When you are first getting started, it can be daunting when you open the doors to your community and the flood fails to arrive. Sometimes communities, for one reason or another, start with a trickle rather than a flood. To build that trickle over time, you may need to pitch in and help out in during a lull in the flow.

I've talked a bit in the past about the importance of seeding activity as opposed to seeding content. The main point is that members don't engage with communities because of the great content that is there, they engage because of the great people that are there - which is why we have a measure of Liveliness as one of the key factors in our Community Health Index. Quite a few may arrive because a search engine has directed them to a solution to a particular problem - but if the answer they need isn't already there, why will they post questions? Because they see evidence of other members who can and will answer - they see activity.

Promotion is still the number one way to drive traffic and members, but sometimes you need a little more to get folks posting in the beginning. So here are some strategies we've picked up on how to build that activity, broken down by two key components: Content and Frequency.

Content

You know your content best, and who your audience is and what they are interested in. But some approaches can work better than others. One good way to deliver content that promotes engagement and participation instead of just consumption is to involve the community members with each other - in other words, don't tell your audience about you, tell them about them!

Some types of content that works well, in order of general effectiveness:

• Posts by other users or users' peers (don't forget direct outreach to known users!)
• Quotes by users or interviews of users' peers
• Stories from or about other users
• Issues reported by users (and the resolutions that were provided)
• Statistics or information about users
• Stories about yourself, as a peer (if you happen to share the same interests/experiences)

Also, do not forget to respond to posts by users! A quick reply with a positive acknowledgement can go a long way to bringing the user back to post again. If your goal is support, though, be wary of answering questions in the community too quickly. An authoritative answer to users' questions can have the unintended effect of stifling conversation rather than encouraging it. In these situations it is good to have separate groups acknowledging new posts (Welcoming Team) and answering questions (Support Team). The Support Team should then refrain from responding for 12-24 hours to allow users the opportunity to answer the questions themselves, and only step in when users are really stuck.

And lastly, a reminder to be transparent and not to pretend to be someone you are not. You will almost always be found out if  you do, and if you use the methods above there really isn't any need. Ultimately, the risks just aren't worth it.

Frequency

When seeding content, what is important is frequency over time. 10 topics posted on one day or in one post are less effective that 10 topics posted across 5 days in 10 posts. The goal is to try to balance your need for content in each discussion board you have with the need for the content to appear fresh when users visit. Larger posts should be segmented into multiple smaller posts, and seeding activities should be spread out over multiple days. The ultimate goal is to ensure that each discussion board has 5-10 posts per day on average (including user posts). Build yourself a reservoir of posts you can use to fill in the gaps when user participation is lower than desired. Over time, as user participation builds you should be able to phase out this activity.

Of course, the fewer boards you have to fill, the easier it is to keep them appearing active! So remember to start with a small structure, but one that appeals to the widest audience.

Like so much about community success, keeping a community active is about planning and preparedness. Make sure you are ready to help out when activity is slow!

Photo by tillwe

In general I like guest posts, they provide an opportunity for some other folks to have a voice without committing to a full blog of their own, or to reach a different audience than they normally do. Better still, I love it when guest bloggers enjoy it so much that they come back again for more! So it gives me great pleasure to welcome backDan Ziman, returning with some takeaways from the Gartner CRM Summit:

It's amazing that it takes so long to recover from time out of the office these days. It used to be just recovering from the travel part, but it's become far more difficult because time out of the office just means there's more to catch up on by the time you get back.  It's taken me over a week. But, now that I've had (ahem) a few hours to reflect back on my time there and dozens of conversations I had with other attendees. Not to mention, some cooler weather to revitalize my senses.

What struck me at this conference was the wide range of experience and knowledge levels among CRM professionals when it comes to social marketing and Social CRM. Only a small minority of conference attendees appeared to be deeply engaged with social marketing, tweeting, or blogging regularly. However, the majority or people I talked to were seriously pondering "what to do". They know they need to do more social-somehow, some way. It seemed to strike a personal commitment and it seemed increasingly important to meeting their business objectives.

Here are the top 3 recurring questions and comments I received:

1)  How will a community initiative map to marketing objectives?

