

Lee and Sachi LeFever from CommonCraft put together this hilarious and educational video on RSS.

In my opinion, great format!

Enjoy:

Click To Play