1. World Class Communities
The Characteristics of Community Excellence
Rob Howard & Cecilia Edwards, Telligent
2011

2. Table of Contents
Building World Class Communities 1
Executive Summary 1
What is a community? 2
Social is the new normal 2
Social technology doesn’t equal community 5
The definition of community is regular interaction, a common objective, and relationships 6
Social media facilitates relationships; community has an objective 7
Online communities are part of the social ecosystem 7
Criteria for World Class Communities 10
Company-owned communities 10
Relationship-oriented 10
Active membership 10
Planned sustainability 10
Characteristics of World Class Communities 11
Identifiable business objectives 11
An emphasis on being personal 12
A culture of belonging 13
Major source of relevant content 14
Leverage the wisdom of the crowd 15
Influential members are highlighted 16
Reward with pixels 16
Establish and enforce guidelines 17
Membership has its privileges 18
How to Become a World Class Community 19
Back to basics 19
Think big, start small 19
Performance-based metrics 20
Be visible and engaged 20
Constantly evolve 21
Conclusion 22

3. Building World Class Communities
Executive Summary
There is a revolution happening right now. It’s name is social networking. Not since
the emergence of email has the business world experienced such a dramatic shift. To
stay on top of the trend, organizations are investing aggressively in tools, people, and
processes. This includes social software that will help these organizations share and
manage information socially with customers, partners and employees.
Gartner predicts, “The worldwide market for enterprise social software will top $769
million in 2011, up 15.7 percent from the $664 million spent in 2010.”1 Businesses
are building and launching a myriad of online communities. These community
investments span from launching proprietary corporate communities to investing in
consumer social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. All of this is in an effort to
reach new audiences and sell more products and services.
“Our end goal is to have
However, littered along this changing landscape are numerous ghost towns — a world class commu-
communities that have failed due to lack of participation, too much control, or lack of
nity filled with passion-
response to users’ changing needs.
ate and engaged users.
Users willing to discuss
Why is it that some communities prosper while others wither and die? Is the creation
not just the positives,
of a great online community simply luck? Should businesses simply throw money at
community technology, features and functionality, and then simply sit back and watch but the areas we need to
it grow? Or is there a more precise and predictable process that any organization can improve and then help us
be guided through? collaboratively make
those improvements.
Much research and analysis has been done to identify leading communities; these Once we have that type
leading communities are widely agreed upon. However, little research has yet been of user base, our
performed to identify what causes one community to succeed and another to fail — opportunities with the
and more importantly, what makes a community “world class”. community expand
immensely.”
Telligent World Class Communities
Survey Participant
1. Predicts 2011: CRM Enters a Three-Year Shake-Up, Gartner, November, 2010
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4. World class communities are those which harness the knowledge and passion
of their audiences to improve customers’ brand perception, and create
measurable business results.
The purpose of this white paper is to breakdown what makes a community world
class and how those attributes can be duplicated.
What is a community?
An online community is a website or part of a website that is typically owned by
a business or organization. It makes use of social software technologies — blogs,
forums, user profiles — to enable interaction between people who have a shared
interest in the objective. The community has a specific purpose or objective that the
organization and the audience together desire to accomplish.
Social is the new normal
Social has become the new “normal” for day-to-day communication. More importantly,
it is the new measure for how important decisions are made. Harvard Business Review
called social, “the most significant business development of 2010” that is “enabling
business leaders to regain trust and credibility lost over the last 10 years.”2
Social networks like Facebook have become part of our daily routine. Its more than
500 million users spend approximately 700 billion minutes on the site every month.3
Telligent conducted a World Class Communities survey and found that 63 percent of
the participants had a corporate Facebook account and 78 percent had a corporate
Twitter account.
2. How Social Networking Has Changed Business, Bill George, Harvard Business Review, December 23, 2010
3. Facebook worldwide usage statistics, December, 2010
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5. Current deployments of social media or communities
Response
Percent
Twitter Account 78.0%
Facebook Account 63.4%
YouTube Account 58.5%
Business-to-business Community 43.9%
Customer Support Community 43.9%
Association Member-to-member Community 36.6%
Interactive Marketing Community 24.4%
Social networks are part of our daily routine.
