The Art of Community is #1 Culture Book on Amazon.com

It may have changed by the time you read this, but The Art of Community has now hit the #1 slot for the Business and Culture category Amazon.com: You can see it on this page and you can check out the Art of Community Amazon page here. Go and buy a copy and support the project, [...]

Art of Community Webinar Soon

Just a quick note: I am doing a webinar on my book The Art of Community at 9am Pacific today. You can join us here.

Social CRM Virtual Summit - November 11th, 2009

We’re proud to be sponsors of Lithium’s online conference Social CRM on November 11th.

The Social CRM Virtual Summit is a five-hour online conference, which includes webcasts by industry leaders in an interactive exhibit hall, a resource center with extensive materials for download, and a virtual networking lounge to chat live with speakers and prospects. Bill Johnston will lead a session on Best Practices: Community, Strategy and Planning with Joe Cothrel of Lithium. Their session includes discussions on:

• 
  
• Defining and creating a community strategy by working with organizational and customer stakeholders to determine needs, goals and key influencers.
• Determining what metrics are important to track, what is currently being measured against what many companies want to measure, and current key performance indicators, featuring research from the Online Community Research Network.
• Defining the value of online communities through the key sources of value, including: cost reduction, lead generation, increased engagement, building customer loyalty.
• 
  
  The virtual event is featured in two time sessions on November 11th.
  

  • 5am to 10am PT / 8am to 1pm ET / 1pm to 6pm GMT, or
  • 10am to 3pm PT / 1pm to 6pm ET / 6pm to 11pm GMT
  • 
    

  
  
  Social CRM Virtual Summit Agenda
  
  The social media revolution has changed everything, including how customers choose to interact with companies and each other online, and where they turn for trusted information. This virtual summit comes at a time when companies are starting to see tangible financial results from deeper online engagement with customers, and will explore the current capabilities of and future for Social CRM.
  
  At this five-hour live, virtual summit you will experience:
  

  • 
    
  • Webcasts by industry luminaries such as Mike Fauscette (IDC), Bill Johnston (Forum One), Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), and Ray Wang (Altimeter Group) in a virtual auditorium
  • Scheduled live chats with industry experts and practitioners from companies including Barnes and Noble, Lenovo, National Instruments, Redfin, Best Buy, Juniper Networks, and T-Mobile
  • An interactive exhibit hall with dynamic sponsor booths, including Genesys, ON24, Ant's Eye View, Forum One Communications, CRM Media, Cognizant, and Liveperson
  • A resource center with dozens of valuable white papers, podcasts, and presentations for download
  • A virtual networking lounge to meet other like-minded professionals through live chat
  • Keynote speeches from CRM thought leaders, Paul Greenberg (The 56 Group) and Brent Leary (CRM Essentials)
  • 
    

  Summit keynote speakers include Social CRM thought leaders, Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary.
  
  Go here to register for this free event and to see the complete agenda.
  

Online Community & Social Media Compensation

Last year, Forum One recognized that one of the key issues community and social media professionals face is that we (as an industry) are suffering from a lack of solid benchmarks, including compensation of online community and social media professionals. In July of 2008, as part of our ongoing research efforts with the Online Community Research Network, we conducted the first comprehensive study and gained valuable insight about online community and social media professional's compensation, team structure, and current job satisfaction.

In July of 2009, we launched the second annual Online Community & Social Media Compensation study, and received approximately 370 qualified responses. Participants represent a comprehensive sampling of organizations involved in building online communities, including: large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers, media & entertainment, retail and independent consultants. A sample of the 300+ organizations that participated include (with their permission):
Answers Corp., Autodesk, Avid, Best Buy, Cartoon Network (Turner), Consumer Reports, Electronic Arts, hi5, IBM, KaBOOM!, Nokia, Quest Software, Sage Software, Seesmic, Sony Online Entertainment, The Knot, and Yahoo!

This year's report was truly global in scope, and included respondents from the USA, UK and Canada as well as Australia, Argentina, Spain, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine.

