Emergence Marketing: communities Archives

March 27, 2007

When it becomes too personal

I wrote about the recent disturbing public attacks that Kathy Sierra had to endure on her blog and others over at the Future of Communities blog.

I wanted to use this personal blog to wish her well and tell her that many people hope that she writes again in the near future!

March 23, 2007

Second Lifers Unhappy with Brands

A new survey of Second Lifers found that 72% of the respondents expressed themselves as being disappointed with the activities of companies in Second Life. More than one third of them had no clue that brands were even present in Second Life and 42% thought they constituted a short term trend. Just 7% consider that it has a positive influence on brand image and their future buying behaviour.

Interestingly enough, the most positively judged were brands from industries such as hotels and retail, companies which already have significant experience of location and experience marketing gained in the real world.

(via MIT Advertising Lab]

January 31, 2007

New Wikipedia case study from HBS

Karim Lakhani just posted about a new Wikipedia case study he developed in partnership with Enterprise 2.0 guru Andrew McAfee on the Future of Communities blog. Like Wikipedia itself, the case is available for free online and is published under the GFDL.

Good stuff!

January 26, 2007

Skypecast did not work...so we recorded a Skype interview

The Skypecast session with Sylvia Marino from Edmunds that was scheduled for today did not work. Since I knew that many people would want to hear her story, we recorded a Skype interview which I posted on The Future of Communities blog.

I apologize for the technology failure and if Skype can fix their problem - which happened twice now - we will resume our series of Skypecasts. For now we will continue to do Podcasts.

January 25, 2007

Skypecast - How Edmunds Leverages Wisdom of Crowds

Tomorrow, Friday (1/26) at 2pm ET, we will be holding our first Skypecast conversation leading up to the Community 2.0 conference. This one will be with Sylvia Marino, the Executive Director for CarSpace at Edmunds. Sylvia is responsible for all consumer-generated content and interaction on three web sites that make up the Edmunds Automotive Network: Edmunds.com, Inside Line and CarSpace. Additionally, Sylvia oversees all aspects of design, features, business operations and strategy for CarSpace, the online automotive social network for car and truck enthusiasts.

This discussion will center around how Edmunds is leveraging the wisdom of crowds in their business.

The Skypecast will be recorded and posted on the future of communities blog. During the Skypecast we will open up the mic for questions from the audience, but if you have any questions and will not be able to attend, or would prefer us to ask the questions, please put them in the comment section of this post.

[Tags: communities community management wisdom of crowds community 2.0]

January 18, 2007

Full eBay research report available

As we reported last year, the eBay customer service community research conducted in Germany was a real interesting case study of how the deployment of customer communities in support of business processes can lead to game-changing competitive advantages.

One of the two lead researchers on the project, Prof. Paul Dholokia, who had commented on the original post, agreed to make the whole research paper available on The Future of Communities, where he will also join the growing roster of contributors.

[Tags: community management customer community community marketing wom word of mouth marketing]

January 15, 2007

The power of communities...and a new group blog

It is unquestionable that if done right, deploying communities in support of specific business processes can lead to game-changing benefits. To cite just a few examples:

Ducati was able to fire their marketing department and replace it with a central customer community group responsible for all aspects of marketing - from product design and marketing communications, to creating the overall brand experience.

In Germany, eBay was able to increase its revenue by 56% by getting existing eBay users to join customer communities.

And through their "Connect and Develop" strategy - which involves employees, customers, prospects and even competitors, P&G is now able to derive 35% of their innovations and billions of dollars in revenue from the community it's developed.

But it is also true that a majority of business community initiatives fail, and will continue to do so. Some companies focus too much on the technology architecture to support communities rather the social architecture - forgetting that some of the most successful communities are facilitated through email lists and discussion threads. Others are not investing enough in getting their communities up and running. And then, of course, you have those companies who try to exert too much control, not realizing that communities are like any complex system - you have too few rules and connections and the system disolves in chaos, too many and the system freezes up.

It is with these issues in mind that we are launching a new group blog on the Future of Communities. We have a terrific line up of contributors and hope that you will join the conversation.