This commitment to social is further validated by research conducted with Forrester
which analyzed spending patterns for social investments. “Social media spending
is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 34% over the next four
years.“4
Organizations that ignore
Forrester found that “86% of interactive marketers plan to increase their spending social technology as part
on social media over the next four years…engaging and managing a community of of the new normal risk
consumers is a top priority.”5 missing out on a major
market opportunity and
U.S. drug manufacturers, for example, realize the importance of social as a channel will have to spend sig-
to their customers. They have been excluded from full engagement because of the
requirement to communicate the fine print of the risks associated with particular drugs.
nificantly to catch up to
They have recently, however, been pressing the U.S.F.D.A. for legislation to enable the competition.
them to advertise in social networks and thus more fully engage with their customers
the way the other industries can.6
4. Midyear Planning, Forrester Research, July 29, 2010
5. Community Management Checklist, Forrester Research, June 29, 2010
6. As Drug Marketers Embrace Social Media, FDA Mulls New Rules, National Public Radio, August 12, 2010
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6. Social forms of communication are also present inside of companies. Businesses
recognize the value of creating communities within their organization. Andrew McAfee
coined the term “enterprise 2.0” to describe how businesses use social technologies
to more efficiently manage the collaboration that takes place day-to-day within the
business.
Why do businesses care about bringing social technologies into the enterprise? IDC
estimates that upwards of 30 percent of employees’ time is focused on finding the
data they need to accomplish a task, and that another 15-25 percent is spent on
non-productive information-related activities instead of asking colleagues for help.7
Social technologies are aimed at significantly reducing this non-productive time.
In Telligent’s World Class Communities survey, respondents who deployed enterprise
2.0 communities confirms this observation:
Greatest Benefit of Enterprise 2.0 (Employee Communities)
2.4% 2.4% Solving business problems through
collaboration
Connecting employees to strengthen
the company's culture
19.5%
Engaging employees to drive innovation
Understanding the needs and
56.1% 14.6% wants of employees
Identifying experts within the organization
2.4% Communicating corporate messages
quickly and effectively
There are numerous business benefits to internal communities.
7. The High Cost of Not Finding Information, IDC, 2001
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7. Social technology doesn’t equal community
Businesses have not hesitated in responding to the new social wave as evidenced by
the current and predicted budgets allocated to social spending.
Technology plays a very important role in facilitating a community, but solely as
an enabler. A clear set of technology norms are emerging for everyone due to the
widespread adoption of social networks – predominately Facebook. For example,
they expect modern and robust forums for support, blogs for learning about new
insights directly from the business, and comments, ratings, and reviews.
In Telligent’s World Class Communities survey, 45 percent of the participants indicated
that technology was very important in terms of capabilities and ranked it third after
ease of use and search tools.
Importance of Community Capabilities
163 Search tools
“Engagement is what
123 Ease of use
makes a community
Richness of community great, but the tools/
121 technologies (wikis, blogs,
forums, etc.) platform need to at least
80 Rich user profiles not be a hindrance, but
at best, facilitate, and
Branding/look-and-feel expand users’ participa-
74 of the community
tion.”
50 75 100 125 150 175
Relevance Points
Telligent World Class Communities
The most important community capability is usability. Survey Participant
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8. The definition of community is regular interaction, a common objective,
and relationships
Online communities form when the technology facilitates regular interaction around
a common cause. For example, today people expect and desire to troubleshoot
problems themselves rather than contact a help center via the phone.
Most consumers regularly — often daily — use Google or other search engines to
seek out information for particular problems they encounter. “Where is a good place
to eat near here?” “What kind of hybrid car should I buy?” “What do people similar to
me recommend that I read?”
It is the dialog that occurs within the pages found by Google that matters most to our While search technology
decision making process. People trust search engines to narrow the information they is great, the simple ques-
need to look at, but decisions are made based on what peers say.
tion of, “What is the best
Consumers want to interact with peers and friends to learn what recommendations laptop?” yields nearly
they have. Research from the Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey shows that 500,000 results in Google.