Several key issues pertaining to online community and social media salaries surfaced during this report, including:
• The gap between the average male and female salaries widened, with male respondents averaging $86,644 (up from $85,423 in ’08) and Females averaging $75,624 (down from $77,319 in ’08).
• The majority of respondents reported a salary increase in 2009, but the percentage compared to last year was down, as was a significant increase in the number of respondents who took a salary decrease in 2009 compared to 2008.
• Average overall job satisfaction was down by a fraction, from 4.2 (out of 5) in 2008 to 4.1 (out of 5) in 2009.
• Several respondents mentioned feeling like they were being inadequately compensated because of lack of data available regarding community and social media salaries, as well as lack of understanding of community and social media ROI relative to their organization’s activities.

Demographics
Key demographic and background information about the respondents:
• The majority of the respondents are Female (52%) vs. Male (48%).
• The majority (77%) of respondents are from the USA.
• Most of the respondents have more than 5 years of experience, completed a Bachelors Degree, and work 41-50 hours per week.
• The majority of respondents work for a Profit Based Organization (85%) vs. Non-Profit (15%).

Industry


Years of Expereince



Work Environment

Location of Community Team
The majority of responses indicate their Community teams reside in the Marketing and Community departments. “No formal structure” and “Throughout the company” were also popular responses. The placement of the community team seems to be shifting to Marketing and Community departments. Last year 20% reported residing in the Marketing department and only 19% reported that they had their own Community department.


Hours Worked Per Week
Most of the respondents (45%) work 41-50 hours per week.


Percentage of Time Dedicated to Community & Social Media
Approximately three quarters of the respondents (73%) said that their job duties were not only comprised of working within the online community, and that a percentage of their time is dedicated to other areas within their organization.



Compensation
The average salary of the research participants, $81k, is the same as last year. The mean was $77.5k, which is $10k higher last year. As in 2008, there were peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k). There were also peaks and dips throughout the salary spectrum for 2009, including peaks for the following salary ranges; $50-55k, $65-$70k, $90-$95k and $100-$105k.

Salary by Gender
On average, the female participants earned an annual salary of $75.5k, which was slightly lower than last year’s $77k. At $86.5K, the male participant’s average annual salary is one percent higher than last year. The overall average annual salary for all participants was the same as last year’s $81k.


Salary by Region: USA
Respondents in the southwest region of the USA reported the highest average / median salary. The average salary for the southwest region was $99k with a median of $102k, which is significantly higher than last year’s average salary of $85k.

The second highest average / median salaries in the USA are in the northwest region. These respondents have an average salary of $87k, which is slightly less than the average annual salary of 2008. Within the northwest region, California had a higher average annual salary ($92k) than reported last year ($89k).

Even though lowest average / median salary in the USA was the same this year as last, the southeast region did have the largest reported average annual decrease compared with last year. This year the southeast region had an average annual salary of $46k, whereas last year it was 72k.

There were general peaks on the high ends (more than 150k) and low ends ($0-$25k) for all regions, except for the Midwest region, which dipped at the low end and remained even at the high end.



Satisfaction
The average satisfaction score was slightly less than last year’s score of 4.2. It is encouraging that while there is an economic downturn, the overall satisfaction with Online Community positions is well above average. This indicates the combination of salary, benefits, work environment and subject matter is working for most of the respondents. Although female and male participants mostly rated as being satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs, the female participants are slightly more satisfied with their jobs than their male counterparts. The women had a higher percentage of rating in the somewhat satisfied category, whereas the men had a higher percentage rating for the somewhat dissatisfied category.



The Full Online Community & Social Media Compensation Report
The full 45 page report can be purchased here: http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/oncosomecosu.html
includes detailed information, analysis and charts on:
Participating organizations industry, size and history of community programs
Community Team Staff & Size
Education and experience of respondents
Compensation structures
Detailed benefits
Salaries
- Ranges
- Average by title
- Average by Gender, Age, Eduction
- Average by global location and USA Region
Salary Changes (Increase and Decrease)
Advice from many of the participants about factors that affect compensation, and the evolving roles and responsibilities of the online community team, the team's staff, and executives.

The tag for the Online Community & Social Media Compensation report is #occomp09.

Community Platform & Service Provider Research

The Online Community Platform and Services Satisfaction research report was published in March of this year as part of the ongoing efforts of the Online Community Research Network. The intention of the research project was to provide insight about customer attitudes towards online community platform and service vendors, particularly around satisfaction. Further, we wanted to explore the unmet needs in the online community platform and services market. The study had over 200 participants, and we gathered data on all major commercial and open source online community platforms, as well as feedback on custom built platforms. Key highlights from the research are covered in the slides below.