[Tags: communities community management marketing plan community marketing]

January 9, 2007

Interesting new research from Pew on Teens and Social Networks

According to a new Pew Internet Report on Teens and Social Networks, 55% of online teens (12-17) use social networks and 55% have created online profiles.

Interestingly enough, the survey found that "...older teens, particularly girls, are more likely to use these sites. For girls, social networking sites are primarily places to reinforce pre-existing friendships; for boys, the networks also provide opportunities for flirting and making new friends." For the older girls (15-17), the percentage is 70% who have used an online social network.

[Tags: social networks online profiles teens ]

November 28, 2006

Moderating a Community 2.0 Webinar on Wednesday

Join me for an interesting conversation on the business of communities this Wednesday with Barry Libert, CEO and founder for Shared Insight (disclosure - Shared Insights is paying me to do this webinar as well as for chairing the upcoming community 2.0 conference), Ed Moran, Director of Product Innovation at Deloitte, and Robert Dell'Immagine, Director of Community at VMware .

You can sign up for the webinar - which is free - at the Shared Insights' web site.

At this point the plan is to talk about why business communities are hot now, what tool-set is available to companies deploying business communities, and what business process and social infrastructure considerations need to be made to ensure success. We will also review and discuss a business community case study.

Hopefully we'll see you there!

[Tags: communities community 2.0 community management business of communities]

November 24, 2006

Upcoming Community 2.0 Conference

As mentioned before, I have agreed to chair an upcoming conference on the business of communities - Community 2.0, which will happen on March 12-14 in Las Vegas.

Communities are hot – every company thinks that they need one, but no one is too sure how to set them up or how to leverage them. As with most new buzzword-compliant memes many will approach the opportunity by throwing technology at it and fail miserably. Others will inevitably trespass ethical boundaries and muddy the waters for those who follow.

But some will take the lead of the existing pioneers and integrate the lessons learned into their approach to the business of communities. Those companies will succeed and derive returns that will shame their competitors.

Community 2.0 is for those people who are interested in networking with other community professionals to develop a deep understanding of what works and does not in this new world. The conference will provide a snapshot of the current conversations and body of knowledge related to the business of communities. For those who are interested in helping to shape the market, there will also be opportunities to join groups of likeminded people into ongoing community council conversations.

The discussions, presentations, interviews, stories and case studies at the Community 2.0 conference will be organized in three themes:

Strategy and theory - what are the underlying forces that make communities tick? How does social networking theory impact communities? Can you leverage crowd sourcing?

Applications and best practices - where can communities help? Have you thought of communities to bring the voice of the customer into your new product development process? Or to involve employees, partners and customers into improving innovation?

The technology and social infrastructure - what are the technology building blocks beyond the discussion thread that make for successful communities? What rules of engagement do you need to set up to avoid your community to become toxic?

At this stage the program includes leading luminaries from well known academic institutions, professional services firms, solution providers as well as private and public community managers. We can already count on case studies ranging from the world of high tech to financial services to teenage-based communities. The Conference will also include a targeted technology expo where you will be able to talk with product and service providers in this space. The program is continuously expanding, so make sure to periodically check the conference web site for latest additions to the program.

If you think you have something to contribute - please give me a shout (francois AT emergencemarketing DOT com or on my SKYPE which is fgossieaux).!

[Tags: communities community 2.0 community management business of communities]

October 31, 2006

Customer communities do pay off!

The most recent Harvard Business Review reports on a study (requires subscription) that was done on the impact of customer communities on customer behavior at eBay in Germany (disclosure - I have an active interest in this topic as I have agreed to chair a conference on the business of communities - Community 2.0 - but more on that later).

The numbers are quite interesting. The experiment involved 140,120 eBay customers who had bought or sold on eBay but who had not participated in the eBay customer communities before. 79.242 were invited to join the online customer community, while the remaining 60,878 were used as a control group. Of the people who were asked to join the community, 3,299 became active participants and 11,242 became lurkers. Over the course of a year they compared the behavior of the active participants and lurkers to that of the control group and found that:

Lurkers and active participants won up to 25% more auctions

Lurkers and participants paid prices that were as much as 24% higher

Lurkers and participants spent up to 54% more money in total

Active participants listed up to 4 times as many items

Active participants earned up up 6 times as much monthly sales revenue

For first time sellers who were lurkers and participants, 10 times as many of them started selling on eBay after joining the community

All in all the activities of the lurkers and participants resulted in 56% more sales during the year of the study - bringing in millions of additional dollars into eBay's bottom line.

