Reference Point

Community today reminds a lot of the Web from 10 years ago.  I was thrust into a position of running our Web team (and defining our Web strategy) in 1999.  Everyone knew "web" was very very important, but nobody really knew why, or what we should focus on.  For us, as a b-to-b business that sells fairly low-cost components and development tools for engineers at a very, very broad level (global presence, 25,000 customers, $700M in revenue) we settled on a couple key areas where we really used to web to drive our business strategy.  For a lot of things, the Web ended up reducing our costs and made us much more efficient.  

CONTEXT: WHAT WEB 1.0 HAD DONE FOR OUR BUSINESS

This isn't brain surgery, but we used the web to drive huge impact in the following areas: 

1. Reduced support costs (discussion forums, more/better technical info online, etc) 

2. More efficient/productive sales (product advisors/configurators to handle simple product discovery and compatibility, part numbers prices and basic info, e-commerce) - our goal was to make our Web handle the internal sales person role to allow them to serve our big accounts/orders 

3. Reduced marketing costs with the same/better reach (literature costs were slashed - our 700 page product catalog was completely eliminated last year, online events and webinars, banner ads instead of print ads) 

4. Intangibles (NI is "with it", they are a modern business that understands where we should be going, not where we've been, etc) 

All of these efforts are obvious now, but back then they weren't.  Also, because it was so important, we separated a lot of this activity into the Web team so we could fund it aggressively and move fast.  Today, a lot of this has been rolled back into the functional groups to become integrated with our business.   Our online event/webinar strategy is owned and executed by our Events team, who also run our physical events.  Again, makes sense, but it was an evolution. 

GOING FORWARD: WHAT WEB 2.0 CAN MEAN TO OUR BUSINESS

To me, the value of the community discussion is how do you tie it to important business objectives and how can we share best practices for using "community" to drive these different business objectives. Any discussion about "I'm rolling out a new community platform" or "what technology platform are you using" is totally irrelevant to me without some understanding of "what business objectives are you trying to drive with your community effort".  I agree that every company is a little bit different, but I heard a couple common themes this week that I think you can capture and start to build best practices around - I also think for each of these topics, you can have a parallel discussion about using open, broad-based community efforts or private, smaller communities): 

1. Influencing product roadmaps (the whole crowd-sourcing thing) - R&D and Product Management 
        - Ideamarket for broad-based 
        - advisory board for private, more intense engagement 

2. Increase your marketing footprint at a fraction of the cost - Marketing 
        - internally-driven bloggers 
        - highlighting/promoting customer bloggers 
        - getting involved in conversations away from your web site (facebook, etc) 
        - building non-branded community sites (the Dell "mobile computing" site idea, or the girl site about dealing with their changing bodies to influence them later to look at certain products) 

3. Closing larger deals/acquiring new customers (sales) 
        - Customer reference programs online 

4. In-house, low-cost primary research - business intelligence 
        - using your broad-based community to get a read on customer attitudes, loyalty, etc... 

5. Intangibles 
        - your company listens, acts on customer input, in general your company cares 

In addition to these business topics, I think there are plenty of orthogonal discussions that could be organized: 

1. Internal engagement - in addition to the obvious "how do I get executive support" question, there are more practical questions even when you do get support, like 
        - what does a moderator do?  where should they live?  what makes a good moderator?
        - what do we separate into a different department and what do you integrate into existing groups?
        - best blog policies for internal bloggers? 

2. Technology platform questions 

3.  Private vs broad-based communities 

Anyway, these are fairly obvious ideas, but I think too many business people (i.e. executives) might equate "community" with "facebook" and that immediately turns them off.  We need to start to equate "community" with "lowering costs", "expanding marketing reach and brand awareness" or "closing new accounts".    I look forward to continuing this discussion with the group of people you assembled this week.  Perhaps there is a good community platform we can all join to keep the discussions going.  

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Blogging from the 2008 Communities Exchange Summit. We've had incredible  presentations from major B2B customer community programs: Intel (Josh  Hilliker, Rhett LIvengood), Intuit (Scott Wilder), Oracle (Jake Kuramoto). Bill Johnston at ForumOne Networks gave results  from their most recent research . . .

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Just caught up with Kingsley Joseph, Senior Product Manager, salesforce.com, who created salesforce.com's IdeaExchange platform. It's being used not only by SFC but also Starbucks and Dell to attract large number of customers to their community sites, make sense of their input, de-dupe their feature requests, and prioritize them in remarkably innovative ways. IdeaExchange makes ample use of popular community tools such as Digg, Twitter, Linkedin and others.

