This month's Online Community Expert interview is with Bill Binenstock of CBS Interactive. In the interview Bill discussed the CBS SportsLine online community. It is rare that the Online Community Report gets access to a very senior person at a leading media company. Further, Bill was very candid in his responses, particularly his observations and experiences with CBS Interactive.

Bill Binenstock's Bio:
Bill Binenstock is the Senior Vice President of Core Services Integration for CBS Interactive.

CBS Interactive is the digital division of CBS Corporation, managing the CBS.com, CBS SportsLine.com, CBSNews.com and theShowBuzz.com websites and building new extensions of CBS into alternative online and mobile devices.

The Core Services Integration team provides foundational services for CBS Interactive. These services support existing operations, on one hand, while facilitating the integration of new products, partners, capabilities and applications into the growing CBS Interactive portfolio on the other.

The group provides indirect infrastructure set-up in areas such as analytics, legal oversight and back-end systems as well as direct support for Customer Service, Product Management and Customer Insight.


To start, could you please provide an overview of the CBS SportsLine community?

BINENSTOCK: To some degree, sports is an area in which communities come pre-formed. Most fans have connections to players, teams, sports, schools, cities, conferences or even leagues.

Where fans decide to experience their sports entertainment is the question. For a fan, it can be a bar, a living room, a park, a gymnasium, a stadium or a buddy's back yard.

What we set out to do with the CBS SportsLine message boards is provide fans one more avenue for sports interaction -- one that is highly attractive to them because it reaches a much larger potential audience.

This is both the challenge and the opportunity in a nutshell: how does a big media company provide fans a venue that's entertaining, safe, useful and vibrant?

In CBS' case, we had a leg up because of our experience in Fantasy sports. Fantasy sports sites are among the first social networks built on the web. In Fantasy, members form groups, set rules, design avatars, build histories and invite friends. Site producers labor to build software that facilitates all these interactions.


Community-Driven Design
Understanding how different types of Fantasy groups interact can provide designers significant insight.

For example, in Fantasy we offer both single games and commissioner games. These are industry terms that denote two types of consumer interaction: in a single game it's interaction with a small group of relative strangers (at least at the outset), and in a commissioner game, it's interaction with a group of close friends.

This experience provided us significant insight into what and how both sets of communities interact. It's taught us about the importance of things like persona, governance, reputation, trust, moderation and value.

We used many of the things we've learned in Fantasy when we redesigned our message boards last summer.

Our approach was to provide a venue for high-quality, user-generated sports commentary on our site. We wanted to increase and enhance what our audience was already doing through their feedback with us; namely, they comment, second guess, criticize and extol, and in many cases, they did so in a tremendously entertaining fashion.

Community Management & Influencer Program
We've tried to separate the CBS SportsLine discussion from others on the web by focusing attention on these top contributors. To do this, we set up a model that lets the community itself designate who these people are.

The community does this by its actions: by rating content, by selecting favorite members and by frequently participating.

It was important to us to have a system that provided a measure of self-governance, that encouraged frequent, positive contributions and that identified community leaders and their extraordinary content.

So, we devised the CBS SportsLine Reputation System, which ranks members based on four criteria: Connections, Value, Participation and Skills. These combine to form one's community ranking as either an Amateur, a Rookie, a Pro, an All-Star or a Superstar.

With each segmentation, come more capabilities and influence within the community.

We also included a feedback loop so that the community could more efficiently govern itself. If members find content they deem questionable, they can flag it as such and our moderators will investigate.

Infractions can lead to warnings or even bannings, and false alarms are also penalized.

To be sure, we actively review the boards to identify anything that does not conform with our Terms of Use, but the System itself significantly aids in this process.

Additionally, the System has a built-in behavioral deterrent: someone who has invested significant time and effort in achieving a high stature in the community will be cautious about putting that reputation at risk with a potentially distasteful posting, an obscene avatar or use of vulgar language.

Growth & Participation
Since the launch last August, we've registered over 100,000 new CBS members, and on any given day between 40,000 and 150,000 visitors reach a message board.

These new registrants are important to the future development of the boards. Their interactions with each other and with CBS can give us greater understanding about what is working and what is not.

Another, somewhat unexpected benefit has been the unusually consistent consumption we've seen thus far.

Consistent with the rest of our site, message board visitors come more frequently during peak times such as the NFL season and March Madness, but the boards remain surprisingly stable even during the normal lulls of the sports season.

Like most communities, it's the top 10% that does the bulk of the actual content creation, and like most communities, the rest of the consumption comes from the 90% who just enjoy following the discussion.

Our message board's population is very similar in makeup to CBS SportsLine's: it's 96% male. 40% are 18-30 and 40% are 31-45. There is little international participation, and what there is comes predominantly from the English-speaking world.

We view our communities as vibrant and constantly changing organisms, so they require constant nurturing, feedback and enhancements. Our System gives us an opportunity to do all of this and then return the value back to the community.

In most respects, our relationship with the CBS SportsLine community has only scratched the surface. They've already provided us multiple insights which will lead to improvements in the next iteration of the software, and we expect this process to go on for years to come.

What is your business strategy with the CBS SportsLine online community?

BINENSTOCK: The contributors who come to CBS SportsLine are seeking like-minded fans and expertise, and because Fantasy sports is so much a part of the CBS SportsLine experience, there is a vast and largely untapped well of insight and aggregated learning that our community possesses.

Our strategy is to bubble that expertise and those capabilities to the top of the site -- to make our audience apparent. The Reputation System helps us do that.