90 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations.8
Modern consumer search engines recognize this. Google includes information about
discussions within search results to help you quickly see how many people have
responded on a given topic. In an interesting side note, Facebook has taken an
increasing portion of this search market space from Google in the last few years.
Your customers are talk-
Interactions can be both positive and negative ing about you. Ignore
In 1983, TARP Worldwide, a customer experience agency, famously published a them at your own peril.
study which stated that one disgruntled client speaks with an average of 10 clients.9
Today in the United States, there are upwards of 3.5 billion brand-related conversations
happening every day, and social media enables people to move these conversations
online. According to more recent research by TARP Worldwide, one unhappy client
who escalates their issue to management represents 50 clients, on average, who
either complain locally or don’t complain at all. And taken further, one escalated
complaint is spread to over 1,300 people via word-of-mouth.10 1 unhappy customer ex-
perience = 50 customers
and 1,300 conversations
8. Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey, 2009
9. The Bottom Line Benefits of Consumer Education, Atlanta, GA: Coca Cola. Inc., TARP, 1983
10. TARP Worldwide Research, 2008
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9. Social Network Online Community
Primary Purpose Business
Relationships Objectives
Primary Enabler
The purposes of social networks and online communities are different.
Social media facilitates relationships; community has an objective
As stated earlier, social networks and communities are very different. In the illustration
above the primary purposes and enablers of both social networks and communities
are shown.
A social network’s primary purpose is creating and fostering relationships, and
the primary enabler is common activities. For example, Facebook enables people
to connect with one another, but the relationships that are created typically have
commonality between activities: school, work, sports, etc.
Contrast this with a community, whose primary purpose is a business objective (e.g.,
product support.) The enabler for a community is the relationships that form to meet
business goals. For example, a community like Psion Teklogix’s provides support
to customers, but the enabler is the relationships that form between customers,
prospects, partners, and experts as they ask and answer questions.
Online communities are part of the social ecosystem
Does this mean that a business should not have a social network, but instead only
have a community? No. World class communities recognize that social media is a new
channel for engaging customers; and that social networks complement communities
via sourcing members, providing a holistic view of social interaction in one central
place.
The primary purpose of a social network is social — to facilitate relationships between
people who share common interests — while a community exists to solve a specific
business problem through relationships.
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10. Businesses must understand that their audiences need a social ecosystem that is Social fans are an asset
comprised of both consumer-facing social networks as well as company-owned that you can build with a
communities.
campaign and then tap
Social media is providing marketers greater reach for less money. According to a into again in the future
2010 survey sponsored by the AMA, within one year, social media is expected to be as long as they remain
10 percent of all marketing budgets and 18 percent in five years.11 engaged with your
brand.
The Social Ecosystem
Forums
Participating Wikis Blogs
Listening, establishing reputation
Managed
Listening, supporting, building
reputation, marketing
External
Communities
Owned Closed Network
Listening, supporting,
building relationships,
collaborating
Example: customer communities Internal
Communities
Example: channels, members
Example: Intranets, communities of practice
World Class Communities
Understand what your strategy is at each layer of the Social Ecosystem. Your online community
is only one aspect.
11. The CMO Survey Highlights and Insights, Christine Moorman and T. Austin Finch, CMOSurvey.org, August 2010
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11. Telligent’s early research, documented in Mashable, identifies three types of
communities in the social universe that work together for businesses as an
ecosystem.12
Participating
These are communities started and managed by individuals or groups of users,
typically on consumer-facing social networking sites, but sometimes also with
proprietary software. Participating communities include Facebook, Twitter and
LinkedIn. An example here would be a fan site for Microsoft’s Xbox or an independent
Porsche enthusiast group. Typically, the organization whose products or services are
the topic of discussion can participate, but has no authority over or access to the data
created within the community.
Managed
These are communities started and managed by the organization, but run on
consumer-facing social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Examples
here include the National Breast Cancer Foundation’s Facebook page, Starbucks’
Flickr group pool, or Dell’s presence on Twitter. The organization is responsible for
running and managing the community, but does not necessarily benefit from the rich
data and user profiles created within the community. Typically, the facilitator of the
community (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) benefits the most from the underlying data.