The full Online Communities: Platform and Services Satisfaction Report can be purchased here:
http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/oncoplandses.html

Beyond The Book: Failure as a Springboard to Success

Those lovely people at ZDNet have let me write a guest post about community, and I have contributed an article called Failure as a springboard to success. The article talks about how if we embrace our failures in our communities, it can help us become better community members, and provides a model for doing so. This [...]

Report Back from the Online Community Summit 2009

Forum One hosted the eighth annual Online Community Summit 2009 last week in Sonoma, and by all accounts (and feedback) it was one of the strongest. We convened 70 online community experts to discuss important and timely topics including: community strategy, employees as social media advocates, "ideas" platforms, the growing importance of mobile and "operationalizing" social media.

I've included links to a few key content sources below. You will find a rich set of observations in the Twitter stream, as well as video interviews from 3 of our session leads.

Tweet stream from the Online Community Summit 2009
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23ocs2009

Flickr stream:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ocs2009&w=all

Video Interviews:
Sharon Carothers of Legacy / BecomeAnEx.org


Jordan Williams of REI.com


Erica Kuhl of Salesforce.com

The Real-time Web: A Short Reading List

A recent series of articles from ReadWriteWeb has spawned discussion here at Forum One of what impact the "real-time web" will have on online communities. Those conversations continue, but I wanted to share our short list of selected readings on the topic from the last 12 months.

Ken Fromm wrote the series of articles about the real-time web, and they can be found here:
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 1,
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 2,
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 3

In the articles, he describes the collection of activities that describe the emerging Real-Time Web:

As with other recent waves of innovation (Web 2.0 and cloud computing, for example) there is no single definition of what the term "real-time Web" means. As a result, it is used as a catch-all phrase for a number of developments underway. At this point, we can identify that the real-time Web...:
1. is a new form of communication,
2. creates a new body of content,
3. is real time,
4. is public and has an explicit social graph associated with it,
5. carries an implicit model of federation.

Other recommended reading:

Google vs. The Real-Time Web
O'Reilly: The Real-Time Web

Real-Time Web Summit
Forum One is working with ReadWriteWeb to promote the Real-Time Web Summit in Mountain View on October 15th. I'll be there - will you? You can register here. Price is $195 until October 8th.… Continue

The Art of Community Comedy Photo Comp

Since I released The Art of Community, one thing has become evident: the people who are buying it are awesome. If you have bought it you are awesome. If you have not, you too can be awesome. This got my mind thinking. We should put a face to the names of these awesome people. Credit where [...]

Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting 2009

Updated 9/22/09.
The Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting research study was initiated in late July of 2009, and ran until the second week of August 2009. The research project was conducted by the Online Community Research Network, and the intention of the study was to get a broad look at what online community metrics organizations are tracking, how organizations determine and report on the ongoing value of their online community initiatives, and the reporting and metrics tools that help companies assess this.

We received approximately 175 responses. Participants represent a healthy swath of the types of organizations participating in online community culture. Participating industry categories include: software companies, hardware companies, consumer goods non-profit organizations, independent consultants and media companies, amongst others.

Report Highlights
Several key issues pertaining to online community and social media metrics surfaced during this report, including:

• 
  
• In general, organizations need to do a more thorough job of defining their business objectives for online community engagement, assessing ways to measure progress towards these objectives, reaching beyond their native platform metrics capabilities, and finding ways to measure the more qualitative components of community member engagement.
• The Role of the Community Manager is increasingly important to developing and refining business process, and measuring performance in these new “social spaces.”
• There is a growing need for community metric standards that are platform and vendor-independent.

Determining What to Measure
From Question 14: How does your organization determine what is important to measure and report?

SUMMARY:

• 20% (34) We stick with what the platform can provide
• 61% (100) We work from a strategy based on business goals and find solution to help us measure what we need
• 19% (31) We try to measure everything, will develop more of a strategy later

TAKEAWAY:
Respondents are primarily shaping metrics strategies based on business goals (61%), even if their platform doesn’t support gathering or tracking desired metrics. Platform metrics are generally speaking, not comprehensive or extensible enough to create a meaningful dashboard to see overall community health, get an accurate visualization of the community’s social graph, and to understand the ongoing insight created by and the sentiments of the community population. The risk in relying only on data that a platform can provide (20% of the respondents) is that the data sets aren’t comprehensive or contextual to organization’s needs. “Measuring everything” (19% of respondents) can overwhelm the community team and stakeholders, and is unlikely to yield meaningful performance data or insight without some rigor in the analysis.
















