Getting the Most ROI from Content for Your Community

Content is the single greatest factor in attracting, retaining, and developing your online community. Smart community managers understand that key indicators like time spent on the site, new user registrations, downloads, and traffic rise or fall depending on content. Content drives engagement — the quality, timeliness, and relevance of articles, answers, profiles, and other information found in your community matter.

The challenge is deciding where to invest time and dollars to gain the best return on content. Some questions to consider:

• Should I pay others for content?
• Do I syndicate it from the wild?
• Should I write it myself?
• Do I count on community members stepping up?

It helps to classify the sources and types of content typically found in an online community, and to identify the content that yields the highest ROI from time, effort, and dollars. Using an example from a B2B community I manage, I categorized content into a value matrix:
Quadrant I: Dialogue

 The enchanted quadrant. Facilitating communication and collaboration between people requires the most energy, and the resulting insights, learning, and knowledge are like gold — desirable and valuable. This means finding subject matter experts, getting them to share openly and often, and exposing the resulting dialogue to those who stand to benefit the most.

Quadrant II: Aggregated Content

As a curator, you filter and sift content in the wild — blogs, comments, forum threads, social network sites — and cherry-pick the best of the best. All this collecting, scanning, tagging, and editing takes a lot of work. You are adding value, because you save your community members from having to do this.

Quadrant III: Repurposed Content

Communities about things people use, like products, processes, and knowledge, often have a history with information artifacts. Whether it's an FAQ cobbled together by loyal customers, a white paper commissioned by sales, or a webinar recording produced by marketing, these reference materials can be useful, depending on how frequently they are updated.

Quadrant IV: Authored Content

Hot button topics raised by the community with few answers are perfect candidates for researching and arriving at a better overall understanding. Of course, addressing the needs of the community with quality information developed just for them means an outlay of time or dollars. Try to leverage domain expertise — find the person(s) closest to the answer. They need to be great communicators and committed to answering questions long after the white paper or ebook is delivered.

Summary

It's likely that your community will dictate content needs that span all these quadrants — no two communities are alike, after all. Using a model like the content value matrix helps you explain the reasons for investing in community moderators, monitoring social media, writing blogs, or hiring a research analyst firm. And, when measured against key performance indicators, you'll have a better idea of how each of your content investment areas is performing.

How to Build a Community Working Group in 5 Steps

Community managers know that caring for your tribes can quickly consume every minute of your day and every ounce of your energy. Whether it's welcoming new members, writing newsletters, moderating discussions, running events, reporting to management, planning strategy (the list goes on), you will quickly find yourself with more work than hours in the day. Practicing good time management can help, but when you are battling on the front lines with requests coming from every direction, you really need a team to back you up.

Effective leaders delegate. Sharing responsibilities with other people will enable you to scale your community by growing membership, launching new groups, expanding into new areas, and so on, without forcing you to give up other important things in your life, like time for yourself, your family, and your friends.

You might be thinking, this all sounds great, but where am I supposed to find this all this help? Resources and budgets are being carefully watched, and for many it's out of the question to hire the skill sets needed to run a successful community. The answer lies in your single greatest asset — the community itself.

1. Reach Into the Community

Reaching into your community and enlisting others to help you manage day-to-day tasks gives you leverage. You don't have to be online every minute of the day, or constantly monitoring RSS feeds or alerts. By identifying key members, making them feel special, delegating responsibility, and communicating frequently, you can build a team that shares in the work, but also shares in the success of the community.

2. Identify Key Members

Start by taking a piece of paper and jotting down names of people you have interacted with via the community in the last few weeks. These may be customers, employees in your organization, or sponsors. Take a look at their profiles. How often have they signed in? How many questions have they answered? What blog posts have they written, or what articles have they contributed? These activities are good indicators of the time your key members invest in the community — the more invested, the more important their role and standing. If you honor members systematically with badges and other awards, this can also help to build your list.

