Interview with Vanessa DiMauro

Vanessa DiMauro is the president of Leader Networks. A pioneer in business-to-business community building, Vanessa has been creating successful virtual communities and networks for more than fifteen years. With the advent of Web 2.0 and social networking, Vanessa founded Leader Networks to help companies leverage technology for two-way communication and customer care. Vanessa is a popular speaker, researcher and author on the topics of virtual communities, social networking, and Web 2.0 for businesses.

Prior to founding Leader Networks, Vanessa co-founded CXO Systems and created the "Peer Visibility Network," a private, executive community that helped senior executives better understand the Web services movement. At Computerworld, Vanessa founded and ran Computerworld Executive Suite, a premier online membership organization of more than 5,000 CIOs from large organizations. She has also worked for other forward-thinking organizations including Cambridge Technology Partners and Technical Education Research Center (TERC), where she helped shape the role virtual communities play on the Web. She has been publishing research about online communities in academic and popular press for over a decade.

Women in Technology International (WITI) named Vanessa one of "Boston's Most Influential Women in Technology" and The Advisory Council (TAC) has chosen her as one of their Thought Leaders – leading practitioners who provide guidance on their areas of expertise. Vanessa has led executive education courses at UCLA – Anderson School and University of Miami and has taught Web-centric application development at University of Chicago. She is currently serving on Massachusetts Governor Duval Patrick's Gov 2.0 Committee, which will examine and address the role community and Web 2.0 can play in government.

She holds both a B.A. and an M.A. from Boston College.

Questions:

What is the "state of online community" with your enterprise clients? What overall guidance do you find yourself providing recently.

Because online communities and networks are so frequently covered in the media and are being touted as the new and powerful way to communicate, everyone is a little drunk on social media– especially in the consumer world. So, what often happens is that enterprise takes these great success stories from the consumer social world and tries to apply them to enterprise communities. This is a serious mistake. There are enormous differences between online communities for the enterprise and those for consumers. Business strategy, content plan, user engagement models, member retention plans and metrics are all completely different with enterprise level communities as compared with general public or consumer social communities. What motivates a teen or hobbyist to communicate with buddies about music or travel, for example, bears little resemblance to the driving interests and needs of an executive or corporate client seeking to connect on a serious business issue.

Online enterprise communities have been around for many years – savvy companies have created all sorts of powerful online communities to support their clients and users since the web came into its own in the late 1990s. Lately, however, it seems that enterprises may be straying off course from their internal customer care compasses. Instead of sticking with delivering excellent customer care, they get sidetracked and excited by the variety in social media tools and the wild-west of consumer social media examples. They are often overwhelmed with finding the best applications (both technical applications and more importantly interactive applications) to help them get closer to customers and revenue, but despite best intentions it is not working.

To help enterprise clients strip away the fuzz, I spend a fair amount of time working with them to clearly define their core objectives for their enterprise online community. I ask a lot of questions. These are the types of questions that firmly root the business strategy for any useful community:

• Do they want to retain customers?
• Is there a need to make collaboration more ubiquitous within the company?
• Do they want to engage the senior-most audience and if so, in what ways?
• What are the business processes they want to support through the community?
• How do they define and measure success – internally and externally?

We also guide the enterprise to engage their prospective members through research and find out what they really want and need from the company. Too often, businesses think they know best. However, what a client or employee really needs from the collaboration effort and what the company thinks they need are sometimes very different.

It is at this point of overlap – where both client and company needs get met – that makes for the most compelling features and functions for an online community.

The second area where there is need for deep guidance is the engagement plan for members. Build it and they will come didn’t work during the internet bubble and it won’t work now. So, the programmatic act of keeping members engaged, continually exceeding their expectations, outreaching regularly to members to deepen their experience are all critical acts to be performed when growing an online community.

Do you think enterprise communities have a chance over the long haul (3-5 years) given that enterprise performance is typically driven quarter over quarter?

Online communities are here to stay. We’ve seen this in the consumer world, and it is happening in the business world as well. There is a increasing demand for private (password protected) communities especially within the enterprise because of the strong returns they offer to customer care, product development, marketing and sales, competitive intelligence and thought leadership efforts across the organization. Simply put, external online communities for enterprise offer the opportunity to create happy clients, peer referrals, faster problem resolution and often are the source of innovation. In this age of the knowledge worker, internal collaboration communities are also proving to be quite effective for organizational sharing and knowledge capture. They can take a bulk of the great information that lives on people desktops and bring them online for all to benefit from and add to the institutional knowledge exponentially. Due to the ease of use of web 2.0 tools, the promise of the Knowledge Management system of yesteryear can now become a reality today.

