I was lucky to be invited to attend Lithium’s LiNC 2010 Conference this week. Everything about this event was awesome: location; presentations, food and entertainment. People from Lithium and ScoutLabs [now part of Lithium] were super helpful, every single detail was thought through – from having power charging stations at each table to availability of hot and cold drinks and snacks all the time!

But the most amazing thing was to see so many happy customers talking about their successes with using Lithium’s platform for their sales, marketing, service/support communities – both internally and externally.

There was lots of excitement in the room. People were sharing their war stories, talking about cultural challenges with getting social initiatives adopted by their companies.

But one of the presentations, the one that was done by Gena Debogovich from Best Buy impressed me the most.

Key highlights:

• Support and enable internal innovation processes: listen to employees ideas, deploy the ones that makes sense to do;
• Do not afraid to try things out: do not over engineer things, sometimes what it takes is just do a trial run…
• Be smart. Be respectful. Be human.
• Listen to your customers and act! Example: noticed customers were trying to get product recommendations within communities – BB is adding option of doing it an easy way!

Selected tweets:

@margaretfrancis: The very idea that brands would show the people ‘behind the curtain’ in a mass way is pretty revolutionary #linc

lylefong: @hp says personalization is a great feature, as long as it is opt-in #LiNC

GarenTatHP: RT @AKAwillardo: Employees are your best brand advocates, but how often do we use them? How often do we teach them to be advocates? #LiNC

@pgreenbe: Most organize communities by product type, not many who org by customer persona #LiNC

Do corporate websites even matter in the future?@comcastcares says: Its more about what it is the customer wants #LiNC

@zazenergy: The best conference I’ve been to in recent memory, #LiNC is AWESOME. Great in-depth case studies on how to build communities. Love it!

@setlinger: Internally & externally, [organizations] need to behave the same way. But most orgs don’t do that internally. @ekolsky #LINC#SCRM

drnatalie: What if your business depended on internal cross-discipine collaboration? Guess what it DOES! #scrm #customerservice #LiNC

mfauscette: Social biz model: feedback, experience, end to end process, actionable insight: SCRM + e2.0 #LiNC

@seanodmvp says “Marketing measures success to get folks to contact them, Support measures for customers to NOT contact them” #linc

erintraudt: #LINC Best Buy social media policy – Be smart. Be respectful. Be human.

bby_community: RT @glfceo: Forums.bestbuy.com 2.5 mln visitors, 79K posts;12 superusers, 3 of them went to CES #LiNC

ekolsky: #LiNC – best buy communities decreased complaints by 18% in 2009 (any stats on reduced return rates you can share?)

glfceo: Forums.bestbuy.com 2.5 mln visitors, 79K posts;12 superusers, 3 of them went to CES #LiNC

pgreenbe: Best Buy brand promise – “Never Leave You Hanging” #LiNC

glfceo: There is no such a thing as a “low value customers” @pgreenbe #LiNC

Congratulations to 2010 Inductees to the VIP Council:

Mark Hopkins, Lenovo (Mark_Hopkins)

Will Rose, T-Mobile (Potential)

Jane Loyless (jloyless)

John Van Horn, Jigsaw Software (JohnnyJigsaw)

Laura Feeney, National Instruments (Laura)

Jason Parker, Best Buy (Jason)

Laura Buchanan, Future Shop (LauraB)

Christian Barnes, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (Mojoswift)

Anton Chiang, Juniper Networks (ac)

Juha-Matti Heikkinen, Nokia (JuhisH)

And:

RT @lylefong: Congrats to all #LiNC Social CRM Excellence Award winners! Future Shop, Betfair, National Instruments, Paypal, Giff Gaff & HP!

@MiaD @Frostola @LizLiz – team #HP

“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.” Einstein

Not too long time ago I had a question related to the use of some type of online service. The first thing I did – went to their online help. It took me a while to play with my search terms to finally get to an article that was somewhat related to what I was looking for. But… it did not contain clear instructions on how to solve my problem.

I immediately decided to use their real-time online chat. Well, the person who was on another side apparently was using the same knowledge base that I was searching in my step 1 of solution finding journey.

And then I had to move to step 3 – writing an email to that company’s support department describing the issue yet again. I did get a response back, but it was the same one that I already heard 2 times before. I responded. My response contained less than admirable words towards the support services of the company which product I was trying to use. Magic! My request got finally escalated! And I did hear back from THE expert. The one who understood my issue and helped me with the solution.

