Webinar: Jet Fuel for Your Community: Finding, Thanking, and Engaging Influencers (12/10/2008)
Start with a lifecyle and then a question. huh?
In most cases you can define a lifecycle - Presales, sales, postsales. Or more granular it could be:
Awareness (I have a need)
Consideration
Comparison
Evaluation
Shop
Buy
Installation
configuration
optimization
etc ( you get the idea I hope). Then, based on your role/function define 2-3 questions relative to your product. These questions should illustrate a use case. "I have xxx digital camera and yyy computers in my house and I want to share all my photos across those computers and with 10 family members across the internet."
Then, two options:
easy: you and a few of your colleagues get in a room and pretend to be a customer and answer the questions. Write down what you do, where you go, what you find, etc, etc, etc.
hard (but more accurate): Get 10 customers in a room. Give them your scenarios and then watch them. DON'T talk to them....just watch (ethnographic research) - even video it. Where do they go. what do they find. What do they like? etc...
It's very likely this will give you and excellent view of what communities already exist and who within them matter. Then you can step back and think - ok, what to do about that. is it good? How do we make it better? etc.
You can go pay a research house to do this. You can pay me to help you do it 
. You can pay and analytics company to go figure it out for you (like Buzz Metrics or Visible Technologies). You could do all these things or just figure it out on your own.
But this is how I would start.
sean
