Meet Your Friendly
Neighborhood Online
Businesses are increasingly accepting the relevance of online
communities to live and grow in today’s always-on marketplace. However,
they’re facing an array of challenges while building such communities
for competitive gains. So My Techbox Online decided to take expert
advice from Ed Moran,
director of product innovation, Deloitte Services LP. Here he simplifies
the concept of online communities in an exclusive mail interaction with
Rakesh
Raman.
What's new about online communities, as people -
including employees, buyers, suppliers, etc - have always been
interacting with each other through e-mails, intranets, and extranets?
True, email, intranets, and extranets have been
around for awhile, and indeed, they have helped support generation 1.0
online communities for decades (think about the early bulletin boards,
message boards, usenets, etc. from the 1970s onward).
Several new developments are driving the growth of
"online communities 2.0". The increase in broadband connectedness (not
just for business, but also consumer purposes), the rise of the C2C
social networks like MySpace and Facebook, the ability to incorporate
mobile into social networking, and more robust tools like blogs, wikis,
bookmarking, photo sharing/tagging, online review/rating tools, and
prediction markets have all driven consumer behavior to accept and
desire the ability to interact with like-minded people. The rich
functionality, wide geographic dispersion, and low cost of the enabling
equipment (broadband, PC, mobile device, etc) just weren't around seven
years ago or so. So the explosion of such functional online
communities is really a new phenomenon.
Can the benefits of creating online communities for
businesses be quantified?
With a little thought and analysis, yes, the benefits
of online communities can be quantified. The first step is defining what
value you're hoping to derive from the community. Common payoffs are
increased awareness of one's products/services, increased "buzz" or word
of mouth about products, increased loyalty, and improved ability to
bring new ideas into the organization. For instance, a success in
increasing "word of mouth" about a product or service through the use of
community can be assessed by an increase in blog entries, search engine
ranking, citations on other websites, and email newsletter sign-ups via
the community. If improved customer experience or service is a goal,
then tracking downloads of software patches, help documents, and
questions answered by the community permit the company to quantify money
saved on call center inquiries.
What's the role of Web 2.0 and user-generated content
to create effective communities?
Communities thrive on relevant Web 2.0 tools, and typically create their
own content. Content largely drives community participation - the more
content you have, the more members you have. The appropriate tools – be
they blogs, discussion boards, bookmarking – enable the community to
find like-minded people, engage in discussions with them, and then
capture content.
Is there a tested methodology to analyze and utilize
the raw inputs collected through such community channels?
Some companies analyze the inputs from users, even
going as far as assessing whether the inputs deserve to be posted on
the community site. While some of these analyses are geared at
understandable concerns like inappropriate or illegal content being
posted, others hinge more on a company's desire to control what is being
discussed on "their" community. More effective is permitting
the community to vet, categorize, critique, and challenge the inputs,
ultimately ascribing a value to it through ranking, adoption, or use.
How would you encourage enterprises to dedicate
resources for online community management?
Definitely. First, managers must realize that the
quality of moderation and facilitation are valued by community
members. Our research shows that "finding the time" to manage the
community is cited as a problem by a number of the
respondents. Management must allocate sufficient resources (read:
probably not one part-time person) to community moderation in order to
optimize results.
Should this activity be handled as an exclusive
business process?
I think communities should be considered an important communication with
the customer (and potential customer), as well as an input to multiple
company functions. As such, it probably makes sense to have specialists
in community interaction and dynamics, and the firm's customer
offerings, manage the communities on a first-line level. But the
business process of managing the community shouldn't be insular. The
community managers need to work with internal (often
functional) stakeholders who need both information from the community,
as well as the opportunity to reach out to the community.
This article first
appeared in the old version of My Techbox Online on Jul. 29, 2008.
