We’ve been saying it for years – you need to go where people hang out if you want to be successful in leveraging social media and communities as part of your business. And thankfully, more and more people are giving that piece of advice to their clients or employers who may be trying to figure out what to do in social media.

Increasingly there has been new “bad” advice seeping in that bit of wisdom as well. It comes in two forms:

1) Going to where they are means going to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

STOP – it is not because those sites have the most number of people that this is where conversations actually take place. Maybe they are, and maybe they are not. I am very active on all those sites, but if you want to reach me as part of my photography tribe or as part of my marketing enthusiast tribe, that is not where you will find me.

Going to where they are has nothing to do with the number of accounts – it has everything to do with the places where your tribes hang out.

2) You should never build your own community

WOW, hold on a minute — true, most vendor-hosted communities should have never been set up. And you could make the argument that most successful communities are tribe-led. But that does not mean that you need to become a extremist about that. Many customer support communities (not all) can thrive on vendor-hosted communities – look at Dell, Adobe, and Microsoft just to name a few. Communities to amplify word of mouth can be vendor hosted – look at the Fiskateers by Fiskars, or the financial analyst communities at Thomson Reuters.

The key is to find your tribes, see where they hang out, and see if there might be an opportunity for you to host them. It’s not easy, but to tell your clients or employers that they need to engage on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn just because that is where people hang out is wrong. And to tell them that they should not try to set up their own environment is probably wrong too!

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.

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?

I have hammered on this topic before, but as I keep talking to people about communities, I keep hearing them think about it the wrong way.

Here is how to think (and not to) about them:

1) We’re having a problem with engagement in our community

Are you sure about that? How do you know?

Let me guess: you are looking at one place (url) where you expect your community to interact and you only see a 10% participation rate.

If it works, your community consists of a group of people who are together because they share a particular interest. If they do, then they may hang together at the URL you are expecting them to hang out or they may not. Think of any offline community you belong to – sometimes you congregate for big get togethers, but often times you have smaller sub-groups who get together in different places, or pairs talking with one another over the phone. Why is it that you expect this to be different in the virtual world?

The largest active group within your community is the active lurkers – that group is very active, but just not in the visible public space. A good portion of your community is also hanging out in other places, not just the URL where you are expecting them at.

2) Should I run my community on SharePoint or should I use some other technology?

Don’t take me wrong – technology can make a difference. But it can only make a difference if you already have a successful community. Technology is not going to determine whether you can have a successful community. In fact, and if your community would not survive in a bulletin board, it will not survive anywhere.

3) I have an “addressable” community of a few thousand people – do I need to develop content?

Ok,  so if you succeed you can expect a few hundred people to engage with you. What do you think will engage them? You?

Forget it!

They will engage along a common interest. If they do that, you better have some valuable content about that interest before they first show up. If you don’t they will never come back. And even if you have thousands of potential contributors, you will need to develop content for them. It is very hard to develop communities that can sustain themselves on user-generated content – in fact those communities are extremely rare.

Think of your community’s lifecycle

Modern tribes are nomadic by interest – and at some point people in your community will move on. Your community has a lifecycle, and you need to watch out for end-of-life situations. Just like off-line conversations, some will peter out. And just like brainstorming sessions, some need to be shut down after a certain time. When that happens you need to provide closure for your community – develop a white paper, a web site with the results/findings of the community, etc.

Participating in communities that are leveraged for business is not all that different than participating in communities in your personal life. You know how to manage your behavior or lead people in your personal life – apply those same principles when you are at work.

It’s simple – Be Human!

You may recall the Tribalization of Business Study, a study sponsored by Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research, which looks at how companies leverage communities and social media as part of their business. The yearly study has come to be known as a valuable resource for companies that plan on leveraging social media and communities as part of their business, as well as a benchmarking tool for those already engaged.

We have just opened the survey for the 2010 edition (http://2010tribalizationofbusiness.com) of the study. If you are involved with communities or social media, we hope that you will join us in taking the survey and perhaps also participate in the upcoming qualitative interviews that make up the second part of the annual study.

In return for your time (the survey should take no longer than 20-25 minutes) and your valuable input, we will send you preliminary results of the complete survey results.

Who Should Participate?
If you are involved with a company’s social media programs or communities, as an executive sponsor, community manager, or outside advisor, we are looking for your feedback.

What’s in it for you?
We happily share the results of the Tribalization of Business Study with those that participate – the companies and/or individuals that are willing to share their learnings and are interested in what others are doing and what it takes to succeed. We also share our interpretations of the results through blog posts, articles, and conference presentations.

What is in it for us?
Two of the sponsoring organizations are strategy consulting companies that help clients connect their needs and problems with the best available knowledge. The other sponsoring organization is a research organization that aims to serve its members and other constituents by providing unique industry-specific insights.

What else can you do to help the industry?
Pass the survey link around to friends, peers and colleagues who are involved with communities and social media – the more people that take it, the better and more accurate the results!