Kingsley will be speaking at the 2008 Communities Exchange Summit on October 15.

Q. Kingsley, if you would, tell us how you got involved with salesforce.com's online customer communities. Who were these people? Where have you taken the program?

A. I became involved with the salesforce.com community in early 2006 when I joined salesforce.com. Back then, we had about 50 pages of content, mainly developed by us. Over the last 2 years, we've created a system that has almost every product manager blogging about their product, as well as lively discussion and idea communities that now span 200k pages of content that attract 100k visitors a month. We're more engaged than ever with the pulse of our community, and have found innovative ways to incorporate it into the way we do business.

Q. What have you learned about engaging with your customers? What works? What doesn't?

A. The key lesson we've learned is that it is a two way street. If you want customers to engage, you have to engage first, and be willing to take the relationship to a new place. Passionate customers expect a responsive business in return.

Q. Let me see if I've got this straight. salesforce.com both engages with its own customer communities via the IdeaExchange, plus you provide a platform - Salesforce Ideas - that helps other companies engage with their communities, correct? How did IdeaExchange come to be?

A. We first created the IdeaExchange in October 2006. Our rapid growth had caught up with us, and we needed a new system for processing feature requests that could scale with our customer community. The key challenges in feature request systems are prioritization and de-duplication. I was looking for a good web 2.0 solution to these problems, when I realized that the social news site model pioneered by Digg would be a great way to solve them. I located a small startup providing an on-demand social news solution, and implemented the IdeaExchange using their product.

The success of the IdeaExchange brought calls from customers (incidentally, on the IdeaExchange) to provide them with the same capability. We acquired the startup that had provided the solution, and we've since re-written their solution on the Force.com cloud-computing platform. It's now available to customers as the Salesforce Ideas product.

Q. Who are some of your marquee customers, and how do they use Salesforce Ideas?

A. When Michael Dell came back to lead Dell, he wanted to have the company reconnect with their customers. During a chat with our CEO Marc Benioff, he showed Michael Dell the IdeaExchange, and before we knew it, Dell IdeaStorm had launched. Within the first week, Dell IdeaStorm had collected more than 500 ideas; by the first month it had collected 2,500 ideas. Soon, Dell deployed EmployeeStorm, a secure community that allows employees to post ideas regardless of where they sit within the company; in the first two weeks of launching it had gathered more than 700 ideas. EmployeeStorm breaks down the silos natural in corporate life and increases collaboration-allowing, for example, tech support employees in Asia to communicate and share ideas with sales reps in Round Rock, Texas.

Customer feedback on IdeaStorm led the company to build select consumer notebooks and desktops pre-installed with the Linux platform. Dell also decided to continue offering Windows XP as a pre-installed operating system option in response to customer requests.

MyStarbucksIdea is an important part of how CEO Howard Schultz isre-inventing Starbucks - to instill what he calls "a seeing culture." While it gives their customers unprecedented say in the business, MyStarbucksIdea is also an always-on focus group for Starbucks to test product concepts. 48 Starbucks Idea partners play the role of representing customer ideas internally, as well as providing responsive feedback to customers. Customers go to MyStarbucksIdea, not to complain, but instead to offer creative solutions.

Q. In soliciting ideas from a large community of customers, how do you a) cull out the bad ones, and b) make sense of the ones that are left?

A. The nice part about Salesforce Ideas and a healthy community is that they do a lot of the hard work of culling out the bad ideas for you. As long as you maintain a healthy community, the application makes sense of what the community wants. Ideas that the community does not like disappear very quickly, and the ones that are ignored by most community members slide slowly into purgatory.

The ones that survive can be ranked by the total amount of interest in the community. Tie this in with customer relationship management (CRM) data and you gain remarkable insight into questions like "what do your most valuable customers want, what does your fastest growing customer segment want?" etc. The power of community becomes many times more valuable for product planning when you can connect it with your customer data.

Q. By the way, why don't you bring us up to speed on what salesforce.com is doing these days.

A. We are in the middle of two very exciting transformations. The first transformation is that, from leading the software-as-a-service revolution, we're now making rapid progress towards becoming the trusted cloud computing platform of choice. The Force.com platform that was unveiled recently, puts the power of salesforce.com's dependable, multi-tenant infrastructure in the hands of developers everywhere. The second transformation is that we're expanding Salesforce CRM into exciting new frontiers like community, innovation management and content management. We're excited about both transformations and are working very hard to deliver more than what our customers expect from us.

As always, we have some very exciting announcements coming out at Dreamforce, our annual conference in early November, so I would hate to ruin the surprise!

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