This brings us to how advertising currently works.

First off I had switched devices using a service with no login so there was almost no way Carnival could have known I was looking at camping gear to either target towards me or away from me.

Second in their buy the frequency cap was obviously high enough that I kept seeing their spots. Since the creative changed frequently I’ll assume this was intended but it upped the effect.

Third advertising has become so network driven that companies often have no idea where their spot even is. I’m not entirely sure Carnival ever intended to target hard rock and pop video audiences with this ad or at all.

The big point here is that my preferences had no opportunity to make it to Carnival. Carnival does a good job engaging in social platforms but advertising (not just theirs) remains almost entirely one way and let’s face it, VEVO does not (and should not) put my camping affinity as the #1 insight to understand.

Privacy has always been cited as the block for getting smart with ads but that’s because we want everything to be done behind the scenes in a stealthy, “we tracked you and you didn’t know it” way.

One ad in to my viewing I would have gladly told Carnival to reach someone else just as I do all the time on Facebook ads with the little [x]. It’s not that they were dead wrong in reaching me, that’s going to happen, it’s that it kept happening. The same is true with TV. How many ads do you see that are totally irrelevant ans yet repetitive (and I’m not talking getting that blanket awareness effect for Coke Zero, I’m talking vocational schools when you have a PhD)? Lots and your chance to tell them? Zero. What’s the mighty “ROI” for those advertisers? Probably also near zero.

I’ve been to Brazil and the Bahamas in the last 12 months, much as we want our message to be a hit on the first impression and to figure out exactly who to reach to get the best response that’s not always possible — sometimes we don’t know who we’re reaching and sometimes who we’re reaching is not who wants our service right now.

But once we do show up the feedback loop works to tell us what to do next yet it’s not being used. We’ve got 3 variations of TVs on the market, a new type of media player every day but where’s the remote with the “no thanks” button? It’s time to build a dialogue into advertising, not to share the ad, not buy from the ad, but to make sure it’s the right ad.

What it is that makes people line up 6, 12 even 24 hours in advance? Is it the deal? Being able to claim first in line?

Certainly price has always had a lot to do with it and even more so in this economy as evidenced by the degree of the deals being offered and the scrutiny they’re getting. But only a few get the $199 doorbuster TVs while hundreds more wait in line knowing they’ll be picking at far smaller deals – there has to be more. At the end of the day we’re talking about sacrificing personal comfort, a traditional Thanksgiving dinner [or at least a long conversation after it] for something that can often be matched online and savings that amount to just a few dozen dollars on items that are hardly necessities.

Great Deals + Sharing = The Black Friday Experience

If we put aside our brand / marketing hats for just a minute, pull out the social science degrees so many of us spent years working on, and put ourselves in the shoes of consumers I think we can see that the success of Black Friday it boils down to our social nature. No doubt the deal is essential but looking at the person to your right and left and realizing that you all share the same goal changes things from a deal into an experience, something you don’t have to quantify the measurable ROI from and are willing to do not just once but year after year. Add in the exclusivity — whether it’s a limited count doorbuster or making a “sacrifice” to just be there and it’s not surprising that many people find the whole event to be, well, fun.  Seeing how Black Friday checkins, social comments and posts have grown even faster than the lines is certainly a testament to our desire to participate with others about what really amounts to nothing more than shopping.

As I talked with people tonight and heard their excitement, even saw a few faces walk out the store after hours of waiting without a purchase or disappointed look, there’s no doubt that for businesses to thrive in this market means going beyond the price war and building on the sense of adventure, chance … of the Black Friday experience. In the race for the customer, the bottom price is not where you want to try and make your stand and yet without offering anything but a deal, its where so many have ended up to the point that 30% off no longer feels special.

As Black Friday Becomes an Event, Success Will Depend on More than Price

But this year with the big transition towards 12am openings, I saw new ideas being tested out there. Best Buy ran movies at select locations; Food Trucks were called in by malls, and straight giveaways like free water are becoming more and more common. It’s personal too: I watched security guards and store employees spend hours outside chatting and standing alongside the crowd when they could have just as easily remained inside their warm stores. All of these actions speak to the link between our customers and our brands – you can call it an incentive, a hook, but the result is that its building community and giving people a sense brands are relatable.

As we see more consumers take part in this communal shopping event, more stores will get into the early openings and offers will increase making it even more important to be seen in the right light, to be more than just a place looking to take people’s money but instead offering up a little empathy, some excitement and perhaps soon a free cup of coffee in exchange for 12 hours of someone’s time.

Of course 8 hours in line are quickly forgotten as the doors open and people rush as fast as they can “walk” towards that big offer – but as I watch people filtering out of this store and back to their cars, it’s clear that the experience is as much a part of their excitement as the savings that exist at 3:30am.

Why. It’s a simple question with vast implications.

A guy starts receiving emails from Victoria’s Secret after placing a gift order – without the details what will those messages say? Are they going to assume he is a direct customer? Why tells the marketing team that instead of multiple-emails a week with personal offers, the message can shift to less frequent suggestions, gift ideas, even useful content that makes the brand useful to him to follow. And the results? Well, I don’t know about you but I don’t know many men buying products for themselves from Victoria’s Secret.