3. Make Them Feel Special

You should always thank your key members for their contributions, but use this opportunity to acknowledge their generosity,  and underscore the value of the social capital they have created for everyone. You can do this privately or publicly, depending on how the person responds best to praise. Make them feel privileged and rewarded. For example, if your key contributor looks up to someone famous in your organization (like a distinguished engineer or a C-level executive), set up a meet and greet, or have the notable individual post a thank-you message to the contributor's profile. All this attention will make them feel noticed and special, and sets up the next stage in building the working group.

4. Delegate Responsibility

The next step is to ask for their help. This may feel awkward, but you'll be surprised at what people are willing to do if you only ask! You can start with a small task, like helping to moderate discussion groups by moving posts to the correct forum. If they decline, respectfully ask why. In many cases, people are reluctant to commit because they are concerned about the time and effort involved. You can address concerns by defining the scope of the work with them, and making them feel comfortable. It's important that you provide training, feedback, and support to your working group member when starting out. Yes, this takes time and effort, but the payoff is a self-sufficient leader who you can count on, and also turn to for additional support as the community takes off.

5. Communicate Frequently

If possible, arrange for your community working group to meet in person, at least once. Since this can be expensive or impractical if your team is geographically dispersed, you can overcome physical distances with web conferencing tools like Skype, iChat, TokBox, and so on. Set up regular meetings, and hold people accountable to attend. Build the agenda, but don't control the discussion. Let natural leaders emerge — don't feel as if you have to own the working group. In fact, ask for volunteers to chair the meeting. This might feel a bit scary at first. After all, this means giving up some control. You should find that over time, the working group will take on more and more responsibilities, and will depend less on you. Congratulations! You now have time to work on cool community projects, or take that long overdue vacation. :)

Top Ten Takeaways - Social Networking Conference 2010

I enjoyed meeting other community managers, social media practitioners, and marketing and business professionals at last week's Social Networking Conference in Miami. It was an exciting opportunity to learn from people in the trenches, who are quietly revolutionizing the way their companies do business on the Web and behind the corporate firewall. Here then, are my top ten takeaways:

1. Your job as a community manager is to have your community face each other (and not you).
   
   Simple but true. Think of an offline meeting. The seating arrangement that stimulates dialogue and encourages people to get to know one another is a roundtable, not a classroom-style layout. Kudos to @RahulnB for sharing.
   
   
2. Federal Agencies like the CDC are leading with way with smart and effective use of social media.
   
   Forget old ideas about stodgy government institutions rooted in the past. Some of the most innovative and comprehensive social media programs are coming out of the Centers for Disease Control. Not convinced? Check out the CDC's social media page, managed by @bujulicious and her team. It's loaded with tools, dashboards, best practices — an all around excellent resource for community managers.
   
   
3. Corporations are developing social networks inside the firewall to run their businesses.
   
   LinkedIn and Facebook cut to the chase and let business and relationships happen faster. Dow Jones is reinventing the idea of a corporate directory by enabling employees to create personal networks from existing contact information stored in email address books. @simonb educated on key learnings: garbage-in, garbage-out applies, curating contact data and profiles is important, as is setting up rules for sharing of personal data to avoid abuses.
   
   
4. Practice common sense meeting new people using social media — don't be a victim.
   
   Have you ever received a desperate message from a friend of a friend over a social network, asking to you to send money now and rescue them from being lost and hungry in a foreign country? According to our friends at the FBI, this is a common ploy to separate you from your hard-earned cash. Even the smartest person can be taken. Don't be embarrassed, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is there to help.
   
   
5. Research says that social networkers are a) not that social b) can be convinced to pay for social networking services and b) are concerned about privacy (or are they)?
   
   Alcatel-Lucent surveyed thousands of people across different age groups and demographics to arrive at these somewhat controversial findings. What's not clear is how communities, and the different member archetypes — connectors, lurkers, collectors and so on — figure into this research. Still, I count myself among many who would gladly pay for more robust twitter services, like reporting and analytics on the reach and influence of my tweets and the people I follow. Thanks to Allison Cerra for sharing the research.
   
   
6. Mobile social networks are a sleeping giant.
   
   @schapsis says that untethering yourself from a desktop Web browser opens up a world of interesting and exciting possibilities. Time and place matters for people on the go, and the mobile phone is ideally suited as an immediate and ubiquitous communication tool.  A mobile social network uses location, geotagging, being "in the moment" for green field opportunities.  My favorite mobility app: FourSquare.
   