Just for the fun of it, I went back not too long time ago and checked the online knowledge base of that company to see if they have updated the solution I was trying to use with the data that helped me with resolving my issue. No, the content was still old, no updates.

Why I am telling you this story? You probably have dozens of the similar stories you can share with me. My main reason is … Social Media and all the hype around how great social media is for customer service support.

Your company’s social media service support will be as great as that knowledge base article that has not been updated for a long time.

Before you through more money and people on these new service/support social media channels make sure you have your back end systems and processes under control.

Here are some of the questions you need to address:

-         Do you have a process in place to analyze social media generated service/support requests:

• What was the root cause of the issue?
• Is there a solution in place in online Knowledge Base?
• Can that solution be easily located?
• Do you need to make changes to your product [UI, layout, flows, etc..] to avoid service/support questions in a first place?

-         People

• Do you train your service/support people to listen to incoming requests, or they are trained to follow their scripts?
• Do you train them to comment on why they think service/support request has been generated in a first place and suggest methods/solutions that could prevent similar type of problems to appear in a first place?

Instead of me re-writing everything that relates to Knowledge Management, I suggest you hire top notch Knowledge Management consultant who can look at your back end systems, processes and can advise you on how to set things up so 80% of most commonly asked questions can be solved online using online help. And you can focus on those remaining 20% unique “hard” requests that most likely relate to unknown bugs and product functions that need to be developed…

Going back to where I started – with that problem that took over a week to solve and all the time and people that were involved in solving it… Nothing has changed. There is someone else who is going through the same process I went through not too long time ago now… Oh, I forgot to mention that I did check their online user forum – had the same issues – could not find the right discussion and when I did, there were no solution in place either.

So please, when you finally update Knowledge Base, go and find that discussion on user forum and post that solution as well! Thank You!

After you go through your list of family and friends, asking them to join your online community, you continue to neighbors… Then you start loosing all the excitement.  Your online community is at about 100 members with marginal level of activity. Your brand and products are not well known. You stuck!

Instead of giving up, its time to re-evaluate your community building strategies:

-         Are you just talking about your company and products? If your brand is not well known that might not work;

-         Constant promotions and coupons and offerings of your products at discounted prices [@DellOutlet example] probably will not work well for your somewhat unknown brand;

-         Are you using the right platform for your community? Should you use just one or many? How to choose?

-         Do you have a content strategy?

These are some of the questions you need to address to determine the right set of steps you need to take to continue development of your community.

Your community building strategies will go through transformations and adjustments as your community will move from one to the next maturity level.

Based on my experience building online [and face-to-face] communities for very different subject areas I came up with the following definitions of stages of community development:

Stage 1 – growing from 0 to 50 members [family and friends stage];

Stage 2 – growing from 50 to 100 members [learning the audience];

Stage 3 – growing from 100 to 500 members [understanding the content and community management strategy];

Stage 4 – growing from 500 to 1,000 members [early maturity stage];

Stage 5 – from 1,000 members and up [maturity phase – main focus on community management; getting into viral growth mode].

Each of these phases dictates the use of different strategies and techniques. The overall methodology as I have learned by building many communities is the same.

The success of your business going forward will greatly depend on your ability to build, grow and manage communities.

Do not give up – re-think your strategies; do not blindly apply someone else’s techniques to your business. .Constantly monitor the health of your community. Measure against the goals and adjust!

What were your learnings from building online communities – mostly interested in stories of brands that are not well known and do not have endorsements from well know personas – typical SMB companies.

In his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School describes the theory of how large outstanding firms can fail “by doing everything right.” The innovator’s dilemma, according to Christensen, affects companies whose success and capabilities can actually become obstacles in the face of changing markets and technologies. There is no more important an issue on the agenda of top management than driving innovation. In this post, we’ll review the evolution of “innovation management” and how social media has a significant role to play. This is one area where social media can “move the needle” for large enterprises and help them change the very nature of the firm.

This article also describes what the Innovation 3.0 is.

I would argue that Innovation 3.0 should not only include social media enabled outside of the company idea harvesting channels but also the inside of the company ones.

A few months ago I invited Tad Milbourn from Intuit to give Silicon Valley Executives an overview of the tool Intuit is using to enable company employees to participate in innovation process. His talk has generated lots of discussions. And that’s the reason we decided to expand on it and discuss the overall process of harvesting and enabling innovations within and outside of enterprises.

