As many of you know, I have been looking for my next dream gig as a social media / community manager for a company whose product I love, and who is committed to using social media as a viable marketing and customer service channel. Well, I am pleased to announce that I found exactly that kind of gig, with exactly that kind of company. As of yesterday, I started working with Biz360, a social media monitoring, measurement and analysis company. Biz360 allows businesses large and small figure out who is talking about them in blogs, microblogs, forums and other social media channels, who the influencers are, and how these influencers and the community at large feel about their products, competitors’ products, as well as just about any other relevant topic or keyword.

Biz360 has been around for roughly 10 years in media measurement, and has expanded its social media presence in 2009 with the Community Insights tool. I had a chance to use the CI tool in my Gowalla vs. Foursquare blogpost, and fell in love with the richness and relevance of data and how easy it is to use. With a few clicks of a mouse, you can set up topics and keywords that you wish to track, and create custom analysis reports and charts, highlighting various metrics like sentiment, reach, share of voice, etc. The amount of data sources that gets indexed is simply staggering, and as a data geek this excites me tremendously. Right away, I knew that this is a product I am passionate about, and when I received the offer to join the team as the Director of Social Media, I gladly accepted.

In my new role, I will be acting as the online concierge for the Biz360, tweeting, facebooking, blogging, monitoring and joining conversations (using the Biz360 tools, of course!). I will also be creating tons of original content weekly, much like the post referenced above, so make sure you check out my Twitter page, Biz360’s Twitter page, and blog. Also, if you have a topic or a product (or set of products) that you want to see covered, send me your ideas. You can email me via this site, tweet me, Facebook me, or email me at mogneva (at) biz360 (dot) com.

As you know, I love data and measurement. In my last post, I started to explore the importance of measuring impact that your brand is having on social media outlets, such as blogs, microblogs, forums, etc. In another post, I discussed the dichotomy of needing to have a long-term marketing strategy, as well as short term tactical initiatives. There are great tools out there to help you monitor and measure what’s going on with your brand or product, so you know exactly who is talking about it, so you can join the conversation, as well as measure sentiment (how people feel about it) and coverage (how many people are talking about you, and how many people are reading and commenting on what’s been written).

I had a chance to test-drive Community Insights from Biz360 (disclaimer: I scored a free account so I could write this post; it is a premium-priced product geared at business customers). I wanted to compare side-by-side two competitive companies in the location-based services space: Foursquare and Gowalla.

One of the most important tasks is defining your keywords correctly. I was looking for mentions of Gowalla and Foursquare specifically within the mobile and location-based space, so I defined it as such. My reach numbers weren’t huge as a result, and Gowalla’s numbers may be even statistically insignificant, but I was able to discard users’ “check-in” tweets that do not hold much factual information. Right off the bat, you can see that Foursquare has a higher share of coverage (number of mentions) than Gowalla. This makes sense, because Foursquare is a more mature product. You can also track how much coverage each product got each day this year. You can see that Foursquare had the heaviest publish date on 12.3.09. As a brand / product / community manager, you should be asking yourself what the qualifying event was, and do a more detailed drilldown of just that day, to see what sources drove the conversation on that day, and what the sentiment was.

Even though Gowalla is gaining steam in the market (in terms of install base and media coverage), Foursquare is still receiving more positive sentiment than Gowalla, and both products mostly talked about in blogs vs. microblogs, which makes sense based on our filters of “mobile” and “location”.

Another interesting tidbit is to track sentiment over time. As you can see below, that spike in coverage for Foursquare on 12.3.09 was mostly positive, while Gowalla received some negative press on 12.11.09.

Finally, if you have enough data, you can run a discovery report, which will show you a topic cloud depicting the most discussed topics around your product.

Remember, by adding extra search filters (location and mobile), we narrowed down our search to mostly full-length content that would mention the product in the context of location-based services and mobile. What happens when we remove those filters? Well, first of all coverage numbers increase dramatically, as Foursqare has almost 33K mentions, and Gowalla has about 10k. A similar share of coverage is present (see below).

As you can see below, sentiment became more neutral across both products, and dominant source became microblogs. This makes me think that this is because the data is muddled a bit with users checking in on Foursquare and Gowalla and having it update their Twitter accounts.

When we remove microblogs as a platform, this is what we get (see below). Foursquare becomes mostly positive, and Gowalla becomes mostly neutral. I am thinking this is because it’s a newer platform, and people haven’t had a chance to get to know it yet. If I was the Gowalla community manager, I would dig deeper to get more insights on the neutral sources.

I took a bit of a deeper dive to understand what the most heavily mentioned keywords were for each of the products (see below). Most buzz around Foursquare had to do with its new blackberry application, love from Robert Scoble and something called Brociety. Looking at the same for Gowalla, you can see that most of the buzz is around its cool icons, and its recent funding raise.

As you can see from our very basic analysis, Foursquare currently has more mindshare, and more positive sentiment towards it than Gowalla. However, Gowalla mentions are growing at a faster velocity, so it will be important to go through this exercise every month to understand how mindshare and sentiment are changing, and who the key blogs and communities are discussing the products.

