Mesh and Building a community

Building a Community – How and Why it Matters

Mark Relph talks with Will Pate, Jordan Banks and Lionel Menchaca.

Mark: community means a lot of things to different people; for many different reasons.

Q: with all those different definitions, what does it mean to you and your org:

lionel: similar interests, form a corp perspective we look at them in terms of customer base. we have a lot of different ones, customers and potential customers.
Will: people know me..that is community that I am in. For companies, there are customers and people who care if you exist in a year or so. For commandN, we get stories from fans, people email us stories to cover, they tell their friends to check it out, it allows us to scale our audience pretty quickly.
Jordan: a group of people that have my back; that have my interests in mind. not too different from internal and external communities in work. We have lots of discussions at ebay about what it is; our job is to enable those who belong. we have a community of ebay employees as well

Q: so much of the web world involves around community, but the concept is not new, even if corporates are only just waking up to it. What has been the implication to your business.

Lionel: before we launched it we were committed to making it work the right way; we knew that if all we do is launch the tools and just state how great dell is, we had to approach this from a customer centric POV, dealing with negative issues and doing something with it. We have to act on feedback

Q: do you feel in the highest levels..have you had the internal fight?
Lionel: no, we did not have this, Michael Dell has been passionate and is really on board. With Ideastorm he liked it and pushed for it to launch, and he is clean that the people have to pay attention to the ideas.
Jordan :the web is a great enabler for transparency and it is hard to hide. some of our biggest successes have been comm-led and biggest failures when we did not listen. One challenge is the range of things but you have to interact, tell people why we a not doing things, let people know they are being heard. It is not easy, but we try.

Q: so how do you do it?

Will: it’s really hard to build it and expect people to show out. you have to figure out where people are. and the rules of the game. what is good on myspace is not good on facebook.

Q: do you need people to own these things?

Will: you need to have someone pushing it, have the evangelist role. a lot of startups do this. but community success is defined by how often everyone in the company is engaged in the community.
Jordan: passion is important; at the heart of any successful community is a passion. it is easy to figure out who the fakers are; it is too easy to think of community as a vertical function, a community team. we changed it to run horizontally so teh community has a voice in all areas. and that made it successful.

Q: is the advice that community goes from the one function to everyone having it as part of their DNA.
Jordan: it may not be possible, so you need the voice at the table. flip the normal saying – when they come, they will tell us and then build it!

Audience Questions

Q: how do you manage that passion; prevent it becoming too nasty.

Will: you need to have the ability to do diplomacy, manage the attacks. create a safe environment and people can stay sensible.
Jordan: there;s a difference btw passionate objectivity and subjectivity
Lionel: we don’t have the same issues as much (people don;t shoot each other). we were going the wring way and had been goign the wrong way for a while. we had to deal with a lot of pent up negativity out form the gate; we knew it would happen and had to put the strategy together about how we were addressing this, let people know it was along term thing. apologising for things we messed up helped the credibility.

Q: ebay may be in a more monopolistic..how do you meet the challenge of increasing pricing and the community reaction
Jordan: which the no comp was true…we are the largest market place, we create a supply and demand that occasionally needs to be tweaked. we keep talking to all the sellers to understand their margins and a pricing structure that suits all. not everyone likes the decisions, but they are made with discussion with the community.

Q: reputation is essential; when you join a community you don;t bring your reputation from the previous comm with you – do you think there is a central way?
Jordan: absolutely, I’m shocked still you can’t bring your reputations with you. I guess it will come, it will a crime if it does not happen.
Mark: is this a barrier?
Will: yes, like password fatigue. someone will solve it the sooner the better.

Mark: can you give me examples, best or worst?
Jordan: we have an active member in Montreal. she came across 6 kittens that needed a home. She had a new brunswick virtual friend h=who wanted them,. they arranged people across all the cities between the two to get the kittens across them.
Will: a kid in Florida, part of Flock community, he is severely disabled, he keeps communicating with me…emails and stuff. what matters to him is that Will listens to him
Lionel: Linux pre-installation was quickly the number 1 idea on Ideastorm; we sent out a survey and had 100k in 9 day. the passion was obvious. from the request to launch was 60 days. we had interest from around the world.

Q: (Lionel) with your comment about Michael Dell caring about community…I get clients who feel they have to do it, even if they don;t get it..so how do you manage resistance.
Lionel: we launched these things quickly, about 4 weeks after the request came. there were not too many other people in the company that realised what we were going to do. we did have opposition. people tend to think we are giving up control we enter negative discussion. It was a gradual process to show the results, look what happens when we blog, People are happy we are sharing..happy that we are listening. When staff see the nature of the discussion, then they start to understand.
Jordan: until 2003 there were no comm. metrics, we had a mandate that it was front and centre. we started to develop metrics, all about engagements. we use boards forums as a proxy; if you were engaged in forums you were 2-3x more valuable. the churn rate were about 1/3 for people engaged on these boards. this gives us a value.
Will: ebay and other places have a bunch of numbers that have come out…see community ROI.
Mark: we answer it the same way..we do the same thing..sometimes its like an unproven theory in maths – we know it is there.

Q: ebay is built on feedback..but it has changed and now sellers can withhold feedback until they get their positive from you as a buyer. Buyers are not represented well..so what do you do to get to lurkers,
Jordan: it drives me crazy that sellers don;t give me feedback. OUr best sellers do leave feedback and you can see this in comments. We have changed feedback on sellers, we allow buyers to provide more feedback.

Q: what are ways to engage?
Will: you are trying to get them to engage with you and with each other. there are support channels, surveys (some of the best ideas c=have come from these); community complements the stuff you do.

Q: Multilingual communities..we have 150k in 12 languages. thoughts on doing this successful?
Will: it’s always a big challenge…not sure have answer.
lionel: one of our objectives over the next year. we re looking at the metrics, seeing what is next, trying to figure out how to launch in europe, no easy answer and we keep working through it.
Jordan: we have chosen to keep sites separate – there;s not a lot of play between them

Q: how do you deal with your community trying to drive you in a different way than your company wants?
Lionel – the onus is on us to explain why things are not feasible. the worst thing we can do is have it rise to the top and do nothing with it. Before we launched, we had done our homework and knew what could happen
Jordan; if we did not let our community push up we would be a shadow of what we are.

Q: online fraud was highlighted in the media..what did you do with the community
Jordan: it strengthened our community as they have a vested interest in making it work. they help keep fraud away

Q: crisis management – what happens when things happen in your place
Jordan: you are either part of the problem or of the discussion. as long as honest, transparent and addressing issues, it is hard for community members to be angry for long
Will: kill them with kindness, honesty, transparency. listening
Lionel: I agree. we knew there was negativity, we let people air their problem, acknowledge it and look at solving..reaching out that way can diffuse the anger and we get past this and into solving it.
Will: the negative people can become your most passionate supporters – as they care about you.