A:  In B2C industries, how important is real-time expert product assistance? It's huge. It leads to improvements in customer satisfaction and loyalty, but most importantly, a visitor completing a purchase. How often do you ask (or get asked) about experiences with particular products? If the community is part of an ecommerce stage/purchase, assisting customers in the midst of a new customer filling their shopping cart, it might be the difference of the cart being left behind. In both B2B and B2C enterprises, web visit duration and reducing bounce rates are critical in determining whether attention is being captured. If your community is being linked by others, your SEO ranking will improve, and returning visitors will enjoy the added customer experience and engagement with your online brand.

2)  I'd rather not let customers post negative opinions on my site. 

A:  Guess what? It will exist on the web regardless. You'll be far more successful with more engaged customers by embracing their feedback. Show you care. This is not just listening-you can use these opportunities to take action and make improvements. That's what your customers are *really* looking for. Is it that people *want* to complain, or is it that they simply want to be heard? Yes, and more.  Would you prefer they complained somewhere else and then purchased from your competitors next time? Or, worse yet - would you prefer they returned your product, which is now a loss, and you have no idea why? Branded communities on your site will give you much more control and insight in addition to keeping visitors browsing and clicking on your domain's web pages.

3)  I think we could just build this ourselves.

A:  Yes, you could, but to get a usable application, it will take you thousands of hours of R&D, QA and user-testing. Do you have those technical resources available? How will you address upgrades and APIs to key enterprise applications?  And, guess what?  That's not even the issue. It's the best practices & industrial strength proof points which will dictate success or failure. Ask anyone who's been successful with communities. Having the right expertise is the key to managing growing and engaging communities. A vibrant community with incentivized participation allows everyone to build their reputations and it fosters true brand advocates.

Hopefully this helps a few of those folks looking for answers. The real question you should be asking yourself, though, is "What business objectives can I address with social marketing and Social CRM?" Starting with clear business goals is your best bet to running a valuable customer community.

Thanks again Dan, you're welcome back anytime! If you're interesting in hearing more from Dan, you can follow him on Twitter at @lostintheflog.

Photo by Omar Omar

Travel for me is always bittersweet venture - I love to get out of the fishbowl from time to time and see what others are doing and talking about, but it's tough to take time away form my customers and the community, (not to mention being away from my family).

That's why I always love to be able to host guest articles from others here at Lithium, who travel to far off events and shows and bring back all the goodies for us here at the home office! So here's our own Dan Ziman, Director of Marketing at Lithium, with what he's brought back for us on the Gartner CRM Summit wrapping up today:

What's hot?   Scottsdale - it's 100 degrees today. What else? Social CRM. It appears to be on everyone's mind and mentioned in nearly every presentation and workshop at this year's Gartner CRM Summit.    

I was thrilled to see all the Lithium customers mentioned throughout keynotes and track sessions that have paved this vision...Starting with Customer Champion award winners iRobot, Barnes & Noble, Research In Motion (RIM), and Motorola.

In conversations with attendees of previous Summits, I learned that three years ago, Gartner told everyone that the social media and social networking storm was approaching and it was time to start looking into what your customers are doing online. Seemed logical, but there were skeptics. Now, when I ask attendees, where is your company relative to addressing customer experience and the social web? Overwhelmingly, the response is "we're working on it."

What else is happening?

1. Go where customers go. The conversation is moving from the service agent-to-customer (the 1:1 channel) to what is our customer saying about us online. The challenge for companies is offering an enhanced service or experience which directly leads to an add-on sale.  It's not that your company has lost control, it's simply that you have to go somewhere else (other than phone or email) to have the conversation. Furthermore, customer to customer interaction, positive or negative, is the way customers live online. The customer network already has power. Are you leveraging that power or putting up a hand (stop sign!)?
2. Strategic resources are needed to engage. Ask not only what technology is required, but also what business and IT functions are required to make this happen? Is this an on-premise solution or can SaaS handle my needs? If I go the SaaS route, how will I deal with integration? If I talk with IT, are they going to try to build it with open source and how can I trust our CIO to understand the business needs? Since you're dealing with your most important asset -your customers-spend time to bring the team together, secure executive sponsors, create a cross-functional social media center of excellence, and, most of all, be flexible. This is an evolutionary  experience running in many directions, thus, your organization needs to develop a structure that can bend and roll with the flow.
3. Not just the external channel, assess your internal processes. If we're answering customer questions or helping to resolve customer service issues that aren't coming into the call center, how will I document and know that the question/issue has been resolved? What KPIs should I put in place to know that we're doing a good job? The successful customer communities are developing a knowledge base far faster than the customer service group. Businesses need to find ways to harness this view to improve documentation and accelerate innovation.
4. Mobile experience. It's interesting to watch everyone walk out of the sessions when the first activity is checking email and sending text messages to friends, colleagues, and family.  Mobile browsers have improved significantly along with all the new mobile apps. However, it's not just a matter of access to an additional channel. Mobile integration requires a new business process and new strategies;  it's moved far, far beyond just a phone number.

