I received some great responses via email and comments on my previous post: Where does the community team belong in a commercial organization?

My point of view in the post was that the Marketing team probably makes the most sense, but I had serious concerns that most marketing teams can't really put their own agenda aside in order to have an honest dialog with the company's customers, prospects and partners.

Most responses I received gravitated towards the marketing organization, with Product Development and Product Support running close behind. A couple of folks recommended cross-organizational teams.

Joi Podgorny's comment was very encouraging in that she had made a decision to have her community team function as as a stand -alone organization.

We ended up having the online community live as an autonomous unit within the company. This was done for a variety or reasons, but especially:

- representation on the executive level - the only team that could voice the unique needs that the online community team had was the online community team themselves

- innovation - having to get approval for new plans/ideas, etc for the community and then seek approval from dept heads that didn't understand our core goals began to hinder the innovation possible on the team

Once our team had autonomy, the morale and inventiveness of our team soared.

After thinking about this a bit more, and mulling over all the great feedback and ideas that my original post spawned, I feel like the best options are:

- Stand Alone Team: The community team (off and online) has a seat at the C-level table and is empowered to run more or less autonomously.

- Part of Marketing: The community team has a director-level lead, and reports in to the CMO or VP of marketing. This would be a bit of culture shock, because a lot of senior marketing staff just aren't willing to give up control and the methods and tools they are comfortable with.

- Cross-functional Organization: The Community team is made up of folks from Product Support, Marketing, Product and the Web Team. A director or VP "owns" the virtual team and the budget. I like this option the least because of the likelihood of bureaucracy and the potential for team members to be serving two masters.

What do you think? If you have a point of view that you don't want to express in comments, or would prefer to have a conversation, please email me: bjohnston@forumone.com.

Lee and Sachi LeFever from CommonCraft put together this hilarious and educational video on RSS.

In my opinion, great format!

Enjoy:

Click To Play

Jim and I had been debating the title for a couple of months, but it really came down to the fact that it seems that most folks familiar with the term "camp" generally expect camps to be free. Obviously, we are charging a modest fee to attend ($175 - $195). We decided to change the name of the June 6th conference from Online Community Camp to Online Community Unconference.

We felt "unconference" was more true to the spirit of Open Space technology, which is the methodology we are employing during the event. We have hired a facilitator, Kaliya Hamlin, who will help us complete the agenda-setting exercise first thing on the morning of the conference, and form then on, the session content of the event is in the hands of the attendees.

For those who don't know ( I didn't until a couple of months ago) Open Space has been around since the mid 80's, when Harrison Owen formalized the methodology:
http://www.openspaceworld.com/brief_history.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Space_Technology

So, we are leaving the concept of "camp" to Foo, Bar and John Waters. We hope you will join us for the Online Community Unconference June 6, at the Computer History Museum.

http://www.forumone.com/unconference

Tim O'Reilly has called for and drafted a Bloggers code of conduct, mostly in response to the over-the-top harassment that Kathy Sierra received a few weeks ago.

From the O'Reilly Radar blog:

We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation. But frankness does not have to mean lack of civility. We present this Blogger Code of Conduct in hopes that it helps create a culture that encourages both personal expression and constructive conversation.

1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.

2. We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person.

3. We connect privately before we respond publicly.

4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.

5. We do not allow anonymous comments.

6. We ignore the trolls.

I think Tim's request is well-intentioned. As someone who was on the receiving end of a very nasty round of harassment on a personal blog a few years ago, I can empathize with the emotions Kathy probably felt. I can also understand the motivation Tim has to address the "civility problem", via the proposed code.

The reality is, the best written code in the world is not going to effect the behavior of mean-spirited people who wish to annoy and harass others online. This has been an issue, more or less, since humans started communicating with one another. We can put policy, laws, and technical barriers in place, but if someone wants to be a jerk, especially online, they will be a jerk.

I applaud Tim for starting the conversation, and I feel for Kathy, and folks like Kathy, who have the courage to speak their mind and honestly express their feelings regularly on their blogs. I'm just not sure a "code of conduct" is going to help anything when civility online is really a matter of basic common sense and human decency.

What do you think?

This may seem counterintuitive, but for many communities, less of a moderation presence is a good thing. This is particularly true when the moderator, or moderators, appear to function as a 'police" presence, instead of primarily playing the role of facilitator. In essence, I am encouraging the concept of letting the community police itself.