Every day Living Social plays on my Pandora stream, inviting me to become a customer… millions of dollars in ad budgets to reach people with a sign up message who are already signed up. I can close their popups but that’s the extent of the feedback… With a simple question, they could appeal to current customers with value, contextual relevancy, something that doesn’t just make them top of mind but invites consideration. And for the price of one answer, I’d get the benefit of not hearing the same boring ad day in and day out.

Why is the hardest question but digital gives us a medium to answer it every day.

Social has created a frenzy for businesses as well all vye for the customer’s attention pounding them about new products, offers and a host of other campaigns we want to see go “viral” but that’s not where it ends. Customers are ready to spill their guts… not in drawn out forms or lengthy processes but through dialogue.

Not just surveys or expensive focus groups, we can go out with messages to customers in an individualized basis and not only to ask them questions but even to show them that we are asking. And they expect it.

From optimized campaigns to operational learnings, there’s a heck of a lot of value in knowing why.

You can’t claim engagement if you’re buying it

Whether it’s a flier in a newspaper with a Facebook coupon, a tv spot with a Twitter url for a contest or an outright offer to buy fandom with a deep discount (see “Did This National Restaurant Chain Put Too Much Love Into the Like?” by Jay Baer) the result a purchase of a like rather than a connection with a customer. As this sort of buying becomes more common place, it’s not surprising that even as brands talk about wonderful ideas like engaging and building community, research from the Get Satisfaction blog shows that 43.5% of consumers are following brands for offers — and why not, that’s what they’re being told they’ll get.

Already missing the mark on relevancy, social sites penalize poor relevancy

With hundreds of connections per user noise has become so high that systems like Facebook’s EdgeRank now exist to tune down what a user, their friends, and even the overall “like” audience see from a brand page. Even on systems like Twitter that don’t have scoring of responses, the mere amount of information makes the less than relevant disappear into the bottom of a long stream. Thus the more a brand buys it’s following, the less each follower sees, or cares to pay attention to the brand. This becomes a cold reality when you discover that some brands are suppressed to over 80% of their audience.

This doesn’t mean abandoning growth goals, but rather settingt expectations about what they lead too

A brand that decides “I’m going to go out and advertise my page to build up” is wrong to use the word engage to refer to that program. Conversation is gone and while the activity is on a social channel, it is as much broadcast marketing as an email list or a weekly mailer… Even worse with virtually no segmentation offered by social networks, the existing loyal fan base is lumped in with the prospecting effort. Everyone becomes one jumbled mess.

On the other hand, a brand that says let’s insert a flier with orders to share a comment, or posts a sign inside our stores with a mention that you’ll find expert product insights, company updates and occasional offers on their social pages is building the expectation of dialogue and is attracting loyalty and certainly customers. A discount may be associated but the qualification is that you want to be an insider, a participant first, and get a little something in return for it in access and savings.

Bigger counts do not actually mean bigger reach or results

It’s a critical realization and once you step down the paid like road it’s very difficult to get back up the relevancy ladder.

Just because you have data doesn’t mean you know the full story

Since the banner first hit the web marketers have been stuck in the same paradigm – the data is there so measure it. And why not, with data coming in seconds rather than days or even weeks, the temptation to assume it’s all right there is great. Yet we’ve started to learn that people are using multiple ads, are narrowing in with many searches over time and conversions are taking longer and longer as the web becomes a corner stone of shopping. Single metrics are dangerous.

The opportunity cost of using social media only to acquire

Instead digital marketing, and even more so social media, must be looked at as holistic program that is as much a necessity as creating brand awareness and consideration is.

Some 70% of Americans say they consult product reviews or consumer ratings before making a purchase, according to an October 2008 survey by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates

One could look at driving user reviews as an acquisition effort. There’s an audience to target, an expense to drive, host and promote reviews and a lift associated with a product that has them over one that does not. But it’s deeper than that.

When the majority of your customers are seeking reviews it’s not just about what you can increment, it’s about what you stand to lose. If you opted not to push for reviews because you couldn’t justify the cost on new sales, you risk all sales, not just new ones as people turn to other sites or product lines that offer the support they’ve come to expect. That’s not captured in lift metrics.

There are no longer channels, even tactics outside of marketing, must complement to earn a sale

Your investments into all forms of media drive people back to you or your partner’s digital properties for research.  Just like with reviews, if someone who uses Twitter sends a message for pre-sales questions and gets nothing… not a customer support message, not a suggestion of a peer to peer area, just silence. That speaks volumes about what your brand will be like after they buy.

This extends to all channels… after being intrigued by a radio spot and going a company’s website a user who discovers a blog about the culture and expertise becomes a great choice, even a premium value, while the other company that just promotes their tradeshow booth feels empty, or “salesy”. Customers don’t care which channel gets attribution for the sale, they simply look for validation – a good buy or a bad one.

Let’s not forget the brand awareness opportunity either

This isn’t just about tactics that support a product purchase on the front end either. Just like TV is run on a negative upfront ROI basis to produce over the long haul, a social campaign can have the same value.