Also, like Biz360 are great for tracking actual articles and blogposts that speak about a chosen keyword or topic. You can sort them in order of reach and impact, so that you know which ones you should read, address and comment on first. For a community manager, this is a true goldmine. It also helps you take a team approach towards community management, by being able to assign these instances to people on your team.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Golden Gifts: Gowalla Steps Up Its Game For The Holidays (techcrunch.com)
• Location’s Social Paradox (techcrunch.com)
• Waze hits the road with Treasure Hunt and Foursquare support (thenextweb.com)
• Twitter finally enables geotagged tweets with new location API (venturebeat.com)
• There Is No Geolocation Social Paradox (stoweboyd.com)
• Gowalla Hops Onto Android Via The Mobile Web (techcrunch.com)
• Flook Takes a Playful Social Approach to Location Discovery (mashable.com)

Social media is a scalable way to create a personal relationship with your customers and consumers, it allows you to be where all the conversations are happening, and if you do it well and with the right amount of diligence, you will win (provided that your customers are participating in the aforementioned channels). Because all of this is happening over the ‘net, and online efforts have always been considered more measurable than their offline counterparts, social media measurement and ROI have become a million dollar question. On the one hand, social media is all about engagement and long term relationship building efforts. On the other hand, brands hunger for numbers, results that are immediately measurable, campaign-based ROI. Monitoring, measurement and ROI have so much mindshare for all of us marketers, that web monitoring and measurement companies like Radian6, Biz360 and Scout Labs (as well as web analytics giants Google Analytics and Omniture) will continue to win in the coming years.

Whether you track short-term social media tactical efforts (I hate the word campaign as applied to social media, so I refuse to use it), or longer term community building efforts, you should be tracking, evaluating, course-correcting and iterating. Not convinced that you should be measuring? To illustrate how important measurement is, and what a vast ocean of data points exists out there, I found this great social media counter created by Gary Hayes. We all know statistics can be stated to prove whatever thesis you have, but the true magnitude of these numbers is truly astounding. It’s dynamically updated, and you can toggle between various time intervals. Enjoy!

Consumers have many shopping options, and retailers are starting to realize that. Brick and mortar retailers (well, at least some of them) are working hard to stay relevant and compete with more efficient and ubiquitous online retailers, and now that social media and realtime communications have blown conventional fashion and retail secrecy to pieces, the consumer is expecting a new level of transparency, engagement and response.

Yesterday I experienced something I liked at at Target To-Go. It’s an innovative holiday shopping concept developed by Target and Kaplow PR. It’s a limited-time pop-up shop aimed at the city shopper. I love Target, but I am a city dweller without a car, so my Target shopping is now limited to online, and in-store when I go visit my parents in DC suburbs. I was excited for my first Target experience in a major city. The To-go shop is open today (12.11.09) through Sunday (12.11.09) in New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC.

This is how it works: 50 items that are perfect for gift giving (or self-pampering) are displayed in large windows, ranging from a $0.99 ornament to Wii fit and iPod Nano. You get a clipboard and check off the items that you want, then get assigned to a window number, where you pick up your items, each individually wrapped in a fun and festive red bag. And you get a large reusable red shopping bag in which to carry all of your new “shopping therapy”. Efficiency: check, great gifts: check, great prices: check, awesome gift bags: check, eco-cool shopping bag: check, easy return process (back to the same store or any other regular retail location): check, hot beverages on-site: check. Awesome merchandising: check, great branding for Target via the pop-up shop and large shopping totes: check, capturing a new customer segment: check. Holiday cheer: very large check. My only concern is the weather cooperating, since it’s 100% outside, and we are looking at a cold rainy weekend in San Fran.

What I especially liked about the Target To-go execution is the social media component. If you have been following my writing and tweets, you will know how much I love blending the online and the offline elements, especially in the retail environment. It works exceptionally well as part of a retailer’s or brand’s Twitter engagement to lead into in-store events and contests. Here’s where Target To-go excels, in my opinion. To drum up excitement and community participation, Target is doing a scavenger hunt. You can grab your first clue via a special gift box, the general location of which is tweeted out, and then follow the clues to a winning gift card. Gift cards come in various denominations, from $10 to$500, and for every found gift certificate, Target donates to Salvation Army as part of their longstanding partnership. Charity, puzzles and free stuff: as a community manager, I approve.

Disclaimer: I participated in the pre-launch press event, where I was given a free gift card of a fairly nominal amount. I am writing a positive blog post because I love Target, and I think this is a great execution. The free gift card did not affect my viewpoint.

As social media gains mainstream acceptance, companies are starting to embrace (well, not always embrace, but at least tinker with) the social and realtime communication channels in order to listen and engage with customers and consumers. But not everyone is ready to engage with the culture of openness and sharing that comes with the space. How do you know if your company is ready? Three words: service obsessed culture. What characterizes a service obsessed culture? Companies with this type of culture differentiate themselves on service and amazing customer experiences.

Amazing customer service can be proactive and reactive. You are providing reactive customer service is when you are monitoring the web for what people are saying about you, and engaging with those people. It’s also when you are providing traditional customer support and moderation on your community site. We, community managers, do all this very well. But how can you be proactive? First and foremost, you have to create a product that rocks your customers’ socks off. Secondly, you have to make it ridiculously easy to procure this product and have an even easier return / feedback policy. You need to be open and honest with your consumers, so that they can see how easy it is to actually become your customers. You need to provide ample communication channels: do you have a feedback / suggestion page (I recommend UserVoice or GetSatisfaction)? Can your users find you on Twitter and Facebook AND phone and email? With so many choices today, the consumer will opt for something that’s easy and the least risky. You can create all the social media buzz in the world, but if your product and support around it stink, you probably won’t be around for very long. The consumer will use these same channels that you used to glorify your product, and share her bad experiences with everyone.