To make this work, a community manager should:

• Make sure the ground rules are clearly written and accessible to all (1 click away)
• Attempt to make the culture welcoming to new members. Further, current members should be encouraged to gently let new members know what is appropriate behavior, and what isn't.
• The moderator should be available and accessible to all via email / IM
• When serious infractions occur, action must be immediate, and should be consistent over time (always the same reaction). Abuse, and abusive members cannot be tolerated.

As a real world example: A few years ago, some of the Autodesk forums had a moderation policy that was more "policing" than "facilitating". In addition to fostering a fairly toxic culture, constantly settling disputes between a particularly over zealous moderator and community members was tiring. We made a major policy change in the forums, and had the moderators play more of a background role. Not only did we experience a tremendous growth in participation and membership, but the overhead of actually managing the forums dropped.

I'm curious to hear others experiences with moderation. Please comment here if you feel like sharing.

Where does the community team belong in a commercial organization? This topic came up at our recent Online Community Roundtable and we ran out of time before we could properly discuss, so I thought I would queue up the discussion here.

The responsibility for Online Community in many organizations is distributed among several teams, including:

- Marketing, which typically owns blogging, blogging outreach and any sort of affinity community, and has some skin in the game on strategy.
- Product Support, which typically owns Discussion Groups
- Product Development, which may or may not own Discussion Groups, a Beta site, and potentially a "Labs" community, as well as potentially product development communities and user groups.
- Events, which owns "live" events like conference and any online component
- Web Team, (who's reporting structure is usually a whole different ball of wax) which typically owns some technology and user experience
- IT, if you are REALLY lucky, your IT department is somehow involved with infrastructure.

The above is just a rough composite sketch based on my personal experience. The reality is that in most orgs, it usually more complicated, especially if you are a company involved in building customer community as part of your business, as opposed to customer community being your primary focus.

So, where does the responsibility for community ultimately reside in an org?

Marketing? At it's best, marketing is about acting as the advocate for the customer back to the organization. At it's worst, marketing is actively trying to convince customer and prospets to do something they didn't know they wanted to do, or don't want to do. A lot of online community activity is coming out of marketing teams today because of typically large marketing budgets, and marketing teams interested in experimenting with new technologies and trends like social networking and blogging. Still, until most marketing teams are REALLY ready to put their own agenda aside and listen to and act on feedback from their audiences, community engagement will be fairly superficial and short term.

Support? Support communities, and in particular those based in Discussion Groups have done the best job of fostering a real sense of community for most companies. Most companies have accepted the fact that the cost of funding Discussion Groups are offset by call avoidance and increased customer satisfaction. Becuase of this, there is generally a spirit of peer cooperation and a genuine interest in helping customers, as opposed to forwarding an agenda. Could the Support organizations role evolve in to an umbrella role of stewardship for all Online Community activity? Perhaps, but I don't think this would happen in most companies for political reasons, and in particular, Marketing's "Divine Right" ownership of customer touch-points.

Sales? Probably not. See the "agenda" issue with Marketing.

Product? Maybe, but I see most product teams as participants in a community, and in particular the community ecosystem around their product or service.

IT? Yeah, right.

It really surprises me that there isn't a more formal approach emerging, and in particular a role on the excutive team like "Community Czar" or "Chief Community Officer". Maybe this is what the role of CMO wants to evolve in to?

What do you think?

The Online Community Expert Interview is a monthly series that features Online Community thought leaders driving online community strategy and practice at their companies. This month's interview features Lee LeFever from Common Craft.

Lee has designed, built and managed online community websites since 1999, when he founded the online community program at Solucient, LLC (a healthcare data company). In 2003 he founded Common Craft, LLC, a consulting company that specializes in Social Design for the Web (www.commoncraft.com ) . Lee was the social designer for the March of Dimes Share Your Story Online Community in 2005 (www.shareyourstory.org) and has worked on community initiatives with Boeing, Microsoft and Geffen Records among others.

You've been working in the online community space for a number of years. What major online community and collaboration trends have you seen at your company? What are you advising your clients now?

Two big things come to mind:

1) In terms of overall trends, community is a big focus in the business world - and it feels real this time. When I started working with customer communities in 1999 I spent a lot of time describing the concept and evangelizing. There was a lot of misunderstanding, doubt and nay saying. When the bubble burst it added fuel to the fire. In the last couple of years, the tools have improved, there are many exciting new models and success stories and your average Internet user has a renewed, more positive perception of community. While there is still misunderstanding, it's exciting to see renewed focus and attention in the community space. Already this year there were two well-attended conferences focusing on community (CommunityNext and Community 2.0).

