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Originally posted on Jive Talks.

 

Replacing five business software platforms (website, intranet, extranet, team site, CRM) with one, more useful solution

 

The Why

A fast-growing, social media agency is by design a very fluid and fast paced environment. At 7Summits we thrive on being creative and collaborative to help solve our client’s problems. By design, we crowd-source idea generation and distribute it across our team to bring out the best ideas and solutions for our clients.

 

Like most organizations, as we grew, so did the number of software systems to help us manage different areas and functions of our business, from Sales and Marketing, to Operations. Here is a high level outline of those systems and their purposes – it’s by no means exhaustive, but you’ll get the picture:

 

PlatformBusiness Function
Software/SystemPurpose
Open SocialSales/MarketingNumerousRelationships/Connections, Content Aggregation & Management.
WebsiteMarketingJive SBS 3.07Summits Marketing & PR
ExtranetOperationsBasecampClient Onboarding & Management
IntranetHuman ResourcesSharePointEmployee communications & Knowledge Management
CRMSalesSalesForcePipeline, Forecast, Contact management & history.
Team SiteAccount ManagementsSharePoint + EmailInternal Project Management

 

Lately, we’ve seen a tremendous growth in the number of prospects, clients and employees needed to perform our work, each of which is touched by one or more of these systems in some way. This rapid growth spurt started to highlight inefficiencies that larger organizations are probably feeling as well. They are using these same systems in a more prolific, and therefore limiting, way.

 

Common issues we experienced include:

 

  • Inefficient effects of using email as the primary communication tool
  • Risk of employee and client confusion – where do they go to get what they need?
  • Information overload – lots of things in many places
  • Version control – effects of redundant content repositories
  • No central dashboard for everything
  • Duplicate logins, content, contacts
  • Impacts of all of this on collaborative working

The aha moment!

After some quick analysis, we realized something. Not only are there inefficiencies in these more traditional systems, but there are a mass duplication of efforts, tasks, and data.

7Summits-Redesign-System-Duplication.png

 

Being a Jive Software Premiere Partner, we often discuss the benefits of Social Business Software (SBS) with our clients and prospects. However, we initially chose it only to manage our public facing website. It dawned on us that we could collapse five different (and antiquated) platforms including our website, intranet, extranet, team site, and CRM system into one solution by leveraging Jive SBS as a replacement. By introducing the benefits of social networking and collaboration, this solution also offers us a unified environment to manage our business lifecycle from acquisition through retention in a much more efficient manner. Imagine logging into one dashboard at the beginning of your day and being able to do everything in one place. That’s something that companies have been wanting for some time – a very exciting prospect that it has finally arrived!

 

The Plan

One benefit of being a smaller business is that we can implement wholesale change without having to interrupt hundreds or thousands of users. Having worked at a Fortune 500 company in the past, I realize the impact of any large scale implementation or change to enterprise software. Most large and medium businesses have similar issues and could benefit from leveraging SBS in a similar fashion to consolidate one of more systems.

 

The Goal

 

Some internal goals that we set as benchmarks for this project included:

 

  1. Embrace a social business model. Hey, it’s in our DNA.
  2. Unify our system architecture.
  3. Remove duplicate content, efforts and tasks
  4. Facilitate collaboration across all audiences
  5. Create one login/account for all systems
  6. Enable cross pollination of content
  7. Expose and educate SBS benefits for all audiences
  8. Enable Project Collaboration – and in a way that supports working virtually
  9. Realize the full benefits of how will it change our working environment?

 

Our goal in writing this blog and sharing it with the larger Jive and Partner community is to share a common problem and offer a solution. We will be sharing more insights on our agency blog as we report our progress toward executing this effort for our own benefits. We welcome your comments or feedback on this approach.

 

7Summits-JiveSBS-circle.jpg

133 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: jive_software, community, migration, communities, marketing, email, integration, documents, socialproductivity, sharepoint, enterprise_2.0, social_media, social_business_software, sbs, jive_sbs, 4.0, consolidation, 7summitsagency
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The role of an online community moderator is a relatively new one. And like any new role, it's going through its developmental stage right now. It is most often confused with the role of Community Manger which has more to do with the overall direction that the community is taking in terms of content and features rather than moderation. I took a quick look for this role on simplyhired.com and there are currently a wide range of job titles that overlap in this area (http://www.wordle.net) pointing to bit of confusion in the market:

Picture 15.png

 

Dawn Foster did a nice job of distinguishing roles (and by community size) in her blog post Community Roles: Manager, Moderator, and Administrator. I also like the slideshare Best Practices For Moderating Your Online Community by mZinga. We find more mature thinking like this published every week; however, we still  a lot of questions about community moderation and what to look for in a good community moderator.