Thank you for your time – we look forward to hearing from you.

[warning: rant]

I have been harping on this topic too many times, but as I recently sat through many conference sessions, and finally opened a book on communities and social media marketing that defined social marketing as “a process that empowers individuals to promote their websites, products, or services through online social channels and to communicate with with and tap into a much larger community that may have been available via traditional channels,” my hair got on fire.

I mean seriously – a channel to pimp your wares that has the potential to reach a bigger audience than TV audiences? Get real! This is bad advice.

Companies that approach social media marketing from that perspective will fail… miserably. Those that realize the real potential of social media will win… big time.

You see, social media marketing is not about you talking with an audience – it’s about them talking with one another. It’s about having a real time window in what your market is currently thinking about – what they like, what they dislike, who has the trust and who hasn’t. It’s all ABOUT THEM – NOT YOU!

Social media marketing has to be steeped in humanity and reciprocity – you give and take. And I recommend you start by giving. If you don’t, people will not only shut you off, they will punish you for not respecting the basic social rules that have ruled human societies for tens of thousands of years. People are no more likely to enjoy a twitter feed that constantly spews company information than they are enjoying a person at a party who only talks about herself.

If you really want to understand social media marketing, start thinking about how you would help a friend or colleague make a buying decision. Would you send them your corporate brochures? Would you spam them the way you do with your corporate twitter feed? Would you use the words you use in your marketing materials?

Chances are you would not.

For some stupid reason, people forget to be human when they step into the office. It is as if they leave their humanity at home and reserve it only for friends and family.

Social Media Marketing is about common sense – it’s about being real, authentic (there is another word that takes on new meaning in the corporate world), and helpful.

It’s about being human.

It’s simple – really.

[rant/end]

Both the slides and the Slidecast from yesterday’s 2009 Tribalization of Business Study webinar are up on slideshare. I am testing a new feature of Slideshare on the presentation version.

Let me know what you think.

Slidecast is here:

Presentation is here:

Well, the results from the 2009 Tribalization of Business Study are finally here.

As a reminder, the Tribalization of Business Study, sponsored by Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research, looks at how companies leverage communities as part of their business.

Over the next several weeks I will post the major findings from the study. The 2009 study draws on a much bigger base of companies than last year’s study as the number of companies which participated this time increased to more than 430.

Some interesting observations that are worth noting and which I may have mentioned to some of you are:

• We are seeing clear signs of maturity in the marketplace – they include companies realizing the importance of lurkers, their increased focus on providing a heartbeat to their community, and fewer of them being stuck in pilot mode
• At the same time we are still seeing plenty of signs of confusion – they include companies not knowing what objective they are least able to achieve, a continued focus on ad-driven metrics, and a lack of people commitment to communities
• Some big aha moments from this year’s study are that most communities still report in marketing, even though their goals are not all aligned with marketing, and that companies list social reasons rather than commercial reasons for success when asked what community features contribute the most to their communities effectiveness

If you would like to get a deck or a presentation on the findings of this year’s study, please email me at francois [at] beelinelabs.com.

Along with the other sponsors we will be posting a release soon.

[update] You can find the release here. We will also be holding a webinar on it next week Wednesday at 1pm ET – you can register here for the webinar.

So this may sound like stating the obvious, but too many companies overlook this key ingredient within their community activities.

What trust does in communities is to lower the transaction costs for all participants. If you pick up a piece of advice from a community member in a community that you trust, you will spend less time doing due diligence on that piece of advice than if you got it from a community in which you have less trust. The result is that more transactions will happen in communities or because of information coming from communities with a higher trust level.

Even though we inherently don’t trust information coming from companies, I contend that most companies who engage in community activities start with a positive influence on trust if they do it right.

So what is doing it right?

For starters, companies should host communities that are centered around the members and their shared passion or pain. If they have employees who are experts in the field, those employees should engage, as long as they identify themselves and as long as they do not all sound like corporate mouth pieces. The company should deploy its resources, which members may not have, to ensure quality professional content development, professional moderation services, online and offline events, and other activities that benefit the membership.

If companies provide a true quality service to their community members by having a community with a high level of trust among members, then that trust will implicitly get associated with that company. And because companies usually have the wherewithal to make that happen, they in fact start with a positive influence on trust.

I get that question so often that I thought I would write a short post about it. What is the difference between a B2B and a B2C community? Or people will ask me, can you please only show me B2B examples because we are different than B2C.

When it comes to communities – especially successful ones – there is no difference between the two. The main interactions in communities do not happen between businesses and other businesses, or between businesses and consumers – they happen between humans and other humans. And that is no different in B2B than in B2C environments.

Sure, some people will show a greater affinity for a consumer product than they will for a piece of enterprise software, but successful communities are never built around products, they are built around the members and their shared emotions. Even the Harley community is not built around bikes, it’s built around a shared lifestyle of the community members. And so the dynamics within that community will in fact not be all that different from the dynamics you would find in a software developer community – it comes down to human to human interactions or h2h.