So, the big message is: "what was tomorrow is today".  Reality is setting in and investments in the customer service experience will improve customer satisfaction, retention and deliver new revenue opportunities.

Thanks a lot Dan! Now if I could just convince him to bring back souvenirs for my kids, I'd never have to go anywhere at all!

To read more comments about the event, check out Twitter hash tag #gcrm or the Gartner web site - http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=838231

Did you attend? Let us know your thoughts!

Photo by Robert S. Donovan

You may have noticed recently that a number of guests have put in an appearance here, discussing the myriad benefits their businesses are reaping from their communities. And as much as I'd like to believe that their controllers and CFOs are avid readers of my musings on this blog, sadly this is unlikely to be the case.

No, it is of course the Forrester Research Groundswell Awards that are once again upon us, and Lithium has ten customers submitting their communities for consideration. As you may (or may not) know, the Awards are arranged into categories under the B2B and B2C segments; those categories being based on the Groundswell book by Forrester analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.  Our customer's communities span multiple segments and categories this year - be sure to take a look at all the entries when you get a chance.

Here are our customers' entries by category:

Business to Consumer:

SUPPORTING. Help customers support each other to solve each other's problems.

• Best Buy http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards2009/detail.php?id=113
• Future Shop http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards2009/detail.php?id=189
• Lenovo http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards2009/detail.php?id=106
• Lexar Media (Crucial.com) http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards2009/detail.php?id=81
• Linksys by Cisco http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards2009/detail.php?id=128
• myFICO http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards2009/detail.php?id=135

Business to Business:

SUPPORTING. Help customers support each other to solve each other's problems.

• Aflac http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards2009/detail.php?id=119
• Pitney Bowes http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards2009/detail.php?id=144

EMBRACING. Integrate customers into the way a business works, including using their help to design products and improve processes.

• Redfin http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards2009/detail.php?id=195

SPREADING. Get customers or users within a company to encourage others to adopt a product or service. (B2B only.)

• Juniper Networks http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards2009/detail.php?id=176

Of course there are many worthy entries posted on the Groundswell site for your review (though we have our favorites, to be sure). The winners will be announced in mid-October, and will be honored at the Forrester Consumer Forum and online later that month.

So what can you do to make sure your favored candidate wins? Votes help, so be sure to view the submissions and submit your choices! And if you have an inclination to post a review, that would be helpful too.

But hey, this is the groundswell after all! I'm sure some of you (and I'm not naming names) happen to be connected to some especially active folks in your communities. They just might be predisposed to help spread the word and get out the vote if you ask. After all, none of these communities would be candidates for this prestigious honor without their support - this is their hour to shine as well!

So spread the word! And congratulations to the entire list of candidates this year - each and every one of you has ample reason to celebrate! And good luck!

Photo by e_calamar

The CRM Evolution 2009 in New York has passed, and I missed it.   But this is the world of social media after all, so you can be sure it was tweeted and blogged by many.

But Lithium was well represented - our own Haresh Kumar was among the team to attend, and collected the following impressions from the Lithium folks in attendance:

Here are some of the highlights gathered from Evolution CRM conference:

1)      Speakers and attendees are well aware of the presence of social media and the impact it has on the brands. It was particularly enjoyable being the cool new company on the block and translating the social interactions to the business value that we provide. Our innovative approach was awarded the Rising Star award by CRM Magazine (along with Google and Facebook).

2)      Great to see evidence of the broad deployment/impact of social not only for businesses, but in the public sector as Brian Komar of Center for American Progress described how they were beginning to integrate social with their CRM systems http://www.americanprogress.org/

3)      It was very interesting to see the various levels of participation by the attendees and their significant use of social media for business applications. Their insightful questions stirred some interesting conversations around how to best manage customer conversations and best practices around it.

