MembersMost Hyper-Social organizations leverage the power of human Hyper-Sociality through online communities. They integrate these communities as part of customer support, product innovation, thought leadership, and public relations, and to increase word of mouth—all with various levels of success. Research in the field of virtual communities shows that most business thinkers agree on the fact that there are four fundamental elements of successful communities:
Members
Content
Member profiles
Transactions
When managed properly, these four elements lead to economics of increasing returns that characterize the most successful communities—those that seem to take off like virtual whirlwinds.
Let’s discuss these drivers one at a time. Understanding the workings and seeing the benefits of the dynamics of each of these drivers is easy. Many of those dynamics, as they relate to the increasing returns that characterize successful communities, were first described (more than a decade ago) by business thinker and management consultant John Hagel in Net Gain.1
Even as an executive, you need to understand those pillars of community building, as they are not only the potential drivers of increasing return in your business, but also the main culprits for community failures.
The more members you have, the more they will tell other potential members, and thus the bigger the growth in your community membership. You may realize that you cannot have a successful community without the “right” members, but what does that mean? It means that you cannot select your members from generic market segments, which are based on the individual characteristics of the people in those segments. Instead, you need to think of them as tribes, groups of people whose desire to hang out with one another is rooted in shared passions (e.g., knitters), shared pains (e.g., parents who have children with disabilities), a shared sense of duty (e.g., military personnel), or categories based on common traits (e.g., women-owned small businesses). In order to succeed, you also need to make your community member-centric, which means that the members and whatever ties them together are at the center of the effort, not your company or your products and services.
A large office supply company set up a community that ran afoul of both of those tenets—and is no longer around to tell the story. First, the company decided to build a community for small businesses—a hugely profitable market segment for it, but clearly not a well enough defined tribe. Small businesses include mom-and-pop stores, restaurants, and automobile dealers, but they also include technology and biotech start-ups. Add to that the fact that these companies are populated with employees who have vastly different job responsibilities, and it becomes clear why there is very little commonality among the individuals within this market segment that could draw and keep them together in an online community. The company also decided to put products (shredders, staplers, paper, and so on) at the center of the community rather than the members, with their issues, pains, and joys as owners of small businesses. So even if the company had been able to tap into a small business tribe, say women-owned small business owners, it would still have had an uphill battle to make that community successful.
Besides having the ability to attract the right tribes to your community, you also need to identify the leaders of those tribes and find a way to engage them as part of your efforts. We call these ambassador programs, programs in which you recognize the leaders by giving them some special status or assigning them a specific role. Our tribalization research shows that only 20 percent of companies that have online communities have a formal ambassador program—a surprisingly low number considering that most documented successful communities have such programs. Think of the Microsoft product support communities and their widely replicated MVP (Most Valuable Professional) program, a distinction that gets bestowed on members for outstanding past performance, without any expectations of future performance. The Fiskateers would not be what they are without the original three lead Fiskateers, and the SAP developer community would certainly be a whole lot less effective without its 70 mentors, who are nominated by the community but selected by SAP. Note that it isn’t the quantity of leaders that makes these communities successful; it is usually the strength of the social contract that the leaders have with you and with the community that determines success.
When you engage people in conversations, be it in communities or in other social media–based environments, remember that you are dealing with humans, and that they will expect you to reciprocate by fully participating in those conversations. Communication, as we have seen before, is a reciprocal process. Unlike with other, more traditional marketing programs, you are asking people to invest their social capital with you. Being human, they will expect something in return—solutions to their problems, good advice, new people with whom to network, or simply entertainment value.
Our 2009 Tribalization of Business Study shows that more than 50 percent of companies that have communities have one or fewer employees (by “or fewer” we mean part-timers) dedicated to the community effort. What are they thinking?
That is, of course, what led to a somewhat comical scenario that one of us ran into less than a year ago. A part-time community manager of a sizable loyalty program in the hospitality industry called us in a panic, saying, “People in our community are outraged by recent changes we made to the loyalty program, and since there is nobody here who has the time to engage with them, some have started trashing the place and put profanities on our corporate blog—can you please help?” What? The company expected its most loyal customers to engage with it in its community, but no one at the company had the time to engage back with them? Come on—just as communications cannot function without being a reciprocal process, communities won’t work unless they too are based on reciprocity. It’s just another example of the legacy left over from years of not being Hyper-Social, and developing bad corporate habits.
Now let’s turn to the role of content in communities—one of the most important and yet underutilized sources of value in communities. The more “quality” content you have in your community, the more value you are delivering to your members and the more they will proselytize the virtues of your community to other members, which will increase your membership. Content can come in a variety of ways, but for this exercise, let’s divide content into professionally created content and user-generated content. Both are critically important in order for communities to work, yet most community organizers don’t think about professional content at all. Note that professionally created content is not the same as your traditional marketing materials. Professionally created content for your community has to be developed with the goals of your community members in mind, rather than your company’s products or services.