Online collaboration with an enterprise’s customers is no longer a “nice to have.” It is a business mandate on so many levels. Companies need to listen to and communicate with their customers/clients in order to survive because they can no longer afford to make product and service mistakes. Now, especially given the new economy, enterprise needs to support their clients and prospects throughout the customer lifecycle. Clients who belong to an online community typically are more loyal and purchase more. This is a good thing for enterprise. Companies who use online communities to exchange information with their clients have a clearer channel and learn of issues and expectations in advance of them becoming institutional problems. Clients who problem-solve with other clients experience a higher degree of support than those who are solo practitioners and are therefore more likely to be retained. Sponsors of enterprise clients often pay a high CPI (cost per individual) for a relationship with a targeted community because they have greater penetration with their specialized audience.

Also, due to the frequency and variety of social media channels available to all, clients have the ability to communicate with other clients and prospects however and whenever they want. It makes good business sense to formalize the collaboration channel in support of them and participate in the dialogue instead of merely watching it happen elsewhere online and trying to react ad hoc. Research supports that professional peers make a majority of their buying decisions due to collegial recommendations across most professions. This drumbeat of awareness grows stronger by the day. And, as the social media industry grows up and the business processes to support metrics and measurement are refined, there are increasingly more ways to establish financial ROI.

What techniques / examples do you use to convince "unconverted" executives of the value of online communities?

I’m going to answer your question in two ways – one is from the perspective of an executive joining an online community as a member, and one is from the perspective of an executive managing the creation of an online community for their organization

Executives today are getting a lot of value out of private online communities specifically for their peer group. I build are for a very senior audience – I did Inmobile.org for wireless executives, Lexis Nexis Martindale-Hubbell Connected – a global community for attorneys worldwide, Sermo and Integrative Practitioner for doctors and so on. For a professional online community for a senior audience – a well thought out feature set and a member care plan is essential to shepherd the value of the community to them. Executives are very tough to engage online because they are so busy and most of their time is spent dealing with crisis and opportunity for the business and not online. But any successful online community for an executive audience needs to make their professional lives easier, connect them with peers and ideas faster and more efficiently in order to succeed. There is zero tolerance for a poorly planned community with execs. Instead, the charter needs to focus on finding and sharing the best content and facilitating connections to solve real business problems. If the community can do this, then they will quickly convert to being members and using the community regularly.

With executive stakeholders within an organization, the value of the community needs to directly align with real business value for them to buy-in and move forward with setting up this type of community for their company. Too often, online community initiatives start by focusing on the tools and features for the members without a deep alignment with the business goals. Why do your members want to blog? What is it for? What value with the company get from supporting a blog? This is the wrong approach. Instead, the emphasis needs to be on discovering the opportunities for returns (organizational as well as financial) from the community – what does the enterprise need right now that they can get elsewhere? What do the clients or prospects need from the enterprise that could be made better or positively different through social media? Where these areas overlap is the fodder for an effective community plan. The stakeholder executive can understand returns, needs and business value. That is their core skill set. If the community outcomes don’t pass the executive sniff test then that is often a good indication that the business drivers haven’t been well thought out yet. When an enterprise community initiatives can show real demonstrative value to stakeholding executives then they will quickly “convert”.

What online community trends are you seeing on the horizon (18-24 months out)?

I see three trends happening over the next 18-24 months with online communities.

1. Consolidation of online community tools. This is eminent because there are just too many out there and many are not as strong as they should be technically or from an integration standpoint. Only the strongest will survive and smaller or niche tools that are especially useful will be rolled into some of the more major player.
2. The online community strategist will become a key role. Organization’s customer care or marketing programs will inherently have programs and efforts that address the online customer and prospect as standard operating procedure. Online community and social media will become fully integrated into the roles and responsibilities across the organization.
3. Multi-dimensional online community features will become more of a reality. From engaging in a design review online with 3-D visuals, the ability to speak and have dialogue captured and transcribed automatically, interactive online seminars and conferences will all become the norm. The line between the handheld device and the computer (the little screen and the bigger ones) will blur and our community participation with transcend the platforms on which it takes place. As we become more social online beings, the tools and support will more closely mirror our behaviors in the real world.