4)      There was the usual dichotomy between "backward looking" and "forward looking" ways of looking at the world. One school of thought, typified by Bill Band, was that you ask people what things have the most traction in organizations - which means what have people spent a lot of money and effort on over the past five years - and then tell others to do those things. The other can be somewhat breathless, but it says, "The whole world is changing and everything is new." Lithium is, I think, well positioned because we take a pragmatic and business-oriented approach to the new, and retain ties to the old.

Thanks Haresh for compiling these and sharing them with us! I'm making my plans for next year, and hoping I'll see you there!

Did you attend the CRM Evolution - what was your impression?

One final entry into the upcoming Forrester Groundswell awards, graciously shared here for the benefit of our members!

Please welcome to the blog Thierry Hay-Sabourin, Senior Manager of eCommerce for Future Shop, as he describes how the Future Shop customer community helps the company's online channel, Futureshop.ca, extend the company's brand promise of trusted, personalized service:

Future Shop is Canada's largest retailer and e-tailer of consumer electronics. With over 141 stores from coast-to-coast and over $3.7 billion in annual revenue, Future Shop is dedicated to providing customers with expert technology advice both in stores and online.

Canada's #1 Technology Community

Future Shop's overall goal is to deliver trusted, personalized service with the customer in mind. The company's online channel, Futureshop.ca, strives to extend the company's brand promise with its mandate "to deliver an expert guided experience for customers that creates loyalty, trust, and customers for life."

Futureshop.ca is executing on its mandate with a Lithium-powered online community called the Future Shop Community Forum whose motto is "Connect, Share, Learn." The Future Shop customer community is Canada's #1 community of technology and consumer electronics enthusiasts. With over 110,000 members and 190,000 posts to date, the community is thriving with a four-fold growth in traffic over the last year. Best Buy, Future Shop's parent company, recognized the forward-thinking nature and success of the community with the company's $1 million Chairman's Innovation Award.

Future Shop’s Tech Blog has also been critical to providing customers with the latest news, reviews, how-to’s and commentary from Future Shop’s expert blog team. Updated daily, each article is fed to Twitter (@FS_Connect) where bloggers and their followers retweet the most interesting posts.

Future Shop's community is available in both English and French, has 14 key discussion categories ranging from home theatre to home office to appliances, with some boards boasting over 15,000 posts to date. The community's main target audience is consumers, but the site also serves merchants and vendors who are able to gather direct customer feedback, and in-store Product Experts. Not only can Product Experts increase their personal brand equity by helping customers online, they also have an opportunity to improve their product knowledge and learn from customers and each other. Future Shop encourages them to log-in to the community from kiosks on the store floor.

As proof of the community's importance and support within the organization, several hundred recipients including Future Shop's top management receive a weekly report that includes key activity statistics and highlights issues and hot topics. With its high degree of visibility, the community is quickly becoming a go-to vehicle for departments across Future Shop to accomplish business goals:

Customer Support: The community helped build a self-service knowledge base that customers tap into to find answers to product information questions, helping them make more informed purchase decisions and get post-purchase support.

 

Marketing: Marketing not only amplifies promotions through the community, but also reaches out to the community as a key source of product input and feedback. For example, the project manager of a new marketing program tapped the community to suggest program features and names. The community also enhances Future Shop's brand image of expertise.

 

Corporate Communications: Corporate communications uses the community to keep its finger on the pulse of Future Shop customer sentiment. Should an issue bubble up in the community, it can be investigated, addressed, and de-escalated in a matter of hours.

 

Recruiting: Recruiting reaches out to the community, a natural pool of Future Shop sales talent, to bolster holiday season and general recruiting efforts. An engaged contributor in the French community was hired through this system in large part due to his participation in the community - which impressed his manager a great deal.

Keys to Success: Innovation and Promotion

With its community, Futureshop.ca took an innovative approach to extending the Future Shop brand promise of personalized service and product expertise online. The company paired its customer community with a virtual product expert - an avatar named Aaron or Fred, depending on whether you prefer English or French - who serves as a user-friendly gateway to and promoter of the community for new users.

Aaron (or Fred) lives on the Futureshop.ca homepage, and encourages users to "Ask an Expert" if they have a technology-related question. The avatar helps users find answers by scanning conversation threads and highlighting relevant information, and if the user doesn't find the answer they're looking for, they can ask Aaron to post their question to the appropriate discussion board in the community. This facilitated approach to new user engagement has contributed significantly to the community's growth and popularity.