750 million people on Facebook outrank major sports events, dramas or reality tv, and they’re around just about every day. So if a customer goes knocking on your Facebook page and it isn’t there, or isn’t doing a good job of holding their attention when they “fan” up, that’s a wasted opportunity. But with social this isn’t just prospective awareness, this is true engagement opportunity where a good program can have that person showing affinity and even spreading it. How does that factor in to upfront sales?

Measure but measure the right picture

By no means do I advocate stopping or backing off on measuring your campaigns but instead it’s about making sure you understand their full impact and measure that. The problem with data is that we tend to focus on what we have easily available, and that’s new customers who come in directly or old ones who stay attached… but engagement, validation, cross-channel sales, and many of the other components of social are not easily studied and thus they are skipped and that not only short changes your programs but opens the door to cutting something that’s far more important than you may realize.

Example Offers as Seen on Groupon's San Jose Page

From the analytics I saw floating around last year it would appear that daily deal sites are hovering somewhere in the 10-15% activation rate (10-15% of sign ups have actually bought a deal) and if this is hugely understated and 35% of sign ups have activated (30MM deals sold, 29MM users, 3x deals each =35% of users ), it’s still a huge opportunity (and probably why Groupon is hiring a Director of Customer Activation with double digit growth goals – sweet job too).

Looking at data from the other side, in a recent blog post, Jeff Bussgang, cites a rumored 3-4% CVR for Groupon. As a leader in the field Groupon should have one of the higher conversion rates as they certainly have many of the top offers and a huge core of interested customers (66% read deals daily!). But unlike a traditional eTailer where a 4% conversion rate is accepted because the vast majority of the 96% remaining users are considered potential future customers (they came to your site for a reason), with daily deal sites, there’s a huge issue – relevancy – which is to say that the traffic is all coming for diverse reasons and, without relevant offers, there’s little reason for conversions to take place.

So cutting to the chase, the issue I see, and keep seeing is the range of those offers. Groupon, Living Social, Yelp Deals, Daily Steals, they can all rake in users with the same deal types (follow a few of the sites and you’ll see businesses recycling old offers as they try different audiences, fee structures) but if what they offer back doesn’t relate to the customer, they leave huge dollars on the table every single day.

Living Social Offer I'd Be Signed up for Twice -- No Wonder Why it's Featured on their Site

Take Living Social’s Amazon $20 for $10 offer that generated over a million sales. The next day my offer was for some sort of premium spa service. I just went from something I really wanted to something I had little affinity for (not knocking spa’s, I just don’t buy their services frequently). To me this is like my sister logging into Amazon and having the entire homepage be filled with table saws – not very useful in her completely managed and very new NYC apartment even if she could use one now and then.

If you look at the demographics of either of the leaders what you see is opportunity. Deals tend to be for health & beauty services, fine dining, and the monthly car wash with an occasional outlier which ranges from exotic dance lessons (demotargeted female of course) to flying lessons. Problem is it’s not just one user type: on LivingSocial (probably thanks to the Amazon deal), 40% of the users are male and on Groupon it’s still 26%. Add to the age – users are young (68% of Groupon is under 34, 36% of LivingSocial) and single (49% of Groupon, N/A by LivingSocial).

Combine these all together and what you get is a dilemma – relevancy vs frequency.

Daily Deal sites have made a promise to deliver something every single day which means rain or shine, good or bad, that offer comes and while anyone can go to the spa or eat a nice meal, the overwhelming focus of the deals are to the same demographic – female, couples, older and for the same types of services (I dare a newly dating, 24 yearold guy to pull out a Groupon code when the check comes and then suggest the same restaurant again for next week). The deal sites know this, Mashable even wrote about it last year: Groupon Eyes Further Growth with Personalized Deals; < http://mashable.com/2010/07/29/groupon-personalized-deals/> but knowing and truly solving are very different as my inbox so aptly shows this morning.

So where do we lie – with opportunity of course.

The daily deal site that gets this first stands to win a lot. Sure the offers they have now may appeal to the majority of their core audience but the majority of their core is already being marketed too left and right by competing services; the generic offer is commoditized. So the site that broads up, ropes in more sales from its younger women (Groupon is doing more and more of this as told to me by several female friends in SF), parents, guys, and even their core demographic who is still seeing many off target offers, the more they stand to capitalize on their existing investment – that giant email database each company has.

If I was sitting in a corner office of one of the independent deal sites right now I’d be pretty concerned about how to up relevancy, and not just to a few major demographic groups but real niche relevancy with offers based on interests (some of us like to read, some of us like to get shot at with paintballs) and the ability to rate ads (oil changes are only for people with cars) and some friendly user reviews (better businesses sell more) to create something like the Facebook feed, but in deal form.

After all, there are a couple competitive businesses – namely Google and Facebook who have expressed great interest in the deal category and have business rolodexes so deep it resembles the size of most company’s consumer database… If they figure it out first you can bet it won’t be hard to get a lot, an awful lot, of businesses churning out relevant offers giving consumers a lot more reason to check with them first.

To sum it all up, daily deals are clearly a huge hit and have brought in revenue at a rate that seems to be unmatched, well, ever. But in a field of competition this fierce there’s a lot of value to users in jumping ship, playing the field, and any other ‘cheating’ metaphor you can come up with. While growing the core, picking up more users and delivering to more locations are all clearly going to help these businesses propel, lifetime value is a win that trumps all other and as Amazon has shown so well, LTV comes best from having something everyone wants, and helping them get right to it time again and again and again.

