Do Your Community Members Deserve a Badge?

Social media badges are not a brand-new phenomenon. I have an impressively interactive badge on the right sidebar from the Pickens Plan community. I downloaded it because I like the community and I like the message of the badge, not because it does me any particular good. I was interested to see a new application by the Huffington Post over the weekend.

In doing research, however, I came across careless use of the term. There are quite a few writers and sites that use “badge” to identify the “this site is a member of Facebook” app like this one that you can get from many social networks. The purpose of these apps is to link you through to your page on the social network. That makes them a chiclet (note proper spelling!), not a badge as HuffPost, the Pickens Plan and others are using the term.

According to my friends at Overdrive Interactive, who have an excellent white paper on the use of chiclets, “Chiclets enable a user to quickly share web content by automatically posting articles, photos, video, and other content to their blog (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad), public bookmark page (Digg, Delicious), or social profile (Facebook, Twitter).” You can download the white paper from the Overdrive home page.

Badges have a different, and perhaps a more personal, use. CNET likens them to the efforts many of us made in Boy or Girl Scouts to collect merit badges for various accomplishments.

According to CNET, the current craze for badges started with Foresquare and the competition of its users to earn status in the community. The HuffPost application rewards its most engaged users by making their comments more visible. There are various levels of activity, which they outline on a FAQs page. For example, a member can become “Moderator” by flagging objectionable commentary on the site. As Bryan Person pointed out last week, sites are either overlooking or falling behind in the important activity of moderation. Encouraging help from their members is an excellent approach. Rewarding them in a visible way for their help seems equally desirable.
Not incidentally, the application for a badge results in the applicant linking their Facebook or Twitter account to HuffPost. The publication is cagey about how they will or won’t use that info, but the FAQs do point out that “the shift in privacy is very minimal.” Not sure exactly what that means, but it worries me about as much as people who complain that their privacy has been violated on other social networks. Social networks aren’t a place for those who zealously guard their privacy!

HuffPost is clear that its current effort is intended to increase member engagement with the site. Why can’t the concept be extended in a way that rewards members for desired behavior. That makes it like a CRM loyalty program. Why is that not a good idea? The Tesco Clubcard is the classic example of a vibrant online loyalty program, but I don’t know any firm that’s using a “proud member of” type badge as a tie-in with its loyalty program.

Maybe we’re thinking too much about social media as an acquisition tool and not enough about its potential value as a CRM tool. What are your thoughts?

A Community Manager Dishes

I’ve written about community monitoring several times because it’s key to successful online community. I was interested a couple of weeks ago in a Matt Rhodes Tweet about interviews Fresh Networks had conducted with Shirley Bradley, the community manager at Business Week. The first part of the interview has a lot to say about community management in general; the second is about community management in a publisher setting.

She describes her role as “efforts to include readers and incorporate user-generated content (comments, suggestions, longer form opinion pieces) in BW’s journalism, elevating our readers’ participation on the same level as our journalism.” Some of her specific duties are:
• Managing customer engagement; see the links in part 1 for the many activities involved. One important activity is to solicit reader involvement. In part 2 she talks more about the “crowdsourcing” techniques they use.
• Included in customer engagement is the monitoring of reader comments. Each editor also monitors his/her own blog. Monitoring is one way of gauging reader sentiment. It also includes removing comments that do not meet community guidelines.

Crowdsourcing is not my favorite term; it seems to smack of an unruly mob running amok. In spite of that, I wanted to see what they were doing, so I went to the CrowdSourcing page. You may have to go there yourself to read the explanation at the top of the page; the relevant phrase is “using large, distributed and minimally directed groups to accomplish tasks.” Ok. While you are there, note that there’s a Featured User—nice pr—and a block of Tweets on this topic (the main filter appears to be the term “crowdsourcing”). Well done!
















When you look further you find that Crowdsourcing is a page on their Business Exchange site (a community site powered by Ning, as far as I can tell). According to the site, “Business Exchange is a Web site that allows users to create business topics, collaboratively aggregate content from the entire Web and connect with other business focused users around these topics.” It has a mind-blowing number of topics (I checked on “Social Marketing,” surprise, surprise!). I registered using my LinkedIn profile. I’m not sure what that adds; it would have been just as easy to fill out the form. However, I may find that I signed up for something else on LinkedIn! Registered users can save content, create a network, and suggest topics as well as simply adding content.

