May 2009 - Lumenatti

I recently attended the latest WOMMA conference in Miami. It was an intense two days, full of knowledge transfer during various break out sessions. We explored the trends and insights of customer engagement, through community and social media. We also listened to similar stories of what was finally proving to be successful, in our ever-evolving world. But, many of these case studies were around causes that ComBlu has always pioneered. For the brands in attendance however, the information was new, exciting and even a little scary.

Brands were in the same boat, asking similar questions such as:

How do I sell this internally?

How do I monetize this?

How do I even begin!?

During a breakout session I noticed one individual was just scratching his head, looking sad of all things. I asked him what was wrong. He said, “Great. I get it. We should be doing this. ALL of this.”

Am I missing something here?

“Well, we do insurance. Who wants to talk about insurance?” he asked with dismay.

I started to think. Well, lots of people! My brain working quickly, I began to lay out an idea.

What’s important in people’s lives? What do we talk about? Family, safety, security, assets, natural disasters, buying one’s first home. I could go on. If your product is boring or un-sexy, go beyond the utility of it and create an experience. Jump right in. Be THE place for these conversations that your customers, or potential customers, are having.

Riffing off this idea, another agency representative said, “Exactly. And, you can provide a place for questions and resources. Insurance is confusing.”

He began to brighten, because now we’ve got something. I continued on.

An insurance community can be a portal for life. With a community you can stimulate everyday conversation, and become relevant to people’s lives. Give guidance, and be a comfort in times of disaster, trouble and need. Be a resource, and provide the content your customers are looking for. Listen, and get direct customer feedback that could help your process and increase satisfaction. Look at it as an opportunity, and not a problem. I could almost see the gears begin to turn in his head.

Do all of this right and you can even measure its effectiveness. You’d be amazed at what a little brand loyalty and awareness will get you. It struck me then, that for an insurer, a little customer love may just be the holy grail.

To drive it home, I began to talk about cost deflection. Eventually your members will develop their own expertise around your service offerings and processes. If engaged properly, they will begin to help each other with policy questions and other important decisions. You’ll save money in a number of areas: claims administration, customer service and support for starters.

Full on smile now. He got up in a daze, reached for his cell phone and walked away. I looked for him later, but never saw him again. Oh well, I hope I was of some help. Good luck Insurance Man.

Consider these community facts (these are real, hard metrics from a number of brand communities but are sanitized and general for reasons of NDA).  Keep in mind, the metrics I am sharing are only the tip of the iceberg of what can and should be measured to effectively determine a community’s performance.

• A group of several hundred (less than 500) advocates in one community generate over 500,000 page views with the UGC they create.  That UGC they create offsets the need for branded content and is more effective.  Marketing pages that receive this content outperform their traditional counterparts in terms of dwell time by over 50%.
• This content has significantly increased both product use/downloads and ad impressions as measured against more traditional methods.
• This UGC is syndicated into outbound CRM messaging.  Advocate content increases the click through rate by over 40%.
• A group of only 10 advocates within a community, focused on product support, is responsible for delivering $1,000,000 in support savings (as measured by cost deflection) to the brand on an annual basis.

Using a tool ComBlu invented and has spent the last year refining called the Community Performance Index (tm), we can generate a set of performance metrics that helps the marketing and community management team to intimately understand what’s going on in their community, as well as, what is driving that activity.  It gives them the ability to deliver to management quantitative metrics as to the value of the community to the brand.

Think of it like a Community Net Promoter Score, only better…ok, maybe just more evolved than NPS since you can’t triangulate a position (i.e. measure where you are) with one datapoint (try doing it on a map and you’ll see what I mean).  But this is another blog post.  Back to topic…

Also, I  mention both ‘Advocates’ and ‘Members’ when talking about community.  Advocates are the heartbeat of any vibrant community and contrary to some positions, advocates are critical to a community’s success.  Advocates have a different role in community than general members.  Why?  They are ‘wired’ differently than the everyday person.  They are more influential because of what they know and their place in the social graph.  Tapping and engaging advocates early and asking them to play a role in the development and growth of a community is critical.

It’s important to note I am not talking about Influencers.  Here’s how we (ComBlu) make the distinction.  Influencers are people with big megaphones and reach a very large audience.  Charlene Li is a great example of an Influencer.

Advocates are everyday people equipped with microphones.  They broadcast to their social networks and peers.  ‘Andy B.’ is great example of an Advocate.

From the user’s side (either an Advocate or an everyday Community Member), the index allows the community to evolve efficiently, so that it provides a high level of utility to as many members of the community as is possible.  Using the index, it is easy to change what doesn’t work and enhance what does.  From the user’s perspective, the net result is a very positive and sticky experience.  The user wants to come back.  They want to use more of the products and services the brand offers.  They want to advocate about their experience.  They have greater affinity for the brand.  They have fun and enjoy the experience.  The community shifts from a ‘want’ to a ‘need’. 

This activity isn’t limited to just the four walls of the community either.  The content that the community members generate is aggregated and then syndicated out across the Internet, impacting the awareness of millions, even tens of millions who encounter this content; all of which is in the voice of the customer, is first hand and genuine.  Using the Performance Index, even sentiment, reach and impact can be measured.

Granted, all of the content isn’t perfectly flattering.  However, if it is a well performing community, change is a constant and dialogue is two way.  Brand bombs (negative content) is a rarity that more often than not is effectively managed by community members themselves, not the brand.  Good brands don’t hinder negative content, they learn from it and act on it.  Community members help each other have a more enjoyable experience with something they have a shared interest in.  A brand’s job is to listen and learn first.  Then act. 

That is why measuring performance is so key, so you know how and where to act.  Guessing is largely removed from the equation. 