So can the results of this experiment be replicated in more traditional businesses?

Some people clearly think so, while others who used to be very enthusiastic about the business of communities are starting to become very skeptical.

Communities require a certain critical mass to get going - and not all companies have a large enough customer base to get to that point. They also require a lot more work and resources than most companies are willing to invest - to set up the infrastructure, to nurture the communities, to acquire content, etc.

Active communities of employees, customers and partners are clearly powerful management instruments that can dramatically improve core business processes like innovation, product development and marketing & sales. They can also backfire and have very negative impact if they are not managed properly, or set up wrongly. Before embarking on this path, companies have to truly understand the dynamics as well as the pros and cons of communities. They also need to find out if they have the resources and wherewithal to create their own communities or whether they should play in someone else's sandbox.

Unfortunately, many will start the process by throwing technology at the problem - let's just hope that those ignorants won't destroy the market for the rest of us like email spammers destroyed email marketing and (un)ethical zealots are slowly destroying word of mouth marketing.

[Tags: community management customer community community marketing wom word of mouth marketing]

August 16, 2006

Advertisers on social networking sites

Nellie Lide over at New Persuasion has the following to say about advertisers on social networking sites (via social customer manifesto):

I think brands will have to go beyond a conversation - though that's a good start - they have to be willing to develop and maintain a relationship/friendship with their customers over the long-term. And I think companies are looking at these sites all wrong. Advertisers, marketers, product-makers are trying to figure out how to exploit and use all the people on these sites - when they should be studying what these folks are doing and try to figure out how they can help these social sites be better for their users. Not more cluttered with their ads. If your product and brand don't really fit in - stay out. Know your customer and respect your customer - that's it.

Amen

At the risk of being repetitive - marketing is not about interrupting or intercepting people, it's about assisting them!

[Tags: marketing advertising brands social networking ]

July 18, 2006

Successful formulas do not always work for others - especially when you miss the key ingredients

Whenever a company finds a new and successful way to reach a goal, or to reach a hard-to-get-to audience - many others follow quickly - copycatting the original company, often times with dismal results. In some cases, as is the case with word-of-mouth marketing, new entrants screw up the whole playing field for everyone.

There are three main reasons why copycatting does not always work. First off, many companies who copy others do so without really understanding what the real ingredients for success are. The second reason, which took down email marketing and potentially could take down word of mouth marketing for all of us is related to ethics and industry self-regulation in the absence of government guidelines. And the third one is that best practices are not always portable from one company to another.

The entry of Wal-Mart with a Myspace-like offering clearly falls into the first category (via adage - may require subscription). In an attempt to appeal to teens with something else than pencils and backpacks, Wal-Mart launched a social networking site called The Hub. The site is designed to allow teens (hubsters) to "express their individuality." They can create their own page to show it to the world, and they can post hot-lists of songs and movies. They can even shoot and submit Wal-Mart related video clips and have a chance that it will be picked up as part of their TV advertising.

So far so good.

Except that they screen all content, email all parents requiring their consent for teens to put up a page, and forbid users to email with one another. Oh, and they reserve the right to modify the commercial created with the winning video...

And they call that a "GENIUS WEB DESTINATION?"

It is web alright, but where are the genius and the destination parts? If all goes well, they may win the top price for the "most uncool" social networking site!

[Tags: myspace wal-mart social networking community marketing]

October 3, 2005

Is "Silicon Valley" a meme?

This post may wind up making no sense, but stay with me and let's see where it goes. Just finished reading a paper published in 2002 by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid,titled " Local Knowledge:Innovation in the Networked Age." In it, the authors discuss the paradox between the local character of innovative knowledge and the ubiquity of information. Nowhere is the paradox more evident than in Silicon Valley. The valley persists as a densely interconnected innovative region, even though its inhabitants loudly proclaim that the information technology they develop renders distance dead, and place insignificant. The authors argue that the paradox exists because of the local character of innovative knowledge, which flows in social rather than digital networks.