———————-

As a side note, there there’s a flip side to this for businesses outside the core of the daily deal sites – easy opportunity. While I’ve become less and less diligent about reading my daily deal emails (they all get sorted and put in a folder), an offer outside the box is going to catch the attention of a lot of people who haven’t bought recently, if at all. Perhaps that’s why my local rock climbing gym and the nearest paintball fields are such fans.

While average order values are a commonly used tool for getting around measuring cost of goods they’re no substitute. Assume for example that your average order for the last year was $100 with a profit 40% margin leaving you $40 to cover marketing and other variable costs. On the surface a mid-year for a new product campaign with a $10 cost per acquisition and a $9 free shipping discount would seem quite profitable but not when we add a few more data points. Most retailers see a strong spike in both conversions and average order size around the holidays and events so mid-year average orders are probably lower than that $100 goal. Furthermore your new product may break margin rules and sell for an introductory price further lowering your ROI. Combine the two and that $40 buffer quickly turns into $30, $20, $10 and well you get the idea.

And of course it’s not just about seasonal events and margins. Offers change your order size and mix in many ways… free shipping with a $99 threshold may seem like a great way to get more orders but let’s build off the first example some more to see what really happens when you measure a promo gross. Assuming you already have a campaign that costs $0.50 per click, a 4.5% conversion rate and charge $8 for shipping for orders would have to move to over 5.5% or a full percentage point to cover the impact of the discount. On the other hand rolling out free shipping with a lower qualifier like $49 may drive your conversion rates through the roof but tank your average order size pushing your margins into the floor as you spend every free dime delivering a small order. In both cases your topline income would likely increase with more orders but again, more does not always mean more profit.

Of course most etailers have all this data at their disposal, it just requires going over to the product database here and there. But you already know what I’m going to say – and no that really doesn’t cut it. When you have to use multiple data sources things get overlooked or put off; a campaign that seems good on the surface doesn’t get delved into for a few days after which money’s been lost and decisions have been made. Only when the data is available in a central place does it truly become actionable and reliable and reliable is exactly what you need to make the next step decision.

So how do you do this? It’s actually fairly simple. Most enterprise reporting suites except secondary commerce metrics like product cost, shipping amount, tax and discounts all through their base tag structure with no need to build fancy import routines. More basic analytics may not tolerate secondary cost data but by computing the net result on your end before the data is put into a tag you can achieve the same result. Either way the analytic provider integration is pretty simple. What’s more complex is trying to bring raw product costs into your ecommerce system. In an ideal world this data should flow right out of your ERP/ Inventory system and to your site but that’s just not the reality for many businesses. A second solution is a simple update process to bulk modify records with raw prices at a regular interval (i.e. weekly). When even that isn’t available it gets down to manual updates and keeping up on them. No matter which integration phase you fit into it’s worth the effort and time to make it happen – and don’t stop half way, it’s better to use gross numbers than to have the wrong net figures anyways.

Once you have everything packaged together and can get that true top to bottom result set you’re ready to really rock and roll. Now instead of looking at campaigns against a big margin percentage you can start looking at both net and gross, pre-campaign cost and post and make decisions about what’s good for growth and what’s good for revenue and do so without waiting weeks to reanalyze every order in another tool.
-

Launching a branded forum opens up a lot of doors but also requires a lot of decisions and upfront work. The first step in the process is solidifying your focus, identifying necessary resources, picking your technology and setting up the basic controls. In this part of my blog post I’ll walk through the full range of software, the options you’ll want to use (and the ones to lose) as well as help you put together a response plan and policy.

Deciding on your focus:

Chances are you’ve already identified a purpose for your forum but if not it’s important to do so before going any further in the process. While some communities combine different areas it’s more common for a company forum either to be all about support or all about product & discussion. Depending on the primary goal you’ll need different tools, technology and resources and of course will be measuring value differently. If you do decide to put both sides under one roof that’s ok too — just be prepared for more resource requirements and a larger project.

Identifying your internal resources:

Before you start any setup or customization it’s essential you know just who will be on your site and how you plan to make it work. I often see branded communities where marketing is the only one tasked with looking at things (and the only one with keys to do anything) resulting in huge gaps in support and unanswered issues.

The simple fact is your community will take time and resources. If you’re thinking you can turn your branded community into some wonderful peer to peer discussion you’re probably wrong. Very few brand communities ever end up becoming huge discussion sites and those that do are generally in very specific niches (like for a video game). Instead think about your community as a place for topical discussions where customers may come for help, to give input and to see what’s up, not somewhere they idle for hours a day waiting to talk more (although it does happen now and then).

Instead you need to be responsible for your own feedback when users aren’t around to do it. This means putting together a list of the major topics you expect to be talked about and working with people in your company to “own” them. Sometimes these people will need to post directly, other times they may just relay comments through another (like in the case of a product manager wanting to get comments on a new item or possible idea).