This is why Zappo’s does extremely well in the social media culture; they are in the business of customer service. This is also why I’m struggling to find a moving company with a meaningful social media presence. Moving companies, in my (recent) experience are the opposite of consumer-friendly or transparent, and they certainly don’t know how to provide a killer product experience. Fraught with scams, questionable pricing practices and extremely poor customer service, they aim to hide information about potential charges, only to release it when it’s too late for the customer to react. Additionally, there is zero customer service, unless you are being courted by the sales guy, who always disappears the minute you have a problem. There is no accountability or feedback method outside of the 800 number, which gives you a daily runaround.

Some of my worst experiences as a consumer have been with moving companies. I recently moved my goods from NYC to SF and became a victim of unethical pricing practices: I was offered a lowball offer followed by price gauging. Money was an issue for me, so I went with the cheapest quote I received. I felt good about the estimate because they actually came over, counted all my stuff and gave me an estimate. If I had spent the time educating myself on the industry, I would know that the industry recently got deregulated, and prior to that prices were pretty similar across carriers, with companies competing on service. I would also know that deregulation has given rise to predatory pricing, with lowball offers designed to loop you in, start the move and then give you a new price when your goods are on the truck (even a worse iteration is a common scam of “Unless you pay me now, I will take all your stuff and auction it off” – this is illegal, by the way). If there was more education available, I would also know to only accept a binding estimate, and never work with a firm that can’t give one. Ah, if only… Unfortunately, I (as many other consumers) did not think it was necessary to spend hours educating myself on common scams, because 75% of my misfortunes I couldn’t even foresee. This information does not exactly make it onto moving companies’ homepages, and due to deregulation, there is not one central agency in charge of providing oversight and consumer education.

I had to fight tooth and nail to get the price down, but still ended up paying twice the estimated amount. To make matters worse, my goods were delivered on a date when I couldn’t take delivery, forcing me to take the goods within 24 hours or face paying an extra $1,000. There was zero communication (let alone online tracking) to tell me when to expect my goods, and various other hidden charges only got presented during pickup and delivery. Thankfully, my very service-oriented landlord bent over backwards to accommodate. There were several extremely serious mishaps and violations, which are too long to discuss here, but will be published to my personal Tumblr.

Moving companies have a vested interest in keeping the consumer in the dark, because if we knew about all the extra charges, we would switch to another lowball competitor (and repeat the whole cycle of being lowballed, then gauged). Customer service is non-existent (even via phone or email), and communication is plentiful only during the sales cycle (during which I was provided factually false information). Finally, there’s very little recourse for the customer to complain / get money back, because most transactions are forced in cash. The consumer has started to fight back with review sites, but it’s still a long way from a perfect system, as a lot of entries have been fake-posted by company employees themselves (you can tell easily if you know what to look for). Other than the BBB and AG offices, there’s not a lot to be done. In its current iteration, the moving industry is not fit for social media engagement. They need to develop the customer service orientation first.

So at the end of the day, the question that I have is: can we take back an industry like that? If there’s no overarching agency to keep the carriers honest, how can we compensate for that? Social web is all about self-organizing, sharing and power in numbers. How can we force companies to be more transparent and service oriented? This is a transactional industry, where I would assume repeat business is infrequent. Do they treat us like commodities because they know we won’t come back, because most people wait several years before a major move? Do they not realize that even though we may not come back, we will send our friends, but only if we had a delightful experience? Do they not realize that they can charge a premium price for superior service? The truth is, I would pay more for piece of mind, if I could be assured of a different experience than then one I had. However, after this experience, I would have a very difficult time believing someone’s promises of service.

Marketers have always struggled to reconcile the long-term, strategic brand-building efforts with shorter, more tactical executions designed to drive spikes of revenue. Social media marketing struggles with a similar issue. I think you need to have both, but you need to be careful about your execution on both fronts. I think of marketing like of a house: the long-term strategic part is the foundation, and the tactical bursts are the “spikey” roofs like the one to the left, meant to augment and increase.

Before the holidays I had a chance to catch up with Cat Lincoln, aka “DearBadKitty” on Twitter. A longtime blogger, Cat now works with a group of brilliant women called Clever Girls Collective. What I like about CGC is their practice of relationship as a foundation to their social media and blogger outreach approach. Relationships are built several ways among key groups: brands with end consumers, brands with bloggers, and brands with their own communities, as well as with external communities. Whether you do it online or offline, relationships take time to build. Marketing and branding today are less about pushing out your message than connecting with the market at its pain (and joy) points. As I wrote earlier, marketing is not a drive-by-shooting, in that all marketing efforts must move in lock-step and over time, growing organically and reinforcing each other. The great news is that the social web makes it ridiculously easy to listen, connect, rinse and repeat.

