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.

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.

I just spoke today with Andy Lopata, who wrote an interesting piece on CEO networks.

Seems like a simple enough concept, right? If you want to be thought of as an expert in your field, besides just knowing your stuff, if you could figure out how experts — not wanna-be experts, but true “A-list” experts that people respect, quote and hire — act, then acting like them, rather than acting like a wanna-be, should boost your credibility even more.

Fortunately for you, there actually are a few things that those A-list experts have in common regarding how they behave in online communities, and this has been a key focus of my study over the past five years. I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while and finally have as part of the launch of the new collaborative blog, Tribal Seduction:

5 Ways to Act Like an Expert in Online Communities

Now please understand… this isn’t about gaming the system to pretend to be an expert when you’re really not. This is about making some smart decisions about how you use your time and how you engage people in online communities. You’ll find, as you put these into practice, that not only will they slowly but surely enhance your reputation, but they’ll also give you more time than your typical engagement pattern. You can use that time to go do the same thing in another community, or to go do other things to enhance your expert reputation, like write a blog or better yet, a book.

Shara Karasic is an online community consultant and currently the Community Manager for Work.com (where I’m Community Leader for the Sales & Marketing Channel). Shara is a heavy user of social networking / social media sites (she maintains an extensive, up-to-date list here).

Shara was recently interviewed for Tech PR War Stories about social media strategies and sites PR professionals should be exploring for their clients.

Download and listen to the interview here (16:05 MP3)

Work.com has a ton of how-to guides on social media and social networking you might want to check out:

• Web 2.0 for Business - Shara Karasic
• Online Networking - Dr. Ivan Misner
• Online Business Networking - Scott Allen (me)
• 5 Steps to Writing a Successful Corporate Blog - Barbara Payne
• Marketing Your Business With a Blog - Brian Brown
• Business Blogging - Scot MacTaggart
• Small Business Blogs - Shara Karasic
• Using Technorati to Find Blogs About Your Industry - Brian Brown
• Hiring a Ghost Blogger - Greg Brown
• Producing a Video Blog - Lou Bortone
• Start Podcasting for Your Small Business - Hendry Lee
• RSS for Small Business - Lou Bortone
• Letting Customers Contribute to Your Web Site - Charles Dervarics
• Doing Business in Second Life - Deborah Kurfiss
• Marketing Your Business in Second Life - Deborah Kurfiss
• Increasing Your Online Visibility Using Work.com - Shara Karasic

Every so often in the business-oriented online communities in which I participate, the issue of free speech and censorship comes up, usually from someone (or several someones) who is testing or pushing the envelope of the acceptable boundaries within the community — profanity, flame wars, etc.

Is free speech an absolute right within online communities? Can an online community, regardless of its size and membership requirements, establish and enforce a more restrictive code of conduct?

There is a long, well-established precedent for moderation/governance in online communities — even ones that are open to the public. Whether it has been tested for constitutional validity in court or not (and I haven’t found any court cases, but would greatly appreciate any references anyone may have), online communities have for years been in the practice of having codes of conduct that were far more restrictive than constitutional protections. Even large, open membership communities have moderators who are able to edit or delete posts and suspend or eject members who violate those codes of conduct. To say that the boundaries of constitutionally protected free speech is applicable to any privately-owned online community is to go contrary to decades of business practices.

Do blogs change this? What about sites like Gather, Ecademy or AlwaysOn, in which individual blogs are aggregated or displayed in the front page and other pages? One could make the argument that blogs are somehow different because of the fact that they are an individual voice rather than a community space. However, the aggregation of them on the front page and the nature of the threaded comments would, I think, negate any such argument. The site may call them blogs, but if they’re aggregated and allow comments, they’re still really just one big threaded discussion forum. I doubt a court would see a substantial difference simply based on the slight technical difference.

Even so, most hosting companies, including blog hosting companies, also have terms of service that are more restrictive than free speech limits, typically restricting hate speech and pornography, among other things. For example, WordPress.com prohibits the use of PayPerPost. Is that a violation of a blogger’s right to free speech?