Future Shop actually began to build momentum for its community right out of the gate by executing a well-planned launch. In addition to garnering coverage by print and online media and key blog sites, Future Shop enticed users to visit the community by inviting them to an online debate between well-known technology experts. Future Shop continues to promote the community with strong visibility on the homepage and by syndicating to key department pages a "Hot Threads" widget that highlights relevant discussions.

Bringing the Community to Life

Future Shop prides itself on being on the leading edge of innovation, a spirit which helped bring the community to life. That said, the idea of a customer community, let alone pairing it with a virtual product expert avatar, wasn't instantly embraced internally. I, along with my colleague Robert Pearson, Vice President of e-Commerce for Future Shop, had to scrape resources together from a number of different areas, navigate around roadblocks, constantly communicate with internal influencers, and convince a lot of nay-sayers that this was the right direction to take. In the end, the project not only got completed, it won the support of the entire organization.

Managing a Thriving Community

Because of the prominent role the community plays in the success of Future Shop, the company leverages moderation services from Lithium to augment their team. Active moderation ensures that Future Shop always has its hand on the pulse of community sentiment and is never in the position of playing catch-up on what's going on in the community.

In addition to oversight by a Future Shop community manager and Lithium moderators, the community benefits tremendously from a key group of highly engaged community members, or superusers, who are frequent contributors to discussions. These superusers volunteer their time to participate in a welcoming committee for new members, create their own widgets and tools that benefit the community (e.g. a widget that displays a user's posts broken down by discussion category), and provide feedback on proposed site enhancements. Future Shop recognizes its superusers with "Kudos King or Queen" contests, gift cards, and simple thank-yous.

Thank you Thierry for coming here and sharing your community with ours!

Be sure to visit the Future Shop community when you get a chance to see for yourselves: http://www.futureshop.ca/marketing/community/default.asp?langid=EN&logon=&langid=EN

Note: updated 9/2 to include the Future Shop blog and correct some of the numbers quoted.

Another of our stellar customers is entering as a candidate in the upcoming Forrester Groundswell awards!

A warm welcome to Barry Paperno, Consumer Operations Manager at FICO and Community Manager of the myFICO Online Customer Community, as he describes how their community is thriving and delivering benefits to both consumers and myFICO:

myFICO is the consumer division of FICO, the company that created the FICO credit score that lenders use. myFICO offers informative credit products that help people achieve and protect their overall financial health. Through myFICO.com and FICO associates, over 23 million FICO scores have been sold to U.S. consumers since the company launched its consumer service in March of 2001.

Challenges

While myFICO's products give consumers valuable information about their credit, government regulations restrict myFICO in the  types of information it can provide customers. While the company can tell consumers what their FICO credit score is, and what the main factors are affecting the score, the organization cannot give advice for how to improve the score. The FICO scoring elements are so interconnected that even when an explanation of the score is given, it may not be clear how or why the score is as high or low as it is.

As a result of the situation, myFICO had to deal with a high volume of calls focused on questions representatives were not allowed or were unable to provide a simple answer for. In addition to creating a dissatisfying customer experience, this often led to long calls where the representative tried to explain the limitations to the customer.

Solution

To better address its customers' needs and to leverage the passion, knowledge, and experience of its customer network , in March 2007 myFICO launched an online customer community powered by Lithium Technologies where consumers can share information and address specific questions or comments posed by other consumers.

myFICO's community has over 300,000 registered members, with 10,000 new users registering every month. And with 20,000 posts and 400,000 searches every month, the community is a thriving meeting ground for those passionate about, worried about, or curious about all things credit. Discussion categories on the community range from bouncing back from credit problems, to FICO scoring and myFICO product feedback, to specific types of credit such as mortgages and student loans.

A critical requirement for myFICO was integrating the community with RightNow Service, the company's contact center solution. myFICO intuitively understood that it needed to connect its traditional CRM system with this new social approach to customer relationship management. As a result of the integration, the community offers customers integrated search results across the community and RightNow knowledge base, and customer service agents using RightNow Service can pull up forum posts, logins, and stats based on the user's phone number and e-mail address, giving them a 360-degree view of a customer's activity.

