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Speaking with Scott Wilder is always fun, and it was so again when I spoke with him a few weeks ago about his online community experiences. For those of you who don’t know Scott, he used to run all small business communities at Intuit. I am also fortunate to be working with Scott on various Human 1.0 projects at the moment.

In our conversation, Scott gave 10 pieces of advice for those of you who are thinking about starting communities. Based on our experiences and research, we’d say they are dead-on:

• Think about the size of your potential user universe
  According to Scott, only 5-10% of your users will join your communities – that is if you set them up right. So, if you only have 5,000 customers you cannot expect more than a few hundred people to show up. Think carefully whether you have enough value to offer the group so that it becomes a vibrant community. And before starting a community on your own platform, evaluate whether it may be better to engage with them on other platforms like YouTube or Facebook.
• Have a clear purpose for your community
  What problem is it going to solve? How is it going to help people’s life? If you cannot articulate the purpose of your community clearly, chances are that your community members will come once, be confused about what’s going on, and never come back.
• Understand the kind of technology that your audience uses
  If they don’t use wiki’s, then don’t deploy wiki-like features as part of your community. If they don’t give credibility to blogging, then don’t ask them to blog – let them have discussion threads. Not only should you deploy the type of tools that they are used to, you also need to use their language.
• Start Simple
  Don’t add too much functionality as you start your community- start simple with a few features. Scott used to make the point that if your community would not survive in a plain old discussion group, it would not survive anywhere.
• Add a  ”heartbeat” to your community
  Communities need a “Heartbeat.” You can provide that by having periodic webinars or online roundtables. Some companies also do it by having offline events and activities, while others do it by having time bound activities (e.g., this week we are looking for ideas about power supplies).
• Pay attention to moderation
  You do not need an army of them, but you need to get the right people, and realize that in the beginning of your online community you build trust through moderation. Keep the community in good shape and the conversations civil to avoid the “broken window theory” – if people will see that others can trash the place, they will do so as well. Have domain experts and make sure you don’t have explicit selling within your community.
• Make sure you capture all the value
  Even though your community may be set up in support of one business process, most communities deliver cross-functional benefits over time. So a customer support community will deliver marketing and innovation benefits. You need to capture that value and report it back to the groups that can use it in a way they understand. At Intuit they set up the community group as a cross-functional center for excellence which reported back to the various groups using their own KPI’s.
• Let the community decide what they want
  Don’t decide for them what it is you will be building. Show them your budgets and let them vote or have discussions about what they want you to do. Co-create with them and make sure that the various departments pay attention to the real voice of the customer – in the end it will help your Net Promoter Score or other metrics you use to measure customer satisfaction.
• Don’t start if you don’t have a customer-centric DNA
  If you don’t have a customer-centric culture, chances are that your online community efforts will fail. Scott believe that Intuit’s customer-centric culture is what allowed communities to be successful (e.g., the “follow me home” program, where they encourage employees to go to retail stores and follow customers who purchased Intuit products to their home to see how they use it).
• Don’t be a control freak – be transparent
  Do you trust your employees to do what’s right for the customer? Do you trust that your customers will behave themselves and help one another in your online communities? Not only that, but provide transparency in the data with both your employees and customers.

Great pieces of advice…let me know if you have others.

Interview with Scott Wilder [ 19:50 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (933)

• Awareness Community – Achieving the Hyper-Social Organization with Francois Gossieaux
  (tags: hypersocialorg)

• Meter of Fact
  Communication World article
  (tags: hypersocialorg)

• Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch – McKinsey Quarterly – High Tech – Strategy & Analysis

• Book Review: The Hyper-Social Organization by Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran | paulgillin.com

• Survey Says Facebook Feeds Narcissism [STUDY]
• Young workers distrust bosses – Telegraph
• The CMO Survey – Duke University's Fuqua School of Business->

• Currents – A Weird Way of Thinking Has Prevailed Worldwide – NYTimes.com
• What Gets People Talking? New Research from Wharton Reveals Surprising Answers – Ed Keller – MediaBizBloggers – Ed Keller – MediaBizBloggers.com – Jack Myers
• Older Adults and Social Media | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project
• Eclipse | MarketingTypo.com
• A Back to the Future Journey in Marketing

What do you think? Research based on eBay support communities that was published in the Harvard Business Review a few years back seemed to indicate that it did.

Some of those same researchers, including Utpal Dholakia who helped us with the writing of our book, The Hyper-Social organization, went back and re-examined the eBay support communities – this time making sure that they corrected the results to account for self-selection bias. The results – community participation could actually have a negative impact on buying and selling. The recent study was published in an article titled “Impact of Customer Community Participation on Customer Behavior,” in the Journal Of Marketing Science, and can be accessed online here. What they found is that community participation has mixed effects on customers’ likelihoods of participating in buying and selling behaviors. In fact, they found that community participation had a negative impact on the number of listings and amount spent, suggesting that people who participated in the communities were educating themselves to be more efficient.

That does not mean that you should do away with online communities! Even the authors of the paper say so themselves.

There is also other research that looks at the impact of peer buying on buying behavior in communities. What this study found is that people with high status within the community would buy less than average – suggesting that they have nothing to prove by buying anymore. Those with low status were not very well connected to the community and peer buying did not influence them much at all. The middle tier – those with medium status – were very much influenced by peer buying and made up amply with their buying for the other two groups.

So while education may lead to short term efficiencies and less revenue from the buyers and sellers in eBay communities, they could also lead to increased customer satisfaction and higher lifetime customer value – which was outside of the scope of this research project. It could also lead to more customer acquisition through word-of-mouth, another metric that felt outside the scope of this research.

What do you think?

• Seven misconceptions about corporate social networking – SmartPlanet
  Review from The Hyper-Social Organization
• The FASTForward Blog » Hyper-Social Enterprise: What it Takes to Lead One: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary
  Another good review of The Hyper-Social organization by Joe Mckendrick

Following the release of our book, the Hyper-Social Organization, we are now launching the first two Hyper-Social Mini-Summits.

Reading a book is one thing. Turning the ideas presented in a book into actionable and measurable programs is a different thing all together. That is why we created the Hyper-Social Mini Summits – one day events to help you turn the ideas that we developed in the book into actionable programs, tailored for your company.

The first Hyper-Social Mini-Summits will be in New York City (Columbia Faculty House on 9/30/2010) and Boston (Harvard Faculty Club on 10/05/2010). The cost is $499 and it includes participation in the whole day event, a great networking dinner with 50 of your peers, a copy of the book, a pre-conference call to assess your specific challenges and expectations, and a post-conference call to make sure that we can address all the questions that will come  up as you bring the concepts back to your organization.

If you are a marketer thinking of leveraging or already in the process of deploying social media and communities as part of your business, you should attend, as this event is designed for you. And no, we are not offering an early bird discount. If a $50-75 discount is the only way you would register, then maybe this event is not for you. You need to see the value – and we believe  that the value that will be delivered as well as co-created will be outstanding. Not only will the session be somewhat tailored to your needs and challenges (not totally as there will be 50 0f you),we will also share the results of the third annual 2010 Tribalization of Business Study, and have a follow up call to ensure that you can maximize the learnings from the session within your organization’s context.

For more information and registration links, please head over to our Hyper-Social Mini-Summit page. We hope to see you there and maybe even bring a colleague or two. And if you have not done so yet, stay up to date on everything Hyper-Social-related by following us on Facebook.