If yours is like most companies, it does not have the critical mass of potential community members that would allow it to rely on the likely meager content coming from those members to provide enough value for the rest of the community. Companies like Microsoft, Intuit, and Apple may have enough potential customers to start vibrant customer communities based primarily on user-generated content, but if yours is not like those, you will have to hire content developers to kick-start the process. In fact, even companies with very large numbers of potential community members are far better off hiring outside content developers to kick-start their community. The reason for this is best explained by Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody,2 when he says: “The number of people who are willing to start something is smaller, much smaller, than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone else starts something.”
American Express understands this. While it clearly has a large enough number of small business customers, it hired a small army of outside content providers when it launched Open Forum, its small business community.3 When you first reach Open Forum, you immediately get the sense that there is a lot of valuable content there—developed just for you. A large office supply company, on the other hand, launched its small business community, without any external, professionally created content. As we mentioned earlier, that community ceased to exist in less than a year. In fact, the company missed all of the key success factors that we describe in this chapter, including not integrating the community with its online transaction infrastructure (which we will get to in a bit), not putting the small community member at the center of the community effort, not leveraging member profiles, and launching a community with only product-related content.
A large retailer, parent of two clothing chains, had a number of communities that violated this rule of community building as well—and those communities are no longer around to tell their story, either. It invited customers to sign up for its “What’s In” community, where they could get alerts from other members about new arrivals at their local clothing stores—except that there were no alerts to speak of, and no other valuable content that would have made a person to want to come back. You could tell when the company blasted mass e-mails to invite its customers to the community by browsing the member list and seeing wave after wave of new members who set up a profile once—never to come back again.
Content created for your community has to have value for its members. It also has to be findable and retellable as part of the reciprocal communications that members will have with one another. As Ted Gilvar, the CMO at Monster.com, told us recently: “People vote on the quality of your content with their time and attention, and that is why you need to produce content worthy of consumption.” We think that professional content is best developed by outsiders and managed in an editorially independent fashion. Not only will this add more credence to the claim that the community is designed around its membership and not the company sponsoring the community, but it also avoids the natural tendency of corporate marketers to talk in the dreaded “corporate-speak” about themselves. Unfortunately, our research shows that most companies would disagree with us on this point—only 35 percent of them use external professionals for their community content development.
While advertising can work in communities, advertising and other marketing materials are not typically the content that provides the core value to your community. There are some exceptions here, like the use of job listings in professional affinity communities. Job listings in professional communities such as PoliceLink, which we discussed earlier, are advertising, but in an affinity-based professional community, they are valuable content as well.
User-generated content is a bit more tricky, especially for companies that have a command-and-control marketing mentality. For user-generated content to work, companies need to embrace some of the messiness that comes with the Hyper-Social shift. Sure, you need to monitor your user-generated content constantly to ensure that it is free of spam and that it does not contain libelous or nefarious content, but that does not equate to “controlling” what appears on your site. You can set up guidelines for what content (comments, posts, discussion threads, reviews, and so on) you will accept on your site, but once those guidelines are published, you need to live by them. Assuming that your guidelines don’t contain language saying that you will reject reviews that are critical of your company or its products (which those of some well-known companies actually do), you have to allow negative as well as positive reviews. If you fail to allow both positive and negative comments, your community will be perceived as another nontransparent corporate mouthpiece of the sort that people have come to mistrust.
Content alone will not make for a vibrant community. There are plenty of communities out there that have high-quality professional content but do not enjoy the forces of increasing returns that characterize successful communities. Like the IBM-sponsored Internet Evolution community (http://www.internetevolution.com), they are nothing more than online publications, with the same economic characteristics as those of traditional online media outlets. Content needs to be married with the other three forces of increasing return in order for your community to take off.
If you capture information about your members and use that information to make it easier for them to find relevant new connections or knowledge in your community, you will increase the value of being a community member to the members, which again will cause more members to join. It is amazing how much people will tell you about themselves if they see the benefits of doing so. Not only will they disclose a lot of information about themselves as part of their static profile, but through their actions and behaviors within the community, they will tell you things about themselves that are more valuable than any data about them that you could uncover through classic market research. What you can get from community interaction is not just information about your community members; it is deep knowledge steeped in social context.
As with anything else in social environments, you need to give your members something in return for all this rich knowledge. That something is useful recommendations for new connections with content and with other members. Think about it: The reason that most of us are willing to share as much information about ourselves as we do with Amazon is that Amazon recommends new books to us (and for some of us, it does an amazing job at increasing our dollars spent not only with Amazon, but also on books as a relative share of our overall budget).
Unfortunately, most communities do not use the information that we give them, or the knowledge that they can gain through our ongoing behavior within that community, to improve our experience within that community. Although this is frustrating for the members who knowingly provide that knowledge about themselves, smaller, tight-knit communities may survive the fact that community organizers do not leverage that knowledge. In larger communities, where it becomes harder to find relevant content, and where we can no longer keep track of who is who by name, it can actually become a deterrent to success if the system doesn’t help us find the right connections.
In order to make it easier for members to populate their profiles, some communities, like Bloomberg Businessweek’s Business Exchange (http://bx.businessweek.com), are connecting to other services, like LinkedIn or Google, to allow the automatic population of member information. As the world of business communities continues to fragment, such federated community management solutions will become more of a necessity.