Often times the best resources come from your customer support department that’s already use to getting a wide range of common questions, dealing with customers individually and talking to them in an appropriate way. And while it’s good to have higher level visibility of the community don’t confuse a desire for actionable visibility with the realities of an executive who likely doesn’t have a whole lot of time to jump into discussions and may not be the best one to do so even if they do. A combination of “ground troops” and higher ups is almost always ideal.

Over time as your site grows and you do foster a discussion base it may be possible to recruit members into the system either as power users who just respond and help or potentially as moderators to handle some of the issues that face any community like abusive members, spam, etc…

Creating a response plan:

Once you have a list of resources you’ll need to develop a response plan. Response plans are basically a document or set of documents that covers exactly how you’ll respond and who will respond to issues of varying types and scale. Without a response plan all you have is resources who are support to work together on a completely virtual and very fast past system and who are unlikely to know what to do n every issue. This opens the door to areas going unanswered or getting answered by the wrong person.

With a response plan it’s clear who needs to own what and how they’ll handle it. This is an extremely important step as it’s rare that your community will be managed by enough internal people to go running around and collect answers from each resource when a question comes up (although if you drive hard enough you may just be able to get to that point). This way if an area is going unanswered you know who to point to and can figure out if there’s been a failure in the process or if resources need to be reselected based on other commitments.

Finally a response plan should cover crisis issues like a product blow up, a spam attack or a large rant. It’s important that in each scenario you know whose responsible for responding and how so that instead of trying to craft a message about a problem with that product PR knows to make one after they do their main release and post it. If there’s one things forums really require is speed and having to figure out who tackles a bunch of complaints after a long weekend isn’t acceptable in your turn around time. People will give you a little breathing room but not much,

Selecting the technology:

The first part of any branded forum is of course the forum system running it. While developing your own technology is always an option it’s probably not necessary given the number of robust products at just about every price point.

Self Service (Low Price) Providers:

On the lower end of the spectrum there’s a wide array of self-service tools designed to be installed and customized by an in-house IT team or consultant. Most of these are written by small firms or individuals to be highly flexible but are intended for more hands-on types who will be hands on in setting up features and changing layout styles. Self-service tools generally offer little customization or support from their developing companies although they come at a very cheap price point which may leave budget room for hiring outside expertise.

Self service tools are also generally backed by large and open development sites where free addons can be found to extend their core functionality adding everything from post rating modules to advanced moderation systems, surveys and much more.

Providers:

vBulletin – Likely the most popular and feature rich tool in its class. vBulletin has been in business since 2000 and offers a rich featureset of forum tools including unlimited forums, user profiles, avatars, basic polling, paid membership options, on-site private messaging and much more. vBulletin is widely selected for it’s well known interface and ease of customization.
vBulletin’s runs $180 for a lifetime license with a $60 yearly update fee.

phpBB – Another well known player in the category, phpBB is a free application released under the GNU license. phpBB offers a slightly different style and set of options but for the most part provides the same toolset as vBulletin but with an open development group rather than a company behind the product.
phpBB is offered as freeware at no cost.

Invision Power – While a direct competitor to vBulletin and phpBB, Invision Board positions its self with a slightly different service offering professional support and modification services. Out of the box Invision Power is slightly underpowered compared to phpBB or vBulletin but still provides just about every tool needed for a branded community.
Invision Power licenses start at $149 ($299 for business premium package)

Other providers: In addition to the companies I’ve specifically mentioned you may also want to look at MyBB, Yabb,SMF, and others.

Full Service (Mid-Tier & Enterprise) Providers:

While it may seem smart to pick a solution by your own company size (i.e. enterprise for enterprise) there are times where crossing into the lower (or higher segment) products may make more sense. The features you’ll find between self-service programs and the high end enterprise tools are surprisingly similar and in many cases, self-service outweighs enterprise. The real advantage of higher end tools comes from reporting, data capture options, integration, and professional support & services.

Reporting with self-service tools tends to be limited to bar graphics of posts, threads and users while enterprise tools may offer detailed analysis of activity flows, contributions, visits, time on site and more traditional web analytics. And of course the more you can see about your community, what people are doing and what they’re using, the better informed decisions will be and the more you can do to grow it rather than spending time going in the wrong direction.

Data capture (surveying and profiles) is probably the most actionable advantage of the enterprise tools and are used to bring customer data back into a single place where it can be evaluated and reviewed. For some enterprise platforms data capture includes robust surveying as well as detailed user profiles while a few providers going even further and combining micro-profiling techniques to build a user profile that grows over time.

Integration support can also be a substantial advantage for your community depending on your launch plans. By combining other data sources (profiles, purchase history, etc…) customers can be verified and identified enabling for more reliable comments and even advanced permission tools to grant access to certain members while excluding unknowns. The more data you can bring in or out of your forum the more actionable information becomes down the road and for responses.

The most noticeable difference between the self service and enterprise tools is in their support and that’s not just IT support. Enterprise packages are often backed by thought leaders and community strategists who can help your brand craft an approach for engaging customers. For a business just getting into social this can be a crucial as launching without a good understanding can lead to a complete failure and waste of time or a huge blacklash as your community becomes a place for critique rather than discussion, support and sharing. Enterprise providers can help identify these issues up front and may even have moderator staff available to help manage your community as it grows.