As more and more marketers start to use the social media tools to market their products, the temptation is to take old marketing tactics and simply translate them into a new medium, which simply doesn’t work. There are two main types of marketing: strategic marketing (this is the long-term brand building marketing) and tactical marketing (its shorter-term, tactical counterpart). Whereas brand marketing is more concerned with the brand personality, how it’s perceived in the marketplace and where in the customer’s awareness it resides, tactical marketing is more concerned with driving awareness and revenue for a particular trigger event, be it a holiday, sporting event, promotional giveaway, brand launch, etc. Tactical marketing has a beginning and an end, and is usually measured against a goal, which is oftentimes to exceed last year’s sales. Tactical and strategic marketing have co-existed together for years, and are a tough balancing act. To some extent, strategic and tactical marketing are at odds, because while branding is tasked with building the value of the brand in relation to its price, tactical marketing often has an aggressive pricing element. If you want to visualize it in form of a graph, strategic marketing results in slower, steady revenue / market share increases, while tactical marketing results in those magic sales spikes that brand managers love seeing.

Brand managers are often evaluated and paid on their ability to surpass last year’s sales, and the only way to exceed last year’s spike is to build a taller spike this year. It’s an addiction of sorts, and entire departments are so entrenched in it, that it’s not going away any time soon. I’ve worked with major brands in the past, in various capacities, but one thing was always true: brand managers always wanted to see tactical elements resulting in spikes. When selling and providing social media and online marketing services to clients, we have to understand this addiction to delivering spikey sales, and we need to figure out how to make promotional tactics co-exist with relationship marketing without eroding each other’s value. Cat Lincoln and I discussed this at length, and I attribute inspiration to write this post to our talk.

If my client is driving a huge promotion for Superbowl weekend, I would need to produce online and community-driven content to support these efforts, as well as use Twitter, Facebook and blogger outreach to communicate these programs. However (and this is huge!), we must take special care to educate the client that this will only work with two major caveats:

1. You have taken the time to build a community and become genuinely interested in what your community is saying, and
2. You limit these tactical “stunts” to very focused, finite and infrequent bursts.

If you only drive tactical stunts, you will fail to harvest the true value of building relationships. It’s OK have both elements as part of your approach, just make sure you put some strategic thought into how the two fill fit together. You are building a marketing house; your strategic marketing, community and relationship building is a steady ground floor, while the short-term stunts are triangular roof on top.

This post is adapted from a post originally written for FashionablyMarketing.Me

If there’s one thing that you should take away from this post, it is that Marketing (online, social or otherwise) is not a drive-by shooting. Marketing is holistic, and great marketing plans take time to develop and nurture. This is true for online, as well as offline marketing; new media as well as older, more traditional forms of media.

So what does holistic mean? No, we’re not offering Feng Shui techniques for your product or some magical marketing plan. Holistic simply means  that you know what your brand stands for and you understand that the tactics you use to market your brand must work together to position or change the positioning of your products. You know the audience(s) you want to target with your message, and know you must keep that message consistent across all the channels you incorporate to deliver it. All of your marketing functions should move in lockstep, reinforcing each other.

Example:  Launching An Eco-Fashion Line

You’re a company launching a sustainable, eco-conscious fashion line of clothing. In marketing your product line, you’ll probably want to emphasize sustainability, the purity of organic fabrics and your product’s contribution to reducing waste via green practices. You’ll want your packaging (or labeling) to convey those qualities in the terminology used to describe the garments, as well as the package design.

Most eco fashion lines have higher retail price point than mass-marketed clothing lines; your marketing must convey a socially conscious, environmentally responsible message that establishes why your clothes are worth paying a premium.

If you have (or wish to have) an online presence (which I presume you do, because you are reading this blog), you’ll want to reach the same consistency. When you’re designing your site, the eco-conscious message should be front and center, and all the design elements should convey the message as well. In addition to having e-commerce and informational functionality (a simple means to an end), you need to produce original content that shows your leadership on the subject matter. Blogging, in addition to establishing you as a thought leader, is a great way for search engines to discover your site.  So in the case of an eco-conscious fashion line, your blog should cover topics related to green living, eco fashion, sustainable lifestyle and eco trends.

Because your target market is an upscale customer who cares about social/environmental issues, he or she will probably want to interact with you and other like-minded customers on and off your site. The great thing about a passionate consumer is that she is engaged and happy to share, learn and interact. Adding social tools to your site is key, as they allow users to connect to the community that lives on your site, as well as communities that you have formed outside of your site.

Community management, which as you know is an area of passion for me, is all about building and maintaining a community, both inside your site and externally. If you have a robust commenting system and allow your users to contribute content (which you absolutely should), you should keep a handle on all of your comments and other content that these users are producing. Thank your users for contributing, answer questions, resolve concerns, but remember to allow your users to express themselves freely. Heated conversations are a sign of passion, so don’t interfere, as long as the discussion is productive. Moderate and guide, when necessary, but never stifle. You should be present on sites and communities where your target customers are, and take the time to interact with them there.

Reaching out to bloggers and conducting online PR goes hand in hand with community management and provides fantastic SEO results via link-building and content syndication. Remember, though, to be selective about the bloggers you approach – just like all the channels you select, it must be consistent with your brand’s message. Do your target customers use smartphones? Well, you should think of ways to interact with them on their phones. Social and geo-location apps allow you to stay front and center in the customer’s mind, engage and entertain, as well as harvest important behavior data.