   
7. 20% of twitter posts mention brands, positive or negative. People are writing about you, whether you like it or not.
   
   @alexdc advises companies to protect their brands and have a risk management and mitigation plan in place BEFORE you end up being punk'd by social media. There are many free and for-pay tools for listening, monitoring, and responding, so there really is no good reason you shouldn't be engaged.
   
   
8. Facebook is a web marketer's wet dream.
   
   The numbers are impressive. Over 350 million users. One of out every three people online. 8 billion minutes spent on Facebook, every day. While Facebook is pushing the boundaries in what people are willing to share with the world about themselves — tastes, preferences, age, friends, buying habits — a marketer can't ignore the opportunities to find buyers faster. Do me a favor — go buy @clarashih's book,  The Facebook Era, Marketing Success Stories and write your own success story.
   
   
9. Social media and business: it's not about the fun, it's about the dollars.
   
   @sandy_carter has to show her boss the money, and prove the ROI for the social programs she manages. She successfully uses twitter and LinkedIn for business campaigns with zero incremental cost, and the lowest industry cost per lead. Amazing!
   
   
10. "Social networking is now a life necessity, like WiFi and oxygen. It permeates business, too."
    
    Hey, hey, my, my. Social networking will never die. Tools will come and go, but the underlying life and world changing forces brought about by the social media revolution are here to stay. Quote attributed to @DozierLaw.

Building B2B Communities in a Low Trust World

B2B communities exist to help companies attract and retain customers, improve productivity, decrease costs, and more. Learn how to create a trusted business community environment where relationships and opportunities flourish in this slideshare presentation. I'm speaking on this topic at the 2010 Social Media Conference this week in Miami, Florida. Hope to see you there!

Building B2B Communities in a Low Trust World

View more presentations from Lou Ordorica.

Risks and Rewards for Community Leaders

If you're involved in managing a community, a social media program, or thinking about starting an initiative for your company or yourself, congratulations.  You're a leader! As David Meerman Scott said in a recent episode of Hubspot TV, we are still in the early stage of the revolution. People diving in now are still seen as leaders.

As a leader, you need to think about risks and rewards, and what you are prepared to do to truly make a difference. Innovation in community and social media starts with taking risks, and being willing to challenge the way people and companies think about themselves and their clients.

It’s a journey, and not a process, and you need to be out in front and experimenting every day. Learning from your successes and failures is the only way you can really grow. If you're not just a little bit scared, then something is wrong.

Business hasn’t really changed all that much, really. Our livelihoods depend on growing our profits and customer base. But, the world we do business in has changed.

The opportunity we have in this new world, is to leverage powerful relationship tools like twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, _____, and communities, to connect with our customers, gain their trust and credibility. By helping them to be successful, and providing experiences that make them feel good about themselves. we're first in their minds when it’s time to buy. If we can have fun, help others, and be recognized for our contributions, all the better.

This doesn’t happen overnight, and having a clear vision, dedication, and discipline counts.

Zappos.com leveraged twitter and innovated in customer services. Not just a shoe company, but real people who listen to and care about their customers. Social media and service is part of the Zappos "DNA" — every employee is trained on how to engage with customers using the Web. Customer complaints and issues are seen as opportunities, not problems.

This approach has won Zappos many loyal customers. In turn, they have shared their great experiences with friends, family, and the world using social networks and word-of-mouth. Zappos successfully raised an army of loyal customers which translated into bottom-line benefits, and even caught Amazon.com's attention.

What separates innovators from those who follow is a courageous spirit, risking much with no guarantees. In today's ROI-driven environment, garnering the support for brave new ideas is challenging, but the beauty of social media is that there is room to experiment — and make mistakes. And, maybe even win big.

I've had my share of projects that did not catch fire, and each brought me a little closer to success for the next venture. The key is seeing each failure as an opportunity to get it right the next time, even while you might be taking heat from your boss, customers, or your own worst critic — yourself.

Have any examples risk-taking resulting in cool innovation? I'd love to hear them.