The main take-away is that there’s a lot going on in Business Week’s social space. It’s probably not a luxury, it’s a necessity for a media vehicle that wants to survive in the changing media world. (On that subject, check out the website for Gourmet magazine before it goes away. The home page clearly focuses on content from their writers and editors. There are discussion forums, but there seems to be no serious effort to bring readers into the editorial process.)

Social media is undoubtedly not the silver bullet for survival for magazines, or any other media, for that matter. The more interesting question is whether a given vehicle can survive without enthusiastic reader participation.

While you’re mulling that question, you can learn a lot about community management (note it’s more than monitoring; see a great post by Dion Hinchcliffe) by reading the interviews with Shirley Bradley. Then stay tuned for my next post. I’ve discovered an interesting new community where content creation and monitoring takes on a whole new meaning—and potentially a whole new series of challenges!

The Importance of Community Monitoring

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb sent me a copy of his recent Guide to Online Community Management. It’s a comprehensive, well-done guide that is recommended for anyone serious about the new position of community manager—either hiring one or being one.

I was on their distribution list because they picked up on a post of several months ago about monitoring community. In it I said that even with the help of a consultant it would take 3 to 6 months of serious effort to build a meaningful community. The report says that’s actually a short time, even with help, and in retrospect I couldn’t agree more. I also find interesting the comment that the more cost-effective long-term solution is an internal community manager.

It’s a 75-page guide, and I can’t cover all the issues they discuss, but I’d like to hit a few high points. Social media is not advertising, is it even marketing? Maybe. Is it more public relations and customer service? Quite possibly.

They do touch on the universal questions, “Should we have/do. . .?” In terms of corporate blogs, they see them as valuable for all except the businesses that refuse to devote sufficient time to them, especially in the midst of a crisis. I think that’s right on. Twitter they also see as invaluable. I’m a Twitter convert and absolutely see its uses. I follow a number of marketers who consistently provide good info in their Tweets and I greatly appreciate them. I also brutally unfollow people who are self-serving or fatuous (that’s a nice old-fashioned word that fits a lot of what I see). I don’t see Twitter as very useful for personal communication, but it’s a great professional asset and “value” is the point. The guide suggests being cautious about spending a lot of time on a corporate Facebook page because returns are hard to achieve. I’d also agree with that.

There’s a lot of focus on the importance of community managers in start-ups. They argue that a CM can be one of the early hires and one of the most cost effective. If you believe in the power of community , that makes sense. The alternative is traditional marketing with a sizeable budget. Community may make more sense for the start-up, but what about the established business? Deborah Ng provides a perspective from an established web business:

Do all businesses need a CM? I’m not sure. I think any company with a heavy Web presence would do well to have someone to spread the word and find out what makes its audience or client base happy. CM’s establish personal relationships and are more invested in the product or service than your usual publicist for hire. Plus, we know the social networks, we know the Web, and we know the bloggers. BlogTalkRadio wouldn’t have hired me if I was just Joe off the street. Being a pro blogger and being able to speak with other bloggers put me ahead of the other candidates. p. 21

What does it take to make a community successful? In a nutshell, a lot of hard work! But it has to be hard work that understands the nature of community. According to Justin Thorp from ClearSpring:

“Your users are the lifeblood of your community. You want to treat them like you’d treat guests in your house. Otherwise, like me, they’re going to make their way to the exits and not come back. One of the benefits of the Web 2.0 era we live in is that there are lots of places I could spend my time.” That’s the kind of plain-spoken, utility-based approach that all parties could probably agree with. That’s language that other people in a company could likely hear from a community manager and agree with (emphasis mine). p. 43

It’s an important part of the job of community manager to do the internal marketing that supports the community effort. That includes, but is not limited to, the importance of good metrics. Isn’t it interesting that efforts like lead generation are easily measured in social media and others like brand development are hard to track—just like in traditional marketing media! They also point to the 90/9/1 rule—it can be hard for a new community manager to remember that only 1% are likely to become “hardcore contributors.”

There’s a lot more, but I’d like to end with Heidi Miller’s tounge-in-cheek warings about using social media:

Treat people in your new social networks as prospects, not friends. Make sure that you constantly bombard them with one-way messages about how great your product is.