One very important caveat to all of the above: it works, but it won’t work immediately. If you expect sustainable success, it has be built over time. SEO, community building, online PR and content creation reinforce each other, but it will take some time to see the results you want. You have to keep doing it every month for at least six months, to gain traction and see results. Placing your product on one of the characters in Desperate Housewives may provide a rush of one-time traffic, followed by a drop-off; however, building these ties to the online community, while keeping your message “on brand”, is going to increase your traffic consistently, month over month, without an abrupt drop-off. That’s why we say that effective marketing is not a drive-by shooting: it’s not transactional, but rather takes time and effort to build and nurture.

I can’t imagine anyone who is a community management practitioner and hasn’t heard about what happened over at Stltoday.com. If you haven’t been following this story, here’s a brief synopsis. Last Friday, STLToday.com did their daily word of the day section of the blog, where readers are encouraged to participate in a light-hearted discussion. In this case it was “The strangest food you ever ate.” So one guy posted a 4 letter word that starts with a “C” and means a part of a woman’s anatomy. The moderator Kurt Greenbaum, who is also the director of social media for STLToday.com, removed the comment. The commenter then posted his comment again, after which Greenbaum went snooping into Wordpress, retrieved the IP address, figured it was a school, and then proceeded to contact the school. The school officials decided to crucify the poor guy (remember, it’s the super conservative Midwest we are talking about), figured out who it was, confronted him on the spot, leading to the guy’s resignation. Then Greenbaum posts on his personal blog and then reposts on STLToday.com this achievement, with a bit of a gloating undertone.

(Note: I use moderator and community manager interchangeably in this post. However, it’s important to realize that moderation is just a part of what a community manager does, and not every moderator is a community manager).

Let’s explore what happened:

Wow… I checked the date after I read this, just to make sure it wasn’t April Fool’s Day. Seriously? Ok, let’s attacked the issues one by one. First of all, there’s the issue of it being a school. Last time I checked, we had more serious problems in our public schools than a 4 letter word. Many things to get fired over, take your pick: child molestation, violence, teen violence in school, bigotry, hate groups. If someone posted “I’m gonna pop a cap in this a-hole’s knee”, and it came from a school (or anywhere really), that’s cause for alarm. If someone from a school posted something about a teacher having sex with a student, then I would understand tracking the IP address to find the perpetrator. But a 4-letter word? Granted it’s a profanity, so what? There’s no harm to self or others or threatening to kill the President, and those are the only examples that I can think of when it’s reasonable and legal to attract the right authorities. On this point, I conclude that the reaction was totally overblown.

Secondly, there’s the issue of expressing your views in public, and how anything you write can be used against you. Ok, fine, I buy that you need to be careful about what you say online and should never say or email anything that you wouldn’t want on the front page of NY Times. However, we ALL slip up every once in a while, and to judge someone on a profanity is going too far. I would judge more harshly if the comment contained profanity in a libelous sense. On this point, I also think the moderator overreacted.

Thirdly, there’s the issue of the guy using his work computer to post a profanity in public. So he is not that smart, and deserves a slap on the wrist. If he logged on as “Public School #3″ and then issued the profanity in public, then I can understand firing the guy. But if you don’t have access to the internal Wordpress controls, you would never know where it came from. This behavior deserves a stern reminder from a supervisor that using a work computer for personal stuff is bad. We’ve all heard that speech before, and I’m yet to meet someone who’s never done that. Let’s get real. The “C” word is bad, but not worthy of this punishment. Seems to me that this particular moderator was out of line, perhaps grinding a personal axe and decided to make an example out of someone. I think Kurt Greenbaum should be fired for abusing his power, immaturity, and what can be considered libel (although he never publicly disclosed the name).

And finally, here’s the kicker (thanks to the commenters on the STLToday.com post itself): he violated his own privacy policy: “We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in ‘Compliance with Legal Process’”. If he doesn’t get fired after this, I would be very surprised. I also see a lawsuit coming, and imagine quite a few lawyers would take this case pro bono or on a % of winnings basis.

Now what?

So what would you do? What would I do as a community manager? The moderator was right to remove the comment. After he removed it, he should’ve contacted this person privately, cited the TOS, and asked him to stop with a strong warning (which is why you need to REQUIRE email addresses and have very strong TOS’s on every discussion forum and blog). If the comment reappeared, the moderator should’ve blocked this email address or IP address, however their platform is structured. Can the abuser write from another email or IP? Sure! But at some point, he will run out of machines, will get bored, and it will be over. Contact him, remove him, block him, but don’t engage the troll in public, and he will go away eventually.

If I was the moderator, I would’ve issued a strong public reminder of the TOS’s and reminded members that profanities aren’t tolerated. Depending on whether they have premoderation tools (seems that they don’t), I may consider adding  them. I personally don’t like premoderation, but if keeping offensive comments out is a primary goal, then the moderator should think about it. On my own blog, I wouldn’t do that, but I also wouldn’t get this wound up if someone said the “C” word. Then again, I am liberal and live in liberal cities like NYC and San Fran.

