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.

I’ve spent the majority of my blog entries thus far talking about how to meet the needs of your customers as well as how to make their experience better but all that’s fairly meaningless if you don’t know who they are and what they’re thinking about when they purchase (or exit). Unless you’ve already got the research aspect handled, chances are you don’t know enough about your customers to really be able to do the things they want (your assumptions don’t count, even if you are in the demographic – a sample of one isn’t a sample) and even if you do the research, chances are you can do more.

From an online perspective it always seems like it would be so easy to know what’s going on if you had an offline marketing job but the truth is there’s still plenty of ways to get to your consumers online and they work pretty well. So here are a few ideas for how to talk to your customers and prospects online as well as a few that cross over into the offline world for those of you doing multi-channel business…

1 – Ask them. (Duh) This one is fairly easy but so many companies fail to do it consistently. When I complete a transaction, ask me about it. Not just for a user review or PR purposes but for your own internal QA and understanding. The hotel and travel industry is starting to get this down, especially the travel booking sites (big time kudos to Priceline on this one) with nearly immediate and automated emails after a booking and it works great. Spitting out a simple survey email is basic and if you’re really working to improve the customer’s response, pair it up with an outbound call center to address those bad remarks (and even some of the good ones as means of building the brand).

2 – Survey the lists & website visitors. Immediate product surveys are a great first stab but they only speak to people who bought, bought online and opened the darn email. Step things up and encourage a wider audience to chime in. This audience can come from your in-house lists, website visitors or a combination of the two – both are familiar with the brand so you’re not going to measure awareness but you can get at site satisfaction, technical issues (IT will just love this one), competitive concerns and a whole heck of a lot more. Throw up a Zoomerang or SurveyGizmo survey on the cheap end (under $600 a year each) or get sophisticated with a consumer confidence score like what Forsee Results offers. With a few simple and fairly quick surveys you can get a great pulse on things in a statistically significant and meaningful way plus since you’re surveying your own base the costs are all but non-existent and even better, you can repeat the exercise over time to see how things change.  

3 – Survey beyond the people who take the survey. The problem with web surveys is that they only talk to people who stick around. If there’s a real site issue, product mismatch or something else major, chances are the people seriously affected are bailing which means you don’t get an opportunity to talk with them. By asking broader questions about the website, about the offering, even about the brand to a general sample, you can get a great sense as to what resonates and what offends or just doesn’t appeal. I’ve been included in a fair number of these types of surveys and some have even gone so far as to show me a few page mockups or banners, almost as if it was mass-usability testing. While I didn’t give as rich an answer as I would have in a focus panel or one-on-one testing scenario, I sure did give my opinion and the company had a great chance to get some broad and narrow stroke responses to pages well before they actually got coded.

To really get at this you may want to consider surveying offline as, well, let’s face it, online panels have their own skew and while offline ones are no different, you want to measure the right audience so if you suspect your users are more casual web surfers, asking a bunch of people who can sit through a 45 minute survey online for a couple of bucks isn’t always the right place to start. But on the flip side, if you’re FaceBook, asking people who refuse to take a survey online may not be a great way to find out anything except how it is that doesn’t have any chance of using your website… which while interesting wouldn’t help you in an exercise to improve visitor retention or anything of the sort.

4 – Talk to them, in person, ya, in person – really. Focus groups don’t mean much of anything to your statisticians but they mean an awful lot in getting imperial and detailed answers. If you’re launching a new site you must, must, must do some basic focus panels for usability testing but more importantly, upfront focus groups help you understand what people are actually looking for. There’s nothing worse than building or starting to build an app with a five or six figure budget than to find out no one cares about having their own calendar on your website. The same is true of basic info – you don’t want a hundred hours of designer time wasted because your category labels are wrong. So ask people.

Side note for anyone trying to justify a redesign or upgrade: Asking people can be a great way to prove just how bad things are on the site currently (although sometimes you’ll find out they aren’t that bad).

4b – On the subject of talking to people in person but a bit different than meeting customers in the open, you can always go super informal and have your office bring in a few friends and family. You can even spin your site around on a laptop and show it to a local group you belong to or your own buddies. There’s lots of bias and you may not even talk to people in your demo but hey, at some point you really just need to get an external set of eyes spotting those huge, but hard to see confusion points. Some people will know the brand and bring that awareness, others will be in the dark and therefore completely off the wall in their vision so while you can’t take every comment back to the designers, you’re still likely to get a few insight points from people that may be just what you need to find the next good test or serious upgrade concept.