Here is an abstract of our upcoming meetup on this topic:

Innovation has been dubbed as one of the more promising purpose-driven applications of social and collaborative technology in the enterprises. Whether as a way to encourage customers or internal employees, Innovation Programs in enterprises have unlocked critical ideas at well known enterprises that has ultimately led to the conception of new product ideas, significant cost savings internally and finally, operational efficiency. Sameer Patel, founding partner at the Sovos Group will moderate a session to highlight the opportunity and challenges that organizations face as they seek to unlock critical insight coming from customers, partners and employees.

Please share with your success stories and lessons learned – how is your company using the power of communities, their ideas to create new, innovative products and offerings.

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During these planning session I met incredibly talented people and also started thinking more about the future – the future of collaborations. As a first step, I decided to learn more about the existing space. The form below should be completed by anyone who knows, uses and can recommend collaboration tools . Hope we’ll be able to compile a nice list that will help others to find a right tool for their needs.

Your comments are greatly appreciated!

First let’s look at the definition of the Sentiment Analysis [Wikipedia]:

“Sentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to a broad (definitionally challenged) area of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining. Generally speaking, it aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic. The attitude may be their judgment or evaluation (see appraisal theory), their affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader).”

And why you should care?

Social Media and Social Networking have fueled the online space. Ratings, reviews, comments, etc – are everywhere.  From NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html :

“This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.”

We tell our clients – you have to listen to what people are saying about your brand, products, services… and more importantly you should react, respond. Nicely said than done. Simple Twitter search on iPhone will give you tons of results. Is it possible for a brand to manually look at the every single mention and respond?? Of course not! Automation is the strategy… But – smart automation. As a consumer I do not want to get some irrelevant auto-response from a brand.

Solution – analysis of the unstructured texts. Not just on a set of keywords, but also on emotions. Not an easy task to do, but there are visionary companies who are working on tools/products that can help brands to deal with all these amounts of unstructured content and help them to make sense of the emotions hidden behind customer’s feedback.

We were able to gather an amazing panel of experts who will take us on a journey inside the fascinating space of sentiment analysis.

Save the date! You do not want to miss these discussions!

How Sentiment Analysis can Make Sense of Social Media (or Can it?)

Date: March 2, 2010

Location: Mountain View, CA

Time: 6:30 pm

Overview:

Ever since we realized that we needed more than mere transactional CRM data to get to know our customers and deliver on the mythical 360-degree view of them, we focused on two areas: what customers want (psychographics) and what customers feel (emotions and sentiments).
We spent the past 7-8 years figuring out direct and indirect feedback methods to try to understand what customers want and need using Enterprise Feedback Management and Surveys. We even went as far as to adopt and implement social media to capture the un-structured feedback that was latent in those interactions.
What we discovered along the way was that Social Media and unstructured feedback can be used to analyze sentiments and feelings, as customers are less controlled of their emotions when interacting in a social environment. We tried to understand the true sentiments behind the feedback and how we can use it for achieve our goals.
Alas, have we figured out how to use it and understand it? Can we really understand and use customers sentiments as metrics? What happens when we analyze for sentiments and not data? These are some of the questions we will aim to answer in this panel including:
· What is sentiment analysis?

· Does it work?

· What are the known problems?

· What are the know results?

· Should I implement it?

· What should I expect after implementation?

· What is the maintenance like?

· Is sentiment analysis for real?

· What are vendors doing about it?

Panelists:

Franco Salvetti holds a position as Senior SDE Manager of the Reference Vertical Answer team at Microsoft Bing Search (previously Natural Language Scientist at Powerset, Inc. now acquired by Microsoft) with responsibility on the scientific aspects related to Web Search Technologies (e.g., Factz and Instant Answers), and Human-Computer Interaction. Previously as a research scientist at Umbria Inc. (acquaried by J.D. Power) he worked on projects involving Information Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, Text Analysis and Graph Theory. Prior to this, he worked for Google in the area of Relation Extraction, IBM Research on a project about Social Network Analysis, Bioserve Space Technology and various start-up companies in Italy.

Jochen Frey is the CTO for Scout Labs and brings significant technical leadership and experience in scalable systems development and natural language processing to the organization. As CTO of Meaningful Machines for 5 years, Frey managed a combined onshore/offshore research and development team and deployed over $1mil in hardware to launch the world’s highest quality machine translation system (Spanish to English, with high quality prototypes for other languages including Arabic and French). He architected and oversaw implementation of high performance, failure tolerant message passing infrastructure and developed a high-speed 200GB distributed full text index. Prior to Meaningful Machines, Frey was the Director of Technology for the Eastern Region at Razorfish (previously iCube), architecting and overseeing numerous large-scale systems implementations. His past experience also includes software engineering for the US Navy and software design of risk management tools for Dresdner Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. Frey has his MS / Diplom Ingenieur in Computer Science and Medicine from the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.