 

One question that companies are asking prospective community moderators is “what online communities are you an active member of?” We like this one because it gets after both experience and passion for online community. Online community participation is an important attribute in a solid community moderator. Active community

CommunityModeration.jpg

participation provides insights into successful use of Web 2.0 effects, facet-based browsing designs, and helpful techniques being employed by other leading professional network communities.This has ramifications to 1) enhancing the feel of the community that they are moderating, 2) positioning the community for ongoing activation, and 3) supporting member retention. The community moderator needs to be on the pulse of what is going on in the online community space – what works and what doesn’t work. Here is a sample of the type of participation that is needed in a single individual:

 

  • Active participation in LinkedIn including various groups for professional networking
  • Facebook fan-page and business-page participant for both personal networking and professional brand affinity
  • Knowledge and use of vertical or niche search engines
  • Presence and participation in popular, topical social media outlets like Slideshare, Delicious, Digg, Vimeo, etc.
  • Professional and/or personal blogger
  • Active membership in professional and/or personal communities that are aligned with their interests
  • Personal Facebook account with rampant, ongoing use
  • Personal and professional twitter accounts with active participation
  • Youtube channel with follower-ship
  • You get the idea...

 

Finding and hiring the right Community Moderator is important. In addition, there are other moderation strategies that important once that individual is on board:

  • Create a community overview that summarizes the community’s purpose and tone. Include a list of goals for members that can be realized by joining your community. Then, moderate the community in a fashion that keeps the tone and direction on par with the community’s intended use. Some communities audit moderator contributions against that community summary, providing the moderator with useful feedback that helps them stay on track.
  • Moderation should be moderate (pun intended!). Some communities launch with the presupposition that they can hypo-activate the community. They presume that all they have to do is “get members” – assuming that once members show up, things will start to happen. Do not assume the members will do all the work from the start and that they don't need assistance after they have joined. On the other end of the spectrum, do not excessively moderate all user generated content (UGC) either – that is a major turn-off as well.
  • Get an experienced moderator. We see many communities launch where the moderator is chosen based on who just happens to be available. Under-utilized employees do not make good moderators! Here are some important items to consider so that you are enabling your moderator while managing the outcome as well:  
    • Provide a certain level of autonomy. This is not a science yet and there will be specific learning that happens with your community. Don’t jump on the moderator when something goes wrong. Let them experiment, fall down, get up and move on.
    • Have a clear job description.
    • Create community moderation guidelines so that expectations are clear. And then don’t forget that they are guidelines.
    • Afford your community moderator and other community leaders opportunities to stay abreast of the latest trends in their role/space by encouraging them to join other communities.
    • Plan to sponsor a couple of key events per year where they can flock together with others in similar roles.
    • Provide time and avenues for them to accelerate their subject matter expertise in your topical community. Do this before the community launches and then keep it going during the beta period and after launch.
  • Membership is a good measure of successful community activation. Engagement is a good measure of effective moderation. This is a very community-specific measurement. The focus is on the conversations or discussions that people are having in your community. The moderator can help make some of these connections.
  • Monitor your community for both key participants and content. Then feature popular content and contributors on a regular basis. Look for the number and type of interactions that people are having with other community members to find members to feature. For content, typical measures would include the number of views, sharing, ratings, comments, replies, and more.

 

Paul Stillmank
7Summits

754 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: community_moderation, community_moderator, community_membership, awareness, community_activation, measurement, connected_social_campaigns, applied_social_media, social_media_marketing, community
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We are scaling up here at 7Summits and so you will see more frequent and varied blog posts in the coming weeks and months. This is the first in a series of thoughts focused on community activation and moderation. We will tag each entry with “community”, allowing you to more easily surface this series for easy reference.

OpenRoad - iStock_000003740345Small.jpgOne of the top questions that we get asked is how to build traffic to a community. Sometimes a community gets launched and the sponsors are surprised that members do not show up more readily.This correlates directly to the level of traffic visiting your community to begin with. Membership opportunity dwindels when there is no one on the road to your community. Building traffic is important and merits some attention before you launch your community. Here are some key things to get after when activating your community:

 

  • Develop an opt-in Beta program to build excitement for your community, seeding it with the best possible members and content so that when others come to visit or check it out, it is clearly obvious what the community is about is about.
  • Identify related conversation hubs with social listening tools and activate your community at these hubs.
  • Integrate existing digital marketing channels and programs / assets to drive program awareness and ultimately traffic such as websites, pay-per-click (ppc), email, etc. to promote the community.
  • Focus on advocate identification and blogger outreach early to help build momentum.
  • Write community relevant articles and publish them in relevant offline and online venues to help drive traffic.
  • Implement a search engine strategy that focuses on optimization and seeding of community content. SEO should be part of this plan.TrafficImage-iStock_000001051305Small.jpg
  • Create off-domain social media satellites on mainstream and niche social networks and echo content and conversations of your on-domain community.
  • Closely watch your web stats and the key words that surface your community even well past launch. You are likely to discover some new medium- and long-tail searches that are surfacing your content or community. Consider creating a page that emphasizes those meta-tags and seed it in both search and social for a great effect.

 

These techniques will help support a well-planned, measured activation of your community, bringing stronger traffic and leaving you feeling less unsure about growing your membership.

 

Feel free to share your thoughts and perspectives on community activation as well.

 

Paul Stillmank
7Summits

520 Views 1 Comments Permalink Tags: community_membership, community_activation, awareness, measurement, applied_social_media, social_media_marketing, connected_social_campaigns, community


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