And this is a key takeaway: the structure of your community, moderation and premoderation tools should be there for a purpose, and aligned with your business objectives. Do you need to keep things very professional and family friendly? Turn on premoderation. Do you want to inspire unfettered conversation and idea exchange? Do you (or the brand you represent) welcome friendly debate? Then the less controls you have, the better. But whatever you do, you should still have strong community flagging features, so the community can police itself.

The job description of a community manager has evolved, and the jury is still out on the “official” description. Some companies consider community management closer to moderation, the more traditional sense of the word. This makes a lot of sense for companies who are building and nurturing their own vibrant communities. However, if you are building a nascent community, perhaps your company is young or the product just launched, you will also be doing a lot of community building via external resources and community outreach. In this post, I will be addressing primarily the outbound efforts of participation, brand building and evangelism. By the way, the Community Roundtable has developed this Community Maturity Model, which helps you understand where your organization is in terms of acceptance of the community model and what activities you will be doing to support it.

I got the following question recently: how do you know where to participate? How do you know which blogs you should be following, who the key influencers are that you should be building relationships with, and on which communities you should be building a presence? After all, the web goes on forever, and there is a lot of noise. How do you separate the corn from the chaff?

I can boil down my personal experiences and observations down to 5 major steps that I follow. Then you can rinse and repeat.

1. If you are new, ask an expert.

If you aren’t familiar with the industry, the first thing you should do is set up a meeting (phone or skype or in-person) with someone who knows their stuff. Although to be honest, if you are hired as a CM for a product in an industry you know nothing about, I’m not sure how you got hired or what the company was thinking. I’m not saying you need to be an expert, but you need to have the knowledge to carry on an intelligent conversation with the community and know where to get answers fast. And just as importantly, you need to have interest and passion. Either way… regardless of how much you know, you should always take an opportunity to learn from someone you admire, or someone whom you want to emulate, unless you are the very best in your industry. And even then, you can still get better and talk to the best in other industries to figure out how you can apply their lessons to your particular situation. Wisdom is learning while realizing that you will never know everything, and that there’s always room for improvement. You should ask the experts you tap for guidance about popular online publications in your sector, what the most active communities are, what people are like in these different communities, what you can read every day to keep up with industry news, etc.

2. Monitor, search and observe.

Community building and outreach can not be done without understanding the larger business and marketing objectives. It drives me up the wall how many companies miss this. If you are targeting a certain demographic with your new product or whatever it is, you need to be building, developing and maintaining a community that is made up of that demographic. When I take on a new client, I set up Google alerts on keywords around which the brand wants to build an identity, whether it’s “busy moms” or “eco fashion” or “muscle cars”. You should sit down with your client and understand where they are, and where they want to be in the consumer’s mind (sometimes you will end up helping them understand where they are, but that’s food for a different blogpost).

In addition to Google alerts, you can discover active communities, blogs and forums via those same keywords in Twitter Search (via search.twitter.com or your preferred desktop or mobile client). Twitter Search is very valuable, because it can show you whom to follow, allow you to interact with interesting people and find other online communities and cutting edge industry news. And you will be not only interacting, but also learning new stuff, which will only make you better at your job. Typically Twitter Search has been a good start for me; I had built solid lists of niche communities that way. In some ways, it’s like going down a rabbit hole, it’s a full immersion, at the end of which you will have a nice list of 20 or so primary communities and some secondary ones. You can start with that weekly, and adjust from there. Depending on if CM is your fulltime job or has been added to your existing job description, you will figure out shortly how much you can get done in a week.

There are also higher-end tracking tools like Radian6, ScoutLabs and others, which can help you not only track keywords, but sentiment around your brand and product and your competitors’ products (that is also food for a totally different post).

3. Listen, then speak

When you find communities in steps 1 and 2, take some time to observe behavior, community culture, topics discussed, particular vernacular. Just as important are the group dynamics. Are there particular members who are the vocal minority? Are there members who jump in to support the vocal minority, but never take the lead? Are there members who just like to hear themselves talk? Are there spammers who engage in self-promotion and post links? How does the community respond to each of those groups? What is the tolerance towards talking about products, even if they aren’t yours? You should have a thesis from steps 1 and 2; in this step, you clarify, flesh out, observe. Figure out who the key valuable members are: are they providing value by offering great information? Are they offering lessons from their own experiences? Do they point other members to useful research that’s been done? Do they seem to know all the latest trends? You may want to then connect with some of these members on more than one platform.

Once you have observed, it’s time to engage. Let’s say you connected with some great folks on various community platforms and via Twitter. Follow them for a while, read the links they post, take note of who they interact with. If they are posting links to various other communities and discussions, add those to your list of places to engage. Follow the people they interact with, listen to what they say.

4. Connect and build relationships. Develop collaborative programs that benefit everyone.

As you become a “regular” on several key blogs and communities, you should be developing relationships with people who run these communities. Ideally, it will happen organically. You will have so much to talk about, and your passions are so similar, that you will connect on other platforms like email, Facebook and Twitter, and become social media allies, collaborators, colleagues. This is when the fun starts, and where the lines blur between community management, brand evangelism and online PR.

