UGCX 09
UGC = user-generated content
Social Content for Big Business 2/9/09
“Opportunities continue to arise for big businesses to leverage social content to create valuable conversations with their customers (and among customers), as well as to benefit company bottom lines. In this session, experts on the front lines of those Social Content will define the benefits and risks of having customer-driven conversations occurring about your brand or products, as well as the costs of not engaging in direct customer interaction.” –http://www.ugcxevent.com/socialtrack.html#s1
Moderator: Laurel Touby Founder & Senior VP, mediabistro.com
Speakers
Lane Becker Co-Founder & President, Get Satisfaction, “a web startup dedicated to fostering new methods of communication and collaboration between companies and their customers. Previously, Lane was co-founder of Adaptive Path, a user experience strategy, research, and design consultancy, known for, among other things, coining the technology terms ‘blog’ and ‘ajax.’ ”
Joe Cothrel Chief Community Officer, Lithium Technologies, Inc. “Widely recognized for his pioneering work in online communities in business, Joe serves as Lithium Technologies’ Chief Community Officer. In this role, Joe is responsible for thought leadership, research, and innovations that will drive the next generation of successful enterprise customer communities.
His prior experience included work with AT&T, Cisco Systems, IBM, Microsoft, and many other leading companies. Joe’s work with online communities began in 1996, when he conducted the first comprehensive research study into successful practices for managing online communities.
In addition to his work with clients, Joe has devoted significant time to advancing the understanding of online communities in business. With partners in academia, he studied the impact of online communities on marketing (Texas A&M University), social and organizational dynamics (University of Toronto), and social networks (University of Virginia). His work has been cited in more than 50 books on the subject of online community, collaboration, commerce, and knowledge management.
Joe divides his time between San Francisco, CA and his home in Ann Arbor, MI. He holds an M.A. from the University of Michigan and an B.A. from the University of Toledo.”
Marty Collins “is a Group Marketing Manager in the Windows consumer marketing group at Microsoft. As leader of the Windows Social Media Team she is responsible for building a strong community ecosystem for Windows and Windows Live customers using social networking techniques.
Before joining the Windows Live marketing team Marty worked in the Developer Platform & Evangelism group at Microsoft focused on building technical community. Prior to Microsoft Marty worked at Oracle focusing on user groups, and in New York City marketing for professional services.
Marty was born and raised in Seattle; she has a BA from the University of Washington and an MBA from Seattle University. You can find her at martycollinsblog.spaces.live.com”
Matt Warburton is the Ex Director of Community Management for Yahoo. As the Director of Community Management, Matt developed and executed the Community strategy for products such as Groups, Messenger, Profiles, and Mail. Matt’s team was responsible for community input/advisory panels, product blogs, community events, and engagement programs. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Matt spent eight years working for eBay. While at eBay, Matt managed several components of eBay’s Community Management team, including input programs, events, and forums.
State of ugc?
Marty: Seeking more content, seeking to outsource to community
Joe Cothrel: More community comments exist, more interaction generated
Lane: Quantify to companies the value more than just feel-good. Print out the good stuff, send up the chain to execs, but that’s not enough. “we’re directionally right, in terms of what we want to do, but need to quantify the value.”
How do firms feel about ugc?
Lane: Timbuktu bike messengers grew up to be parents, outcry for diaper bags for a year or 18 months. Now one of the best-sellers
Joe: worthy cost avoidance: tech support done by other users. People who participate in ugc, just reading even, remain customers 50% longer.
Marty: We’re solving business problems with actual products. Need current customers to use more products. There’s an engagement boost when people are interacting about the products.
Matt: eBay uses it to get feedback on products, marketing, development
How do you justify doing social content?
Matt: get insight: Transactions, cost avoidance (answer question), knowledge = power,
Marty: Scale: only 15% of Internet users are creating content, so we scale the content to the entire base. Paying a small number to serve a larger number of people.
New techniques?
Marty: RSS and tagging: content created on blogs, use aggregation model, tag and then Microsoft pulls that content into its site.
Joe: We want an open platform, pull content that exists elsewhere, share info
Matt: Wisdom of crowds: other users vote on ideas, drawback is setting expectations, have to be willing to take action on info, have the list of concerns evolve
Marty: YouTube lots of demos on web. Scrape YouTube and invite them to be linked to Microsoft site. Offer a showcase and Microsoft promotes it. Bring in 3d party content, make use of it for own purposes
What are users restricted from, how many conversations get banned?
Lane: It’s a question of do you build a stadium or a church? You set the tone. “I hate message boards; it’s like a stadium after the game is over.” The design and way you set the space indicate the tone. Useful to have occupants read an agreement: something that’s written for humans not lawyers.
Leads to self-policing
Matt: Terms of service, people report items, abuse cube. It’s more about what you should do, NOT what not do as a community
Joe: have procedures for what happens when people do what they shouldn’t. How should my company participate? Exec comment or get in there and interact
Ccpac.com here’s what companies agree to, here’s what customers agree to
Matt: get company out there: not defensive, internal guidelines for how to participate
If find out there’s a common problem, get out there and answer those questions
How does company value social content? What have we gotten for out efforts, metrics?
Lane: Still more work to be done, most right now praise-oriented. Product ideas, conversations oriented toward value-added. Maybe be more specific for marketing. A community dashboard for executives? Not quite there yet.
Matt: depends purpose of community. Quantify ideas generated, questions answered by 1 customer reference post?
Joe: Link customer id to id of community, you should know those community participants. Not just the users who contribute, everybody, even the ones who are just reading. If the customers buy more, then they’re better customers
Matt: Why come to community: get info. Often go out and buy
Marty: New member signups, postings, look at it each month, if not growing: why less healthy, what needs to be done to bring posts back up. Had community manager shoot content about new product in 90 minutes, not weeks and thousands of dollars spent
Is social content seen as critically important, marketing, PR, how sell to execs?
Lane: Recession-sensitive. How do I engage with the community? What does
engagement look like? Walls of business are way beyond the physical building
Matt: already laid-off, first hit often marketing. Can run the program with fewer people.
Joe: unlike ’01 downturn, this isn’t going away. It’s the nature of the medium and every company will be doing it. Less expensive than other marketing initiatives. Still seeing a lot of demand for this.
Marty: measured against other marketing initiatives, traditional media, etc.
Practical techniques to keep management bought in?
Joe: decisions are made with numbers and stories, together a powerful conversation,
Lane: balance the qualitative or quantitative
Marty: should you build your own? Should you seek out what’s already there. Monitor everyday what’s being said
How get peers to buy-in, when they have other things to do?
Lane: People love to talk about things they know. Look for committed team to share their knowledge. Do it as a team, buddy system, sit with them and coach their posts
Joe: not everyone will want to participate, but let them know what the rules are, afraid they’ll get yelled at.
Marty: facebook branded page that talks about upcoming products, have pop-ups. How much want to get involved vs engage with fan pages. “larger ecosystem” wall that lets people talk about product.
Don’t look at what you’re creating, there are people talking about product there, so go there and engage
User-generated libel in other countries?
Joe: general courtesy and protocol should take care of it before it gets that far
Lane: when marketing dominates the thinking, have to get away from the “campaign mentality” because this is an ongoing conversation