So now we take a step toward thinking of Silicon Valley as a meme. In case you want to brush up on what defines a meme, check out wikipedia here. So why did the young hackers, engineers, MBAs and others go to the valley? According to the authors is it because Silicon Valley is still one of the most significant nodes in the "new" economy, a concentration of inspired ideas, astounding wealth, and the means to turn the former into the latter. So it seems to me that Silicon Valley is as much an idea as it is a place. And the idea behaves much like an organism. As long as the idea can spread, be nourished and mutate to adapt to changing conditions around it, the idea lives on. In the valley, the idea of what it represents is in fact mutating, and adapting to the post-bubble world around it. The communications technology that ought to drive down the reason to congregate, and doom a place like the valley, seems to be having the opposite effect. That seems to be because the technology is supporting the social networks there in new and useful ways, allowing the meme to strengthen and spread.

Does this make sense?

September 26, 2005

Plague in virtual world...

This one is fascinating. A plague hit World of Warcraft - killing entire cities (here - via IFTF).

The plague started as a spell in a dungeon, but when people returned to their town they infected people nearby. Apparently the administrators were baffled and tried to quarantine areas of the world - but the plague quickly spread beyond their control.

[Technorati Tags: virtual world online gaming]

September 21, 2005

Interesting virtual world story

I had an interesting conversation with my 10 year old son this morning as I drove him to school:

he: I had a really good morning so far
me: oh yes, how so?
he: I had a great talk with my good friend hello137
me: where is he from
he: New Zealand - we've been friends for over a year
me: interesting
he: we are in the same business you know
me: really - what business are you in these days (he's been in the fishing biz, the coal trading biz, the smithing biz, etc.)
he: yew tree selling business
me: cool
he: it's a good business - yew trees sell for about $300/each and I have been able to buy a real good axe
he: but hello is more of a merchant than me - he barters stuff and then resells those things

He was talking about an exchange he had this morning in one of his favorite online communities - runescape.

So, who said that online gaming is bad for you?

[Technorati Tags: virtual world online gaming]

August 16, 2005

Yikes - gen-x generation turns 40

Time flies - I remember the Gen-X generation being in their teens and early twenties.

Now the oldest ones are turning 40 (here).

[Technorati Tags: gen-x psychographics]

April 28, 2005

Gated online communities

Jennifer Saranow wrote a piece in the WSJ yesterday (The Gated Online Community – requires subscription) about the recent successes of exclusive online “social networking” communities. The most famous invitation-only community is of course Google’s own Orkut – although the company claims that the invitation part was meant to control growth and not to create exclusivity. Others mentioned in the article include asmallworld for people splitting their time between St Barts, London and New York; funhi – with “virtual” bouncers and everything; and closedsociety just to name a few. Those exclusive communities use the exclusivity as a way to lock in traffic and ensure repeat visits, which the more generic communities seem to have problems maintaining (e.g., less that half of Friendster’s 16 million users visit the site regularly).

The article also mentions open communities – like Myspace, Friendster, LinkedIn, and Ryze – noting a trend away from some of the older general purpose communities towards more business-like sites like LinkedIn.

I personally doubt that many of the smaller exclusive communities listed in the article have business models that will prove successful in the long run. It has been a long time since I seriously thought about virtual communities (I once tried to launch a startup in that space – ’96 – a bit too early), but I would have thought that the first key to success in getting a community off the ground was still to get to critical mass as quickly as possible. With exclusivity you can only do that a few times, after which it must be really hard to enlist enough people to invite others to reach that critical mass fast enough. Add to that some of the other critical success factors – such as a shared interest, shared goals, strong sense of belonging, large enough active user base vs. lurkers, etc. – and you end up with a lot of those communities that just have too small a membership and links that are too weak to succeed.

That being said, I am convinced that exclusive communities that can overcome some of those obstacles – communities with very strong bonds, those where a large percentage of the membership is driven to contribute, the ones with a strong sense of belonging, or those communities where reputation is important and peer controlled – can succeed.