Under the Uniform Commercial Code, we all have the right to voluntary restrict our free speech by contract, and when we join an online community we are doing just that — subject to whatever the terms of service are. In fact, the contract doesn’t even have to be explicitily signed in order to be in effect. Consider that when you walk into a theater or restaurant, you give up some of your free speech rights. Do anything that is significantly unpleasant to other patrons — talk too loudly, let your kids run wild, etc. — and you’ll be warned and eventually ejected.

Why would anyone expect an online community to be any different?

You do have the right of free speech, but the owners of a community also have the right to establish and enforce codes of conduct within the community, and be joining that community, your right of contract supercedes your right of free speech.

So when you find yourself bumping up against the boundaries of behavior in an online community, you might want to consider whether that community is really the right community for you. If so, then you can either adapt your behavior to the code of conduct or you can use persuasive means to try to change the code of conduct. But don’t make cries of “Censorship!” — you gave up that right when you joined.

Sid Yadav writes, “33 Places to Hangout in the Social Networking Era,” a summary with brief profiles of 33 different social networks, each with descriptions and target demographics.

Andrew Shaindlin (who contributed a sub-chapter of The Virtual Handshake) just co-wrote a good piece on Online Networks: A New Tool for Alumni Relations : How third party social and business networking sites can benefit alumni online communities. His coauthor is Elizabeth Allen, Communications Coordinator at the Caltech Alumni Association.

One of the great ironies (and brilliant aspects) of TheFacebook is that it has monetized the networks of Harvard, Yale, and virtually every other university in the US—without paying them a dime! Andrew wrote this piece to explore how university alumni communities should respond to these new services.

From Jason Dowdell (via Claire Delong of Accolo): Konstantin Guericke of LinkedIn writes:

There are two types of acceptance rates…

1.) Those from invitations
2.) Those from introductions.

Invitations to connect are generally from people you know and trust already, like former co-workers, classmates, etc.. By accepting an invitation, you agree to make introductions for the person when he/she wants to meet people you or your contacts know. Of the people who send over 10 invitiations, 7% have an acceptance rate of 90% or higher. These kinds of conversion rates are unthinkable in traditional marketing, but only possible via word-of-mouth marketing where there are well-established relationships and bonds of trust.

Introductions are contact requests from people you generally don’t know and who are contacting you about doing business via an introduction from someone you know. When accepting a contact request, you are providing your contact information, so you can start a dialog about the opportunity via phone or email. When people receive an introduction, they accept it (meaning they provide their contact info to the sender) 84% of the time. This is quite amazing given that they generally don’t know the sender, and it’s a testament to the fact that business users realy heavily on social filters — they are much more willing to give their attention and respond favorably to someone who comes introduced (even if the sender is just a friend of a friend of their connection) than if they get contacted directly via phone or email where nobody is vouching for the sender and where they can’t easily look up the profile of the sender. It also shows that most users are careful which people they let into their LinkedIn network and that they give signficant weight to the fact that one of their LinkedIn connections is recommending the sender, based on their direct knowledge of the sender or based on the recommendation provided about the sender by someone they know and trust.

What comparable data can other services provide? Any ideas?

One of the questions David and I are frequently asked, and that comes up as a recurring topic of debate, is, “Which online tool is best for me to meet and sell to the right people?” In our latest Fast Company column, Of Hammers, Wrenches, and Screwdrivers, we take a side-by-side look at online networking communities, blogging, and LinkedIn, and compare and contrast them based upon the Seven Keys framework we introduced in The Virtual Handshake.

While the boundaries between the application of these tools is somewhat fuzzy and they tend to cross over each other, this is a handy, concise overview of the predominant models and how they relate to each other and to your activities.

David Teten notes that Professor Constance Porter wrote more on this topic at Centrality Journal. See Blogs, Social Networking Sites or Virtual Communities: Alternative Paths to Building Relational Equity with Customers (Part 2)