2) In my experience, there is a much needed focus on the role of the community manager. Companies are starting to understand that community isn't a technology that you plug in and leave alone - it's a way of doing business that takes time and hard work. In the best success stories, there is almost always a person or small group that understands community processes, sets expectations, and balances the needs of the community and the organization. Community management is an important skill we need to develop more in the future.

Do you have examples of a few major corporations / sites doing interesting things with online communities? Who are you paying attention to?

I've been really interested in Dell's Ideastorm. I'm hearing frustration from companies that relates to filtering community "noise" into actionable and valuable data. While Ideastorm may not be a traditional community, it is an interesting experiment in enabling members to propose/promote/demote the ideas that they value the most. Of course, the onus is clearly on Dell to close the loop and react to these suggestions in a balanced way as they did recently in agreeing to ship the Linux operating system.
Another example is Ducati Motorcycles who recently moved away from a traditional marketing department in favor of working with a customer community. The quote I've seen is that the community is at the"center" of the organization's structure. At Common Craft, we're currently working with Microsoft on community-based support and I've been really impressed with their level of commitment and focus on community as a part of their future business.

What are areas of growth in corporations in the use of online communities, from an investment, feature, or member growth perspective?

I'm excited about the evolution in modes of community participation. In the past, "community" was often enabled through a message board, email list, newsgroup, etc. While these are all very useful and popular today, they are now part of a much broader set of features that enable member participation in a community. Let's face it, discussion is intimidating online and off. We can now offer members a number of ways to participate that don't have the social pressure of a discussion (but may offer a gateway to discussion).
One way to look at this is through what I call "community currency". In this case, currency means the basic unit of exchange between members. It may be discussion, or it may be photos, videos, friend lists, social bookmarks, ideas, how-tos etc. These form the foundation of exchange and a chance for trust to develop as a community gets started. Another example is the ability for members to take small actions that enable the community to be better organized or more dynamic. Examples included adding tags to content, ratings, reporting spam, bookmarking, adding friends, joining/creating groups, etc. All of these concepts are part of re-thinking what community participation really means.

What should every CEO know about online communities?

I founded Common Craft because I'm convinced that online communities will represent a competitive advantage for organizations in the future. In my version of the future, the company with the most engaged and productive community of customers wins. It's hard work to really engage customers in this way, but once the relationship is there, the potential impact on innovation, anticipation of change, product development, marketing, etc. is huge and becomes a differentiator in the market. An online community is an invitation to get these new kinds of relationships started.

I've heard a lot of discussion around creating formal online community strategies in the last 6 months. I've also heard of (and experienced) community efforts that are stalled or even abandoned because of lack of a formal, codified strategy. Personally, I think this is just silly. Think about it: What if you had to come up with a formal communication strategy, put it into powerpoint, and shop it around to all the VPs before answering the phone the next time it rings? Whether you host one or not, your organization has a community that is networking, forming opinions about you, and growing stronger every day.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to encourage everyone to pursue creating online communities with reckless abandon here. What I am saying is that there are factors in play that make it easier, more beneficial and more crucial for you to engage in community building activities for your organization, if you haven't already.

As I mentioned in a previous post:
1. It's cheaper to engage in community-building activities. We've gone from 7 figure portals to free independent communities to 5 figure deployments for customer, large-scale sites.
2. It's faster to deploy. Days and weeks, not months or a year.
3. Community already exists. The fact is, your org or brand already has a community. If your customers aren't talking about your products or services online, you might be in big trouble.
4. Passionate customers have an appetite for engagement online (and to varying degrees, the flavors of less passionate customers). Customers have an expectation that your company is available and "present" online.
5. The value is starting to be measurable (but still difficult)

The reality is, for most companies it's close to impossible to create a buttoned up online community strategy at this point. Some reasons?
- In most companies, there is no ownership of community at the executive level
- Community responsibilities scattered over multiple organizations: support, marketing, online, product management, IT, to name a few.
- The expertise for creating this strategy typically isn't in house. It needs to be grown, contracted, or hired.
- ROI is difficult to clearly quantify at this point.
- The community at large is not employed by the company, and does not necessarily function in the organization's best interest. This tends to give execs, and particularly marketing and PR, fits.

What can you do?
Start with quick wins. Create a blog. Participate in other hosted discussion groups or online communities. Go to one of your user group meetings and get to know the attendees.Communities start with small networks and weak ties that grow larger and stronger over time. Even a single person in a large company can make a difference. Don't use lack of "strategy" as an excuse to not start a basic community engagement effort To my earlier analogy mashup: pick up the phone.