Yesterday, I hosted an online event called Business Social Software Jeopardy. We wanted to provide an entertaining way to share some commonly requested facts and make it as interactive as possible. The contestant were Jeremiah Owyang, Bill Johnson and Laura Ramos. You can watch a recorded version of the event here. Dennis Howlett did a write up of the event on his blog.

Surprises

• Although this event was designed to be more focused on externally facing social software like online communities, there was a lot of interest around internal use and even the merging of internal/external solutions
• The fact that 60% of companies had online community strategies in place seemed controversial though the audience poll showed it at 51%. The source was from the January Tribalization study, not Forrester like I mentioned.
• We had over 200 participants who asked over 100 questions (tag cloud and some awesome questions below)
• It was a technical miracle that we had 4 webcams, powerpoint, audio, and audio effects all working at once.

  

The answers

• Online community members visit a corporate website 9 more times than non-members.
• 10% of negative sentiment an online community should have to be perceived as credible.
• 60% of companies that have an online community strategy in place.
• 10% of company’s marketing budget should be spent on this to stay competitive.
• Listening, Talking, Energizing, Supporting, and Embracing are Forrester’s key objectives of a community strategy.
• The Enterprise Octopus is used to represent people-centric vs file-centric collaboration
• Soft costs The #1 cost enterprises forget to measure and plan for
• Driving awareness, generating new ideas and increasing sales are the most common business objectives for an online community
• 40% of this Nike’s online community converted to customers

As always the audience questions were awesome:

We didn’t get a chance to answer all of them, but I’ll try to in upcoming posts.

• Do you find that customers come asking for your advice thinking “Strategy” or thinking “Campaign”? (short term versus long term)
• In context to my previous question, how should an organization address compliance matters within the social space, e.g. with respect to the information exchanged ?
• For an online community, what are some of the more effective tools you’ve seen that drive interaction? Blogs, detailed profiles, instant messaging?
• How do free tools work such as google analytics for a smaller company?
• Have you seen prediction markets catch on as a market research tool?
• Rather than just open blogging, having people submit content and someone monitoring what goes up on the blog?
• Your thoughts about hiring a “ghost” blogger to represent your company (in conjunction with an IT media firm)?
• What are your thoughts on controlling content of a blog?
• So are we going to start seeing people construct bogus negative comments just to show validity?
• Can we take a stand against ROI because it is quantitative and this is clearly a qualitative realm? We need to help businesses re-frame their language.
• When starting “small” how do we keep interest of our publics?
• Manager for internal communities? Yes. They need fostering and managing just like an external one.
• Is it possible to apply that approach to internal rollouts?
• How do you sell social software when there are so many free software programs out there?
• How does one justify the resource costs for the types of roles talked about in this discussion? Are there any reports or research that support the justification for such resources?
• What are the standard titles you find for the Community Strategist in the companies you work with?
• Where do you see social networking/communities being driven from within the enterprise? Marketing? PR? Marcom? Other?
• Do training costs fall in the soft costs area?
• What are the typical ROI metrics used to justify investment in such a tool/initiative?
• The numbers of companies having a community strategy is quantitative. Aren’t we missing the qualitative?
• What do you think about having a so called “blog” without comments for an organization that’s afraid of receiving negative comments?
• Documentum now provides a release that enables discussion threads on documents. And companies like Jive, obviously, enable discussions as well as documents. Will there be a sensible convergence in this space, so that you don’t sacrifice capabilities in either the document management or the discussion forum categories?
• Putting people first sounds easy, but can the panelists talk about the cultural challenges with actually doing this?
• What are some ways to measure the success of online communities?
• What government bodies have online communities / strategies?
• How do you regain interest in an already established social media outlet, which has gone through a lame duck period?
• 60% seems REALLY high based on what we’re seeing (from Mzinga)
• How can we increase the quality of social content in terms of relevance without putting too much burden on the community members?
• Your thoughts on utilizing social networking to grow your customer base in a small business/mid-size business environment that primarily has relationships with customers managed by individual sales/account managers. How can social networking be useful to help in such situations to grow the business?
• What’s your view of prediction markets, within the enterprise and as a tool to make external communities more engaging?
• We recently switched our external (student) communities to Jive Clearspace Community, and we’re trying to decide whether to use that same instance for internal collaboration, or to use Jive Clearspace or Microsoft SharePoint Server. We are also trying to figure how how to bridge internal & external collaboration.
• Have u conducted any research on the companies which have used social software effectively? If yes, would you provide some examples.
• More openness internally – less sensitivity. Great opportunity to teach E2.0 behaviors readying folks to move outside
• How long does take for a community to take off what metrics should used?
• There is a third group – external parties such as co-developers, consultants, projects that involve multiple parties
• How do you position Social Platforms within the myriad of forms of collaboration (messaging, communications, docs, etc) without making it just another tools to remember ?
• Are companies bringing business partners into their networks?
• Costs – has anyone looked at the percentage of total costs that are accounted for by technology versus people costs?
• What do you think about the need to “connect” the inside and outside (towards customers/partners) of social interaction & collaboration?
• Is there a future for a merge between intra and extranet?
• I’m interested in ways to promote internal/intranet use. We don’t control the external community involvement in IT.
• What industries are more appropriate for building communities? Do you see any differences in how people interact in the technical/scientific space (maybe not as open to participate in a community)?
• Is it better to try to build your own online community or just sponsor and get involved with independent social networks that already exist in your industry? Which has more traction?
• Which department typically heads up social software? IT, Marketing….?
• Can one social software offering adequately serve as both enterprise and extranet, or are they really different enough that they need to be separate?
• I have heard that Social Networks for businesses can lower support costs due to self service. Are there any hard facts to backup this claim? Also, any employee retention facts due to Social Networks?
• What is best practice for providing Search across a Enterprise-created support knowledgebase and community-authored content?
• What have you found to be the biggest unexpected benefit, or use of Business Social Software?What are the critical success factors for implementing a social network in a “legally sensitive” industry vertical like pharma, healthcare or finance?
• Where can I buy the Enterprise Octopus?