AvectraLabs

I’m a big fan of Social Media Week all over the world. But, as all good things have to come to anend, the 4^th annual SMW12 NYC (#SMWNYC), officially ended on Friday.  It seemed to me that SMW NYC with their packed schedule and multiple events was changing the world one session at a time!  

Some of the most memorable events started out over at Bloomberg World, with prominent keynote speaker, John Bell, Global Managing Director of Social Media at Ogilvy.  Heading up a team of 500 social media employees over the span of 35 countries (incredible); John stressed the urgency to socialize our own businesses to socialize our enterprises.  

Of course, I attended the “close quarters” Valentine’s Day gathering. There was love in the air as Shana Dressler of Social Innovators Collective put on a fabulous networking event, match making entrepreneurs and non profits for Social Good. Social Innovators Collective brings together the brightest, most innovative individuals and companies serving non profits. Find ways you can contribute to the collective!

On Valentine's day I was heartfelt to meet Yao Huang who told me about “The Hatchery” (Are You Serious?) event the following night.  It was indeed a great event covering marketing, finance, technology, etc.  Presenting in a rather unique way, the panelists included, Bill Reinish of Paladin Capital Group, Kirill Sheynkman of RTP Ventures, Sachin Jade of  Klifer Capital, and Brad Harrison of BHV. The Hatcherty and Yao are also doing some exciting things with new new startups. One of my favorite projects is Win4Causes.com... Check it out. 

Next night, it was time for the #SUXORZ: the worst social media screw-ups of 2011. I attended the event with friend Brittany Brady of Sysomos and we had a blast!  The event took place at the Gershwin, with panelists Brian Clark, BL Ochman, Jessica Amason, Brian Morrissey, moderator (Blogads CEO) Henry Copeland and Social Media DJ Jon Accarino.  Fortunately I was able to laugh (and not cry) about some very poorly executed social media initiatives.  All in all, the winners (or losers) made some brave attempts; just came up a little short….and ‘lost’.  I guess we should thank the winners for helping us know what not to do! Sometimes you can learn more from failure than success. Last week I wrote about some other Social Media #Fail lessons learned here.

David Eastman, CEO of JWT North America, focused his talk on Facebook coming up with his own definition of the big four tech companies as GAFA. You guessed it; Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. According to Eastman, whichever of these four giants that first position themselves to control the formula -  Digital Identity + Digital Media Consumption +Mobile Devices will control the market.  He also emphasized that Facebook is a tactic, not a strategy. (Great)  A strategy is always needed for successful marketing.

Ann Mack, Director of Trendspotting (coolest title ever) for JWT, shared details on claims that “73% of American adults agree that people use social media to brag about their lives. - Ann Mack #smwjwt.   Ann outlined trends that are shaping social media.  “Between social media, the advancement of mobile technology and location based services, there is a radical transparency in all of our lives. “Conspicuous living” has reached an all-time high.  She continued to project that we’ll see more services like Turntable.fm and Yobongo, which make it fun to discover new music or people.

So what’s happening with Non Profits?  The New York Public Library, Angela Montefinise, quotes Toby Daniels (@tobyd), the CEO of Crowdcentric and the Founder & Executive Director of Social Media Week. "Non profits have been able to start quickly, experiment, invest very little and incrementally build on successes over time, learning as they move forward from their mistakes and from the interactions they have with their users. There's nothing, essentially, holding them back or making these kinds of strides."  Specifically, he referred to social media's impact on non-profits like The New York Public Library, which hosted four events plus the opening reception at its landmark building on 42nd Street. "I think what the Library is doing is phenomenal. I think it's some of the smartest and most interesting stuff out there. …I don't see very many libraries using social media. The future for any organization, obviously libraries included, is in being able to reach and engage your community through multiple mediums. The physical pieces will continue to be very important, but continuing to engage them elsewhere is incredibly important." 

One of the panels early on in the conference highlighted NYPL's successful Twitter model, which won a PR News Non-Profit PR Award in 2010.

There’s no doubt, if you wanted all the tricks and tools of Social Media, SMW NYC12 was the place to be!  What was so true to the topic was that the presentations, panels and events from all over the world were live online!  Tweet your question and lo and behold – an (almost immediate) response!  And check out the screen shot (below) of Social Media Week Real Time Infographic.

Can’t wait ‘til next year!

Barely into 2012, I jumped ahead eight years and began to speculate as to what non-profits are going to look like in 2020. We all know change is on the horizon.  With the endless array of business models now at our fingertips, and the Non-Profit sector becoming increasingly innovative, the possibilities are limitless! Along these lines,  Katherine Pickus makes this interesting comment in her recent article, “Gone are the days when businesses existed to make money and nonprofits focused only on making the world better. Now both organizations are influencing each others’ practices and finding ways to work together…. By taking a new look at what it means to be a business or a nonprofit and applying these learnings in creative new ways, we’re leveraging the unique assets of each to get the best of both worlds.”


It’s no secret that the lines separating corporate and community are blurry. Non profits are quickly realizing they can no longer stay cemented to old school marketing plans and ignore social media, if they want to stay relevant, that is.  Social Enterprise is quickly being adopted as a valuable tool to help build and sustain NPO’s.  That being said, within the social media arena, the question now at the forefront is, ‘how is the change made from the very corporate concept of CRM to SCRM?’ (A very hot topic these days).


The learning process starts by the obvious: including social networks as part of your present CRM strategy, thus maintaining customer relationship across the social Web board!   Although this initiates an ongoing learning process on the part of NPO’s, I really like what Katie Shields says about the clear advantage of non-profits.  “In the business world, a common sentiment about social CRMs is that it is entirely new territory. Corporations, who are used to traditional Madison Avenue, top-down marketing campaigns, find that social CRMs are not their specialty. Here, nonprofits have a clear advantage over their for-profit counterparts!”


Emphasizing the need for change, a report by IBM makes things very clear , … “your organization may be present on social media and it may have a CRM (customer/constituent relationship management) strategy, but if you don’t have a social CRM strategy that combines the strengths of those two, you’re missing a key piece of the puzzle.” 


It’s important to make note that SCRM is an extension of CRM, not a replacement for CRM. Salesforce acknowledges SCRM as a natural extension of CRM itself.  For example.  “Twitter CRM and Facebook CRM are natural extensions of Salesforce CRM.  That’s because all three live in the same place: the cloud.  So if you’re using salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud or Serfice Cloud, you’re already positioned in the best of possible worlds.”


So, here we are – Social meets CRM…So where do we go from here?  How do we barrel forward with SCRM, create strategy and start learning from businesses?  As Social CRM revolves around the co-creation of value with customers, how does a company measure the value created by Social CRM? The answers to these questions and many more will help point you in the right direction.  Of course, my response and solution to these inquiries is, ‘Avectra’ – the key that opens the door to your SCRM experience.


AVECTRA -  Avectra Social CRM incorporates the social interactions of the relationship into an organization's membership and business strategies to build long-term loyalty, trust, and mutual value - one member engagement at a time. And to realize these benefits and more, today's smallest, largest and most successful member-based organizations need a comprehensive suite of membership management and social business tools: 

• netFORUM 
• MemberFuse Community 
• Social Console - Social Media Management 
• A-Score - Socialytics 

Avectra Social CRM represents a fundamental shift in the way an organization identifies, serves and retains its members to how it will define the future success of the organization and its membership initiatives. It signals the end of the era of AMS, and the beginning of the era of Social CRM for Associations!