Results

The myFICO community is a stellar example of the cross-departmental business benefits of deploying social technologies. Though myFICO launched the community to be a complementary support channel for customers, Marketing and Sales have also realized benefits from the company's customer network discussing its products and services in an open forum. Key metrics that illustrate the value the myFICO community has created include:

Lowering support call volume and length: The community contributed significantly to overall customer service inquiries declining over the last year by 1% (vs. 23% growth the year prior). myFICO also directs about 10% of callers to the community for more detailed user-to-user help, helping to decrease myFICO's average support call length.

 

Attracting new customers: Community URLs have grown to account for 39% of all myFICO.com traffic from search engines, significantly helping FICO achieve its Web marketing goals.

 

Driving sales: The community helps FICO achieve its sales goals in two ways -  the average spend of a customer jumps 66% after they join the myFICO community, and  13% of all myFICO online sales involve viewing a community page.

 

Enhancing the customer experience: Facilitating user access to helpful educational content and advice helps myFICO deliver a satisfying customer experience, a key component of the company's strategy to attract new customers and enhance the loyalty of existing customers.

Thanks Barry, and good luck to you and your team! Be sure to visit the myFICO community to check it out for yourself: http://ficoforums.myfico.com/fico/

Community success can mean quite a few things, but the biggest gains almost always occur when the needs of the company and the needs of the users overlap. Whether the community focus is on support, promotion or innovation, both users and the organization stand to benefit.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Mark Hopkins, Social Media Project Manager and community manager for the Lenovo Community - and known around these parts as Mark_Hopkins. I've been fortunate enough to interact with Mark a number of times over the last couple years, from the launch of the Lenovo community on the Lithium platform almost 2 years ago, and then more recently here on the Lithosphere community. An extremely active mind and a self-effacing personality, Mark has worked tirelessly to build the Lenovo Community into a place connecting customers to customers, Lenovo engineers, and even Lenovo partners to increase the quality of the customer experience with Lenovo products and the Lenovo brand.

Just a few examples:

• Following the launch of a new W500 model laptop in late 2008, some customers were having difficulty in accessing the graphic acceleration features under some CAD packages, and were confused by how the video drivers reported the graphic processor model. Lenovo engineers and engineers from the graphic processor supplier interacted directly with customers on the community to come up with a solution within weeks, instead of months.
• Customer feedback collected in the community concerning the sunset of the popular Lenovo ThinkVantage System Update application in April, 2009 was a significant factor in the investment and relaunch of the application in late May.
• One skilled and enthusiastic customer wrote a fan control application for a popular netbook computer, shared the application in the forum, gathered usability and bug feedback from his peers and provided several updates. The application allowed members to fine tune the operation of the cooling fan on their netbook.

More to the point for Lenovo as a business, the messages marked as solutions in the community have been viewed over 3.74 million times since the feature was enabled in April 2008. In fact, a recent Forrester case study of the Lenovo community noted a 20% decline in the rate of call volume comparative 2007 to 2008 time periods in the US - and that's when normalized for the install base under warranty.

The key to their amazing success? Mark has this to say:

"Our community works because it's a collaboration...between the company and our most enthusiastic customers."

Mark and his colleagues at the Lenovo Community make it their mission to get to know their community, and especially the superusers who power the results listed above. By focusing on helping his members be successful, Mark ensures they will continue to return and fuel the business success Lenovo needs as well.

One such superuser in the Lenovo Community is Jane Loyless, who is also an administrator over on http://forum.thinkpads.com. According to Mark, Jane has logged over 5K hours in their community since it launched, and is currently the lead volunteer moderator at the Lenovo Community (she's also active helping others on the Lithosphere as well - you may recognize her as jloyless here). Before launching Lenovo's own community, Mark reached out to already active users around Lenovo products in the social web to ask for their support and lend his own. 

Both Mark and Jane were gracious enough to answer a few questions for us here about how they have accomplished so much in the Lenovo Community:

ScottD (to Mark): How did you get started with the Lenovo Community?

Mark_Hopkins: After monitoring the blogosphere for substantive discussions about Lenovo and some of the major product brands like ThinkPad, we noted that the majority of the content originated in several forums. Passive viewing only took us so far and we wanted to learn more, be able to ask questions, and offer guidance. We approached Bill Morrow, the owner of forum.thinkpads.com to see how we could get involved. Bill, and his moderation team welcomed us, pointed out some of the broader topics being discussed, and fostered the relationship building.