In part three of this blog post, I’ll reveal how Community Performance Indexing works.

So here’s the thing: I love American Idol. Maybe because when I was a kid I loved all the different amateur hours that were on TV…Ted Mack, Star Search, the Gong Show. I also love America’s Got Talent, mostly because it’s a two-fer: “American Idol meets The Gong Show”. Idol’s Season Eight is rapidly coming to a close, which means I’ll get a few hours of my life back. So, what does this all have to do with the price of beans? Simple. American Idol is a great microcosm for some community best practices.

Community is a place where people connect around a common purpose. American Idol brings together a huge group of people wanting to be the next big thing in music. The season takes us through try-outs, which eventually winnows down to the final 12. The community members can participate and interact with the show in a variety of ways. This process gives us a peek into community building, scaling and measurement. Here’s how:

· Great communities have an advocate base at their core. These are the people who create content, are highly productive and typically are highly rated for their efforts. Smart brands use a specific methodology to find and activate their advocate base. In our American Idol model, the contestants are akin to the group a brand would look at to find their advocates. The 100,000 that tried out this year were systematically filtered according to specific criteria. The judges, who represent the brand,  ultimately only see a few thousand of these contestants, who have already been screened by producers. This is exactly the role of an identification algorithm. It screens a large group and gets it down to a smaller group. Ultimately, the behaviors of this smaller group determine those who are truly advocates and which of those are the top tier or high performers.

· In our American Idol example, the top tier advocates are the top twelve that make it through to the 12 week elimination round. These advocates get special recognition, engage in a distinct way from the rest of the membership base and are constantly ranked and rated by both the judges (the brand) and the show’s viewers (the community membership). This is exactly how a reputation management system should work in a community.

· As the season progresses, the community members can engage with the show in a variety of ways. They can view the show, vote for their favorite contestants, download songs and videos from the show, engage through a variety of social media tools, and even see favorites from previous season’s perform on the results show. After the season is over they can see a live show of the top ten and they contribute to a charitable cause, Idol Gives Back. We call this an engagement strategy. Unfortunately, many communities that we study offer very limited ways for members to engage. The community manager fails to recognize that a membership divides into distinct personas who all engage differently inside a community and throughout the social eco-system. Without multiple ways to participate, the community can quickly become a ghost town.

· Our final node of this analogy is measurement. American Idol has a huge metric: their weekly vote count which is typically in the tens of millions. They can monitor if this count trends up or down and compare it to comparable periods from previous seasons. This is an engagement metric that goes way beyond viewership or page views, which is a typical metric that many online communities use. But Idol can also have a dashboard that shows contributions to its charity, impact on advertising revenue, sale of merchandise and records, tour revenue, etc. They can actually measure the impact of community on sales drivers or KPIs. Every community manager should be able to create correlations between community actions and KPIs or they will not have what we call a “dashboard with teeth”.

Idol is the original engagement –based TV show. Its producers devised the concept to change their music business. They had interests in finding talent, producing recordings, selling the most records they could, producing concerts, and managing the talent they have under contract. They used TV in an entirely new way: to build audiences for their new artists before ever producing a record. That’s what community should do for brands. It should be a game changer.

So anyway, I’m rooting for Adam ; let’s see if the community agrees

Last year, on AMC’s cult favorite, Mad Men, creative director, Don Draper, was talking about a pitch the agency was making for American Airlines. He basically summed up the effort as having “lots of bricks, but no building”. In other words, the team had lots of random good ideas, but no cohesive strategy that was going to drive business for the airline.

What a perfect analogy for what has been happening in the social media space. Companies have been experimenting with social media tactics. In fact, they have petrie dishes all over the place. The problem is these experiments are tactical; akin to lots of random good ideas that don’t roll-up into a strategy. Many marketing teams are tricked into believing that they are growing because their experiments are evolving along with the “maturation” of social media channels. For example: a product group may start with a single Facebook page, then add some cool apps, create campaigns to drive traffic and build their fan base, and eventually run a Twitter stream on their pages. Or, they may start by posting a single YouTube video, then build a branded YouTube channel with multiple videos and “shows” and eventually become a YouTube partner and create campaigns using its contest tools.

I don’t doubt that marketing teams and agencies are learning from these experiments, but the smart companies are starting to “press pause”. Why? Because they need some urban planning. They are realizing that what they are doing on YouTube has little to do with what they are doing on FaceBook. Or worse, they’re finding that they have dueling initiatives from different product groups who are vying for the same consumers and are unwittingly dissipating each others efforts.

Urban planning organizes initiatives around customer groups instead of product groups or corporate initiatives. Customer neighborhoods are defined, building codes developed, municipal services organized, officials elected and neighborhood watch groups established.

• The neighborhood defines the special interests and needs of its designated customer group.
• The building codes establish the rules of engagement such as frequency of contact, how programs are deployed, .
• Municipal services organize and integrate the social media tools that make sense for each group.
• The elected officials determine what tools will be used and organizes the outreach and deployment from a variety of departments or product groups. They also make sure that social media approach is tightly integrated with traditional marketing channels.
• The neighborhood watch group tracks and manages all the analytics and rolls all the social media initiatives into a single, actionable dashboard.

Urban planning is even more crucial when companies have multiple community initiatives. While we’ve been seeing more companies press pause, we think more should do so. ComBlu recently started a comprehensive research project to determine who is an urban planner and who simply has a pile of bricks. Our early findings are interesting, with very few companies or brands having a solid foundation for a cohesive community strategy. So far, we have looked at 3 industries and see many commonalities across them. Unfortunately, these similarities are what not to do instead of great best practices.More on this as the research evolves..