David Bean, PhD, Chief Technology Officer, Semantic Technologies, Attensity
In his role as CTO David is focused on the development of technologies that better manage and deliver superior natural language processing applications. David is the author/recipient of six patents and has over sixteen pending software patents. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the University of Utah’s Linguistics Department, where he teaches applied computational linguistics. David is a sought-after guest lecturer to a wide range of commercial and academic groups. He is also passionate about lecturing at the elementary school level to introduce young minds to astronomy, physics and other cool science things. Prior to Attensity, David was an IS director and an independent consultant in the healthcare industry.

Esteban Kolsky is the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management. He currently helps clients determine how to design, implement, and manage better experiences for communities and customers across all channels, including the new media and social channels. He also conducts research on SCRM and Communiities, which is distributed through his blog “CRM Intelligence and Strategies”.
Esteban has over 22 years of experience in the Customer Service and CRM space, spending more than ten of those years working as a consultant and advisor to some of the largest global organizations on their strategies for Customer Service, CRM and Experience Management. He also spent eight years at Gartner as an analyst writing about the future of CRM and CEM, including coining the concepts for Enterprise Feedback Management and Collaborative Customer Service, two of the hottest trends in social media.

Register Here!

In my previous blog post I said that companies have to find ways to locate those amazing people who spend hours every day helping others in solving problems. In their spare time. And without pay! Yes companies, find those people, make them feel very special – they are saving you money, ok?

So who are they – these highly valuable, hard to find “answer” people?

Why do we need to worry about characteristics of these “answer” people? Because if we know what we are looking for we might be able to find them. And we know by now that we need to find them. We need to help them if needed, support them, reward them, and make sure people know about them.

Here is my sample list of “answer” people attributes:

-         on Twitter – lots of replies; less posts and RT;

-         consistent presence – few hours a day;

-         consistent level of responses;

-         typically associated with very few areas – on Twitter – limited number of hashtags, everywhere else – tags, key words, etc…

Source: Marc Smith

Source: Marc Smith

You can see now “answer” people specific patterns you need to watch for doing your social networks analysis.

Your community will never be successful without these absolutely amazing dedicated “answer people”! Be nice to them!

What has changed in a community management space?

Before: companies were creating and managing communities:

Now: users are initiating service/support requests everywhere: on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. , forming their own service/support communities on multiple social networks:

Many companies are struggling with their social media service/support channels strategies.

Here are some lessons learned from Intuit and my thoughts:

-         Based on your products and services pick and prioritize service/support goals per social media channel. In Intuit case, #1 priority is still the internally created communities with millions of users and hundreds of thousands of service requests. The service response goal for Intuit for this channel is 75%. The second most important service/support channel for Intuit is Amazon with target response rate of 100%, etc..

-         Users do want to get support on the same channel they initiated their request at – attempts by Intuit to channel these requests to a special community place have failed;

-         Users trust more their peers for service/support questions;

-         There are many people [experts in your product] out there who will be more than happy to assist others – in Intuit case, they rely almost 100% on their super users to provide Twitter-based technical support;

-         Use community management methodology for social media initiated support communities. Recognize and award most useful users. Kira from Intuit has mentioned about the special Twitter list Intuit has created with the names of the most helpful Twitter-based Intuit users.

Questions to consider:

-         Do you know whether the same gurus who are providing the most helpful support on your internally managed communities are also providing support across social networking channels?

-         Who are the most helpful service/support gurus for your products/services per social networking channel?

-         How can you connect all the dots? How can you make sure people who can provide online support via social networking channels can connect to the ones who need help?

Few weeks ago I did a post on Social Networks Analysis. It was pretty clear from the mentioned diagram that this specific brand did not create twitter-based communities – too many disconnected dots. “Answer” people could not be found anywhere on this graph… Now I think there is a need to create integrated cross-channel communities graph in addition to per-channel social networking diagram to get a better understanding of all the dynamics of all service/support channels. Companies need to come up with integrated service/support communities’ management framework. This will enable them to provide better customer service/support everywhere where the customers are at a lower cost.

Please share with your experiences running service/support operations on social networking channels. Also, make sure you follow our meetup – we have another great panel on The Future of Customer Service coming up on 1/12.

I posted videos from our previous meetups over here.