I can’t yet envision where NPO’s will be in 2020… I am sure, however, that SCRM is the right conduit to success; the pathway being brilliantly defined and plotted by Jacob Morgan in his blog, The Evolution of CRM to SCRM.  In it he explains how, “Chess Media Group in collaboration with Mitch Lieberman decided to breakdown how CRM has evolved by taking things back to basics and addressing the questions of: who, what, when, where, why, and how.”  This is a great visual emphasizing the shift from CRM to SCRM being behavioral and interaction based and not technology driven.



You might want to take a look at Katie Shield’s article.  She has some interesting observations:

• Social = Social Networks. Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube amplify the voice of the customer. These networks provide a powerful platform for consumers and potential donors to interact with organizations, brands and companies.
• C = Customer. (Or donor.) There are already millions of people assembled on social networks. All an organization needs to do is tap into the network. There, they’ll find many of their existing customers/donors and potential customers/donors, served up on a silver platter!
• R = Relationship. Online relationships between customers and organizations are characterized by quick and easy communication. And, for the most part, all of the communications on social networks are open and transparent, visible to other customers/donors. For example, if Marie Antoinette answered a peasant’s message about bread prices, it would be seen by all of France.
• M = Management. With communication out in the open, organizations have a much better chance of understanding and engaging with their customers. Social CRM tools help organizations to connect the dots of online conversations with customers and provide a real-time record of your business activity.

It’s easy to screw up social media if your organization is not prepared to be social. I attended an event lat night at #SMWNY called SUXORZ: Worst Social Media Screw ups of 2011. It's alarming just how clueless and unprepared many orgnizations are when it comes to social.  And it's not the lack of social tools, it's the lack of strategies that lead to these extraordinary disasters! The failing goes beyond the public social media sites, as described in Jessica Stillman's post on 3 popular ways to screw up social enterprise. 

Yammer CEO David Sacks a few weeks ago, suggested that companies often go wrong by “trying to bolt that on to some existing tool, because if the tool isn’t built from the ground up to be social, it’s not going to have the level of usability that’s required.”  

Many will agree that the first step in changing a potential negative situation is simply becoming aware of it. Then, the call to action! Instead of completely changing business processes to adapt to social tools, think about how you can make your business itself more social – it’s not all about the tool, it’s about the innovative strategy behind it.  

Another great idea to embrace change within your organization is to incentivize staff and customers to socialize. Give them a reason to get value from it. Let’s face it.  Participants who have been offered what they consider to be generous incentives will more likely be more eager to participate.  For example, offer exclusive giveaways, resources (white papers, content) etc., only on social channels. Create that ‘community feel’ by rewarding your employees or customers for being active on your social networks. Highlight their interactions and good ideas (think badges, member spotlights, special tweets or recognition, etc.) Thinking about these things ahead of time will ensure that including social tools in your overall business strategy will NOT result in a screw up later.  

Should you decide to rethink your strategy techniques, Frank Marquardt at Mashable offers 5 Key tips:

1. Know your voice
2. Time your content
3. Know your audience
4. Solve problems
5. Be true

Remember, there’s no need to re-create everything from scratch; find inspiration from successful organizations and see what they’ve done then decide if it makes sense for your association. You might want to start with:

• Dan Shipp’s article on Non Profits successfully embracing social media. 
• Debbie Weil, author of the “Corporate Blogging Book” has posted a list of 75 “Big Brand” corporate blogs List of 75+ Big Brand Corporate Blogs   The list also includes associations and non-profits.

Also, Robin Broitman’s ideas on Influencing Influencers may be helpful.   There are great  resources offered here, which include tips and advice that can help you identify influential bloggers and other social media users and develop strategies to engage your targeted influencers in ways that will help you achieve your objectives.  In this informative blog, Robin discusses Identifying, Targeting and Courting Key Influencers.

Harness the power of social media!  Listen – Understand – Engage!

Is Pinterest just another new social media craze?  I don’t think so. Right now it’s about the

direct traffic to your web site where you can communicate your dream for your cause. 

Yes, I quickly noticed Pinterest offers high visibility for non-profits.  I kind of like hanging around the leading edge of non-profit technology, and in doing so, I checked out Joe Water’s piece in Huffington Post, Why and How Causes Should Use Pinterest.  In his blog he asks the question, “Is your nonprofit right for Pinterest? You may want to pull up the article and see if you have all the right answers.

Frogloop’s Avi Kaplan challenges you to Steal 42 Creative Pinterest Ideas for Non Profits. For example, if you're an animal shelter or animal rights organization: Pin pictures of animals who need homes. Share the story of each animal in the Pin Description. Where was Scruffiefound? Did she need medical care? Were you able to find a home for her?

or Pin pictures of families who adopt animals from your shelter. Many animal adoption services send representatives out to do a home visit before the family can be approved to adopt their new pet, or even to drop the pet off once an adoption is finalized. Use that opportunity to get a picture with the family. 

Wolf Photo: Credit to Flickr user: Dennis from Atlanta

Or, if you're a church, synagogue, or other religious organization: Scour the web for yummy recipes your congregants can prepare for the holidays, then pin images of all the yummy dishes that link through to  the full recipes. Bonus if you convince members to pin their own recipes posted on their own blogs. Food can offer great visuals and this can be a great community building exercise.

See and enjoy the rest of the Pinterest creative ideas for nonprofits right here.

Also, let's revisit this post by Kiki L'Italien offering great advice for Association Executives interested in Pinterest:

• You don't need to jump on Pinterest right away, but you should make it easier for others to promote your content on Pinterest. 
• SEO works well with Pinterest already (its domain authority is rising fast) and can definitely work for you. 
• You know all those sharing options you hopefully already have for your content? You should look for the "Pin It" button to add to those. 
• If you sell books, merchandise, anything...make it Pinterest friendly. 
• Start thinking of images and videos a lot more seriously for their Pinterest use (you should already be doing this for future mobile use anyway)...arm your conference speakers, attendees, members, content providers, authors with Pinterest enabled promotional materials. Ways to spread the word on Pinterest from their websites and newsletters. 
• Start thinking of if you have "How To" videos, articles, or tutorials that might be of interest to a large group of people. These types of things are extremely popular on Pinterest. 
• If you want an example of an association using Pinterest, check out The American_Speech-Language-Hearing Association's Pinterest page. They discovered a large amount of traffic coming from Pinterest in their website analytics. When they explored it, it turned out many of their members were using Pinterest for sharing ideas and news. ASHA's social media queen Maggie McGary helped other ASHA members figure out how to use Pinterest by writing about it on their blog (bonus points for educating all members on the hip new way to share!). This may be something your organization could do, too.

Pinterested yet? Here are a few other resources you may want to review before you start ‘Pinning”:

• John Haydon 12 Ways to Use Pinterest for your Non Profit
• Non Profit Tech 2.0 How To: Get Your Nonprofit Started on Pinterest
• BWF-Social The Social Side of Giving 
• My Favorite - Non Profit Infographics by Beth Kanter

For more on Pinterest, check out this infographic that shows the site is driving more traffic to retailers' Web sites than Google+. 

Is Pinterest fundraising technoloyg? Will Pinterest be part of your Social CRM or Fundraising CRM strategy? Can it be used as online giving software to drive more traffic to non profit fundraising efforts? The case studies are still be formed, and it's exciting to watch them unfold!

