Notes from Online Community Camp 2006

Yesterday I attended the Online Community Camp hosted by the fine folks at Forum One, held down in San Francisco at the Fort Mason Center (which is also hosting a Yu-Gi-Oh championship, for your random fun fact of the day).

This was in the “unconference” model – a hundred or two people involved in running, managing, or promoting community web sites get together and suggest a range of topics to discuss – the catch is, by suggesting a topic you are also volunteering to lead the discussion (I wasn’t feeling adventurous, so kept my mouth shut :)). Then everyone votes, and the Forum One guys picked the top nine topics and set the schedule for the day, with three sessions of three topics each plus plenty of snacks and networking in between.

The format worked well for this – I went down interested in hearing who was doing what in this space, and getting a feel for what kinds of issues, concerns, or challenges they were facing. The open discussion format made that easy, with everyone chiming in on occasion.

The topics I attended:

Community Metrics & ROI
This is a major, ongoing concern for anyone working on community initiatives, especially at larger (or older) companies. Some of these platforms and programs can get spendy, especially with headcount factored in, and those who control the purse strings generally want to know what they are getting in return. However the nature of community means you tend to get loads of ‘activity metrics’ (# of posts, active users, time between post & answer, etc) but translating those to ‘impact metrics’ (lowered support costs, increased sales, boosted customer satisfaction) can be incredibly difficult.

People from Autodesk, Apple, AARP, and a range of other companies chimed in, and the problem seems universal. The standard way many folks seem to tackle this, is using broad user research to establish some correlation between community involvement and whatever impact metric matters most to management – increased satisfaction, higher likelihood to purchase, and so on. Then sell that case to those who care, and follow up with regular activity metric reporting. The inference is that if higher community participation = higher positive trend against impact metrics, then while you might not be able to show direct per-user ROI (e.g. user A. Johnson got a question answered on a forum, which led him to purchase), you can make a fairly compelling if circumstantial case for the ROI of your program.

One of the most popular measures of ROI used seemed to be lowered customer support costs. Increased customer loyalty and satisfaction were also mentioned – we use all three at Microsoft, depending on the program and Web property.

Community Management / Moderation / Creating Customer Evangelists
In retrospect, we perhaps had too much to cover in this session. One of my key learnings was how differently I was defining community than others in the room – rather than a single web property (forums site, for example), I think of community as a broad set of participants who can be engaged in a variety of “community-type” activities like online product team chats, blogs, events, etc. So from a management perspective I care less about how to moderate forum trolls, and more about how to manage interaction with those individuals across multiple channels.

This is really the community management challenge Microsoft faces – we have a wide range of “community-type” activities, some common across all product groups, some unique to individual teams. But a single participant (cutsomer, partner, etc) might jump across any number of those, both online and offline. The tone of the community needs to be set across that entire landscape, and to the degree possible you want to track your interactions with each participant.

We talked a bit about various types of communities people at the event were managing:

• Public – open to any and all (MySpace, for example)
• Private – invite-only (think limited beta communities)
• Enterprise – inside the firewall. Seemed to be growing interest in this, but not a ton of experience as yet.

A good session in general, even given I missed 5 minutes to step out for a call (sorry…).

Intersection Between Online and Offline Community
One topic I voted for and have a lot of experience with and passion for, but I skipped it in favor of a session on Emergine Technologies. Dammit – too many interesting discussions, not nearly enough time. My particular interest here is based on connecting online community activity with offline community – user groups, meetups, and so on.

Emerging Technologies
Predictably this one dove pretty fast into Web 2.0 (O’Reilly’s lawyers take note, I’m not hosting a conference or anything…) and AJAX, but also touched on mobile, RSS, and more. Some words of caution on getting too enthusiastic with AJAX given it can tank your site performance. Pretty much universal use of RSS for various purposes. There was a fair amount of discussion over a desire for a common identity infrastructure that cuts across online communities – some mention of something by Six Apart which I didn’t catch the name of, some derision of Passport (I know, I know…), mention of Microsoft’s upcoming InfoCard technology, and so on.

This would have been a *fantastic* time to bring up Windows Live ID and some of the cool things site owners can tap into, but given I don’t really know what I’m talking about there, that would have been a bad call. Something I definitely need to brush up on.

Note – it seems the wiki for the event is private, which Nancy White pointed out in a comment. I have no clue why it’s so, yes, that does have a hint of irony about it.