Company-Owned
These are communities owned and managed by a company typically running
commercial or open source community and enterprise collaboration software.
Examples include the National Breast Cancer Foundation’s community website,
Starbucks’ blog, or Dell’s support community. The organization is responsible for
running and managing the community and benefits from rich data and user profiles
created within that community. These include private B2B and internal employee-
targeted communities.
12. How Businesses can Harness the Power of Online Communities, Rob Howard, Mashable, April 2010
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12. Criteria for World Class Communities
In the evaluation of world class communities, Telligent considered only those
communities that met the following criteria: “...many communities
that I find valuable (even
Company-owned communities the communities that
There are many great communities that have been started and grown to world class appear on discussions/
status through grass root efforts, such as Wikipedia. Some open-source software
communities, such as Linux, are great examples of well-disciplined, engaged,
comments in blogs), but
cohesive communities. In fact, many of these communities are the pioneers in this none are outstanding.
space since widespread enterprise communities are less than a decade old. While None make me stop and
there is much to learn from these communities, their challenges and objectives are say, this is the way to do
different from those of businesses, so we chose to focus only on company-owned
communities — external and internal.
things.”
Telligent World Class Communities
Relationship-oriented Survey Participant
As described earlier, community is not synonymous with engagement. While
community cannot take place without engagement, engagement can certainly take
place without community. Many support forums fall into this category. Engagement is
taking place in the form of asking questions and getting answers. There is even a bit
of reputation that can be developed by the most frequent answerers. But that tends
to be where the engagement ends (i.e. once a problem is solved, the engagement
is over). Thus, no relationship is formed. World class communities must go beyond
limited engagement to create a sense of belonging and relationship.
“...world class goals
Active membership are still further out than
While great design is important, people and engagement are imperative to all most have accomplished
communities. There are many aspiring communities full of cool features, impressive
bells and whistles, and award worthy design, but lacking an audience. So while ease
to date.”
of use and user interface can certainly enable communities, they were not a major
Telligent World Class Communities
focus for this report. Visitors, members, and engagement are what matter most. Survey Participant
Planned sustainability
Many communities are formed around specific campaigns — e.g. political campaigns
or product launches — and are very successful. For Telligent, the real test of whether
these communities are world class is their staying power. Is there a way to keep the
visitors coming and keep the members engaged when the original campaigns end?
While tactics used for communities around campaigns are interesting and worthy of
being leveraged in world class communities, we looked more broadly at what it takes
to remain sustainable.
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13. Characteristics of World Class
Communities
In the survey conducted for this research, Dell, Starbucks, Intuit, and Apple were
identified by a few respondents as leaders to be emulated. Most respondents,
however, could not provide an example of a world class community. Telligent believes
that while true leaders exist, it may be too early to declare that anyone has reached
world class status on all fronts.
Though no current communities have achieved a world class standard, Telligent has
identified nine characteristics that if met would merit “world class” status.
1. Identifiable business objectives
World class communities have balanced objectives: the company is meeting
their business goals and the members are using the community to address their
needs (support, product information, word-of-mouth recommendations, employee
networking, etc.).
As stated earlier, one of the distinguishing characteristics of a community versus a
social network is that the community has a business objective enabled through the
member-to-member relationships.
Examples of business objectives include:
World class communi-
Support - This is the most common use case for external-facing communities. The ties can execute multiple
community is used to enable crowdsourced support for a company’s product or strategies simultane-
service. Example communities: Dell, Microsoft XBox, American Express ously, but must start with
a clear focus.
Interactive marketing - Branded communities are not new. What is new is the use of
communities to capture the new consumer behavior: socializing the buying process
using the voice of the customers to help sell and recommend products. Example
communities: Electronic Arts, Starbucks, Cadbury
Networking - Networking communities are most often used for B2B or employee-
driven communities. The objective within a networking community is to tap into the
unstructured people-driven knowledge streams that were previously inaccessible.
