Following are my notes on the BRITE Workshop on Online Communities, at Columbia Business School

Community as Part of Your Site Offering: Strategy from 50,000 Feet and Tactics from the Trenches
Sylvia Marino, Executive Director, Community Operations, Edmunds.com

3 person staff running this. I’m the Executive Director of Community Operations. I have my own P&L. We get profitable quite early in the year. I have a community manager, who deals with moderators and members. Senior Product Manager who makes sure community is integrated throughout the site.

We sit in the media group, separate from editorial, but equal to them

Our membership agreement is one of the most copied on the Web

We’ve banned a user and sued him to do that

Consumers engage with others, editors, industry experts, manufacturers, experts

General rule: no soliciting

A: Why do you have both Forums and Social Q&A?

A: Q&A is for quick response.

Forums is for longer-term dialogue

Our customers engage in Edmunds, Carspace, and also elsewhere: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, widgets, mashups, RSS

Our community tools (e.g., Twitter) have empowered editors.

We have lots of moderators, most of whom are part-time

Consideration Marketing—strategic placement based on what the contest is.

Advertisers used to worry about seeing their ad next to negative conversation but that’s now rarely true. Most advertisers are doing packages.

We’re #3 automotive info site, after General Motors (whole network) and eBay motors . So we’re the only neutral information site.

We use NetworkedInsights, which measures your ROI on your community activity.

Every page and every product is a community opportunity

Read customers.com by Patricia Seybold. First figure out the customers’ needs, and then see if you really need Twitter, blogs, podcasts, Facebook, etc.

We’re a private family-owned company (Steinlauf family)

Dealers tried to co-opt our service to promote themselves. Customers didn’t like having them in forums, but wanted to know about good dealers. So we added dealer ratings/reviews, and now local auto repair service ratings /reviews.

We decided that thinking that our users could spell was a really radical assumption.

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Interactive: Creating Experiences For Online Communities
Bernd H. Schmitt, Professor, Columbia Business School, best-selling author, “Big Think Strategy”, with Aliza Freud (CEO Shespeaks), Sylvia Marino, and Olivier Toubia

Q: Who participates in these communities?

Marino: it’s people with needs. Although I often wonder if these people have jobs. For support , to give & receive information, and entertainment. I have a federal court judge, to a woman with 9 kids. I have people who are in every day, and people who come in once every 3 years when their lease is up.

Freud: People of all ages are online, but their purposes vary widely. Moms often go online to monitor what kids over age 13 are doing.

Q: Comment on manufacturer-owned sites.

Marino: User will always have suspicion that negative comments are edited out. When we get complaints from car manufacturers about what is written on our site, our response is always, ‘make better cars. Treat your customers better.’

Marino: some years ago L’Eggs launched an online community for pantyhose members. Real women said, ‘women don’t want to talk about pantyhose’. But it turns out, there were people who wanted to talk about pantyhose: duck-hunters and cross-dressers.

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Integrating Online Communities: From service and product forums to a holistic approach to customer communities
Richard Binhammer, Conversations, Communities and Communications, Dell, Inc.

“Dell has been a leader in using social media to engage its customer community in tech support, product development, and public relations. Initiatives have included corporate blogs, customer-to-customer support (C2C) forums, IdeaStorm for idea generation, online videos, and ratings & reviews. Richard Binhammer will discuss Dell’s current community initiatives and future plans to integrate these diverse programs into a holistic approach throughout the company.”

Launched online communities since 1996.

There are 4000+ conversations about us every day.
We decided to listen, learn & participate.
We estimate we have 2b interactions with clients evey day. IdeaStorm has 9800 customer ideas so far.

Main channels now:
- resolve dissatisfiaction
- Join conversation
- Share content & collect ideas: StudioDell, IdeaStorm, Blog roundtables, Second Life, Digital Nomads (powered by Dell but not officially a Dell site), Regeneration.org (powered by Dell but not officially a Dell site)
- Tell our story: Direct2Dell blog

We’ve done $0.5m in revenues on twitter (from DellOutlet.com)

Our premise: we are a listening company.

When there’s a dispute, we try to take it offline, because of our privacy policies. To solve your problem, I need your Dell ID and other information. We then cross our fingers that the customer will acknowledge that we solved the problem. 90% of the time they will do so.

We are evolving to a model where we don’t treat online as a special type of media. Core group of 40 people in conversations with community team.