ScottD (to Jane): How did you get started at your own community at Thinkpads.com?

jloyless: In the mid-90's when I got my first ThinkPad (a 755CE), I joined the TP Mailing List and IBM's TP forum on CompuServe to learn about it and to get help with a few problems. As IBM was winding down their participation at CS and setting up their own forum, Bill Morrow decided to provide a user-to-user support forum at thinkpads.com to complement his TP reseller business. The ThinkPad forum (TPF) and the mailing list became homes for the CS TP refugees and grew rapidly as word spread. When the forum got too busy to handle himself, Bill invited James Maugham, me and a couple of others to help him moderate the forum. Eventually, James and I became admins there as well.

ScottD: Why did you reach out to Jane and others prior to launch?

Mark_Hopkins: We knew they had more than 5 years of experience under their belts running the kind of community we were looking for, so they were the ideal guides and coaches to have onboard to help us make the right choices, and craft balanced policies. We also wanted to be sure that the two communities could coexist in a constructive way - that we weren't seen as a disruptive force.

jloyless: In mid-2006, we got an e-mail from Mark asking how he and the team from Lenovo could help. After some lively discussion internally about whether we were letting the fox into the hen house, we decided to accept his offer on a trial basis. It didn't take long for Mark and his co-workers to become valued contributors, and over the next year or so, he and a few others from Lenovo regularly visited TPF, helped us resolve issues, passed along tips and just spent the time getting to know us and the community.

ScottD: What were your first thoughts when you heard about the Lenovo community? What made you decide to participate?

jloyless: Our first thoughts?  Hmmmm.... probably not printable here!  ;-)  It was a little scary because, even though TPF is mostly a hobby forum for Bill now, we were afraid it would suck all our traffic away.

Mark's openness and invitation to include us in the planning and implementation made a difference to me, though, and as I told Bill and James, the train was leaving the station whether we were on it or not.

Having dealt with Mark for nearly a year at that point, I assumed Lenovo's forum would be successful unlike IBM's earlier failed attempt, and I intended to be on the train. Mark followed through with his promises and actively involved us by getting and, most importantly, listening to our advice on everything from boards needed to community guidelines to who to invite in for the soft launch.  And even now he continues to visit TPF to check in with us there to see if he can help.

ScottD (to Mark): Did you have some initial concerns? How close were they to what actually happened?

Mark_Hopkins: I worried that we might have too much overlap, that we would not grow membership because another mature community already existed. I was nervous for the first week after launch, but quickly realized my concerns were unfounded. We grew faster than expectations, and as our product portfolio expanded, so did the scope of our community.

ScottD: How soon were you able to see benefits from the relationship with these superusers?

Mark_Hopkins: Oh, from day 1. Having a seasoned moderation team managing the day to day affairs and helping to get the word out, was invaluable in that it let us focus more of our time on the content, finding answers to some of the broader concerns. As the team grew in size, and diversity, the value has expanded. Some of our moderators speak more than one language and participate in multiple communities. They act as nodes in a human network, expanding our collective awareness, understanding, and ultimately, influence into other spheres.

ScottD: How did the company letting the customers be the moderators affect participation?

jloyless: I think it helped because we were familiar faces to the ThinkPad community whether they were coming from one of the forums, the mailing list, or the Usenet groups. It was a sign that Lenovo was going to fit into and cooperate with the existing communities rather than trying to supplanting them which went a long way towards minimizing territorial hostility. It also helped because, at least in the beginning, we knew a lot of the members coming in and could identify our initial superusers. Now, it's a fluid network of communities, and core groups of members float back and forth between their "home" forums and Lenovo's.

ScottD: What do we see as possible future steps for collaboration?

Mark_Hopkins: I think there are a lot of potential opportunities for collaboration - certainly languages, social platforms, and technological elements and features of the community itself, and of course, we are always looking for ways to incorporate feedback into our products and services.

ScottD: Why do you think the superusers, the Gurus and other active members of the community keep coming back?

jloyless: I think it's two-fold. First, most of us started out looking for help ourselves, and we know what it's like to not understand why our computer isn't working. It feels good to have someone come back and say "that fixed it!"!

Second, that close working relationship that Mark built with us has continued even after the forum launch, and as new superusers develop, they're included in our "Guru" group and in many of the conversations.