Example communities: US Department of Defense (APAN), Psion Teklogix, Procter
& Gamble
Employee collaboration - Research conducted by IDC identified that for an enterprise
to “gain the greatest leverage from its ‘information assets,’ knowledge workers must
be able to share and reuse information regardless of format or location.”13 Employee
collaboration through social technologies is based on the new normal behavior pattern
of how consumers locate, use, and manage information. Example communities:
Procter & Gamble, Texas Instruments, Intel
13. The High Cost of Not Finding Information, IDC, 2001
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14. Examples of member needs include:
Find answers to questions - The most common landing page for users of the
community is the page they were directed to by a search system — either internal
or external. The majority of people within the community will always be consumers:
those looking for solutions to problems or answers to questions.
Make decisions based on the experience of peers - Amazon is the showcase for
enabling people within the community to learn and make buying decisions based on
the shared experience of peers. Other examples include popular weight-loss sites
that enable community members to discuss their results with one another.
Find people that have knowledge needed to complete a task - This is a common
use case internally. Employees want to leverage the power of the community to
understand who within the organization has the information needed to complete a
given task. Many organizations realize that the new competitive advantage is how
quickly employees can use information to make decisions.
Procter & Gamble (P&G) is a multinational company with 138,000 employees in 160-
plus countries that faces “...countless opportunities — and as many hurdles — for
P&G to connect ideas and expertise.”14
According to Michael Fulton, P&G’s enterprise architecture capability manager, “Until
now, wikis, blogs, podcasts — they felt like the place for the techno-elite. This [social]
platform makes it easy for everyone to participate.”
Using a new internal community named PeopleConnect, a 150-person, geographically
disbursed work group came together in two months rather than in six to 12. “This
platform drove speed, transparency and a desire to engage with the change previously
unseen at P&G,” Fulton said.
2. An emphasis on being personal
World class communities are personal and emphasize connecting members with real Businesses must realize
people within the business. that social is a revolution
in both how
World class communities foster real dialog and are authentic. It is critically important customers are serviced
that the business does not attempt to falsify activity to inflate what appears to be active
participation (i.e., impersonating members and asking questions or impersonating and how they experience
customers and answering questions). Authenticity is critical. the brand.
In 2009, a global computer hardware manufacturer was caught paying for positive
reviews of its products on Amazon. Not only were good reviews being paid for, these
same reviewers — many of whom never used the products — were also asked to
classify negative reviews as “not helpful”.
14. How Procter & Gamble Got Employees to Use Social Networking at Work, Rick Swanborg, CIO, August 24, 2009
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15. Part of being personal and real is encouraging community participants to fully complete
their profiles with photos and additional profile details that enable the community to
learn about them.
This is especially important for the community manager. Members want to get to know
(and befriend) the community manager. Within world class communities, members
will see the community manager as the face of the brand.
Communities thrive on
personal connections.
Lionel Menchaca, Dell’s Chief Blogger
Rather than presenting filtered information through a PR agency, businesses such
as Dell enable passionate individuals who are intimately familiar with the company’s
products and services to directly represent the brand.
When you encourage and foster participation from the company, you strengthen
the brand with the customers. In fact, over time you’ll see customers become brand
champions.
3. A culture of belonging
World class communities foster a culture of collaboration and engagement.
New members are welcomed into the community with clear and concise directions
for how to participate, how to set up their profile, where to ask questions, and how to
find information.
Relationships are a key ingredient to success. Communities should enable automatic
friending, where new members are automatically connected with a designated person
within the community, such as the community manager. This way, new members
immediately have a starting point for forming relationships.
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16. Forming relationships early is critical, unlike social networks where the primary
objective is the relationship. Within a community the relationship is the enabler.
Communities that promote relationships and networking within the community see a
much higher return rate.
Altimeter stated that, “while no one yet has the data to determine direct cause and
effect, what we do find is a financial correlation between those who are deeply
engaged and those who outperform their peers.”15
4. Major source of relevant content
World class communities focus on creating relevant and timely content that cannot
be found elsewhere.
Telligent’s research into world class communities validated that people who use
communities place a high amount of value on the content: finding answers to
questions quickly and identifying relevant information were ranked as extremely
important.