Social media is a phenomenal early warning system.
I can name 3 issues (e.g., laptop batteries) where social media warned us 3.5 weeks before anything else of a major issue.

I’ve probably covered half my salary in computer sales.

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From BarackObama.com to AT&T: Using online communities to engage, energize and mobilize constituents
Thomas Gensemer, Managing Partner, Blue State Digital

“With nearly a million members, the My.BarackObama.com social network has helped to win a presidential primary, raise enormous funds online, and reshape the role of the Internet in political organizing. The company behind the social network, Blue State Digital, has worked with more than 100 clients in politics and business, to develop new media strategies to grow relationships with customers and advocates. Managing partner Thomas Gensemer will discuss how they have worked with the Obama campaign and clients such as Stonyfield Farms and AT&T to energize and mobilize constituents on their behalf.”

Our tools & programs: the basics. Easy signup. Email broadcast. Fundraising. Event management. Surveys, quizzes, polls. Petitions, tell a friend.

1.6m active profiles.
Over 50K groups & circles
Over 250K user-organized events

List power:
Active users (about 5% of active signups)
One-time users
Profile owners
Low-level actions
Basic signup (deadbeats >35%)

93% of Americans expect companies to have a presence in social media.

Why network?

- self expression & ego
- utility
- Exhibitionism/voyeurism
- Reputation (Linkedin)
- Altruism (actblue, my.barackobama.com, angie’s list)

If you had 10 of your most loyal customers in a room, what would you have them do?

I don’t believe that everyone should have a social network.

1/10 of Best Buy employees have created a profile on BlueShirtNation.com

BMW’s site on Facebook makes sense. It doesn’t require people to join a new network.

Al Gore’s “We” social network hasn’t taken off, because it’s not tied to face-to-face local events. What can people organize around?

Analysis: why doesn’t Whole Foods have a real social network? There’s real affinity, real physical presence.

Key Lessons

Not all networks utilitarian; in fact, most won’t offer utility.
Need shared affinity
Need low barrier ‘ask’
Need ongoing engagement tactic (e.g., local meetings)

If you’re a ‘deadbeat’, you get a ‘thank and spank’ message saying, ‘0.5m people have signed the petition; why not you?’. We work with an organization called Wal-mart Watch.

If we had done what Kerrey did, focusing on MySpace / Facebook, we would be very limited in our ability to message people. We wouldn’t own the data.

110 people now work in new media for MyBO, including people in all 50 states.

Following are my notes on David Rose’s talk at the recent Liminal Group conference, “The Future of Business & Strategy Summit”, on “What’s Next in Business: tomorrow’s game changing technologies”:

I’ve invested in over 75 companies, but I consider myself mainly an investor.
Started my first Internet company in 1998. it took $20m to get to product ship.
2000: 2nd internet company. Took $2m to get to product ship.
We most recently invested in Pond5, which does user-generated stock footage. When we invested, it had a management team, had launched, had revenues. They had only spent $20K.

It’s dramatically cheaper now to get to launch.

No one knows where it’s going.

4 major seminal ideas you must know if you want to be able to function going forward.

1) The long tail.
2) Web 2.0
3) Globalization
4) The singularity (Ray Kurzweil)

THE LONG TAIL

Typical record store has 40,000 tracks in inventory. Rhapsody has 400,000 unique songs streamed monthly.

Barnes & Noble has about 130,000 titles in a store.
Majority of Amazon’s books are sold outside the top 130,000.

Supply side drivers:
-centralized stocking
-virtual distribution
- delivery on demand

Demand side drivers
-internet connectivity
-search engines
- recommendation software
- Sampling tools

WEB 2.0

Web 0: brochureware
Web 1.0: transactional sites
Web 2.0: transactional sites

Uses example of Shakeshack in his neighborhood, which has a daily Flashmob (organized via Twitter)

The Web as platform
You access everything through your browser
The architecture of participation: you are part of something else.
You (and they) own your data

Software as a Service

About 1.5 years ago we changed Angelsoft to a pure SaaS model. We upgrade every 5 weeks.

- no physical delivery costs
- no version issues
- continual upgrades
- perpetual revenue stream (retainer)

Collective intelligence: wikis
Blogs. 6 mos. ago I just launched my personal blog.
Podcasts
Social software
Messaging (Twitter)

Cross-device mobility: computers, smart phones, cell phones, digital signage

Outsourcing:
- most efficient, most effective or cheapest option
- production of things, services, ideas
- Can outsource to companies, teams or individuals
- One-off or long term

Recommends CrowdSpring.com—you post the price you want to pay, and people do the work on spec. Had a portfolio company who used this to design a logo.