When:  Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Where: 79 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10003 

Time:  5:45 pm – 7:45 pm

The 501 Tech Club is a monthly gathering of people working on or interested in nonprofit technology in the New York area. The meetings are opportunities for anyone interested in helping nonprofits use technology to get together and talk shop in a fun, informal setting, and the name refers to the fact that most of us work primarily with and for 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations.

I am privileged to have the opportunity to speak at this gathering where I’ll be sharing on "The New Era of Fundraising - Expectations Changed by Innovations". Social media offers tremendous insight and various opportunities for nonprofits to engage effectively with donors. On the other hand innovation is forging the path as to the way we engage and the modus operandi is constantly changing: thus making it more important than ever for nonprofit leaders to scrutinize their fundraising strategies.  I think we can all agree that the framework for nonprofit fundraising presents challenges.  For example:

• What can nonprofits do to identify the need for donors to feel valued to their contributions and connected to their cause on a continuing basis?  

• How does the social, human, face-to-face, relationship fit in the overall picture?  The Millennial Donors Report 2011 by Achieve and Johnson Grossnickle and Associates (JGA) found that while giving via mobile/text and social networks is an up and coming way of soliciting gifts, when it comes to requests for their time or money, Millennial donors put high value on face-to-face communication.” 

• How will your nonprofit be distinguished from the distracting and competing online sources? 

• How can nonprofits leverage Social CRM to adapt to donor expectations?

The Benefits of Crowd Funding

What NFP's can learn from the revolutionary concept of Crowd Funding
 

Times are changing!  We now see the terms Crowd Funding and Crowd Sourcing popping up all over the Internet.  Crowd Funding (sometimes called crowd sourced capital, or street performer protocol) describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money and other resources together, usually via the Internet to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_funding

As far as Crowd Sourcing goes, when putting a variety of definitions together, we get the picture.  Personally, I like CBS Jennifer Alsever ‘s definition, … “the basic idea is to tap into the collective intelligence of the public at large to complete business-related tasks that a company would normally either perform itself or outsource to a third-party provider. Yet free labor is only a narrow part of Crowd Sourcing's  appeal. More importantly, it enables managers to expand the size of their talent pool while also gaining deeper insight into what customers really want.” 

Basically, Crowd Sourcing means to "use talents of the crowd", and is a play on the word outsourcing. The origins of the word Crowd Sourcing are credited to Jeff Howe, a Wired Magazine writer who first brought Crowd Sourcing to people's attention and vocabulary with his 2006 story, "The Rise of Crowd Sourcing".  http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/Crowd Sourcing.html

Whatever term you want to use, you can’t get away from the fact that Social media is impacting fundraising.  In fact, Crowd-funding is changing the way not-for-profits and Associations operate today. Non-profits don’t need to lag behind the corporate world when it comes to IT  - so maybe NOW is the time to ‘take it to the Crowd!’

Take a look at just a few of the online crowd funding websites you can take advantage of and raise the funds you need for your specific project.

1. Profounder  ProFounder is a proud sponsor of the Hello Etsy Summit on Small Business and Sustainability. Profounder follows strict guidelines to legitimize Crowd Funding investments.  They offer a step-by-step fundraising system, to providing unique individual tools to assist entrepreneurs at all phases of their community funding journey, to holding events, to simply building awareness and community around this vision, we've evolved our products and will continue to do so to best meet entrepreneurs' needs. 
2. Kickstarter.com is a popular crowd funding site. “Kickstarter is the world's largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.  On Kickstarter, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands. Why? It protects everyone involved. Creators aren’t expected to develop their project without necessary funds, and it allows anyone to test concepts without risk.
3. BlueSwarm.com -  social fund raising for political campaigns. 
4. Apps.funder funds new mobile apps.
5. Start Some Good  is a new platform for social good initiatives to raise funds and grow a community of supporters.  
6. IndieGoGo.com  one of the first crowd funding sites, launched in the beginning of 2008. IndieGoGo’s Slava Rubin notes a slew of competitors now-a-days .. “We just focus on maintaining an open platform, customer happiness and being global. We just want lots of happy customers all around the world.”

Just think, what if you could actually drive your cause through crowd sourcing and funding?  In citing just a few, clearly, Crowd Funding shines as the latest fundraising trend for nonprofits.  The question is how to get started.  Listed below are several Crowd Funding websites to get your non-profit on the road to success.  Why not take time to review these valuable aids and kickstart your non-profit in 2012!

• Looking to the Crowd – Crowd Funding Options for Your Nonprofit
• Online Fundraising, Cause Marketing and Crowd Funding Platforms that Benefit Nonprofits
• 15 ways to crowd fund your startup or project 
• A valuable resource!  How to Compare Crowd Funding Websites
• Social Entrepreneur Funding Series: Crowd Funding Your Startup
•  Can’t find an investor for your startup? Try Crowd Funding!
• Stop Begging, Grovelling & Pleading. Try Crowd Funding Your Small Business or Startup Instead

This year, why not let your customers drive, direct, and finally directly fund your operations!

At Avectra we believe Crowd Funding can have huge implications for the future not for profits! Avectra delivers fundraising solutions for non for profits including A-Score™ and Moves Management. And coming soon, even AvectraLabs will have some new Crowd Funding concepts to share!

• Have you evaluated and maximized the quality of customer interactions?
• Is your organization prepared to stand out - differentiate themselves and do something of last value in 2012?  In what ways does your organization show value to members, customers, suppliers and the community at large?
• Has your organization dipped its toes into the Social CRM waters yet? (Today’s reality) What tools are you using and what do you need?
• Are you exceeding member expectations? (At times it’s easy to keep doing the things that we know will work. New ideas have to be great ideas that will exceed the expectations of our competitors and our members.)  Yes! 

• Core values
• Strengths
• Challenges (specifically with retention and recruitment due to changing member expectations)
• Competition (why your services are superior)
• Leaders  (great leaders will reinforce core values)

1. Have you formulated a detailed action plan for your new business model - For-profit/Non-profit fusion?  What about CRM? I’m sure there is a lot to learn from those who have paved the way. 
2. Does your plan coincide with your non-profit’s mission?  Make sure the mission is not overshadowed by the profit.
3. How much money will you need and where can you find it?

Questions of this nature and many more, were on the table at Global Engagement Summit (GES). "The Best of Both Worlds: Merging For-Profit and Non-Profit Models,"  In the endeavor to wrap up the discussions, Jamie Jones, associate director of the Social Enterprise at Kellogg (SEEK) Program, is reported as saying, “we’ll see success when social responsibility is not just a program but an integrated part of any company. Only when CEOs start to see social responsibility as a financial opportunity - as PepsiCo. recently demonstrated in its large-scale, historic investment in Mexican sunflower farmers - will we finally see true scale and social impact throughout the business world.”  (see full article)

"Social entrepreneurship is really taking off around the world," says David Bornstein (@dnbornstein), author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. Bornstein hails the work of Ashoka, an organization that helps fund entrepreneurs with innovative solutions to social problems.

According to Bornstein, the relentless won't-take-no-for-an-answer quality of entrepreneurs is what gives them their edge in business. "They absorb the failure, they learn, they surround themselves with a good team and then they redirect." These same attributes, when applied in the social realm, can result in community-changing solutions.

In addition to the abovementioned,  Social Entrepreneur – Blake Mycoskie (@blakemycoskie) offers some great insight to set the gears in motion as he writes, “Social Entrepreneurship is, first and foremost, a business. That means it is an organization engaged in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers, but it trades primarily to support a social purpose (not profits for shareholders!). Like any business, it aims to generate profit, but it reinvests those profits in the business or in a social cause. It is, therefore, not simply a business driven by the need to create profit for shareholders or owners. Social Entrepreneurship is committed to commercial viability but the prime motivation is building a better society and finding a solution to social problems.”