Typical Community Uses
Nice To Extremely Rating
Not Needed Have Important Important Average
Finding answers quickly 0.0% (0) 0.0% (0) 24.4% (10) 75.6% (31) 3.76
Identifying relavent information 0.0% (0) 4.9% (2) 39.0% (16) 56.1% (23) 3.51
Identifying experts and/or
influential people 2.5% (1) 7.5% (3) 35.0% (14) 55.0% (22) 3.43
Forming relationships with other
0.0% (0) 12.5% (5) 55.0% (22) 32.5% (13) 3.20
community members
Contributing content like FAQs,
recommendations, reviews, 2.4% (1) 14.6% (6) 58.5% (24) 24.4% (10) 3.05
and opinions
Influencing other
4.9% (2) 22.0% (9) 48.8% (20) 24.4% (10) 2.93
community members
Receiving recognition
for participation 2.5% (1) 27.5% (11) 47.5% (19) 22.5% (9) 2.90
Sharing content across social
media channels (e.g. Facebook, 7.3% (3) 41.5% (17) 31.7% (13) 19.5% (8) 2.63
LinkedIn, Twitter)
Content searching is a community driver.
15. The world’s most valuable brands. Who’s most engaged, Altimeter, July 2009
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17. When creating the first developer community for Microsoft’s ASP.NET product in
2001, the number one emphasis was creating unique content that could not be found
elsewhere. Conference materials, special articles, sample code, and even blogs
written by the ASP.NET team members provided a plethora of unique content to draw
developers into the community. It was only later that forums were added to enable
those members to interact with each other.
The majority of people who visit a community have a specific need or problem they
wish to solve. The unique content found in a community is the starting point for building
longer-term engagement between a member and the company.
“If you want to make a
5. Leverage the wisdom of the crowd correct decision or solve
a problem, large
World class communities harness the essence of the wisdom of crowds. The term groups of people are
“crowdsourcing” was coined by Jeff Howe in 2006 to describe this.16
smarter than a few
Experts don’t know everything, and a company cannot know everything about their experts.”
own products and services. The people who join communities have a valuable set
James Surowiecki, author, Wisdom
of opinions, experiences, ideas, and insight that other members and companies can of Crowds
benefit from.
When someone asks a question about a product, world class communities will often
wait to allow someone from the community a chance to answer before they jump
in as a way to encourage “crowd” participation. They even pose product questions
themselves that the community would be better equipped to answer than their
experts.
Ideation is social technology that enables participants to suggest and vote on ideas.
It is increasingly more visible in world class communities to enable the product
development process. In addition to polls and surveys, communities like My Starbucks
Idea are asking for input on ideas, allowing the community to express their collective
opinions, and then sharing the results. What takes this practice to a world class level
is that Starbucks holds itself accountable to the community and reports on what was
done with each idea presented — whether it was adopted or not.
Very little guessing needs to be done when a company is able to get the direct input
from the community first-hand on how the products are used, issues that arise,
resolutions to those issues, and preference for new products. This is the value of
crowdsourcing.
16. Crowdsourcing: The Next Big Thing In Social Networking, Robert Bravery, Business Computing World, November 24, 2010
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18. 6. Influential members are highlighted
World class communities know who the influencers for their products are. And once
influencers have been identified, businesses reinforce who the influencers are by
publicly identifying them within the community.
An influencer in the context of online communities is a person within a community that
can influence behavior of other members of the community. People read what they
write, comment on their contributions, follow their lead on behavior, and generally
take their recommendations.
This influence can be for purchasing decisions, but it can also be information decisions.
And, an important distinction that is often overlooked: influencers can be both positive
and negative. Positive influence can motivate a consumer to make a buying decision
or use a specific document for decision making. However, negative influence has the
opposite effect of influencing a decision not to purchase.
Within communities, positive influence and negative influence can be measured. The Why is identifying
positive influencers can then be highlighted by the organization. influencers important?
People are three times
Word-of-mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchase more likely to trust peers
decisions.18 When making decisions, people want to know who the experts are and
whose opinions they should listen to. over advertising.17
World class communities encourage the formation of influencers, highlight their
contributions within the community, and work with them to affect the culture.