Can offshore to contract manufacturers, wholly-owned subs, or teams for hire.

Use a service like Panjiva to evaluate a range of suppliers.

Open sourcing: now being used for applications, tools, information (Wikipedia), and operating systems? Vast majority of websites run on Apache, an open-source toool.

Self-service: slowly pervading our entire world. It includes technical support. You see this with ATMs, gas stations, airline checkin. Retail check-out (including Home Depot).

Communications: wireless, VOIP. Every Mac comes with software to allow 4-way visual chat.

THE SINGULARITY

Ray Kurzweil argues that the rate of change of technology is accelerating at a constant rate. In other words, it’s exponential growth not linear growth.

In medical technology: there’s accretive benefit from explosive growth in computing power and increasing miniaturization. There’s also reverse-engineering of the human brain. Put that together: you can download your brain into a box. He predicts this will happen by 2045.

I enjoyed attending New York Word Camp 2008, which attracted about 150 avid WordPress users. My notes follow:

Matt Mullenweg, CEO, Automattic, “State of the Word”: NYC Edition

Wordpress was born from a blog: I posted that a prior open-source blogging platform really needed to be taken forward. Someone contacted me, and it grew from there. There are now over 90 contributors to the core code, plus thousands of plugins.

Asked audience split between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org. It was roughly 50-50.

Mentioned Wordpress.com is blocked in China, because Wordpress.com doesn’t cooperate with China’s censorship requirements.

Notes from the subversion repository: the place where people document their changes
2007: 1090 changes
2008: 2,840 changes to date, which lead to 11 releases (He apologizes for that number.)

We are at a historical high in # core developers for Wordpress. This team reviews contributions of outside developers into Wordpress.

2007: 2.8m downloads
2008: 11.1 m downloads

Wordpress.com:
2007: 1m blogs , 20m posts, 1.6b page views
2008: 2.4m blogs , 35.8m posts, 6.5b page views

Akismet has caught 5b spam, with 99.925% accuracy, which is much better than success rate of email spam blockers.

Spammers are going to invent artificial intelligence, because they have motivation and $ to do it.

New technique they use: leave complimentary post and link it to a URL that looks like a church or school, but is really a spamfront. Sometimes, the post is copied from a legit comment a few months ago.

I created Akismet to save my mom from reading offensive spam, when she started a blog

I’ve been to 18 Wordcamps, 9 upcoming.

We only organized one; the rest are community-organized.

Three major releases this year: 2.3, 2.5, 2.6

100,000 installs of Wordpress iphone app. Coming soon: stats and comment moderation on your iphone.

Most popular page on Wordpress.com: stats page. “You guys reload your stats like hamsters on crack.”

Behind the scenes, new changes coming: theme directory. All themes will be vetted for safety/security.

There were spammers who bought ads for ‘free wordpress themes’; created a beautiful ‘free wordpress themes’ website; but every theme would have a backdoor or spam links in the footer.

We’re getting 100 theme submissions/ week. They’re all being manually vetted for safety. Now over 100,000 downloads.

Also launching Wordpress Zeitgeist. We’re following the Firefox model. We want to make it one-click easy to upgrade.

6m Wordpress.org blogs (including Wordpress MU, multi-user). About 4m of these are multi-user blogs. I was surprised, because Wordpress MU is much harder to use.
Of these, 5.1m are secure

Plugins are a free market of features.

On a list of activated plugins, here are the most popular:
#145 OpenID
#24 Adsense-manager
#12 Hello Dolly, my favorite
#10 cforms (contact forms)
#9 wp-polls. Lightweight forms of interaction with audience increase likelihood of commenting
#8 WP Automatic Upgrade
#7 wp-cache—performance upgrade
#6 wp-db-ackup
#5 stats
#4 nextgen-gallery. I frequently get asked how do plugin authors feel when you move the plugin into the core. We usually simplify it when we bring it in.
#3 google-sitemap-generator
#2 all-in-one-seo-pack
#1 Akismet

This list is a very good indicator of what Wordpress will look like in the future. By tracking this, we can build features for people before they even know it.

We acquired Intensivate (commenting system) a few weeks ago

Average of 5 plugins per blug. The record is 800 plugins. Therefore, essentially everyone in this room is running their own version of Wordpress. This makes it very hard for people to compete with Wordpress. It’s easy to compete with features (just pay some developers), but hard to compete with community.