Because you have chosen your connections and communities so carefully, you will have a ton in common. Why don’t you swap guest-blogging spots on each other’s online homes? Taking it a step further, is there opportunity to put together an event? It can be an online Twitter party or an offline event. Can it be a joint giveaway? If you are an eco-friendly body products manufacturer, you may want to do a contest with an eco-friendly blog that has a passionate and engaged community. The possibilities are endless once you start collaborating! You can come up with whatever works for your industry and sector. The key to remember is to make it: 1. valuable for your partner, 2. valuable for you and 3. valuable for the readers. How you define value is up to you; it can be participation, site visits, new products purchased, number of tweets and retweets. Just like with anything, you must align with your partner on measurement and metrics for success.

5. Tweak and iterate. And what about that pesky ROI?

Now you know what communities are a good fit, which ones are active, which ones you align with the best, and which programs work the best. Tweak and iterate from there, and remember to track Google Analytics too (or Omniture or whatever you use). But here’s one important caveat with outbound community management. Sometimes you will see results from outbound community participation immediately in your traffic results, and sometimes it will take longer. Obviously, with contests and other limited-time offers, you will see results between the start and the finish date. When you are participating in discussions and building up your cache in an external community, it will take much longer.

But how do you increase traffic to your site and get people to join your internal community? And should that be the goal? When you are heavily entrenched in a community, and others can click onto your website from your profile, people will click if they find you interesting. Here’s the key: IF they find you interesting. Become interesting first, become a community member, before you can even think about posting an occasional link to your site. It’s generally considered bad taste and spammy to post links to your site, unless it’s an integral part of the discussion, AND you have to earn that right first. So although you will see some clickthroughs, community building is about relationships, and that takes time. It will take you time until you can invite people to your own community (tastefully), or propose joint programs to other bloggers and community managers.

Creating a positive brand image does not always bring users to your site, and that shouldn’t always be an objective (unless it’s a contest or another activity that brings people back to your product page). Think of everything else as brand exposure. If someone sees your brand’s name 3 times, they will remember you and next time they see a marketing message somewhere else from you, they will have been primed already. You need to manage your employer’s and client’s expectations accordingly, and add other non-traffic-centric objectives. And remember that objectives are different for longer-term relationship building vs. limited-term promotions.

One of the most important tasks of a community manager is to be a conduit between the community and internal departments. One such department is product management. A good community manager understands what the community wants in terms of product, and is able to curate the community’s many needs, while reading between the lines. Then the community manager must relay this information to the product folks, making sure to prioritize, and help them arrive at a balance of features requested by the community, as well as driven by the internal product roadmap.

So how does a community manager take a virtual pulse of the community? He / she could ask the community in a blog / comment setting, or to send suggestions via e-mail. Ok, that’s great, but how does one organize and make sense of all of this information? And equally as important, how does one understand which ideas have more community support than others? Well, as you might have guessed, “there’s an app for that!” Actually, there are several apps. Here I will discuss, compare and contrast two (seemingly similar, yet different) tools to crowdsource product ideas and improvements from your own community!

The two tools are: GetSatisfaction and UserVoice. GetSatisfaction, the incumbent, has been around for a few years, and has the benefit of being the market pioneer and having powered feedback for many companies and brands, large and small. A newer, yet formidable, competitor UserVoice recently burst onto the scene capturing the hearts of many community and product folks with its focus on virtual brainstorming and constant product improvement, and making GetSatisfaction pay attention. As the battle rages on, I took some time to tinker with both applications. And here’s what I found:

Even though both applications seem similar on the surface (both exist to collect feedback from users in an open and community-powered setting), one main difference between UserVoice and GetSatisfaction is the focus. While GetSatisfaction focuses on both, reporting and tracking progress with product bugs, as well as eliciting suggestions from users, UserVoice is laser-focused on suggestions for future improvements. From a community perspective, both are extremely important. First of all, you need to make sure that your customers have  an active feedback loop about their technical (or non-technical) issues – we all know that the best marketing is great customer service (take Zappos for example). This is where GetSatisfaction steps in. At the same time, your community wants to have its voice heard and wants to play a role in the future of product development. This is where UserVoice excels over GetSatisfaction, in my opinion.

UserVoice:

I was lucky enough to get a personalized product tour from the UserVoice team (hopefully GetSatisfaction will invite me over after this article for a chat and product review). As you can see from the screenshot (and I used UserVoice’s own feedback account for this), the homepage of each forum is dedicated solely to eliciting either new ideas, or feedback on existing ideas from its community. As you can see, the top tab allows you to see ideas sorted by number of votes, which is a bit skewed, because it automatically gives preference to more “aged” ideas with more cumulative votes. The “hot” tab, however, gives newer ideas with traction a chance to get noticed. The other 3 tabs are self-explanatory. To ensure that you aren’t suggesting something that’s been already suggested, the systems make you search first (clever!). I invite you to explore the forum homepage for yourself.

Idea suggestion, voting and commenting:

After a community member suggests an idea, other members can vote and comment on the idea. Each voter gets 10 votes to be allocated at any given time, and you get your votes back once the idea changes status to being implemented. According to Scott and Daniel of UserVoice, this is done so that the vocal minority doesn’t overpower the rest of the community. Also, by only voting for his / her favorite ideas, each voter has to put forth more intellectual work in evaluating ideas.