At any time, you can visit the Community Home page to see which of the top members are online, which threads are "hottest" or which have come from top members.

This makes it easier for both anonymous and registered members to quickly pick out what's hot, what's new, who's of interest, who to believe and who to discount.

Ultimately, we want to create enough really good contributors and really excellent content to draw more and more of the best sports experts on the web to the CBS forum.

Can you summarize why you think that the CBS SportsLine communities are a success?

BINENSTOCK: Let me begin by talking about the Fantasy sports community in particular, because that community has been a key driver of the CBS SportsLine economic engine for a long time.

If a product meets a need and friends feel compelled to tell friends about it, it's likely the product will thrive. That was the case for CBS SportsLine's Fantasy community.

Our community formed around our software and then the community itself exerted control over it. They did this by providing their feedback which was impassioned and frequent. Their input influenced each subsequent iteration and enhancement of the software.

Over time, the software and the communities evolved together.

Similarly, by building the Reputation System into our more general communities, we expect an evolution that yields something more than just software.

What we'll get is an interaction that iterates to specific value-creation for the audience that exists now, as well as the audiences yet to come.

What makes our System a success is this inherent capability to evolve: both in terms of satisfying our audience and in meeting our business objectives.

The way we measure that success in the immediate is via engagement: specifically, minutes of consumption. With so many competing priorities for today's audience, we've focused on how much time consumers spend with our products as a proxy for satisfaction.

We've seen that number grow with time, but as you might expect, we think there's ample room for improvement.

Obviously, this doesn't mean creating time traps where we make it hard for folks to find what they want in order to artificially inflate one business metric.

Engagement minutes must be considered along side goals for increased visits and expanding reach. We look at these as well to get a holistic picture of the system's vital signs.

Another important measurement that we're not monitoring right now is the ability to assess our progress with product improvements. There will have to be metrics that speak to the number of user-generated-enhancements that successfully make their way into the product and the speed in which they get there.

We've got the good fortune of having a large audience. It's now incumbent on us to listen to them.

What are some key lessons learned during and after the tech crash
of 00-01? How does the resurgence of interest in online community
impact your strategy moving forward?

BINENSTOCK: I suppose the implication of the question is that in the tech crash many people jumped on the "internet" bandwagon with no clear concept of what they wanted to achieve and only poorly constructed plans for how to achieve it.

So, I suppose the argument here is that when people talk about web 2.0 or social networking, there is a level of suspicion that they're engaging in similarly frivolous behavior to that of the late 90's.

There's a difference here. Social networking has community, but community is not social networking.

CBS is not a social network. We are a media company with vast resources to attract, entertain and distinguish communities.

Certainly, people who approach community with a "me too, social networking is cool" attitude are probably doomed to fail. Community is not something that one can apply or exert. The communities themselves have too much power and too many choices, so you must provide members value for their contributions and their time.

In our case, as a media company we always want the community and the discussion to have context, even if that context ultimately gets modified or rejected by the community.

If the community produces the kind of excellent content it's capable of, the kind we think our Reputation System encourages, CBS also possesses the unique capability to bring all of the assets of a company of its size to bear in order to highlight such creations.

That's the kind of value contributors can recognize and embrace.

Can you talk a bit about how the CBS SportsLine online community helps add value to the CBS brand?

BINENSTOCK: There is a little bit of chicken-and-egg going on here.

The suggestion is that a vibrant and highly regarded community provides a significant impact to the CBS brand, but I also think that the CBS brand helps us build that valuable community.

I believe most people would say that the CBS brand stands for high quality entertainment and conveys honesty, trust, stability, social change and justice.

In news programs such as Edward R. Murrow's "See it Now", or Don Hewitt's "60 Minutes" as well as in programs such as "All in the Family" or "M*A*S*H", there has been a long-standing tradition at CBS of urging change, raising awareness and encouraging debate.

These characteristics are important to someone considering interaction with a community.

For many of us, the CBS Sports brand holds a similar kind of aspirational symbolism -- one of high quality and excellence.

It's as though the greatness exhibited by the athletes has also informed the broadcast and the brand itself, so for many, CBS Sports denotes excellence.

If things evolve as intended, community members with affinities for the qualities that CBS and CBS Sports represent will gravitate to us. Our System will then discover and highlight the best contributions and the best contributors.

So, my expectation is that this relationship will have an ongoing and evolutionary influence over the CBS audience and the CBS brand.

What key trends are you paying attention to with regard to your
online audience?

BINENSTOCK: Cross-platform capabilities are high among them. Giving members access to their information via phones or set-top boxes will be of greater and greater importance as technologies evolve.

Cross-site portability is also important. Capabilities to have access and control or to share one’s creations and interactions on other sites or with one's friends will become more and more important.

Finally, I'd say personalization of experience has always been a hallmark of what CBS SportsLine has done, but there's ample room to improve and provide our audience even greater control and a more direct impact over their experiences with us.

What are the biggest challenges you face in building and running
the CBS SportsLine community?

BINENSTOCK: Competing priorities is probably at the top of my list. The good news about our industry and our space is that there are so many incredibly cool things to do and so much innovation taking place. The bad news about our industry and our space is that there are so many incredibly cool ….

As I said earlier, we get valuable feedback from our community, and using that feedback will be the key to our success. We now need the time to make the changes they've called for.

Once we do, I expect to see the same kind of exponential ramp-up we saw with our Fantasy sports communities.

When members are happy with their experiences and proud of their creations, they bring their friends and families with them.