Going forward:
-better plugin stats

Hardest part of my job: deciding what should be in core? We believe core should be small, light, fast. It should be faster with every release. Look at popularity of plugins. Look at what bleeding-edge blogs are doing. Sometimes I put in things that I just want. I’m a photographer, so I like the galley feature.

Some people were gaming the download feature; that’s why we don’t consider it the most meaningful feature.

Wordpress 2.7 will include: Dashboard redesign, dashboard comment replies, keyboard shortcuts.

We created a “Bizarro Wordpress”, Crazy Horse, which was the opposite of everything Wordpress does. Very popular.

It doesn’t make sense to download a plugin to your PC and then upload to your server. It should be a direct link between the two servers, each of which is on a 100megabit connection.

Should soon be buttons to add a Google map, photo from Flickr, etc.

When he was in China, as an experiment, he did a search on ‘falun gong’. The search didn’t work, and his internet went down for 5 minutes. He was punished.

Blogging in China is highly self-censored. Your posts can get unpublished if you discuss certain inappropriate topics, so you have strong motivation to self-censor.

When he was there, the Chinese milk story disappeared one day. No blog posts, no news stories.

A lot of people are using Wordpress.org . Long term, I think censorship will be less of an issue.

Themes for 2009 development of Wordpress:
- Upgrades should be super-easy
- Security. Many US government agencies are using Wordpress internally. Showed an impressive list, e.g., Coast Guard.
- Rich Media. I just bought a tool that adds core GPS/bearing data to photos I take. We can incorporate that.
- Multi-modal. Blogging should adopt to whatever you’re blogging. E.g., if you blog a photo it should be formatted differently than just text.
- Wordpress becomes a hub. Bring Facebook/Twitter to Wordpress.
- Fashion and tattoos. “We’re taking the “W” back.”
- Crazyhorse.
- Year of Themes. Themes can do everything plugins can do, and can even bundle plugins.

I can’t take my data out of facebook and run my own Facebook. But I can take my data out of Wordpress and run my own Wordpress.

Backpress = shared infrastructure between different systems that are broadly applicable. Includes: user authentication. People will be able to build other systems on back of this.

BuddyPress = rough equivalent of Facebook network but on Wordpress system. You never know what will happen with Facebook, Flickr, etc. Wordpress can be the safe repository of all that data.

There aren’t that many applications that can get 150 people to get together on a Sunday to meet one another.

Contact information: http://Ma.tt
m (at) mullenweg dot com

We’ll probably always be in PHP and MySQL. Because we’re a platform, we have to be backwards compatible. Apple broke that rule, and it hurt their popularity with developers. I recently loaded a 1992 DOS game and it ran on Vista. That’s amazing.

Buddypress today is not ready.

A prominent musician with hundreds of thousands of users is switching his social network over to BuddyPress.

Wordpress MU lags regular Wordpress by a few weeks.

We’re seeing a lot of Wordpress being taught in journalism schools. I think you’ll see some prominent journalists, e.g., Om Malik, starting their own company and blog. His brand was more important than Web 2.0/Fortune. He has 10 employees now.

NY Times is an investor in Automattic. We’re working with them.

All the CNN blogs are hosted on Wordpress.com .

Wordpress.org and Automattic have only one link between them, which is me.

Automattic has raised 2 rounds: $1m first round, $30m earlier this year. Everyone around the table is in it for the long term. No plans to sell or IPO. We’re trying to build something generational. Inspiration is Craigslist, with 25 employees, massive pageviews.

Wordpress.com now has 230m unique visitors. 30 employees.

When I started Wordpress, I feared it would break the open-source model, but it didn’t. People kept contributing. When I started Automattic there was no IP in the firm, which is highly unusual for a software company.

Any of you could download Wordpress.org today, and start a direct competitor to Wordpress.com . This totally aligns incentives in the long term. There are now about a dozen companies trying to do roughly the same thing.

Aaron Brazell, How to Hit the Blog Big Leagues
Former CTO of b5media
Technosailor.com . 4 writers on this site.

90% of your visitors come from Google. They’re first-time visitors. Important to convert them.

Scoble’s starfish theory: there are people who don’t really know what they want. Scoble is very distributed (Flickr, Friendfeed, etc.), and those different legs touch people with different interests. If you’re a mommy blogger, and there’s a searcher who is visually oriented, you as a mommy blogger will reach her because you have uploaded some good stroller photos to Flickr.