As social funding has indeed become a critical strategy, take a look at CRM in Not for Profit, wherein a critical question is posed, “Is CRM as effective within organizations that operate on a not for profit basis?"  I really appreciated the response by Graham Hill, “Despite the emphasis on profitability in much of commercial CRM today, there is no reason why CRM as a business capability cannot be used to equally good effect in a not-for-profit ….  The heart of commercial CRM is managing contacts with customers such that sales are generated, customers are satisfied and relationships are developed. All of this at a profit.”

In the comment section, I was ‘all ears’ when reading a note by Barnabas Tiburtius .  “It is heartening to know that this model is in operation elsewhere in the world. The background of starting the hybrid model in the state of Tamilnadu, India was the lack of accountability in an NGO run organization. This is in the business of Microfinance. We are serving 10,000 members in nearly 600 Self Help Groups. The NGO model was in operation for 8 years and sustainability became critical and the Hybrid model For-profit Non-profit was put in place in 2004 and today we have turned around the organization. We have gone one step further by launching an initiative for technology evolution in the market place for improving the impact of the microfinance program.”

An interesting observation is made in consideration of Microfinance in an excerpt from ‘Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know, “There was once a time when the future of microfinance was contingent on the fortunes of the Grameen Bank. Today, microfinance is no longer dependent on any one institution. No one is “too big to fail.”   If the Grameen Bank collapsed, its borrowers and staff would certainly suffer. But in time, other microlenders would absorb them. (There are hundreds in Bangladesh alone.) Seeds have spread and a forest has grown. The vitality of an idea, widely understood and accepted, keeps it alive. Significant credit for this change must go to Sam Daley-Harris (@samdaleyharris), the social entrepreneur behind the Microcredit Summit Campaign, which helped thousands of independent organizations coalesce into a global movement that achieved audacious goals in less than a decade.  People will continue to create newer and better microfinance organizations into the future because they know they can do it, they know how to do it, and they know why it is worth their effort. 

No doubt, it will  be interesting to follow this golden thread and see how value and impact is maximized through these hybrid evolutions.

• Manage what you can,
• Influence what you cannot directly manage and 
• Balance what you can neither manage nor influence. 
  

• Business managers and IT managers are beginning to work more closely together to co-own and co-sponsor emergent collaboration initiatives. Forty-six percent (46%) of respondents state that their organization's business and IT departments were jointly responsible for sponsoring the effort.
• Forty-three percent (43%) of companies cite financial gain (cost savings and revenue generated) from implementing enterprise collaboration tools. 

• Social systems used within a business environment present a number of unique challenges compared to other enterprise IT applications. There is benefit in prototyping or experimenting with some applications in order to gain experience, but don’t let that be too ad hoc in its objectives and governance.

• Employees will only participate in social applications if they find them simple, useful, and to an extent, entertaining. Managers and leaders should set scope and style early on.

• Encourage staff to adopt a business-like attitude to avoid gossip and clutter. If necessary, have a separate social area for birthday congratulations and pet photos.

• Defining a number of application processes rather than specific platforms will help to achieve early wins.

• Enterprise Q&A and Open Innovation schemes have shown themselves to be very productive.

• If there is cross-over as to which applications to use for which purposes or processes, define the scope and set guidance.

• If you expect staff across the enterprise to take time out to respond to questions and requests for help, set up a measurement mechanism and link it to a rewards system either in status or of monetary value.

• To avoid the same questions being asked repeatedly, ensure that you have good search and FAQ mechanisms. Consider linking such content into a generic enterprise search portal or ECM system.

• If you are connecting with technology partners how are you enhancing security restrictions?

• Are your employees intensely trained using a social business system?

• What has been your experience as you entered E2.0? 

• Have you tried and failed and are you ready to try again?

In this series we've shared many different community types.

So far we've covered:

• Employee Communities
• External Social Networks
• Support Communities
• Acquisition Communities, and even…
• Dating Communities!

That's a lot of communities! As the community takes on a life of its own, most organizations find themselves facing the need for more than one community. So, you have to ask some questions as your organization's communities scale.

• Would you have to use a separate community platform or site for each one?
• Do you have unlimited money and time to manage all that?  
  
• Would you be able to stay updated and informed on all the innovative technology and strategies within your enterprise? 
  

Probably not. Fortunately though, a single online community can serve multiple purposes and objectives.   

Think of it like Community "Bundling"… much like you may do with your cable provider. Why pay separately for Internet, Phone and Cable when you can get all these services together for one low price!? No, I'm not selling you broadband. But, to that point, why use a separate site for employees, customers and prospects? You don't have to.

Here are a few examples of ‘bundling’.

• When phone companies offer a lower price for phone and internet service, that's a bundle. 
• A gift basket of a bottle of wine, cheese and crackers and candy is a bundle.  It's not sold at a discount.
• A veterinarian that offers a service for new puppy owners that includes well check visits, shots, spay/neutering, and flea control products is offering what marketers call a "product bundle".
• When a computer store sells a printer, paper and an extra ink cartridge, that's a bundle.
• A grocery store that offers "dinners to go" is offering a bundle.
• A spa that offers a relaxation package of a massage, facial and manicure is bundling. 
• And now… an online community for several different purposes!

At Avectra we use one community: AvectraCommunity.com for our staff, customers, partners and prospects. Configured with the proper security permissions and integrated with our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database, Avectra has the ultimate community serving several types of stakeholders.  

This diagram shows the relationship with the various communities we've discussed (excluding dating of course).

As you can see, the Internal communities are for staff and partners. External communities are usually for prospects and brand community. Customer communities are usually a hybrid. But again, with the right integration and configuration, one community can work for all purposes. 

Tips:  

• Stakeholder Strategies: When using one community for multiple purposes, each purpose needs a clear strategy including goal, communication plan, engagement campaign, staffing, etc…
• Make Community Integral: Remove other forms of communication where possible such as email, side conversations, Skype, Google docs, etc… If there's other ways to communicate that people are used to, they'll use those instead of the community.
• Integrate: Your community should be your "User Experience" site, but you shouldn't spend an exorbitant amount of time "Administering the "Users". By integrating your Community with your CRM, HR System, and other databases that already has your user data, you prevent managing multiple systems with redundant data. The more overhead it takes to manage the data, the less time your staff spends on community and content management.
• Content is King: As stated in previous blogs, good content drives community engagement, which in turn can drive commerce (or conversion of a call to action). Make sure you focus on WHY your users are accessing the site. It's usually for content such as discussions, resources, whitepapers, survey results, market research, etc. Whatever the valuable content is that each stakeholder wants, make sure you drive that information into your community and make it as available/aware as possible. 
• Community Management: It takes more than just one person to make a community successful. You need multiple people across your organization who take ownership of their area of the community. Each stakeholder group (employees, partners, customers, prospects) should have a community manager. Also for an employee community each department should have a person in charge of their community area. For example the Sales Team, Finance Team, R&D team, etc. should have a designated point person to ensure their department is utilizing the community for communication/collaboration.
• Be Persistent and Open: It's a marathon, not a sprint. A community is a long-term strategic initiative and full engagement won't happen over night. Often users are slow to adopt a new way to communicate, but don't give up. Make sure to reinforce the community as core to your communication. Be transparent and open with your audience about why it's important (to improve their experience). Encourage your stakeholders to offer feedback on how to improve the community. Be open for change, but determined to achieve full engagement. 
• Engage and Measure: Make sure to stimulate engagement with several approaches. Ensure email notifications remind users about activity. Use reputation points and leader boards (similar to Foursquare) to incentivize and reward your users for activity. And remember to measure the activity and trends over time. Melissa Parrish shares some great metrics on Community Benchmarking. 

