Well, I simply can’t resist this great story. Check out this personal invitation from Small Business Server MVP and New Orleans resident, Jeff Middleton. Jeff is hosting a conference focused on his community which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Certainly every resident suffered from this event, but perhaps no group as devastated as small businesses; the long term life blood of every community. New Orleans and the legacy of Katrina seems an ideal backdrop for talking about IT responsibilities in crisis planning, business continuity and disaster recovery.
I’ve known Jeff for several years. He and I spoke many times immediately following Katrina as I tracked his efforts to both personally recover and contribute to his fellow residents. While too many of us have moved on and news coverage has abated, those in New Orleans are still living with the realities of what is a very long term recovery.
I was inspired to see so many of Jeff’s fellow MVP’s volunteering their time to this worthy event. So, I encourage you to check out the links and help re-ignite some attention on this topic, this part of our community, and the event itself.
Welcome from Jeff
http://www.conference2007.SBSMigration.com/events/
Katrina
http://www.conference2007.SBSMigration.com/experience/Katrina/
A little help from friends
http://www.conference2007.SBSMigration.com/content/advisors/
Thanks,
Sean
Better known as the old 80/20 rule. In the web world this still applies. Read up on Italian economist Vilfred Pareto to get some of the history. I haven’t directly discussed this principle here yet and how it applies to Community insights and research, but I thought it was about time. This principle is often used in quality assurance or quality control planning and is a fundamental tool in Six Sigma. Below is a sample Pareto Chart that looks at the hypothetical data relative to frequency of reasons for arriving late at work (thank you wikipedia for the exhibit).
So, why am I talking about Pareto Principle? I thought this a timely follow up to my post on Community Segmentation. I don’t want anyone following my blog or thinking about Web 2.0 to think of it as a replacement for market research, user acceptance testing, focus groups, or anything else you may do today to aid in the decision making process. Your communities can massively augment and improve your customer/user intelligence, but make no mistake it can’t be your only source. Your community participants may represent a selection bias in your research. Your elites are a selection bias. If only a few % of your total users are active in your communities, is it a statistically significant sample? (I did NOT just say that the feedback/insights from these segments is NOT SIGNIFICANT!!! It most certainly is. It just isn’t the whole picture). The largest source of "listening" for many companies is their call centers. How do your # of callers and your # of community participants compare – are the insights gathered from these two sources different? In what ways and what might that tell you? This isn’t an either/or – it’s about building a strong story through all your insight sources.
Consider these questions as part of how you think this through?
- How will your online community investment inform your market and product research processes?
- Do the users in your communities represent your broader set of users?
- What user segments are not well represented? Why not? How will you understand them?
- Is your community insight capture focused only on "power users"? If the BBQ company I love only listened to users like me, they would build an amazing BBQ for high end users, but may price or feature themselves right out of the market for the masses. Who do you want to be?
- When your elite contributors give you feedback, are they representing themselves or the users they are helping? Ask them. Generally they know the difference.
I worry about those talking about web 2.0 as the dream "listening system." If you are doing this right, you need to Pareto and consider all of it. Most common sources of defects, types of defects, causes of complaints, recommended features, etc. against all your segments and your audience all up. Then decide based on your goals how you prioritize. Where Web 2.0 then circles back again is on the need for corporate transparency…sharing how and why you made these decisions. This is where a bit of courage will be necessary as not all your users will agree with you and in particular, some of your most valuable users won’t agree – but you owe it to them to be open on your process.
Sean
At the end of "Your Community already exists," I promised a follow up on segmentation. So much has been written about this that I hesitate to add my own spin, but I’m resisting re-researching the topic to pick who I think did it best. My goal here is not to create the "industry standard" taxonomy, but to set a framework for how I’ll discuss it overtime here at Community Group Therapy.
If you really want to explore this topic fully, it is likely well worth exploring my blogroll for others points of view on this.
So here goes. This is essentially how I think about online communities from a segmentation standpoint:
- Internals: Often forgotten in the taxonomy – but CRITICAL. Who are the internal employees in your company that are participating (or need to participate). What are their roles? Do their roles reflect your community goals (Do you have aspirations for product improvement insight, but only marketing participating)? Are they "volunteers" or is it their job to be in the communities? Are they there because they want to be or because they were told to be? You’ll have all of this – map it, plan for it, reward it if necessary, negotiate for it as needed (carrot and stick), develop your pitch to convince as needed – Just make sure you pay attention to it. Your community without participation from across your company will not achieve its potential.
- Moderators: These are sometimes employees and sometimes community volunteers. They’re critical to the tone, manner, health and managing the "norms" of the community. They need to be empowered, but very cautious in using their power. Moderation is part art, part science. Consistency is key. They need to be a very well known and respected participant in the community. Oh..and some personality helps:)
- Elite contributors: NOT to be confused with Moderators. These are your most active 1% of unique users (or even less in Microsoft’s case). This is the steep part of the curve where a small percentage of users are massively…even shockingly active in your communities. Reminder, I’m very biased, but to me, this is job #1. This is the segment that you have to deeply engage. (For Microsoft, these are the MVP’s). Their reasons for their level of activity are largely their own, but it is never (or rarely) about helping you…it is about helping other users. Their "ROI" could be described as learning, socializing, helping, "Pay it Forward," or simply as altruism. Misunderstand the motivations of this audience at your own peril!!
- Active Participants: Often described as the next ~20% of active participants. They represent the next most active (though significantly different than elites)group of participants. They are predominantly "askers" but are also "answerers" and some % of them will someday be your Elite contributors. These are your "regulars" – they come back because it was good last time.
- Lurkers/Consumers: These are the masses. They probably found you via search. They may or may not come back. In the end they have utilitarian needs from the community. This is over-simplified to be sure – in fact I’d love your input on how to break down this group a little further. Somewhere in this group are participants I’d call "curiosity seekers." They are circling the pool and looking at all the fun…building up their courage to jump in. The tone/manner/approachability of your community will determine how much courage it takes. This group I think is particularly critical to the long term vitality of your community.
- Non-Users: Well, all of the above are probably a small percentage of all your users…so you have A LOT of work to do. It is equally important to consider your non-users. Why are they non-users? What can you do to attract them? If you attract them too fast, might they damage your community. What are you doing to drive awareness of your community resources? Ease of discoverability? Re-use of the content? Remember…Field of Dreams was just a movie!
Now that you have a taxonomy (mine or another you like)…what to do. Just ensure you check your plan, end to end, against this taxonomy. If you design your community with lurkers in mind, will elite answers dislike your design. If you design for elites, will curiosity seekers ever get in the pool? Are you differentiating services and/or benefits by segment? Let’s face it, you will have budget constraints. Some services may have cost you can’t scale beyond your 1%. Consider the currencies ("coined" by my friend Lee at Commoncraft) that benefit each segment.
Whatever you do, don’t go and build your community strategy without considering segmentation. Even if you get some things wrong, having the context will allow you to identify and troubleshoot your errors much more quickly.
Sean
