This month's Online Community Expert interview is with Jake McKee of Ant's Eye View. Jake is only a few weeks in to the new practice with Ant's Eye View, so I really appreciated him taking time out for the interview.


Jake's Bio:
Jake McKee is an evangelist for online and offline community building, social media, and customer-company interaction. He has been working with online communities, fan groups, and consumer groups since the early days of the Internet, and has a rich background in Web development, community management, business strategy, and product development.

Jake is the Principal at Ant's Eye View, a Dallas-based social media and customer engagement consultancy. In a past life, Jake was the Global Community Relations Specialist for the LEGO Company, where he spent five years on the front lines of customer-company interaction.


You recently opened a new practice. Can you tell us about what prompted you to start AntsEyeView, and what the company intends to deliver?

First off, thanks for the invite. I’m a big fan of the Online Community Report blog, so to see my name there is a big deal to me.

Ant’s Eye View is a consulting practice focused on helping organization form honest-to-goodness relationship with their audiences. From Social Media training to community strategy to day to day fan relations, we do absolutely everything in a very small niche. This is a continuation of the work I’ve done for may years for brands like LEGO, Dr Pepper, FX Networks, Woodford Reserve, and others.

We’re already working on a number of cool projects, and are about to close several more. Stay tuned at antseyeview.com for details.


You've been working in the online community space for a number of years. What major online community and social media trends have you seen in your practice over the last 12 months?

Yeah, I remember pitching clients on social aspects to Web sites in 1996. You know, the days when they said things like “Please take our email address off the site, we’re worried we might get too much feedback from customers”.

The last 12 months or so has been an interesting time to do what I do. 12 months ago, I was having lots of conversations with clients and potential clients where they were asking us to first explain what all this social media and community stuff was about. In many cases, we were helping to support our client contacts within an organization to pitch it or explain it to their colleagues and managers.

Lately, it seems like that “pitch” isn’t there – they know they want to do something, their bosses expect them to do something, they’re just not really sure what to do or how to get started. I talk to a lot more business professionals with their own Facebook profiles, and who joke about playing with Twitter, posting Amazon reviews, and any number of other online social activities. These same types of people a year ago were brushing off social concepts because “MySpace is ugly and meant for teens”.

But even as this awareness grows and the tools get better and better (anyone seen Facebook lately??), we still advise our clients of the same thing we have for years: build relationships, don’t implement tools. Relationships are the crucial part of any “social” activity, whether online or offline, whether business focused or personal. Certainly tools may be part of building relationships, but that’s a sub-task, not a main task. Building new tools is fun, certainly. It’s the best way to get the “Rush of the Reveal” - that amped up feeling you get when you can unveil something. But success is sexier, or at least it should be. And success is often minor change that has huge impact, or changing someone’s opinion of an organization by listening and responding to their concerns.

I tend to find great value in small functionality. I am working on a top secret project with LEGO right now where we’ve involved 50 consumers from all over the world in work together on a new project. Our tools? Free, open source, and perfectly suited for the task at hand.

Do you have examples of a few major corporations / sites doing interesting things with online communities? Who, from a corporate perspective, are you paying attention to? What about individual practitioners or agencies?

It’s a bummer than once enough people start saying how great a great product is, it’s no longer kosher to continue talking about how cool that thing is. I’ve been amazed at 37signal’s Basecamp product. I’ve used it for groups large and small to help keep development on track and groups, often of people who have never worked together, participating in the process. It works wonderfully. Companies of all sizes seem to be using this easy, basic tool to get through the day.

Other examples:

Walmart adds reviews – As Andy points out, the fact that you can now review anything in the Walmart.com catalog, even a toothbrush is a major advancement.
http://www.damniwish.com/2007/07/a-landmark-mome.html

AMC’s Mad Men Blog – I’m very impressed with how effectively selected the content is that goes into this blog. It’s a perfect mix of fun stuff for fans of the show, new and old, hardcore and just passing through. It’s not a sales pitch, and it’s not too detailed either.

Nikon is doing amazing things with their blogger relations program. Imagine the kind of support and attention you get when you send out a $1400 camera to a blogger with the directive to “take pictures, blog if you like”. Those I’ve talked to about the program, who had gotten one, were truly impressed and have promoted their “new friends at Nikon” quite a bit. Here I am talking about them (as a jealous by-stander, even).

Intel & Battlefield 2 – Intel funded the development of a custom, new map for the mostly unsupported Battlefield 2. EA has nearly walked away from this game after releasing their next gen of the franchise, Battlefield 2142. (The last post on the EA Battlefield 2 site was in October 2006). Thing is, there’s still a large, dedicated group of BF2 fans out there. For a community feeling ignored and forgotten, Intel scored huge points with a large group of gamers by delivering something offbeat, but coveted. Gamers didn’t cry “marketer!”, instead thanking Intel for propping up the lagging support.

One other thing I’m paying lots of attention to these days is my buddy Lee. Lee runs Common Craft (www.commoncraft.com) and has been using the PaperWorks concept to create some truly exceptional video content describing in a few minutes fairly complex concepts.

Honestly, I think the agency world is lagging behind. Sadly, I’m hearing many more interesting programs coming out of brand managers than from ad/marketing/pr agencies. Remember when the agencies pushed the client, not the other way around?


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

I almost hesitate to talk about the opportunity for the growth of the use of online communities. I’d much rather talk about how corporations are going to do better at listening to their consumers first. We get so caught up in the Rush of the Reveal, that we think far too much about the tools and not enough about the long term, or heck, short term relationship.

What should every CMO of VP of Marketing know about online communities?

They are made up of people. This seems silly to even bring up, but honestly it’s hard to remember. I hear more people within organizations saying things like weirdo, freak, strange, “too much time”. Communities are driven by emotion, whether in support of tragedy, or growth of a hobby, it’s being part of something bigger, connecting with other people that truly shapes involvement in community groups. Treat a community like a dinner party, as my buddy Lee always says. You wouldn’t show up uninvited, you wouldn’t jump into a group conversation without figuring out the tone and content of the conversation, and you wouldn’t leave without thanking your host. Observe, ask questions, offer to help, then ask for favors.