Want to learn more about Avectra Community? Or even better, learn how Avectra's community product MemberFuse™ can be the all-in-one community solution for your organization? Give us a shout!

• Employee Communities
• External Social Networks 
• Support Communities, and
• Acquisition Communities

Now, we’re going to change it up a bit. Today, let’s talk dating!

Didn’t see that coming did you? Stay tuned. There is a moral to this topic… promise! 

First I have to mention, some of the most incredibly rewarding experiences in my business career have been to deliver industry and member communities for associations.  I have done this now for 8 years.  Consequently, community vitality is now my purpose, promise, and passion.  Drawing from this background, I’ve come to the realization that successful online communities must have a clear purpose and stimulate relationships. This goes for both associations and businesses.

Match.com is all about generating meaningful connections for their community members. Not much different from the purpose of your community, right?  With this in mind, what about considering a mentoring-matching program to enable employees to gain professional training and development?  Or, what about customers being matched to the appropriate sales associate, based on interests, region and business need? Certainly, some ideas to mull over.  There’s so much we can learn from the successes of online-dating applied to social business.

Community begins with purpose and flourishes with relationships.  Creating an online community for your employees and customers is the cornerstone in establishing the foundation for these relationships. Caught and almost lost in the web of doing business through social media is the art of establishing a “human” business. More and more, the art of “being human” is relevant to business social success, even spawning a whole book by Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter, “Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World”. It’s more than being authentic… it’s about being a real person. (Shameless promotion: stay tuned to the Avectra blog for announcements on Humanize as our next book of the month club, and a topic for an upcoming California SAE webinar on December 15^th, sponsored by Avectra). 

Paramount to achieving your business objectives and keeping your audience engaged, your social media plan should be designed to influence, captivate and inspire consumer confidence.  The truth is, today successful marketing is contingent on priceless qualities like trust and integrity, rather than large marketing budgets.  Built within your community should be a proactive, ‘we care’ service ethic, with ‘we do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do’ as your community aphorism.

Purpose comes before strategy.  Once the strategy is in place, then its decision time as far as which tools will help you execute your strategy.  I think we can all agree that acquiring and maintaining a sound strategy is integral toward building your community.  Nonetheless, you don’t want to focus on the strategy and tools alone. Tony Ebikeme writes, “Strategy isn’t the goal.  It’s the path you plan to take to get there.” So have you thought about the purpose of social business and why your customers or employees would want to be engaged?

I use social media every day in some form or fashion and it is clear that every site, internally and externally has a different purpose. One of the ways to gain exposure and activity to your social business is to leverage external social media sites. The extent of using external sites depends on both your purpose, and the external site’s purpose. For example, Facebook is for friends, (but may also be good for business just because it has the most users, 600 million).  LinkedIn seems to satisfy business-related purposes, Match.com is for dating, and an association member community is for the purpose of a particular trade or profession. 

Suffice to say, you wouldn’t really try to connect to your customers on Match.com (that may be weird). However Match.com may be a benchmark for facilitating community relationships… the second success factor to focus on.   “Although having a benchmarking methodology may in itself seem something of an expensive luxury - it can reap huge rewards, not only in performance but in establishing valuable strategic alliances. In ‘s addition, low cost mini-benchmarking can prove highly effective - after all it is the ideas for profitable change that you are seeking, not an entire 'crib sheet' to copy another organization's e-service or another country's entire strategy!”   - E-Service-Expert.com

I think Farra Trompeter‘s ten best practices for using Social Media summarizes this article appropriately:

1.              Take a deep breath, and let go. You’re not in control anymore.

2.              Stop, look and listen.  Tie your goals to what people need, and meet your audiences where they are

3.              Build your strategy around reality  Select the tools based on their purpose, your audience and what you can manage in terms of staff time and costs.

4.              Remember what you learned in kindergarten: be nice, share, and say thank you.

5.              Emphasize the social in social media.  Schedule calls, meetups and events to connect online communities.

6.              Get personal. 

7.              Be flexible.  Your community will move around; the tools are going to change

8.              Don’t forget your website and integration.  Bring all your online communications together and repurpose content.

9.              Change how you define success.  It’s about content rather than numbers; relationship building rather than ‘marketing’.

10.            Pause and evaluate.  Keep listening, and give yourself time to build community, trust and conversation.

Get more from Farra and BigDuck here. 

Oh!  One more question,  - as a community manager, do you think you could write off your Match.com subscription as Research & Development expense?

So far in this series we've highlighted Employee Communities, External Social Networks and Support Communities.  Today we will focus on Acquisition Communities; a term we use at AvectraLabs. This community type may also be called Prospect or Lead Communities.

The purpose of the Acquisition Community is simple: Conversion. This approach is to generate awareness of your value to prospective customers, capture their information (with approval), engage them to connect with you in your community, with the ultimate goal of customer conversion.

The term "customer" is interchangeable with words such as Member (for member-based organizations), Donor (for fundraising or advocacy), and Employee (for recruitment efforts), etc. The key element of an Acquisition Community is not to launch a community with an existing user base, but to build it through external engagement efforts.

Here are a few specific steps you may choose to guide you through the process:

Step 1) Build Awareness

External engagement efforts may include a series of campaigns to build awareness and drive recruitment to your community. The most popular external campaigns include Social Registration and Sign On. This effort involves building awareness to a prospect with meaningful content publicly accessible on your website, blog or Facebook. The prospect then interacts with the content with either a comment, rating, survey response, or any other opt-in exchange. 

Step 2) Capture / Register User

Before the interaction is complete the user must connect their Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter account and in doing so authorizes your community to capture their information and registers them as a user. Keep in mind this happens seamlessly to the user, as they never leave the website they’re currently visiting. In the background you have registered the user in your community, captured their social interests, photo, and inserted demographic data into your CRM. 

Step 3) Engagement 

Now that you know a few things about the user including their social interests via social integration, their recent interaction with your content, and most importantly- how to reach them on their terms; you can begin the engagement process. The key here is keeping it conversational and relevant. By this time, you understand your audience to some degree; you know what they like, and are clued in as to why they are interacting with you.  Make them feel at home on your site; stay focused and encourage participation. 

The first contact is not the time to sell.  It's a time to excite and reach out. Make your inquirers feel special. Get them to like you by offering something of value.  Be creative, passionate and inspirational throughout your interactions.  Ask questions - start a conversation. After a few points of contact with your audience, you can invite them to participate or get more involved in a campaign on your website with a business goal of conversion. 

Step 4) Conversion  

Conversion can be a few things… a request for information, an agreement for a sales call, filling out a full community profile, or inviting other friends to participate in the internal (acquisition) community. Regardless of the conversion, you must focus on the means to your end (conversion). If at this point you've done a good job of engaging and creating rapport... don't blow it with a typical hard sale. Keep your goal and the campaign clear and simple to the user. Reward and/or recognize them for successfully completing your conversion goal.

Some other references we like here at Avectra include:

·      www.involve.com. See the Walmart facebook page. Embedded within the Walmart face book page are acquisition-like widgets that have an online community behind them.

