Confessions of a Community Junkie

The value of volunteers

2009-07-28T10:35:00.000-07:00

The legal definition of a volunteer:

"A grantee in a voluntary conveyance; one to whom a conveyance is made without valuable consideration; a party, other than a wife or child of the grantor, to whom, or for whose benefit, a voluntary conveyance is made."

"...without valuable consideration..." Businesses with online communities almost always deal in one way or another with volunteers. Having been overseer of Novell's volunteer programs for over 15 years I've seen a lot of discussion around monetary value of volunteer service and of compensation. Various laws in various countries make the legal issue one that can spin your head around if you let it. Disclaimers abound trying to address liability issues, but they also address the issue of whether or not a volunteer represents or works for a company. There are some fine lines. Does volunteer work represent a "value" to the company? You betcha.

Here at Novell, volunteers answer forum questions, create and share technical documents, participate in beta testing, etc. etc. Everyone that reports a bug or makes a suggestion is a volunteer...it's just all a matter of scale. The value of all volunteer contributions could be very, very, very roughly estimated by equating forum answers to technical support calls, technical doc contributions to documentation, etc. but then not every forum post would be a support call and every document submitted wouldn't be written by the documentation department. What can you equate a bug report or beta participation to? Also, you should ask what is the value of a forum post or a blog entry when the interactions are not one-to-one but one-to-many or many-to-many where multiple parties benefit over an extended period of time?

The bottom line is that any attempt to put a dollar figure to volunteer contributions in a complex business environment would be spending a lot of time to come up with that rough estimate.

Like documentation, you know it's critical, you know it has value, you know you would lose customers without it, but you can't know the dollar figure in indirect revenue it brings to the company. You do it because you know it DOES have value as a cost of doing business.

Now if you are a savvy business/marketing person, and If you have read about social networking and communities such as the book 'Groundswell' you know that the significance of social media, hence the significance of volunteers who are advocates and influencers, is great and worthy of time and resources even if you can't supply an exact dollar figure to the bean counters.

Support? Marketing? - What is "Service"?

2009-07-27T08:54:00.000-07:00

I have participated in the Consortium For Service Innovation off and on for a long time. The organization does a lot of good work and my employer, Novell, has successfully implemented many of the standards and ideas to come out of this group which has been a big benefit for customers and the company. Since the beginning of my involvement in social media, starting with forums on a bulletin board, the focus in the tech industry was on technical support, or "service" if you will.

While discussions in forums were primarily focused on after market technical support, there always was the rogue discussion started about future, product features, company direction, company stock, mergers, etc. etc. These discussions weren't viewed as mainstream. They were always considered a side bar to the focus of the community.

With the recent boom of social media sites and the types of information and discussions that happen there, customer service has taken on a new definition. Kind of like the old definition of "organic" vs the new definition of "organic"...or for some old folks like me who still thinks thongs are those rubber things you wear on your feet, now referred to as flip-flops. Customer service is no longer viewed as just technical support and is no longer just the responsibility of just the support department in a company or organization.

Service is providing the information people are looking for. If you tell someone about some upcoming training or a conference, that's service. If you interact with someone and share insights about a new version of a product, that's service. The questions don't even have to be asked to be able to provide service. Many times I've seen discussions started by an announcement of something new (for lack of a better word: Marketing), which serves customers by informing them of options and availability. People have more questions in their mind than just how to fix something. Sometimes they don't know the question until they have a little information. The social technologies available today make it much easier to exchange information in an informal setting and companies would be well advised to take a look at their "service" and "support" activities to ensure they are focused on what people are looking for in today's communicative and evolving world.

Community: Airing Your Dirty Laundry

2009-07-24T08:36:00.000-07:00

User communities and social networks have long been known as the place to talk to and get feedback from customers. What happens when you've got something you want to hide? You can't. Unless your company has an employee count of 1 (you) and whatever it is you want to hide never touches your customers, chances of you successfully covering it up are just close to nil. What you do is use it to your advantage.

Remember the story of Miracle on 34th Street where the Santa was telling customers about high prices and pointing them to the competition? What happened was that the customers started believing that the store had their best interest at heart and it turned out to be a good thing.

Here's a modern day tale of the same thing. Amazon.com CEO doesn't put out a press release, he posts directly in the community apologizing for a big screw up. Look at the comments and the reaction he receives. I love a story where everyone lives happily ever after. Lessons could be learned from this.

In The Beginning

2009-07-23T13:52:00.001-07:00

Hello. My name is Kim Groneman and I admit, I'm a social-media-aholic. [listens to everyone say hello]

It started back in the 80's when I got interested in electronics and computers and got a good job with the U.S. Government dealing with the sharing of information [ahem....]. I wanted to quit traveling the world and settle down so I went to work with Novell in 1991 which brings me to my story:

In the beginning was The Source. The source was all knowing and all sharing and the best place for businesses to connect in a social networking structure with their customers. Novell had a forum on The Source. The Source was then purchased by CompuServe where two forums were created, one staffed by Novell employees and one staffed by volunteers. People interested in Novell would pay high connection fees over phone lines to connect directly to The Source or to CompuServe and talk to their peers and other people interested in Novell products. Most of the talk was technical support, but with the advent of offline readers, connection time (hence charges) went down which allowed for better socializing and the getting to know peers of similar interest.

Years passed and connections to the Internet became more ubiquitous at technology companies and Novell moved off of CompuServe onto their own NNTP news forum structure. This was a great step forward in social networking because unlike using CompuServe, connecting to Novell's system was free of charge (except for your ISP charges). The social networking in the Novell online forums around the company and products surged. Users were helping users, friendships were made and a real community was formed. Social networking was entrenched in the world of technology and IT at various companies.

Again, years passed. Wikis and blogs were created on the HTTP protocol and new forms of sharing and socializing were taking hold of the technology industry. Companies experimented with their use and they eventually found their niche and became as commonplace as forums. Each media was a little different in approach, scope, and purpose and each had their place in the social exchange of information. Novell included these media in their portfolio of community options.

Once again some years passed. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and many, many more focused social networking sites appeared along with community creating tools such as Drupal and others that aggregated some of the previous technologies into social networking infrastructures. Companies including Novell spread out their mode of community sharing and people were able to concatenate their information into the tools of their choice.

Which brings us to the present time and the continuation of a great journey into the "beyond the galaxy" world of online social networking where Novell is navigating full throttle into territory that is new and little is known about it, yet the field of "experts" is growing exponentially.

This is my journey as community/social media specialist at Novell. “To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.”
....well at least to try to learn from our own experiences as well as the experiences of others as we join the online revolution that is social networking. On with the show.