Finally you’ll find that enterprise providers tend to be more professionally focused on developing features that a business needs rather than ones that are peer to peer specific. You’ll also find more attention to data, usability and the customer experience on the site.

Providers:
Lithium – Providing a full range of tools from forums to blogs and chat, Lithium has been in the community space for many years and offers an enterprise version of the self service tools with a look and feel that you may find on a peer to peer community (that’s a good thing).

Clearspace Community by Jive – Perhaps the most enterprise looking tool, Jive’s platform works as a social networking platform with an approach on centricity and bringing together tools from forums to wikis in one place for the user and admin. As with Lithium, Jive is backed by an expert company with traditional type account and strategy teams available for support.

Groupee – Originally a self-service provider, Groupee has evolved into an enterprise platform that centers around forums but also offers many additional features including photo sharing and sophisticated profiling. Groupee is sold on a CPM model rather than a post volume or support engagement Groupee is much like its former self-service competitors but also extends to offer a simple API and more professional services.

Satmetrix – Less known than the other companies, Satmetrix is an enterprise provider with a less competitive looking tool and set of features but with some very powerful profiling tools. Because Satmetrix is often used for “closed” customer-only communities there’s not a lot of feature details known.

There are a lot of advantages for enterprise tools but they come at a cost, a technology dependency and sometimes don’t make sense. If you are a “larger” sized company and end up using a self service tool don’t worry, you won’t be alone.

Features to look for:

As a branded community your feature needs will be different than with a typical peer to peer community. While you may have some out of the box needs to address your particular customer segment be sure to look for this core set of features with any solution you pick or build:

- Unlimited forums, threads and posts for discussion to take place on
- User profiles that can be extended through a control panel interface to add fields & options
- User selected avatars, badges and other basic display options
- Personality options including images, smilies, and font/colors for posting
- Access to private messaging between users and site administrators
- The ability to highlight announcements and stick posts with key information
- A Permission system that allows you to identify what tools and areas users may access
- A moderation and reporting tool to control content and close or remove threads
- The ability to set alerts using email or other tools for incident reports
- Basic polling within threads to capture data (ideally sophisticated surveying as well)
- Simple access to account data to review, export and email users
- The ability to integrate with your CRM system or external database
- At least basic analytics on activity and growth of social media metrics
- Advanced controls to turn on and off features and customize options without code changes

Setting things up just right

Every forum program out there will offer you more features than you know what to do with so when it comes time to configure it all it’s easy to feel a bit overwhelmed. My suggestion is to start thinking about how you want your community used and what you’ll be ok with and build around that goal at all times as you review tab after tab of options.

Starting at the core it’s pretty obvious you’ll want different forum categories for different topics and sub-topics. For a support forum this may take the shape of different types of products, customer levels or issues. For a more general discussion community breaking things into the topics you want discussions to be centered around will encourage activity to grow in a certain direction. All forums should generally start with a category and sub-forums for announcements (site updates & happenings), product or service information (new launches), support (getting help) and possibly introductions.

Along with the forum structure there’s a good deal of access settings in most software packages to go over. Most forums can be left fairly open while others like announcements may be locked down entirely for just administrators and feedback ones may have a hybrid where users can respond to posts but not start threads. Access for editing threads is also something to look at as you consider how each internal resource should be utilized in your community and who you want to be able to make changes in the event of an issue.

Finally consider how each forum needs to look and operate. If you’re asking for support inquiries in one forum consider using a thread prefix option to make it easy for identifying types of problems and responding to them. If you’re trying to create an expert content section see if you can make your first post stick to the topic while subsequent posts show up more like comments than a threaded discussion.

Next you need to decide how users join and what information they must provide or can provide. Lock things down too far and you’ll find no one participates, ask too little and it’s hard to know who you’re speaking with. An ideal arrangement is generally to get a few basics (username, password, email, first name, customer type) as required upfront basics and then prod for additional details afterwords (post alerts until someone fills out a profile, send an email reminder, etc…). If your forum supports micro-profiling to use polls and other one off questions to add to a user’s profile be sure to consider that as well.

After you have users able to register you have to decide how much freedom to give them. Do you want everything to be about straight posts and answers or do you want some personality. This can be as simple as picking fonts and colors to be used or adding graphical badges under user profiles to denote seniority in the community, contributions and a professional role. If you’re validating customer identities be sure to acknowledge this with a badge or colored username.

Graphical options like smilies, post icons, and any other image can (and should) be tailored to fit your brand. Using your color scheme for a new post icon is great… having a smilie with a machine gun isn’t. Thankfully most forums come pretty simple out of the box so it’s more a matter of reviewing what’s been set rather than trying to remove stuff that doesn’t belong.

There’s probably also a host of control focused tools in your software package to focus on from censor options to moderating new users and threads to banning options. Review each of these to insure they’re fair (no banning all your competitor’s names unless they become an issue) but also cover you (no swearing should be tolerated or show up).

Ultimately your goal should be to make a friendly community that that has enough flexibility and personality to feel like a forum but that stops short of anything you’d find in a peer to peer community. Each customizable element should be thought of in terms of the audience, the possible benefit and abuse.