·      eBay has found they increase conversion rate of transactions when their users are community members vs non-community members.

·      Another good article with examples about lead-communities here by Paul Chaney (@pchaney).

A few other considerations to this Social Registration / Sign On / Acquisition approach is about privacy and disclosure. The method behind our approach here requires you to fully disclose what data you are accessing, and what you plan to do with this data. As you probably know, most people don't read the Terms and Conditions or Privacy Policies. That's the scary thing. Personally, I give assent to my info being used and abused left and right, just to have access to the latest web app or the ability to save a few seconds of logging in with a separate password. There are some moral and ethical issues here. For example what if the user disconnects their Facebook account from being linked to your community? Does that mean you have to delete and remove the data? There's a lot of gray lines here and this issue will certainly become a much more important one as access to our data becomes more prevalent and our control over it diminishes. Can we really trust the vendors to do the right thing? 

I know Avectra spends a lot of time and thoughtful energy in considering the avenues, ways and means to ensure the protection and privacy of our users' data, but not all companies do so. Avectra has an immaculate reputation of earning our customers’ trust because of our high standard of reliability.

Hopefully, these few tips have challenged you to build a solid foundation for your Acquisition Community.   

No doubt a valiant effort will require some long hours and hard work... 

Gordon B. Hinckley once said, “You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.”  

AvectraLabs Attends Web 2.0 Expo - Our thoughts...


Time flies! It’s hard to believe that this action/content-packed expo went by so quickly. I was impressed to find many of the sessions inspiring, exciting and relevant; kindling some ideas, (at least within me), that caused me to step back and take a second look at the big picture, a panoramic view if you will, of the amazing technology of our day! 

AvectraLabs made a strong appearance at Web 2.0 Expo (@w2e). It’s safe to say we stood out in the infamous Purple Pumas! The three of us pictured here include Luiz Lopes, Rocky Segarra and yours truly (Sterling Raphael).

Here are a few observations and ideas we gained at the expo. 

Luiz attended Tuesday’s session on Flickr PuSH: Real-time Updates on the Cheap for Fun and Profit by Neil Walker (@nolancaudill), Nolan Caudill. 

Neil had us taking a look at how Flickr developed around the pubsubhubbub (https://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/) -protocol for it’s new API which handles near real-time access to images and tons of other objects from Flickr. 

Ideas presented here open up a whole new experience for developers and for users, who won’t have to sit and wait for an API response.  The API will push data whenever it’s available. 

View the Recap and Slides...

Next Luiz attended Code As Craft: Building a Strong Engineering Culture - by Chad Dickerson (@ChadDickerson)

This was an impressive presentation.  Chad is the new CEO of Etsy. This talk was all about the culture he and his team cultivate at Etsy, and how things worked organically to match the type of company they are creating.  His discussion focused on ‘culture’.

• Culture is the game.
• Culture is what brings great people to your company
• Define the culture and show it, let everyone express it wherever and whenever.
• Not everyone is going to agree, but the culture will dictate respect when you do disagree. 

Chad reinforced the idea that "Engineers are Creative people” and because of that he encourages his engineers to give talks/presentations and helps them when submitting call to papers and trains them on presentation skills. Outstanding!

Collaborate with OpenSource world.

View the Session Slides. 

More at: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/

Luiz also attended the session “The Secret Path to Success in Online Video” - by Dina Kaplan (@dinakaplan)

Dina is one of the 3-founders of Blip.tv.  She discussed in some depth about the surge in online video series, an industry with much potential. I was interested in her discussion about blip.tv, and the reasons for failing on the first try.  I was impressed to hear how by tapping into an established community (Online Video Bloggers) they were able to listen to their requests and build a platform their users loved. Five hundred sign-ups in one day.  She encouraged posting content regularly, even if it’s not part of the series.  The use of Social Media has been a real success for them..  Eyes are drifting from TV to online.

 

Ignite NYC was the highlight of the week for me. 18 renowned speakers took the stage in rapid paced keynotes. One of the most entertaining was by Alexis Ohanian (@kn0thing) from Redddit.

One of the favorite sessions I attended was on Guerilla Marketing – by Jay Conrad Levinson @zakiwarfel 

It was a treat to hear from Jay Conrad Levinson, Father of Guerilla Marketing. "Guerrilla methods are faster, less expensive, less rigorous versions of their non-guerrilla cousins. They offer an acceptable trade-off between rigor and cost effective techniques" - @zakiwarfel  "I'm referring to the soul and essence of guerrilla marketing which remain as always -- achieving conventional goals, such as profits and joy, with unconventional methods, such as investing energy instead of money.  http://www.gmarketing.com/

A few notable quotes from my sessions include:

• @MBLOOMSTEIN discussing Content Strategy and says “Hoarding and Aggregating Content IS NOT the same as Curating” 
• @PeterKim says the key to using Facebook is a 3-step process. Starting with creating Awareness, then focusing on Engagement, finally the goal of Conversion.
• @adamconnor shares on giving better design critique by “Use a filter. Gather initial thoughts and reactions. Revisit them in the right context.” And “Lead with question show interest in the process.” I’m sure Rocky (the AvectraLabs UX Designer), is happy I learned a few things in this session!

Speaking of Rocky… he attended a few sessions including HTML5 the WOW and HOW – by @petele a Developer Advocate @ Google.

Pete was an interesting fellow and very clever in how he explained the HTML5 revolution and his enrollment with Google. He also went through a demo/tutorial on a small application using HTML5 and Javascript where he referenced the webkits and HTML5 elements we need to be using at this stage of the evolution.

HTML5 Tools, References and Kits we should be using include:

• We should be watching Paul Irish videos on htmlrocks.com
• HTML5 Cross Browser Polyfills - for less modern browsers
• Chrome Frame plugin
• Linear gradients rgba
• var els = document.getElementByClass
• .classlist api
• @font-face & Google API's learn more
• binary attributes
• Web Sockets - For sending and receiving messages
• Socket.IO to wrap around web sockets

References:

• http://www.html5rocks.com/en/
• http://petelepage.com/blog/2011/07/showing-hiding-panels-with-html-and-css/

Slides:

• http://bit.ly/pGGGn3
• http://petelepage.com/blog/2011/07/showing-hiding-panels-with-html-and-css/

Rocky’s favorite session was Mobile First, presented by Luke Wrobleski (@LukeW)- Co-Founder, Bagcheck Inc., LukeW Ideation & Design. 

Luke’s session talked about my favorite web topic "Mobile First". I am a hardcore advocate to this notion that Developers/Designers should be thinking about the Mobile version first for any web app.

Luke discussed three reasons for considering mobile first:  

1. The Mobile Growth
2. The Mobile force of making you focus
3. Mobile Extends your capabilities.  He mentions that in iPhone apps, the main function should be immediately apparent. Minimize the number of controls from which users have to choose and most importantly, create this first before getting to the desktop version of the app.

Key points:

• Google programmers are doing work on mobile applications first, because they are better apps and that's what top programmers want to develop.
• Mobile Web growth has outpaced desktop Web growth 8x. Smartphone sales will pass PC sales in 2012

Resources & References:

• The Touch Gesture Reference Guide is a unique set of resources for software designers and developers working on touch-based user interfaces.

These are just a few of many thought-provoking ideas we gained at the Expo, but suffice to say – this was a knowledge-packed event – a great learning experience!  Between yesterday’s miracles and tomorrow’s dreams, we live in a tremendous day and age!  