However, all community members aren’t the same. For example, the screenshot you see to the left is of Rich White, the UserVoice founder, who definitely has a very high score of activity and idea generation . In our meeting, I suggested rewarding users with the highest activity and idea scores, with more votes. The team admitted that they have played with the idea, but the jury is still out on what will be done in the future.  A case can be made for keeping the vocal minority at bay when the community is young.  This keeps everyone from getting frustrated about not being heard. I think over time, in a more mature community, as an admin you should be able to choose to reward users with highest quality of contribution. What I do like is that as a new commenter on a suggestion, my avatar and suggestion floats to the top automatically (see right).

Moderation:

As an admin ($19 accounts or better), you can moderate each entry by deleting it altogether or editing the name. You can also respond with a status, updating all voters on where the idea is in the process. GetSatisfaction also allows the admin to respond with a status, but moderation tools only come with a plan priced at $99.

Bug / problem reporting is separate and secondary:

I think it was smart of UserVoice to isolate suggestions from bug reporting. By separating the two, you keep the focus and the mood oriented towards the future, improvements and growth. It also opens up the market to communities and products who don’t want to focus their feedback experience on fixing issues – perhaps they aren’t creating a high tech product or manufacturing a tangible good. You can still submit bugs, but unlike GetSatisfaction (more on GS below), this process is not public. When you submit a bug, an email window opens where you can privately communicate your issue. The exciting thing is that as an admin, you can hook it directly into your bug-tracking software. How’s that for convenience? (GetSatisfaction also allows integration with Zendesk in plans over $99).

Private forums:

Another feature that makes UserVoice stand out as a superior crowdsourcing tool is the ability to set up private forums. Not all brainstorming is going to be public. Sometimes, brainstorming is internal to your company. Sometimes, you want to invite a few hand-picked users to solicit and discuss ideas. UserVoice allows that, with various validation methods. It also allows voters to vote anonymously, so that good ideas are surfaced from all echelons of the organization, regardless of office politics. GetSatisfaction currently does not have private forums.

With UserVoice, all users can have 1 forum (premium can have more than 1) and 100 voters voting on all ideas within your forum. With premium options, you get considerably more voters, unlimited forums, private forums, analytics, moderation tools, domain aliasing, single sign-on (allowing users to sign in with the same credentials they use elsewhere on the site), data export, design customization and even whitelabeling. You can read in more detail about the plans here.

GetSatisfaction:

GetSatisfaction focuses on more areas:

GetSatisfaction, by contrast focuses on both, problems and ideas for improvement, which changes the focus and confuses the voice of the community, in my opinion. When bugs and problems live on the same page as brainstorming and ideas, it can get a bit confusing. One thing that GetSatisfaction does better than UserVoice, however, is taking the meritocracy idea a bit further and awarding the “brand champion” status to the most helpful members of the community.

The process works in somewhat of a similar fashion to UserVoice. A customer enters either a problem, question or suggestion. Other community members can comment and report that they are having the same issue or question, or “like” an idea. This way, the best of each section rise to the top, similar to UserVoice. However, unlike UserVoice, each member gets unlimited votes, which dilutes the quality of votes for each idea. Both platforms have self-policing community features like flagging as spam or inappropriate. You can see the full listing of GetSatisfaction plans and features here.

Both tools have common features:

Both tools have built a viral element into the suggestion process: each time a user is on the suggestion  / issue page, he can tweet or Facebook this idea to get more traction from his friends, at the same time increasing awareness for the community. Some more of the common features are: have several features that are common to both, such as moderation, analytics, commercial API, custom design, signle sign-on, among others. However, most of these features start at the $99 / month plan for GetSatisfaction. I have put together this handy chart to highlight some common features and how much it will cost you to get those features under each platform.

User experience:

Although there are quite a few similarities in the two platforms, I think the user experience in UserVoice is far superior for surfacing future-facing product ideas and strategy: it’s streamlined and focused, whereas GetSatisfaction suggestion page is very noisy.

Conclusion:

To my clients, I would recommend both platforms to be used side by side, but for different purposes: GetSatisfaction for a community-based problem resolution, and UserVoice for community-based idea generation. For example, if I’m working with a client with a technical product, who has bugs and wants bug tracking to be open and community-based, then I would recommend GetSatisfaction. I would also recommend that same company use UserVoice side by side for crowdsourcing ideas. If users can benefit from the community based FAQ, relying on previous resolutions of the same problem, then the brand should definitely use GetSatsifaction. However, if you want to keep your bug issues more discreet, you can use the UserVoice bug tracking piece. Just about all companies can benefit from UserVoice. It’s also extremely affordable, and most companies needs can be met with the Tin ($19), Bronze ($89) and Silver ($289)plans.

If you do follow my advice and use both platforms, you should make sure to differentiate them on your site. You can list GetSatisfaction under “feedback” tab, and UserVoice under “improvements or suggestions” tab.

Because of the lower price point and the focus on idea generation and curation, UserVoice has been adopted by users outside of the usual enterprise / company realm. For example, musician Mike Shinoda uses the forum to source new artists to his label: users can pitch themselves or other musicians to the community, and the rest of the community votes. UserVoice was also used by the City of Seattle in its Mayoral Race to surface ideas for Seattle’s improvement initiatives. Because UserVoice is so focused and easy to use, I imagine its users will keep redefining its future uses.