For example, avatars are a very common feature on forums and may make great sense for a branded community focused on younger consumers who are discussing a themepark business. However open access to avatars in a b2b community may make less sense and instead providing company reps with access to their logo could be a better fit. Similarly do you want to allow users to upload photos which could be used in product samples or not? Should they have access to posting links to other sites? The ability to start polls? Just about any feature can make sense for the right branded community but there’s a wide difference in what a very open, discussion oriented consumer forum can use versus a b2b or tightly focused support one.

The forum rules

After everything is setup and ready your final configuration step is to put in place a set of rules that govern what users may do, how the site works and the ownership of it all.

If you’re familiar with the recent FaceBook debates over privacy than you may be a bit worried about backlash for your rules but relax, changes are your community will have a lot less emotion tied to it than a 175+ Million user system. Still you want your rules to be clear but also fair. Users should be able to expect to be treated properly and as humans. That means not removing content just because it isn’t positive, not banning people who aren’t the biggest fans and not trying to own their thought process. On the other side you want to be clear that SPAM, swearing, flames, personal attacks and anything fraudulent or fake isn’t acceptable and will be removed. You also may want to claim use to provided content for marketing purposes (remember, people are coming to your community to interact with you – not because they want to share photos with their friends).

Remember, your rules aren’t something people will follow like a service agreement so only exclude things you plan to enforce. It’s not a fun process to ban a user from breaking one rule when half your community is breaking another one.

Your legal department may also have a thing (or 5) to say about what to include here.

Coming up next

Look back for part II of this series next week where I’ll discuss getting your community started with seed content, attracting customers and prospects and building discussions and relationships. I’ll also be diving into the bottom line results of a community and ways to measure the success in dollars earned and saved.

It’s easy to blame economy for decreases traffic, leads and sales but is that really a fair assortment or are you missing the bigger picture and perhaps the opportunity for growth? There’s no doubt that consumers are spending less these days and no doubt that their cut backs have impacted both the offline and online worlds but the economy is not the only thing changing and impacting spending and for many companies it’s time to face a reality that’s a whole lot scarier than an economic downturn – it’s time to realize the model has changed. Whether sales are falling down or rocketing up, it’s time to understand your customers in a way you may not have done before. It’s time to make decisions based on the reality of the new world and not just assume that a greater impact is at play in changes.
A few weeks back I posted about Circuit City’s bankruptcy and closure and the events leading up to it, both economic and simple consumer change. There’s no doubt that Circuit City business was impacted by the economy; consumers are clearly not rushing out to buy plasma tvs in mass but that’s just the tip of the issue. Circuit City sold products that have transitioned in great part to the digital world while they remained very much an offline company. Sure they sold products online, had customer reviews and even offered hybrid solutions like in-store pickup but that wasn’t enough. Circuit City watched as an industry went from their world to over 50% digital. 50%. That’s half the sales, half the customers, half of everything and yet they didn’t change half of their business.
Add to this the improvement in their offering. Years ago people bought products like VHS movies or cheap DVD players that needed to be replaced a couple of years later. Today we buy high quality DVDs, we play movies on state of the art systems and the last thing we have to have is a transition to Blue Ray so while they invested in the change, marketed something new, it wasn’t necessary and even before the economy changed consumers were hardly flocking to make an investment change that didn’t really change a whole lot. And Circuit City wasn’t unique in this – auto manufacturers are struggling with consumers who need to buy cars less often (when you can go 250,000 miles and only drive 12,000 a year an upgrade isn’t necessary in 5 years) and want cars that work differently than they ever have before. Sudden market changes and consumer perception impacted their world virtually overnight (ok over a year) but their product cycles take many years to change – that was a disaster waiting to happen.
Your business may not seem muck like Circuit City or an Auto Manufacturer — you may not be stuck in the retail world or have a product with a lessening replacement cycle but odds are you’re a lot more similar than you may think. Customers are changing in their purchasing behavior, their needs and their methods and keeping up means getting insights. If you aren’t taking the time
So what do you need to do? Simply put you need to ask the right questions and you need to keep asking them. Looking at analytics is a good place to start the insights process but all that tells you is where people went and what they did, not why and why is what matters.
A few days ago United Airlines, a company that in recent history has been anything but nimble, sent me a survey asking about my travel habits last year and the changes this year. While it was a quick survey they pried into the amount of travel, the type of travel and most importantly why habits were changing. Sure United could look at the market and say “hey, the economy is slow, people will fly less” but that’s not enough. United’s survey may discover the economy is the only issue but now they have a sense as to where people are spending their money, to if they want vacation packages versus just airfare, if they want quality versus pure price… they’re learning how to tailor their offering and their messages and that gives them an edge up. If all United learns is that consumers really just want cheap flights they’ll be in a much better spot – less wasted resources on offer testing, less working on deals to offer other services, more focus and more results.
These days we all need to be like United and start surveying our customers and our prospects. Some of these tactics can be cheap, others take resources but they’re vital to understanding the change. Ask your customers and prospects what they are doing, what’s changing, what channels they’re shopping on, if price is more important than other factors, if other factors are more important than price. Identify demographics and customer types…. digital customers versus retail versus multi-channel and segment the results. Find out if they’re comparing stores for deals, reading your reviews, or looking for more information. The more details you can capture on who people are, how they’re changing and what they need the more you can adjust and develop.
Sure it’s tempting to buy into the doom and gloom but let’s face reality. Amazon was up; Costco was up and on and on. Companies are finding ways to grow by offering what people want in a time where the economy is uncertain and technology, information and consumer choice have all changed and continue to change.
Asking starts with a survey so head over to Zoomerang or SurveyGizmo, build a survey and launch it to your email database. Incentivize it or just let it fly, either way ask today and keep asking less you end up offering a product no one wants or in the wrong medium.