And that’s our recap for #w2e!

Don’t forget to follow @w2e and visit http://www.web2expo.com/ to register for future Web 2.0 Expos!

“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.”

- John Russell, President, Harley Davidson

So far in this blog series on Community Purpose we’ve discussed Employee Communities and External Social Networks. Today we’re going to focus on Communities for Customer Support.

What is a Support Community? 

The purpose of a support community is efficient facilitation of knowledge sharing. A Support Community socializes the support process by creating/ allowing collaboration around issues and feedback. Customers can help customers, and support people can interact in an open and conversational style while providing necessary support. Best of all the knowledge is searchable and sharable for future customer self-help. 

The Avectra Community:

MemberFuse, Avectra’s online community product, allows organizations to control the look, content, advertising and access based on the member data stored in netFORUM or another CRM system.

We are in the process of rolling out our own community platform to allow our customers to connect to each other and our support staff.

While it won't replace traditional support outlets, the Avectra Community can increase knowledge sharing, problem solving, and a sense of belonging with customers as they rally around issues and ideas to improve their experience. The need to contact Avectra support through traditional channels has the potential to decrease dramatically as customers will be able to find answers to common questions posted by their peers.




Another good example of support in a very social way, is GetSatisfaction, a simple feedback button that turns a comment or question into a knowledge base of users helping each other with the product or service.  Benjamin Gauthey, Digital Marketing, Microsoft Corp comments, “In our opinion, Get Satisfaction is one of the best social media feedback tools available today. Our customers love it because it creates a dedicated place where they can be heard and have a direct connection with our engineering team.”

Also, at AvectraLabs we’re experimenting with integrating GoToAssist  into our community platform. GoToAssist isn’t a Support Community, but is complementary to one. With GoToAssist you can easily view and control your customers' computers online to quickly resolve their technical issues.  It also provides you with secure live-support capability. They offer free trials for individuals and for teams.

Ideally, your support ecosystem would include Community, CRM, Ticketing and Live-Support Capabilities.

Every support community platform has unique benefits. Let’s take a look at just a few of the many …

Benefits of a Support Community 

• Improves Customer Experience by giving on-demand access to knowledge
• Knowledge Sharing - If you help a customer in a ticket or a phone call, that content is lost and not searchable
• Lowers Support Costs - It's more efficient for support staff to interact with customers in a community, then in a situation where something is resolved on a phone call
• Lets customers feel they're a part of a bigger community, not a lone customer with a lone problem
  

Keys to Setting up and Maintaining Your Support Community 

• Integrate them with your CRM - It's powerful if you track your customer feedback to their relationship with your company.
• Integrate with Ticketing System - Any support desk software you have, such as NetSuite.com  or zendesk.com will allow for integration with their API's. Make sure your online community can take a discussion or comment and create or track tickets with these systems.
• Monitor and Integrate Social - Your customers are talking about your products and services regardless of if they do it within your community. You need to listen, monitor and respond to customer conversations as it relates to support. 
• Allow your staff to be social with support. Zappos.com is a groundbreaking organization in many ways, but are infamous with how they handle support calls. Their support staff are allowed to be personable and social. It’s this unique approach to support that creates a culture at Zappos that attracts loyal and passionate customers.

As previously stated, when you tie together all your support tools, including Community, CRM, Live-Support, Ticketing System, and even external social networks… you create the ultimate support ecosystem.

I really like what Dion Hinchcliffe writes in his article on 12 best practices for online communities:

“Connect the community with the other CRM-related aspects of the organization. Customer communities have been used successfully for customer service, the generation of innovation, trend spotting, marketing, lead generation and many other activities. In the future, it’s likely that many customer communities will blur extensively with the organizations they are associated with and become more and more closely involved with their customers in a wide variety of activities. Those organizations that can do this successfully will likely reap rewards of efficiency, innovation, productivity increases and others, while assuming some of the risks involved in any sort of crowdsourcing activity.”

We are at the point where "Social" Business is now JUST BUSINESS. Your customers expect to be part of your community. Help them do so. 

One final thought. At Avectra we have many years of experience with associations, who create communities for their industry. The association business model needs to change to keep the associations relavant and funded. Avectra has tools that help with that. My point is... I find it interesting that we’re helping associations become more like for-profit corporations with their business model. But at the same time, we need to help for-profit corporations become more like associations by creating communities. A Customer Community is a step in the right direction. 

But wait... why can't I just use Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter as my ONLY community network? I get this question often. 

Here are a few reasons not to go "all in" with only the external networks:

1. They own the user experience. Though Facebook claims you YOUR content, it doesn't allow you to control permissions or own content on a granular level for your audience. Not the best scenario when your managing employee or customer support communities.
2. The permissions, privacy and features can change on a dime... we've seen this happen with Facebook many  times. You don't want to exclusively bet on their feature roadmap for your organization's community efforts. 
3. They don't integrate with your CRM, HR System or ERP. You should integrate business rules to your community permissions (see graph below). This is a big concept in Social CRM. 
4. They want to monetize YOUR users. Your business models are not aligned. You can't control or monetize the advertising to your users. 
5. Once your users get all your value on the external network, your value proposition is dilluted. They can then self organize there without you.

This graph demonstrates the relationship between your own community, your databases, and your external social networks. Again, a big part of Social CRM.

So how do you leverage external social networks?

• Awareness > Engagement > Conversion (thanks to @PeterKim for these steps): Use external sites as a way to create awareness and engage your audience. Have conversations with your users and when appropriate, bring them in to YOUR private community where you can deliver more relevant value and have a more appropriate interaction with them. Then focus on conversion. A tool like HootSuite.com can help you monitor and publish with social networks.
• Social Sign On and Registration. Allow your users to sign on using their Facebook or other accounts. The web is now ubiquitous and users should be able to go from site to site without authenticating each time.
• Use Facebook Ads & Pages to market your network. Facebook Ads let you target very specific niche users who may be interested in connecting back to your own branded community. Your Facebook Page is an portal that should include photos, news, conversations and energy. 
• Be where your users are! Chances are your audience uses LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Flickr, Foursquare, Meetup and more... Maybe you don't want to create a presence on Match.com if your audience is there, but ya never know! It could work. (watch for a future blog on this topic).

In summary, your community represents more than just the site you have branded that integrates with your website. Work with the external social networks, not against them. And at the same time, the external social networks should not be your exclusive community platform.

View more from @PeterKim here or on Slideshare.net

“Work is a profoundly social activity. The design problem of cyberspace has thus become how to develop information systems that support work socially."

Prof. David Hakken, SUNY Institute of Technology

The Problem and the Fact

Blogs can be a powerful communication and collaboration tool. Using this mechanism, today and continuing my blog series; I want to focus on the idea of Employee Community (internal to an organization) and distinct from the ‘Customer Community” (external to an organization). In doing so, I want to highlight the... 

• Problem: Many companies are silos of information, where knowledge is either unshared, or lost.
• Fact: Silos are best left on the farm – not in your company, association or organization. 

I think the term ‘silo’ serves as a relevant background for the problem.  Many are aware that the term ‘silo’ was snagged by the technology age and was taken to describe the technological simulation of the free-standing grain silos, a common sight wherever there are farms.  One word – two meanings. 

A silo mentality within an organization assumes the position of independence, seclusion and isolation. Information, knowledge and original ideas are communicated top to bottom - vertically, and thus limited to those within the silo.  Interesting enough, the silo found on farms have no windows – nothing can be seen from within the boundaries of the silo; not even people in other silos.  (food for thought)!

