NETTING IT OUT
Online community platforms, until recently considered relative newcomers on
the software stage, are becoming more and more prevalent as part of companies’ online
toolkits. Built initially with only basic forums (a.k.a. message boards and
threaded discussion lists), they continue to develop dramatically in scale
and scope, providing arrays of features and capabilities for community members
(your customers), moderators, administrators, business sponsors, and other
key stakeholders.
Customer communities can empower customers and strengthen the relationships
between them and your company. This happens through careful planning, assigning
sufficient resources, and selecting the right tools. While you should never
discount the human element in achieving your goals, the underlying technology—your
platform—also plays an essential role in your community’s success.
We’ve developed this framework to help you evaluate online community
platforms and identify the one that’s best for you. This second version
reflects the technological advances and increased expectations for what community
platforms can and should be able do. The past year has seen many changes in
the online community space, including an emphasis on graphical and interactive
media (especially photos and video), advertising, and social networking. To
address these changes, this framework contains new and updated customer scenarios
and criteria for evaluating community platforms.
EVALUATING ONLINE COMMUNITY PLATFORMS
Selecting an Online Community Platform
Nurturing vibrant customer communities has be-come a critical core competency
in leapfrogging the competition. That’s why many organizations are
now investing in fostering online customer communities. Companies are committing
more internal re-sources to manage and facilitate customer communities. At
the same time, many firms are evolving and/or shoring up the software platforms
they use to host these online forums. The purpose of this report is to provide
a useful evaluation framework you can use to select the best online community
software platform (either in-house or hosted) to meet your organization’s
needs and the needs of your customers.
To build a successful online customer community—whether your customers
are looking primarily for answers to questions, for fellowship, to meet new
people, for fun, or for opportunities to contribute—you’ll want
to think carefully about the different audiences you seek to attract and about
the needs of each of your main external (and internal) audiences. But beware…this
isn’t something you can predict or plan with absolute precision. An online
community is organic; you can guide and nourish it, but ultimately it will
grow in the direction the community wants it to go. (Gardening analogies, though
trite, are not inaccurate.)
While your long-term goals should be large, your community will likely start
out small. (In fact, it’s almost impossible not to start out small.)
In this regard, the technology platform you use should comfortably support
the needs of your small nascent community. But the platform should also be
able to grow with your community in terms of both functionality and technological
infrastructure.
REQUIREMENTS FROM KEY CUSTOMER SCENARIOS
We see five distinct groups of people (summarized below) who have reasons to
become involved with the community, look to get something out of their participation,
and have a stake in its success. They are your customers, community moderators,
community administrators, subject-matter experts, and business sponsors.
Each of these groups has its own needs, desires, and goals. We think in terms
of Customer Scenarios—sets of tasks that customers (used here in the
broadest sense) would ideally like to do in order to achieve desired outcomes.
These scenarios become the foundation on which our platform evaluation criteria
are based.
Table A lists Customer Scenarios for each group, along with the desired capabilities
from the online community platform. The third column in the table provides,
for each scenario and capability, the evaluation criteria against which the
platform is measured.
Online Community Customer Scenarios
(Please download the formatted PDF to see the table at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/fw01-10-08cc.)
Table A. This table lists Customer Scenarios that are dependent on a
good online community platform, as well as the platform’s capabilities
that enable the scenarios to be achieved successfully. Our online community
platform
criteria
are derived from these customer scenarios.
1. YOUR CUSTOMERS. These are the people who make up the community and who become
its members and leaders. On a member-by-member basis they’ll have different
reasons for joining and participating, which they’ll do to greatly
varying degrees, but on the whole they come because they have questions to
ask and problems to solve, because they want to connect with others who have
similar interests and concerns, because they want to make a contribution
and be recognized for it, because they want to express their ideas and opinions,
and because they identify with and have (or want to have) a special relationship
with your company.
2. COMMUNITY MODERATORS. Moderators are helpers, facilitators, and guides.
They can be your employees, work for a third-party freelance contractor,
or be experienced responsible customers and members of the community themselves.
In all cases, they want to help everyone achieve their individual goals,
and ensure that members have a positive experience in a comfortable environment.
3. COMMUNITY ADMINISTRATORS. Administrators have the most technical role and
need to know the most about the way the platform works. They want to create
and maintain an easy-to-use environment that functions well, and they want
to support all stakeholders in their work.
4. SUBJECT MATTER-EXPERTS. These experts usually, but not always, work at your
company. They are extremely knowledgeable in areas important to your customers,
and want to share that knowledge, as appropriate, with the community. But
they want to learn from customers as well, particularly from the most innovative
ones. And, for the most part, they want to be recognized for their contributions.
5. BUSINESS SPONSORS. Business sponsors are the ones who set the business goals
and provide the resources to make the community happen. They may be executives
involved with marketing and market research, sales, product development,
technical support, customer service, or something else. They want to know
what’s on the minds of customers in general, and what they think about
specific products, services, and processes for doing business with you. They
want to reduce the demand on certain company resources, such as customer
service and support centers, while increasing revenue from developing stronger
long-term relationships and encouraging community members to act as spokespeople
for the company’s products and services. And they’re the ones
who sweat the impact of the community initiative on the company’s bottom
line.
EVALUATING COMMUNITY PLATFORMS
Evaluation Criteria
Our criteria for evaluating online community platforms includes the following
six top-level categories (see Illustration 1):
•
Capabilities within a Community
•
Community Participation
•
Moderation and Administration
•
Architecture
•
Product Viability
•
Company Viability
CAPABILITIES WITHIN A COMMUNITY
An online community platform should support a variety of communication channels
between and among members and your company. It should make it easy for your
customers to find whatever they’re looking for. And it should provide
a mechanism for members to rate the value of the content they create, and
for people to be recognized for their contributions.
Our framework contains four criteria for evaluating a platform’s community
capabilities:
•
Communication Channels
•
Collaboration Methods
•
Search
•
Reputation Systems
Online Community Evaluation Framework
© 2008 Patricia Seybold Group
Illustration 1. This illustration shows the top-level criteria and their subcriteria
for our online community platform evaluation framework.
Communication Channels
We informally define a communication channel as “a medium for conversations.” These
conversations can be between two individuals, such as a customer and a support
professional (one-to-one communication); between one person and a group of
people, such as an email newsletter (one-to-many communication); or among people
in a group, such as a public forum (many-to-many communication). They can also
take place in real time, as in a telephone conversation or online chat (synchronous
communication) or occur at staggered points in time, as in email and message
boards (asynchronous communication).
A robust platform lets community owners choose from a variety of communication
channels—forums, blogs, chat, and messaging—to meet the needs
of the community. Each channel has its own strengths. A platform needs to
provide at least one channel, but more offerings are better, even if the
community owners decide not to implement all of them.
This report continues...
To read the full report: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/fw01-10-08cc