The automatic population of member profiles with information that you have about them based on other relationships is something that needs to be member-driven. We have seen too many internal communities fail because the profiles were automatically populated with information coming from the company’s human resources database. People take offense at some of their personal information being made public without their consent—e.g., the number of years they have been with the company (which may make them look old if they have been there for a very long time).
The easier you make it for community members to engage in a transaction (find support, buy something, or discover relevant information), the higher the value they will derive from it and the more they will tell other members, which will increase your membership once again. Whatever the purpose of your community, make sure that people can get to what they came for in the first place as quickly as possible and with the least amount of distraction. If they came to get support, give it to them fast; if they came to buy something, make the experience as smooth as possible; and if they are there to help you design new products, don’t exhaust and confuse them with unnecessary steps. Research has shown that people who participate in online product design communities have a higher willingness to pay more for the products that they cocreated, so these are community members who you do not want to turn off from participating.4
If you already have a transaction-based relationship with your customers, think seriously about connecting that transaction-based infrastructure with your communities. Coming back to the office supply company, when it launched its community, it was impossible for people who already had an account with the company to connect their buyer profile with their community profile or to go from a product recommendation by another member in the community to actually ordering that product within their account.
Monster.com, on the other hand, is a company that got it right. After it purchased Affinity Labs, a collection of affinity-based professional communities, it realized the benefits of connecting the communities with the Monster.com job board, a transaction-based job search and recruiting platform. Not only are the combined profiles much richer for recruiters looking for talent (they now include social context), but they changed the nature of the relationship that the company has with talent from an episodic, transactional relationship to an ongoing relationship in the context of rich tribal behaviors. The company also created the potential for community members to become part of the talent acquisition and development process, thus turning the whole process more social, with community amplification and higher levels of trust.
There are other elements that drive and define communities, such as the social infrastructure and the technology foundation of communities, or the integration with the business processes that they support. None of those characteristics has the same power as the four forces of increasing return that characterize successful communities.
The social infrastructure of communities, however, deserves some special attention, as it is frequently the cause of community failures.
Too many companies with communities think that they need some sort of monetary contract with their community members, or at the very least with the leaders of their tribes. Much of that thinking goes back to the tradition of focus groups, where we pay people to come and fool us (and themselves) about what they intend to buy or how they perceive our products or brands. Humans are Hyper-Social, and within well-oiled communities, the strongest contract you can have with them is a social contract based on reciprocity. People will help you design better products knowing that they will be able to buy better products down the line, or just knowing that it will make them look cool or intelligent within their tribe. People will help you support your products because they are hardwired to help other members of the tribe, and trust that they will get help in return when they need it. In his latest book, Predictably Irrational, behavioral economist Dan Ariely argued that we live in two different worlds: one in which social norms prevail, and one in which market norms prevail.5
The social norms include friendly requests that people make—for example, when a neighbor or friend asks you to move a couch. You do not expect to get anything in return right away, and the feelings associated with helping the person are usually warm and fuzzy (for both parties). Market norms, on the other hand, are cold and calculated, with exchanges being sharp-edged: wages, prices, rent, and so on.
One of the experiments that Ariely recounted involved three groups of people who were asked to do a repeated task for five minutes—combining circles and squares on a computer screen. The first group was given $5 for the task, the second was given $0.50, and the third was asked to do it as a favor. The group that was paid $5 worked harder than the group that was paid $0.50 by about 50 percent. The group that was not paid, and that evaluated the request in the social framework instead of the market framework, beat both other groups. Ariely then repeated the test, but instead of giving money, he gave the members of the first group a gift of chocolates worth about $5, but without telling them that; the second group got a Snickers bar; and the third group was again asked to do the task as a favor. This time all three groups achieved the same positive results.
Another point that Ariely makes, supported by more experiments, is that once a person evaluates something within a market framework, he will continue to do so even after payments are no longer given. Therefore, it is a very bad idea to create situations in which the two frameworks are mixed.
Pfizer is one of the companies we interviewed that understands this. When we spoke with Rob Spencer, the so-called chief idea management officer (not an official title),6 he explained to us that the company never uses rewards in its collaborative problem-solving or social innovation exercises—it relies exclusively on recognition instead of rewards. For Rob, it’s extremely important not to monetize what are essentially social contracts.
There is not much to say about the role of the technology infrastructure in community management, other than to note that, unfortunately, many community initiatives start off as a technology platform exercise rather than a social one. That is the wrong way to look at setting up communities—and, our research has found, a large cause for failure. As Intuit’s vice president of communities, Scott Wilder, would say: “If your community cannot survive in a bulletin board, it will not survive anywhere.” We could not agree more.
What we’ve covered in this chapter is not exactly new ground. Much of the basic information was available at the end of the last century. Nevertheless, most Hyper-Social program failures today can still be attributed to what we covered in the chapter. So when people come to you with plans and programs that touch on Hyper-Sociality, make sure that you are armed with questions to challenge their assumptions.
Why did we come up with this technology plan—would a bulletin board not have sufficed? Where is the content going to come from that will provide value when members first check in (and when they come back)? Why are we not tying the community efforts to our e-commerce site? Are we allowing people to bring in their profiles from other sites?