Metrics Currently Being Tracked
From Question 16: What do you currently measure?

SUMMARY:
The top 5 items that online communities measure for tracking and reporting are as follows:

• 152 Responses - Unique Visitors
• 150 Responses - New Member Registrations
• 143 Responses - Page Views
• 126 Responses - Visitors
• 116 Responses - Message Posts
• </ ul>
  
  The top 5 items that online communities don’t measure, but want to are as follows:
  
  • 90 Responses - Member Satisfaction
  • 90 Responses - Influencer / Evangelism
  • 84 Responses - Member Life Cycle
  • 83 Responses - Member Loyalty
  • 73 Responses - Referrals to Community
  
  
  TAKEAWAY:
  The top 5 items that online communities currently measure for tracking and reporting are the same for both profit and non-profit organizations and include Unique Visitors, New Member Registrations, Page Views, Visitors and Message Posts.
  
  Non-profit organizations concentrate on measuring Podcasts & Video Links and Member Satisfaction, more often than other organizations, whereas commercial organizations place more attention on measuring Retention / Attrition, Member Loyalty, Member Blog Posts and Conversion than non-profit organizations.
  
  As organization’s community strategies mature, the trend to primarily report on basic web metrics (page views, registrations) will be replaced by metrics that speak to the health of the community, the strength of members’ networks, the quality and type of member participation, and more robust measurements of member engagement. The data suggest that we are on the cusp of the evolution from “basic” community metrics to more robust and contextual reporting.
  
  Currently Measuring - Profit and Non Profit
  
  
  A larger version of the graph can be downloaded here:
  http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/images/metrics_tracked_2009_graph.png
  
  
  
  Top 3 Key Performance Indicators
  
  From Question 19: What are the 3 most important community key performance indicators in the reports you send to management?
  
  SUMMARY:
  
  • 32% (74) User Activity / Engagement
  • 21% (49) Membership Count [New Registrations, Active]
  • 18% (42) Number of Posts / Comments
  • 5% (12) Member Satisfaction / Loyalty
  • 4% (10) Number of Questions Answered
  • 4% (10) Sales Revenue - Up Sell, Cross Sell, Renewals
  • 4% (8) Leeds / Referrals Generated
  • 3% (6) Number of Downloads
  • 3% (6) Number of Influencers / Evangelists
  • 2% (5) Visitor Retention
  • 2% (5) Number of Conversions
  • 1% (2) Donations Received
    
  • 1% (2) Visitor Geographic Dispersal
  • 
    
    TAKEAWAY:
    Almost a third of respondents indicated that User Activity / Engagement (32%) is one of the most important key performance indicators in the reports that they sent to management. Within the User Activity / Engagement category, the following 3 key performance indicators were the most commonly reported:
    
    

    • 33 Number of Page Views / Clicks
    • 22 Number of Site Visits
    • 19 Number of Unique Visits

    
    
    The other two key performance indicators that many respondents input into management reports are Membership Count (21%) (including new membership and total membership count) and the Number of Posts / Comments (18%) received on their site.
    
    User Activity / Engagement is the number one item to track for both profit and non-profit organizations. Within this category the specific key performance indicators were dispersed similarly, with the profit based organizations having a slightly higher percentage ratio on key performances such as the Number of Threads reported and General Participation. Non-profit organizations, on the other hand, have a slightly higher percentage ratio on reporting metrics such as Number of Returning Visitors and the Number of Site Visits.
    
    Another common response from profit based organizations was related to reporting key performances such as Sales Revenue and the Number of Conversions whereas non-profit organizations had a higher percentage response rate for reporting the amount of Donations Received.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    USER ACTIVITY / ENGAGEMENT 34% (BROKEN OUT):
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    Access to the Full Report
    For members of the Online Community Research Network, the report is included as a benefit of your annual subscription. If you are interested in joining the OCRN, or learning more about the Network's activities, please go here.
    
    The Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting 2009 report is also available for purchase for $295.