5 – They’re already telling you. Seriously simple one here – step outside of your office and visit customer service. I’d guarantee you any long time rep can tell you 5 problems with the website and 5 ways to improve it without missing their next inbound call. Customers call when they get stuck, not in great numbers, but as I always said to my CSR agents – if one person called you, chances are a dozen more took off for the same reason. I suggest going beyond just occasional “checkins” and establishing a point person in the service department and a point person in marketing or the web team to have a scheduled update with a list of issues. Often times you’ll end up going over known issues or things you don’t want to fix, but hey, if you just get one good bug, one good insight you’ve got a winner. Plus through those conversations you and your interviewing of the CSR team, you can get some great insights into the personality nature and type of clients visiting your site, or at least the segment that’s willing to call.

6 – Use your analytics. It may seem counter intuitive – analytics group people and certainly don’t capture comments or feelings, but don’t they? When someone visits a page and bails, there’s a reason for it. Web analytics don’t often tell you what that one person did but in aggregate you can get a very good feeling for what people are doing. Path analysis is great for this sort of exploration – are 50 or 60% of the users who make it to a campaign landing page clicking in to the same next page, adding an item to their basket but bailing the second shipping information is shown? Bingo, we’ve got an insight.

These days there are a few tools that let you watch users in real time, most interesting to me are the chat solutions with proactive capabilities. What I love about this is you can track a user around your site and if it seems like they’re getting stuck or confused, invite them to get some assistance. Many will decline, few will accept but when I ran a chat program a few years back we had great results and, since we got to move from analytics to person-to-person interaction, we got insights too. There’s nothing wrong with having your agents throw a couple website usability or experience questions into their conversation to tease out feedback in very real time.

Of course you don’t have to use chat to get visitor level analytics, there’s plenty of other tools to do it. Whatever you use, try adding in some additional segmentation variables to classify people (return customers, new, campaign origin, etc…) and spend some time going through each of their common experiences. It can be difficult to figure out why they left but it opens the door for testing as well as for using some of the other tactics with a specific question in mind – if everyone bails on product 42 and testing all the pricing, color and image options doesn’t fix it, you know what you need to ask your next focus group, survey or just a couple of buddies down the street.

7 – Get offline and hit the pavement yourself. Most of us sell something offline, have retail stores or customer who experience our brand in a retail way and even if you don’t, chances are you can still find your customers at a tradeshow or local event. Every now and then you have to throw conventional measurement to the wind and just interact. Yes there’s bias, yes it means you have to talk to people, yes it means getting your hands dirty but if you’re an executive or someone up in the marketing chain and you’re not talking to people on the customer level, how can you ever expect to understand them. So many executives and managers get caught up in running things and looking at demographic generalizations that we forget to find out the issues and challanges that our customers are really facing as well as the ideas they have for how to make things better for their needs.

I’ve heard about Disneyland Execs who make regular rounds at the park with no special badges, Walmart c-levels who drop by for visits and talk to people on aisles and many other examples and these are downright amazing to me. If your company has a lot of face time (i.e. retail, an airline, hotel, etc…) why not consider hiring someone at a high level to work in marketing or ops that is just there to help mingle with customers, blend in with customers and at times resolve issues for customers at a low level. Nothing would make my day more than getting off a late, rerouted flight than to have someone with real authority there helping us after he or she experienced the same thing.

A flip side to this is letting your bottom-level employees actually access management. If you’re a larger retailer this is difficult and takes work but having managers report up to regional managers who report up to corporate just doesn’t cut it. Sure you have to do this most of the time but some days you also have to talk to the field and get a few part-timer employees giving you their individual gripes and those of the customer. This is where the insights live. These are the people who know what little things would make customers love you. Don’t forget that while the bottom rung may not have the MBA, they know what would make life easier for themselves and the good ones can almost always see where it would help the company up top… not every idea is good, but they all come from some inspiration that’s probably worth being aware of.

8 – There is an eight… What was it? Oh, that’s right… get yourself to tradeshows & events and see what’s happening in the industry. There’s a ton of people doing research online and a ton of companies with new products and services from analytics to surveying to a million things not listed here that you should be exposed to. Lots of people skip shows because for a lot of reasons (I loathe the “sales presentations” myself) but at some point you have to put those aside and realize that all the products and insights sent out in newsletters and from cold calls aren’t going to give you half of what you can get from chatting to a dozen people in the same world who’ve had a couple of drinks and are willing to share their techniques (but hopefully not their results) to getting into the consumers head.

Have your own research method or suggestion? Please share it as a comment and yes, this includes posting your relevant service offering if you have one.