Now, considering the age of technology and the speed at which it is evolving, it is no time to conduct “business as usual.”  Truth be told, the results of a siloed mentality are not hard to predict. 

Some of the unintended consequences include:

• Managers, employees, departments are unable to freely communicate with other information management systems
• Supervisors are unable to efficiently track the collaboration and interactions amongst their projects and teams
• The company is prevented from monetizing the opportunities offered by an employee community Using Email exclusively for your communication prohibits knowledge to be easily shared and searched across the organization.

Good News:  Knowing and accepting the problem are the first steps to building a vibrant, active, community and will provide the infrastructure needed to connect these silos laterally.   The problem does have an Answer – its called Employee Community. I want to take into account just a few of the Benefits of an Employee Community.

An Employee Community will:

• Break down silos between teams and departments
• Enhance the knowledge repository and sharing across the enterprise 
• Allow remote employees to stay engaged with business 
• Allow targeted and purposed collaboration around company objectives
• Create mentoring with those with professional compatibility - like a new employee to a senior one, in the same department.
• Customize news and announcements; bringing together multiple areas of company information into one aggregate dashboard. 
  

At Avectra we have AvectraCommunity.com. It’s our own Employee Community. It’s already helping our own organization by allowing departments to interact both among their teams AND also across departments. HR uses it to share updates with particular teams, office locations or departments. Product teams can update stakeholders of new features and sales teams interact with engineers AND customers during proposal processes.

So now, as you consider your employee community, allow me to make a few Recommendations: 

• Make it mandatory and develop a procedure for employees to use Community for knowledge sharing, otherwise... email will prevail.
• Top Down Support. The CEO and Executive team must not only endorse community use, but be users themselves. 
• Integrate with your infrastructure: Whatever your employee management system is (HR system), such as NetSuite. That way when employees are hired or leave the company, the community is automatically updated.
• Have one overall community manager to ensure the community is correctly used, but also ensure each department has a community manager for their indvidual team.
• Make it fun! Use rewards, contests, or games for active or valuable community users. Those who are sharing or helping the most should be rewarded or recognized (vacation time, prizes, or even just Community Member of the Month). 

“When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality." 
- Joe Paterno    

Here’s to the success of your Employee Community!

The purpose of this blog series is to identify the differences and multiple purposes of online communities including, but not limited to:

• Employee Communities
• External Social Networks
• Membership Communities
• Customer Support Communities
• Innovation / Learning Communities
• … hey, why not even talk about Dating Communities! 

Each community purpose we explore will encompass various attributes. The stakeholders, permissions, content, and engagement strategy will all be different. In each of these blogs we’ll look at case studies and suggest best practices to optimizing your community for a specific purpose and objective. We will also reference a living casestudy of our own community (preview shown to the right).

Before we dive into this series, it might be a good idea to first make sure we are on the same page when it comes to an understanding of the definition of an online community.  Out of curiosity, I researched tons of definitions.  The one I like best is Jeremiah Owyang’s as he shares an excerpt taken from a Forrester Report: Online Community Best Practices.

 “An online community is an interactive group of people joined together by a common interest. It’s also one of the most powerful tools a marketer can deploy for customer retention, word of mouth, and customer insight. To host a successful community, think of it as you would product development: Start by focusing on objectives, chart a road map, assemble the right team, and plan to be flexible. Then build your success by launching the community with the backing of your most enthusiastic customers and staying engaged as the community grows. Above all, remember that control is in the hands of the members, so put their needs first, build trust, and become an active part of the community.” (available for Forrester clients) - you can access the full report at the Forrester site.

Now, pause a minute and take inventory of the many different types of online communities accessible today, (just a few listed above.)  In doing so, ask yourself, ‘what is it that draws and attracts us to online communities?’

• Is it the ability to formulate a community around your company or association in the hope of increasing revenue?
• Is it that we are interested in education; and online communities’ shift us from the traditional classroom?
• Or is it that we all enjoy meeting people with similar interests and enjoy the exchange of ideas and resources without ever having to leave the comfort of home?

September 27 – 29, Silicon Valley Marriott, Fremont, CA

Sticky Content

‘Loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute principle of self-sacrifice’

Woodrow T. Wilson

You guessed it! My topic is loyalty and my argument is that member loyalty to an online community is all but dead in this day and age.  Commitment to an online community, simply for the sake of being a part of a community, is gone.   Members are no longer assumed eternally loyal to an online community. Now that there are so many options online, commitment is diminished…competition is fierce!

For example, look at MySpace... do you think there's still many MySpace loyalists out there? Facebook is still holding strong, but Google+ is on the rise. Social Networks, regardless of the purpose cannot expect their members to stay and be loyal if the value isn't there or a better alternative becomes available.  Organizations cannot assume members will be loyal and connect to their community without some long-term, lasting value.  Organizations and community management must take a servant approach to engaging communities around content value creation. Above all, your community must resonate with the governing factor - loyalty, integrating all the trustworthiness and thoughtfulness associated with this remarkable trait. 

So, consistent with my themes in previous posts and speeches, content creates community creates COMMERCE... allow me to ask:

• What's sticky about your content that keeps your community engaged?
• What's allows them to collaborate or connect to that content, and
• Can they build relationships with other like-minded community members?

If so, relationships can be developed between community members.

Believe it or not, ‘loyalty’ is not a separate topic from my speech, to be delivered at ISSMM Converge, on ‘How to Monetize Your Online Community.’ In fact and indeed, loyalty is the backbone of Avectra and at the core of everything we do! 

During my session, will you, as an attendee, learn new, clear cut ways to turn your online community into revenue-generating enterprise?  Absolutely!  And, at almost every stage of my talk you will hear the overtone of commitment and loyalty relevant to members and organizations.  

Now on to ISSMM Converge:  

It is an exciting time in our field, and during Converge, I am looking forward to hearing from, and hopefully meeting, Lyle Fong (@lylefong) to get his perspective on the future of "gated" communities and how Lithium and other community platforms fit into this increasing crowded software category. (topic: Gamification of Social Media)  Lyle Fong is the CEO & Co-Founder of Lithium.

And .. I definitely anticipate meeting Angela and Jamie from Campbell Ewald and explore how advertising and digital agencies are using social to drive product enthusiasts communities. Also, I’d like to see how are they collecting data authorized from Facebook, LinkedIn, etc... And, are they putting this data back into a CRM to tell the bigger customer or lead story? Angela Zepeda, Managing Director, and Jamie Lewis (@hinj19), Digital and Social Strategy at Campbell Ewald – is one of the largest advertising and digital communications agencies in the United States. ( topic: From the Boardroom to the Sea; Real-world Case Studies)

Hope to meet and greet you at ISSMM!
 

Don't miss my presentation, How to Monetize Your Online Community.

Thursday, September 29th @ 10:30 am to 11:15 am

Sterling Raphael, President and Founder AvectraLabs / Avectra
@SterlingRaphael
LinkedIn.com/in/SterlingRaphael
 

If you need more information regarding Converge 2011 and the Institute for Social, Search & Mobile Marketing (Issmm), visit www.socialsearchmobile.org   If you are planning to attend and haven’t registered yet, today’s the day! 

Tags: conferences, sales, marketing, search engine marketing, social media, aol, mobile marketing, co, altimeter group, current tv, brian solis, gamification, issmm, social search mobile, mobile monetization, blogher network, lithium technologies