Get to know the top bloggers in your vertical. You’ll learn a lot from that.

Endorses Friendfeed over carnivals as a vehicle to build social capital with top bloggers

PageRank is not as important as subscriber count. (Incidentally, Google doesn’t own PageRank; Stanford does and Google has a perpetual license.)

Problogger has 50,000 readers; very knowledgeable.

I recently attended a private talk by Dr. Eric Clemons, Professor of Information Management at The Wharton School, at the offices of www.firstwivesworld.com, the first social network and community dedicated to women transitioning through divorce. He is currently creating a case study on the site. I definitely love their name!

My notes:

He avoids being an investor in companies he profiles/analyzes.

Quoting a panelist from a panel he moderated: “We may not do the deep analysis of traditional journalists, but we’re so wired. We’re a collective mind.”
“We don’t need fact-checkers. We don’t need editors”.

Is the internet a breakthrough in human communication?

Social networks still have norms, which constrain what you can do.

Superficial monetization of a social network with advertising is a failure, because it doesn’t fit the social norms.

In beginning of radio: there was no programming because there was no one listening. RCA owned a radio station and made radios. They solved the chicken & egg program by giving away thousands of radios in NY which were tuned to only 1 station, theirs. Then they could go to media guys, and tell them 100% of NY radio market is listening to RCA. Now we can go to Colgate and sell advertising.

Have you ever noticed that all the ads on the different channels run all at the same time? Because you agreed to be captive in exchange for free content.

BUT the net is entirely voluntary. It’s like showing up at a medieval faire.

Most attempts to monetize the net are ill-conceived at best to offensive.

British Airways used to have a promotion: if you buy a 1st class seat, you could bring your wife. Problem: people would bring their mistresses.

Facebook Beacon is making the same mistake. If I buy black lacy lingerie, 3 possibilities:
1) bought it for myself
2) bought it for wife
3) bought it for another woman

In all of these scenarios, I don’t want my wife / network to know about this.

My first wife left (rightly). She said, “During the day, I’m first in my class at Cornell Law. I come home and I do your cooking. Do your own cooking!”

Ultimate terror: 2:45am. If I need to whine, the only person who will listen to me whine is the reason I’m whining.

When I was 25 and my wife left, I was disoriented. It had been my life, my car. When she left, my network fell apart. We have a group that is in need but too embarrassed to ask.

I had grad students whom I paid to play Second Life, and another whom I paid to play World of Warcraft. One was a jock, who created a character called Sweetie. He would send her to bars, salsa with other characters, and then watch her be violated.

No one on a dating site wants ONLY a virtual relationship.

3 P’s of a successful online network
1) Personally relevant. If it’s not relevant, it’s just bad TV.
2) Participatory
3) Physical transition

The hard part of a social network is monetizing it.

How would you feel if a woman you met on First Wives World said, “I’m a therapist, and I want to be paid for providing you some counsel.” You have to be careful about violating norms.

I have a freshman, who has a company. You send him a text message, and he’ll forward them to everyone you know. E.g., when Heath Ledger died, I got 70 messages. Some other faculty said, they had to cancel classes, because everyone was either texting or crying. The students say they get 10 messages/hour, except Friday/Saturday night when they get 40 messages/hour.

The people we’re trying to capture are ‘digital virgins’. I want them to become digital residents.

A lot of people freeze halfway through the registration process on First Wives World. As soon as my activity online is linked to my real identity, I’m nervous.

We’ve done studies of the depth/loyalty of the average 19-year-old employee. They’re both cocky & ignorant.

The alternative to advertising is letting users design it.

Here’s what FirstWivesWorld should do. Tell ETrade: we won’t take your ads. But give us $0.5m to do research on needs of divorced women with money. Because we did the research together, you have an exclusive on this relationship. You cant get this knowledge from anyone else. This is not giving an exclusive on banner ads.

Bud spends $.75b on promotion. Kraft hasn’t gotten past the model of: we’ll sell a product the buyer doesn’t really like, but he’ll buy it if the price is low enough . We call this promotion, even though neither the buyer nor the seller is happy with the transaction.

Companies have both a promotion and an advertising budget. There’s not as big a pressure to justify ROI on the promotion budget.

The flush toilet and the elevator made cities possible.

The iphone may be as big as the automatic transmission.

If YouTube collapses the public broadcasting system, the culture goes away.

We are teaching people to use itunes as a coping mechanism. That is emerging spontaneously from the community.