When it comes to using features to drive site usage and interest, what you do shouldn’t end with new developing something new. As I mentioned in my first post, a great deal of forum development is done by programmers without thought to User Interface or best practices [this is especially true for the lower-tier products]. As a result there are some fundamentally broken parts of almost every forum out there, things which simply doom sites to have low conversion rates and high bounce rates.

Take a look at your site from the perspective of a user – how do they get there? Most forums find the bulk of their traffic coming in on subpages – forums, threads, photos, etc… I’ve seen some sites that had their top organic search term drive less than 1% of traffic, when you have stats like that you know people are entering all over the place. This means a lot of wandering users but again, most forums aren’t setup to talk to new visitors at all, in fact most forums treat them like they must know the site to be that deep. Think about it – a visitor google searches for a long phrase topic, a forum pops up since the forum has content on the subject but what the visitor gets is a thread. There’s no way to get to a Q&A on the subject, nothing telling them they can participate in the discussion, no next step, no direction. So unless all of your visitors are forum pros, the experience is lots of confusion, little direction. Most forums have huge bounce rates as a result.

Step forward a few ticks and assume the visitor does hang around enough to figure out that the site is a user community. They want to join so what’s next… click some button called register and this is what they’ll likely see:

If this was a lead gen form on any commercial site someone would be fired. Boxy layout, a page that scrolls when there’s all of 10 fields on it and absolutely no sense as to benefits, costs or next steps. If the visitor wasn’t certain about the site’s purpose or the process this page isn’t going to help much.

So how do you fix these issues? Take a traditional approach. Redo the registration page to something simple like in the example below which I’ve successfully launched for several clients. The results? Funnel completion rates for one client went from under 50% to over 85%. 15% abandonment is something most lead gen sites would kill for.

Here’s an example of a basic, moderately optimized registration page:

Fixing millions of potential “landing pages” to guide visitors in topic by topic isn’t possible but with some basic checks, you can make a great step. Greet guests with a message explaining the site, listing the options (other tools, registration benefits, etc…). If you have the technology resources and the time to do it, develop a logic tree and link topics to other pages, micro-portals. If you have a wiki this works wonders… someone hits a page on a very refined topic and at the top, after their welcome greeting, is a simple list of related topics. Boom, they get more content.

Every aspect of the site is up for change and should be reviewed. Most forums use a stock support page to get help, many never change their error message in the event of an outage, or their welcome email which reaches every member and so on and so forth. I encourage every one of my clients to visit their forum as a guest, register again and review the interface and copy in detail, you should too. If you really want to go further ask a few friends or family members to go through your site and complete goals, their feedback is invaluable at understanding how someone with no experience with the site sees it.

As a final thought, consider for a second who makes it to your forum and what your goals should be. I know most forum owners outside large corporations have never considered personas but they should – you should. There’s a few rules tossed around out there that explain just why. 10% — Out of tens of thousands of visits you’re lucky to get 10% to register and 10% of those will be active at any given time. With that mind, you need to treat people properly. The typical guest is at your site for information. Not to participate, no to talk… just to get information. Thus your goal for them is to get a second pageview. To get a third and a fourth. Get them involved just enough to build a little awareness in hopes they return later and maybe, just maybe, increase the registration rate a few ticks.

Another persona set exists in your current membership. It’s great to say you have 100,000 members but if those 100,000 came over an 8 year period and only 5% are active, the new competitor with 25,000 visitors 25% of whom are active has you beat. For those that do register only part will ever post and far less will keep posting but many will or would “lurk” [browse without being active]. Again, you can’t stop this, people will fall out of the activity cycle, but you can respond to and embrace it. You can use messages and email to direct people to be more active but there’s no way to get them all to be active. So instead communicate to keep them engaged as well. People who don’t post lose touch faster which means you need to be reaching out to them. Newsletters with information [content], event reminders, whatever makes the most sense for your niche use it. This keeps you top of mind and increases the odds that someone returns to you later. People don’t have to be actively adding to be of value, the more they read the more traffic you have and the more likely they are to jump back in overtime and use those new features from before.

Look at your community in terms of who is there, what their goals are and develop features, navigation and messages that corresponds to all of them, not just to your power users. When you do this your overall activity increases as does your participation and satisfaction. One size fits all just doesn’t work in an area with so many types.

Remember, there’s always another community looking to target the same niche, that’s the nature of something with such a low cost of entry. To stay top or become top you have to offer more than the guy next door and that means implementing ideas that are not just what you think is good but features that people actually have a use for, can figure out how to use and can find.