7. Reward with “pixels”
World class communities showcase members of the community and reward them for
participation, even those who are not considered influential.
This doesn’t necessarily need to be monetary acknowledgment either. Instead, world
class communities adopt the “pixels vs. pennies” approach, using badges and other
digital tools to call out different participant levels.
17. Social Networking Sites: Defining Advertising Opportunities in a Competitive Landscape, Jupiter Research, March 2007
18. A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing, McKinsey Quarterly, April 2010
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19. One company that has demonstrated this in a world class fashion is GameStop.
GameInformer.com is the digital publication of GameInformer, a monthly
magazine published by GameStop. GameInformer.com is full of tips, reviews, and
most importantly, perspective from the avid gamers who participate there daily.
GameInformer.com recently won a Webby award for its community.
What makes GameInformer.com unique is its extensive use of reputation within the
community to enable gamers to unlock new capabilities as their reputation and trust
level increases. In other words, GameInformer.com showcases and acknowledges
members by recognizing their contributions and continuously promoting their
contributions.
8. Establish and enforce guidelines
World class communities publish a set of community participation guidelines (e.g.,
what is considered acceptable behavior) and enforce them. The guidelines exist
to ensure that bullies and trolls — people who simply like to argue for the sake of
arguing — are properly moderated within the community.
Helpful guidelines for participation should not be overly complicated but address the
following:
• Represent yourself accurately - no impersonation of other people.
• Respect the rights of others, including copyrights, personal information, etc.
• No harassment or harmful behavior.
• Only include content that is relevant to the community.
World class communities also make it clear what will happen if the rules are
violated.
These guidelines are not used, however, to remove negative feedback or criticism
of the company. World class community owners recognize that most people only
criticize when they feel compelled to make their experience better. Therefore, they
encourage authentic feedback and engage with community members on ways to
improve.
Highly successful communities will eventually become self-policing. Members, rather
than the community manager, will identify content that requires moderation and take
appropriate actions. However, it is highly suggested that the software running the
community also supports some manner of auditing to ensure there is accountability
for all actions.
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20. 9. Membership has its privileges
For communities to have long-term sustainability, members must feel a sense of
belonging and even exclusivity. Members of a community want to feel as though
they have the inside scoop on what is happening at the company and that their
membership provides them access to things they cannot get elsewhere.
This exclusivity is created in many ways:
• Announcements made in the community prior to them being made “publicly”
• Product/service pricing specials available only to community members
• Reports, articles and other information that is available only in the community
• Priority access to key company employees
• Participation in member-only beta programs
• Ability to provide product feedback
• Engagement in ideation for new products and product improvement
These are things that make it worth joining a community and remaining an active
member. When people can get things in the community they are not able to get
elsewhere, their level of commitment and engagement in the community increases.
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21. How to Become a World Class Community
Not every community will become world class. It is important to recognize that attaining
world class stature requires many reviews of community and community strategy, a
clear focus on engagement, and full support of the organization.
Back to basics
While this document outlines a set of characteristics important to world class
communities, it is often in the basics where we see communities fail.
First, ensure that there are easy ways to engage that make sense for what you
are trying to accomplish in a community. For example, if you are looking to start
discussions or allow people to ask and answer questions, make sure forums are
prominent on your site.
Second, if you have a clear set of experts, either within your company or your
community, enable blogging, where longer pieces can be crafted and responses
provided by others. Failure most often occurs
in executing the basics.
Third, media galleries are a must if you want members to share photos and videos.
Fourth, easy ways of engagement, such as commenting, rating, and liking are great
ways to draw in members.
Finally, great profiles and a way for members to engage with each other are a must.
These are the enablers in a relationship — a key factor in establishing a sense of
community.
Think big, start small
When launching — or revamping — a community, it is helpful to have an idea of
where you might ultimately like to take the community. Therefore, spend some time
thinking about what you would really like to get out of your investment of money and
time. Establish a vision for how it could impact the way your company does business
and interacts with customers, partners, and employees. Some helpful questions to
consider are:
• Who are your members?