[Technorati Tags: communities social networking]

April 10, 2005

Sunday morning musings on identity and culture

My son learned how to smith bronze and steel, and he learned how to fish with nets (and how to cook it too). He tells me that sometimes there is speculation in the coal market which makes it more profitable for him to sell coal outright rather than to mine it for smithing. He also plays with teams – sometimes with people from other states or other countries, like Australia, New Zealand, or Sweden. This morning he was the only American on a team full of Belgians – most of whom he never met. As the game progressed they were talking to one another in Dutch while switching to English when they wanted my son to do something. All along my son kept talking to them in English about his position, his recommendations and other things. The other day, there was a 45 year old woman on his team. And one of his regular team mates is a college kid in Europe. He is a member of a guild in one world and also a member of a clan in another. His friends go by names like doodleman, intelogix, shady, and chainsonic.

If you have not figured it out by now, my son, like millions of others around the world is playing in digital worlds like RuneScape, Halo2, Tony Hawk Underground and others. He interacts with other through chat or VoIP (I read somewhere that Xbox Live has the largest VoIP user base.)

Sometimes, I wonder how these new interactions will affect their sense of “self”, their identities, or what impact it will have on cultures…

It's easy to understand the benefits of virtual worlds like the ones sponsored by the Starbright Foundation, where severely ill children can play with others in virtual worlds from hospital beds – thus forgetting their ills for awhile and appearing like everyone else in those make-believe worlds.

We adults know that on the internet “nobody knows that you are a dog” (remember that cartoon?), and that is part of the fun. But what does it do to kids that are spending part of their formative years online?

About ten years ago I read the book Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the Internet by Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the sociology of science at MIT. She says it is good for them to experiment with different personae. I can see that, but are those virtual personae competing for attention with the real life ones?

Maybe now is a good time to go and re-read that book…or maybe I’ll go re-read William Gibbson’s books…any other suggestions?

[Categories: identity internet culture turkle]

April 7, 2005

Young adults and how they spend their time online

Susan Mernit has a a great post on her blog with her notes from a talk she gave at the American Press Institute. It describes the online habits of the Millennial Generation (18-35 yo).

It was interesting for me to see how many well educated editors had never heard from services like LinkedIn, Bloglines, Technorati, Orkut, and a bunch of other things that young people use and that some of us take for granted. Adoption for all this new stuff is still pretty low...

One thing that I did not see on the list but was expecting is online gaming (both computer and online-enabled game consoles)...

[Categories: demographics mernit]

April 6, 2005

Blogworking? Yes - but what about the potential barrier to adoption...

An interesting post on AlwaysOn (via Schel Holtz)defines Blogworking as the next evolution of social networking...

Self-governing social networks combine with interactive weblog publishing to create something people just call Blogworking. People have been Blogworking well before the term was popular, but whatever you call it, the trend is gaining momentum alongside social networking sites which do not provide editorial content.

I buy that - adding community features and participation capabilities (as differentiated from collaboration capabilities) to social networks would give me an added incentive to join and participate.

And as a marketer, these tightly focused communities, if indeed highly visited, would be extremely valuable!

There is, however, a potential barrier to adoption for these blogworking sites. The way that they are being described now, they are yet another "place" that we have to go to to stay informed. Now, most of us "belong" to multiple potential communities. I contend that if you have to start "going" (as in clicking) to multiple places in order to stay informed - you will eventually stop going to all of them!

It's a phenomenon that we witnessed at eRoom Technology - where we built a virtual workplace/group collaboration product. Once people started to belong to multiple projects (which were happening in multiple eRooms...i.e., different urls, they quickly stopped using eRoom and reverted back to the old hacks of getting a project done with a virtual team - email, fax, phone, IM, etc. We had to integrate whatever was happening in the different virtual workplaces with people's email (which is a person's personal workplace) in order to overcome that adoption issue.

I suspect the same will happen here. Whatever happens in those blogworking communities will have to be fully integrated with my personal "place" - which in my case and for this kind of stuff will most likely be my personal RSS aggregator.

[Categories: blogworking collaboration community]

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