Be in a hurry to show “results.” Forget that “Connections over time equal trust” (--Tara Hunt); insist on showing immediate sales, hits, and click-throughs from your blog, podcast, Twitter, or Facebook page with no concern for building relationships with your friends and participants.

Keep it impersonal; sounds like a corporation. Avoid speaking in a human voice; always “regret any inconvenience we may have caused you,” instead of saying “sorry we messed up.” People love to interact with stale, sterile impersonal corporations, right?

Be the same. Never change. Keep on doing what you’re doing. Don’t bother to differentiate yourself from your competition; just stick with what you know. Never reach out.

Be afraid. Let your fear of loss of control of the conversation cause you to treat social media like traditional media. p. 45

As I said, there’s a lot more. The report is probably a bit pricey for a casual read, but for community managers—or those who need to have one—it’s must reading!

Response Monitoring That's Military-Friendly

One of my students saw this AP article on military use of social media about the time I saw the one in Marketing Vox. She picked up on the amusing idea of a general using "friend" as a verb--thanks, Beth! My reaction was that I'm delighted when someone does my work for me.

This chart is from the Air Force, and it seems to me to all be right on target. In fact, soon after I first saw it I had a comment on another blog that exactly fit one of their scenarios. Good for the Air Force! And I highly recommend that you copy and save it for your own use.

I'd add one scenario that I've discovered through trial and error. If a commenter makes a comment about something other that the subject of the blog post, it's a good candidate for being ignored. At best, one brief factual response and ignore anything further.

What I realized is that a commenter like this has an agenda and is not likely to be convinced by either fact or sweet reason. The news blogs are full of commenters like this and they can be really annoying. But unless you need to get a fact out, ignore them. They have a short attention span and will soon be looking for someone else to annoy.

Happy monitoring!

Boone's Army is on the March!

I’ve written about the Pickens Plan before. Although having $58 million to spend on creating and energizing a community doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t guarantee being smart. I watch on a daily basis, and what I see is consistent effort, good community management, and considerable activity taking place within the community. All is indicative of a well-conceived, well-managed effort. Seems to me Boone Pickens is getting his money’s worth, although I’m sure he would say that the real proof will be getting elements of his plan put into action.

To continue the push, Wednesday through Friday of last week there was a Virtual March on Washington—the first thing just like it that I’ve seen. Once again, it was well organized and flawlessly executed. He explains much of what’s going on in this video. According to the website today 4,558,010 people took part. That sort of participation doesn’t take place by accident!

People who are members of the plan--”Boone’s Army” he calls them—were informed multiple times about the coming event. Members can set preferences for frequency of content, and if I investigated the timing carefully I’m sure I’d find that they were timed so every member with email contact got at least one message. Most of us got several.

Each day, Wednesday through Friday, members of the Army got a message—from Boone himself, of course—urging participation. Each day had a different theme to encourage repeat participation. When you clicked through to the site, you found it well organized to support the march.


What impressed me most was the message page. It had the usual prepared message, but this one was easy to edit, unlike others I’ve used. Most impressive of all was the list of recipients. Along with the usual suspects, it included “Your U.S. Senators” and “Your U.S. House Representative.” The contact info in step 2 is optional, but my guess is that they have congressional district in their database for virtually all members (they’ve worked hard on that also). They could personalize correctly whether the sender choose to include contact information or not (and apparently some of our elected representatives do require it in order to receive email messages). This application was powered by Capitol Advantage. Turns out that’s the publisher of print Congressional directories, and they now have an email personalization product. Cool! Especially since it works!! The acknowledgment message contained the names of my senators and representatives to prove that it did.

Once again, Boone Pickens and the generals of his Army (whoever those generals may be; I still can’t find out) seem to have done it all right. They built up interest, motivated people to participate, and gave the appropriate autonotification. I expect the website to be updated in a day or two with a follow-up on the march, doubtlessly accompanied by another video from Boone.

I keep recommending the Pickens Plan as a best practices site for non-profits. None of the ones I know have $58 million to spend, but the truth is that a lot of that went for television to jump start the Plan in the initial stages. The online portion can be copied by all but the very smallest non-profits; they’ll just have to be satisfied with building participants more slowly.

What can corporate marketers take away from this? Good management of social media programs for one thing. My sense is that Boone Pickens has no interest in seeing any of his money wasted. Beyond that, in a new media age, corporations should think about being a participant themselves. You can see several corporate partners on the site. Owens Corning was one of the early supporters—an obvious tie-in with their energy-saving product lines.