Some of them have gone on to become moderators as well giving us a volunteer moderator team that spans the world. As a result of being included from the start, we feel like we have a strong stake in the forum that keeps us coming back every day, and Mark continues to foster that connection daily by asking for our advice and opinions and making sure we know that we're being heard. We don't always get what we want, but they are listening.

Something that Mark said just before the forum launched was about wondering what would happen if he threw the customers the keys and that he was about to find out. I think he found success for the forum by doing just that, and speaking for the mod team, it's rewarding to watch the forum grow up and to be part of its success.

ScottD: Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and experiences with us Mark and Jane!

If you would like to check out the Lenovo Community for yourself, go to http://forums.lenovo.com!

In my last post I happened to mention the upcoming Forrester Groundswell awards for "excellent and effective use of social technologies to advance an organizational or corporate goal".

Well I'm deeply privileged today to open my blog to a worthy candidate, the Crucial.com community! So here's Sam Harmer, the Public Relations Manager of Lexar Media, with their entry:

Crucial.com: Enhancing the Customer Experience with Online Community

Crucial.com is an online destination of Lexar Media, a leading global provider of memory products for digital media. As the demand for better memory solutions has increased, so has Crucial.com's customer base and the challenge of maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. To meet that challenge, the company explored its options for scaling customer service to keep pace with the growing and evolving needs of its customers.

Crucial.com decided to implement a Lithium-powered customer community. On the community, members and visitors share ideas, solutions, and best practices about Crucial memory products. In just two months, the Crucial.com customer network has had more than 1,000 users register to join the community.

"Customer experience is something that is extremely important to us at Crucial.com, and we saw an enormous opportunity in working with Lithium to enhance that experience by making it easier for customers to interact with each other online," says Fred Waddell, general manager of Crucial.com. "Doing so provides an additional, valued service to our customers, but also amplifies word-of-mouth marketing by exposing new customers to potentially thousands of raving fans talking about our products."

Crucial.com's community is positively impacting customer experience and satisfaction in two ways. First, the community gives customers access to their peers, who are a highly trusted source for information and support. Second, the community is easing the burden on existing support channels. Crucial.com has already seen an overall reduction in support call center volume for Crucial products, and a staggering nearly 50% reduction in support chat volume, enabling the company to continue delivering timely and high quality customer service.

In addition to answering one another's questions, community members have also provided valuable feedback to the company. For example, thanks largely to feedback from the community, Crucial.com discovered that 64-bit windows users were experiencing problems using its System Scanner tool. After additional testing and development, the company was able to resolve the issue and make an enhanced 64-bit version of the tool available to customers.

Visit the Crucial.com community: http://www.forum.crucial.com/

Thanks so much Sam! Good luck to you and the Crucial.com community!

It's been over a year since I started blogging here, but in all that time I've never posted a 'link' post. For those unfamiliar, it's a post that contains mostly a digest of links to other content. Some find them useful, some call them link doping, some view them as the selfless act of sharing with your fellows on the blogosphere, but there's no doubt they are effective tools of the blogging trade. I wish I had a reason for not putting up a link post before now, but the sad truth is that I guess I just like to talk. As Exhibit A, I present my first link post, complete with a paragraph full of explanation preceding it.

But there's just quite a few things going on recently, and so here's some items I thought you all should know about:

The 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards

This is a great opportunity for you and your team to receive well-deserved recognition for your accomplishments from key social media industry influencers. Deadline for entry is September 2nd, so click to find out how to enter.

2009 Community & Social Media Compensation study is open

The Online Community Research Network is compiling its latest compensation study, so here's your chance to share how you make money doing what you love.

SF Chronicle asks why online communities faring well lately despite economic downturn

Quick interview in the San Francisco paper with Lithium CEO Lyle Fong on why companies are investing in customer communities while budgets are tight.

Hot Topic Roundtable: Social CRM from1to1Media

Insightful ~10 minute audio/slideshow roundtable on Social CRM from CRM experts Bill Band of Forrester Research, Brent Leary of CRM Essentials, and author Paul Greenberg.

Not strictly speaking a link, but have you seen Flickr's new search results page? Very nice!

And finally, I just loved this deck on Corporate Culture from Netflix. At 128 slides it is pretty hefty, but they go fast and it was designed for reading. Definitely worth checking out!

It might be another year before I post this many links again, so take advantage while you can!

Photo by mulmatsherm