• How do they like to engage?
• What pains or problems can potentially be addressed in the community?
Once you have your initial plan in place, choose a much smaller starting place. This
could mean fewer elements, fewer target audiences, or a combination of both. You
could start with a question-and-answer forum about your products and add blogs
later. You could pick a small group of customers to work with and expand based upon
their feedback and experience. You could launch a pilot for one of your products with
a sampling of customers.
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22. Where you start should be primarily determined by your company’s experience level,
culture, structure, and capacity. There is no right answer for everybody.
Performance-based metrics
Communities that arrive at world class status will share many of the same
characteristics, including having clear measurements for how they define success.
Since this will evolve over time with the life of your community and clearer business
objectives, the list of metrics does not need to be long or complicated. “What gets measured
There are three basic forms of measurement to consider: gets managed.”
Peter Drucker
• Basic traffic-related measurements such as page views, visits, and time on
site. These provide a sense of whether enough people are coming to the site.
No matter how well designed, a community still requires visits to exist.
• Engagement measures such as number of connections/friends, comments,
replies, and posts. These let you know that people are moving from just
consuming information — which can be done on a traditional website — to
engaging with each other.
• Qualitative feedback from polls, surveys, and sentiment analysis. If you are
engaged regularly in your community, you will have likely established a culture
where your members are more than happy to tell you exactly what they think
and to provide suggestions for improvement.
Be visible and engaged
One of the biggest mistakes of managing communities is called “launched and
done.”
Businesses will plan, select a strategy, and then successfully launch a community
only to leave it under-resourced. There must be a well-known, readily identifiable
community manager.
The primary areas of focus for your community manager should be demonstrating
the desired behaviors you would like to see your community members emulate;
putting a face and personality on the community instead of merely a company brand;
evangelizing the community needs to the company and the company brand to the
community; and enforcing the rules of the community to prevent unwanted conduct.
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23. Constantly evolve
World class communities constantly adapt the community to the needs of the
members. They provide timely and relevant information, address new and different
ideas, adjust to the evolving mix of members, and make room for the influence of
leaders.
Communities have their own life cycle. The management of the community must match
the prevalent need in each phase. Newer communities require guidance, to establish
a culture and to help the members to get to know each other. Established communities
need to support the contributions of emerging leaders. Mature communities need to
be reinvigorated and fresh.
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24. Conclusion
While there are numerous impressive and effective communities today, according to
our criteria, no single community has yet reached the status of “world class”.
Many of the characteristics that define world class communities seem obvious.
However, companies deploying communities still put the majority of emphasis on
technology and do not make the necessary long-term investments to properly grow
their community. The opportunity for a distinct market advantage exists for companies
that put community at the core of how they work with their customers and employees.
It cannot be a “bolt-on” solution.
To truly become world class, leaders will invest not only in the technology to run the
community, but the people and resources to support the community. The community
must be an integral part of the entire experience and culture of the organization.
Businesses that are on the path to world class status have a common characteristic:
constantly measuring and improving. Leaders have begun to directly link, in a
measureable way, community activities to business behaviors. Whether it’s a change
in consumer behavior – one company has reported a link in increased shopping
cart size to community participation – or the effectiveness of employees managing
information, the measurements need to be readily available.
Today’s business is defined by driving down costs and maximizing employee
productivity. Companies that integrate social technologies into the DNA of how their
businesses operate will write the future. Enabling faster and better decisions, while
dealing with more information than ever before, will be the competitive advantage of
business 2.0.
Rob Howard is the founder and CTO of Telligent. He is the vision behind the
company’s product development and innovation and is known throughout the industry
as an authority in social community and collaboration software.
Cecilia Edwards is the senior director of strategy for Telligent. She uses her vast
experience in corporate strategy to help Telligent customers drive the most value out
of their online communities.
About Telligent
Telligent powers social communities for more than 3,000 companies worldwide.
World class brands, including Dell, Microsoft, Electronic Arts and Reader’s Digest,
trust Telligent’s enterprise-grade social community suite to connect and engage
with customers, prospects, partners and employees. For more information, visit
telligent.com.
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