This is the age of the soft sell—not the hard sell or the intrusive ad. Non-profits do good. Corporations can do well by supporting carefully-chosen non-profits.

Three stakeholders win—the non-profits, the corporations, and society as a whole!

What About the Changes on Facebook?

If you’ve missed it elsewhere, Facebook made changes on Wednesday that affect brand pages. When C. C. Chapman visited my class that evening we looked at the changes and wondered if the inability to moderate wall comments would scare away some brands. Caroline McCarthy had a good post on CNET yesterday that explains some of the issues.

You should check out some of the brand pages that you’re interested in. Target is one that gets Facebook and does interesting things. Check out their page and notice all the comments on the wall and look at their reviews page. All of us should "fan" (note that that's a behavior) a few good brand pages and watch what they do.

I noticed on my page that C.C. has updated the page for his agency, The Advance Group. The portfolio page represents the work of the agency and their boxes page shows the other ways you can follow this group of social media marketers.


No one is talking much about the effects on non-profits. In fact, I thought that non-profit pages were to remain under the Groups rubric. I checked out one of my favorites, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and it clearly has been converted. MSCPA is an organization with many passionate supporters, as you can see if you look at one of their pages. This is the wall page from their Angell Memorial Hospital. They will have people bring up issues from time to time, as people are currently discussing the closure of animal shelters as a result of the recession. These people are posting with sadness and understanding, but others could post in a more critical way.

It’s nice to look at this as a great way for consumers to contribute. Businesses and non-profits also have to look at the monitoring and response function. If you have your own page, you have to keep an eye on it. But you also need to be watching what people say about you on other pages.

It sounds to me like a serious set of feeds and filters for any business or non-profit that’s serious about its online reputation. When Facebook talks about filters, they are talking about personal Facebook pages and the way individuals can control their feeds, which is fine, but I doubt that it’s sufficient for businesses. There are some third-party Facebook tools out there, but a quick search didn’t reveal the kind of tool I have in mind.

I’ll keep looking. In the meantime, if you know of any monitoring tools specifically for Facebook, let me know!

New Site for News and Brand Monitoring

Over the weekend I set up a new (another, actually) personal page. I had seen a notice about Ogilvy’s The Daily Influence site, and a look suggested it was worth taking for a trial run. I’ve had my Yahoo! start page for many years, and I have no intention of giving that up. I am, however, often surprised when I ask groups how many have a personal page—a lot don’t, so this one might be worth a try.
I liked their social media page—a lot of familiar sources and a few new to me. I added this blog so it would be on the page with the rest. As a news source, I was perfectly happy, except that I wished I could somehow put a link on my Yahoo! page, although it’s not really configured for that. Maybe I can add a widget; I’ll have to work on that.

What I didn’t pay enough attention to in the beginning was The Listening Post feature. Thanks to a review by Melissa Daniels drew my attention to the reputation monitoring feature. I tried that out and was impressed. In the Twitter box I put this blog. A search always produces a lot of noise, because DIY Marketing is a common content phrase these days. I entered the name of a non-profit I work with in the YouTube search box and found more videos than I knew about even though I do pay attention.
So I’d suggest that the news pages are potentially valuable, but the reputation monitoring is more so. At the same time, a comment on Melissa Daniels’ post pointed out that there’s a good list of free tools on Mashable and some of those may be more robust. But for the small business or the beginner, this all-in-one place may be a great time saver and/or an eye opener to the important world of monitoring your brand online.

Managing Your Branded Community

As noted yesterday, I’ve been writing a lot about community lately; I think it’s a (the?) pillar of Web 2.0. I’ve done posts on aspects including best practices and monitoring. It was the monitoring post that connected me with Brian Person when he made a thoughtful comment.

Bryan works for LiveWorld, a supplier of community-related services. I’m breaking from usual practice in writing about it, because they don’t offer free services. Their target market is large corporations who are willing to pay for services that smaller businesses can provide for themselves. That gives them a special perspective.
LiveWorld offers a platform, but their value added seems to be in the services they offer to assist their customers. They manage branded communities and provide a monitoring service that is available to even to communities that do not run on their platform. That says something about what corporations are finding difficult or onorous. Why? I suspect its because of the necessity to set management and monitoring guidelines and train a group of people to implement them. In some cases it may also simply be that the corporations do not think they have employees with the necessary time or expertise.

They have an interesting new addition to their product line called LiveBar, which allows customers to add social functionality to their own websites by offering conversations and something they call “soapboxes” that have blog-like functionality. LiveWorld CEO Peter Friedman demoed the new offering at the Web 2.0 expo in late fall.

Earlier in the week I had an opportunity to talk to Brian Person, who’s written some interesting posts on the corporate blog lately. I asked him what made their services worthwhile when there are free counterparts available. He said that it’s partly their experience with social networks and communities. It takes 3 to 6 months of serious effort to build a sustainable community. It’s not a silver bullet and good consultants help managers understand that and have patience. Monitoring does seem to be a real issue. He says they usually monitor communities for their customers. They require the customer to invest at least 10 hours each week in community management. This is not an activity to just be outsourced and then wash your (corporate) hands of the operations. It’s your brand; continuous involvement is necessary even if you hire management services.

Both those are useful lessons for the small firm. “Community development,” if you will takes ongoing effort. Monitoring, with careful guidelines especially if done by more than one person, is essential.

So community may be the common theme of Web 2.0 and branded communities may be seen as desirable. However, they are neither resource-free nor quick nor necessarily easy to establish. The smaller business may find it wise to participate in established communities of interest rather than trying to start a branded community. What do you think?

Monitoring Community

For those of us who work in social media environments where the traffic is manageable (that probably can be translated that we wish it were higher!) monitoring is an ongoing but not huge job. Yes, it’s labor-intensive, but we know the issues and the values involved. Judgments can be made and unacceptable contributions can be removed or banned.

However, when you have a large vision and are willing to invest resources, you need more structure. All firms—large or small, experienced social media user or newbie—can learn from best practices of organizations that monitor their communities for the greater good.

I’ve written before about the Pickens Plan. It was launched in late summer and, in the run-up to the inauguration, is aiming for 2 million members. The plan wants them to be active, and that’s a lot of participation to monitor. My sense is that their district leaders are volunteers, but as I’ve noted before, Pickens and his people are not forthcoming about organizational details. But the leader in my district is an activist and has said some interesting things about the community lately.

What piqued my interest was an email in late November. It hit the right tone as a “friendly reminder.” It directed the reader to a blog post and that, in turn, to the Pickens Community Guidelines. If you follow links there, you see that the community is hosted on Ning and uses its terms of service but the guidelines seem to be specific to the Pickens Plan.

The guidelines are long but very much worth reading and thinking about. Let me highlight a few issues of interest:

• “Be Polite” is the first rule, and it has specifics.

• There are a lot of rules, all of which make sense to me, about proper use of the individual’s account on the Pickens Plan

• There are many rules that can be summarized as “no commercial activities”

• There are fraudulent or unethical activities that will result in account suspension.

and finally, to quote directly:

• We welcome constructive feedback, but will not tolerate excessive public posts criticizing Pickens Plan staff (including Site Administrators and Regional Leaders).

• Public posts debating these rules and/or moderators' enforcement of such will be removed without comment. We do encourage feedback and invite you to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

So there’s a lot of effort here. I get the sense that they may be using some filtering software also, but again they aren’t forthcoming (in this case quite understandable) about tools and techniques.

Ok, so this is a huge public effort. What about large corporations, especially on the B2B side? I looked at IBM and easily found a values statement and a set of guidelines for a community of current and former IBMers. There may be other communities and sets of guidelines. This particular one is hosted on Xing, a global networking service, with its own guidelines. IBM added guidelines for its own employees on top of those.

Adobe makes a big effort to get customers to offer content that will be helpful to other customers. The guidelines for the Adobe Forums are specific to that purpose and, again, make a lot of sense.

What are the key take-aways on monitoring communities? I’d suggest:

1. Communities must be monitored in terms of acceptability and relevance.
2. They need rules of the road. The rules need to be tailored to the nature of the community.
3. The rules must be enforced. That requires individual judgment and action, and that is fine. If moderators don’t perform effectively—whether it’s an employee, a PR agency, or a volunteer—the organization should replace them, quickly and decisively.

This is a conversation. If it’s not civil, there will be many of us who do not wish to take part. Those who want to form a community should carefully think through its objectives and the guidelines and activities that will be necessary in moving toward those objectives.