Reality Check

Cisco's Annual Tech Trends & Predictions Event: Looking Ahead to 2014

It's been awhile since I blogged, but (early) New Year's Resolution is to do more of this and *much* more frequently.

I recently moved roles over at Cisco to the Chief Technology & Architecture Office, working for Dave Ward (Cisco's CTO & Chief Architect for Engineering) and with lots of great other folks who you'll hear about soon. I'm focused on driving new software solutions and offerings to market - from concept and initial architecture to delivery. We have some amazing things coming down the pipeline and more on that soon, I promise. I'll also be traveling a bit more speaking at events and discussing some of our roadmaps and what we see happening in the industry as a whole as we move increasingly into a virtualized world where new network architectures need to connect to and drive business outcomes via new technologies (and yes, lots of software in there). 

Tomorrow we're hosting the Annual Technology Trends & Predictions Event, which will go into what we expect to see in 2014 for not just Cisco but the industry as a whole. It's my first public gig in my new role, and it will be a live broadcast event (via Cisco IPTV & WebEx). You can register here.

Dave & I will be speaking on the Future of Internet Architectures, including how open and programmable interfaces are not just a necessity but a must for today's infrastructure, and how services and APIs essentially *are* the new platform. We'll go into a few hints of what is coming down the pipeline, discuss Open Source, of course SDN & NfV and more, and what all of this means for customers, partners, developers - and even business users. That's all I'll disclose... for now. You'll have to attend in order to get the full scoop. :)

There's a great roster of speakers including Susie Wee (VP & CTO, Networked Experiences), Guido Jouret (VP & GM, Internet of Things) and Maciej Kranz (VP of the Corporate Technology Group) who will be walking through different aspects of multiple technologies, solutions and shifts we across the entire market as we move into 2014. Please use the Twitter hashtag #CiscoTechRadar when tweeting during the event as well - we'll have people responding and also ensure we answer questions post-event via that hashtag. 

It will be a great event, I promise you that. Typically this is just an analyst, press and investor event but this year we're opening it up for the public to attend too - make sure you register to attend, and get ready with some good questions - we want to talk about what's coming in 2014 and I expect you guys to step up with some great questions to ask us. Post event I'll be sure to recap it here and happy to answer any Q&A that didn't get a chance to be answered as well. 

Cheers, and look forward to seeing you all tomorrow!/LC

 

 

 

My Last Day at Microsoft - On to New Adventures in SF!

Today is my last day at Microsoft.

It's truly been an amazing ride. I joined Microsoft in 2008 to lead the Web Platform & Standards team...  and what an experience it has been. Looking back at what we accomplished, we really built a strong foundation for so many things at Microsoft. We built the Microsoft Web Platform, our first web platform that allowed for a one-click installation of all the web development products at Microsoft. We created and launched the Windows Web Application Gallery which included community applications such as DotNetNuke, Drupal, and more for developers wanting to jump-start their web experience. We furthered the relationship and got more internal support for PHP (huge win!). I got to work with the Open Source team on building Microsoft's first open source foundation, CodePlex (now Outercurve). I worked with brilliant teams to help launch BizSpark and WebsiteSpark. I got to lead efforts around the web keynotes at MIX. Oh - and I spent my first of many all-nighters driving launches with amazing engineering teams. You don't know how to truly launch a product until you're taking calls until 3 and 4am in the morning in order to go out the door with a new product at 6am that same day :)

But all rides must come to an end.

I received and accepted an offer last week to work at Juniper Networks as their Director of Community Evangelism. It was a role that was too good to pass up. Looking back at what I truly have passion for, it's really forging that new road - doing things that are brand new, creating that path, pushing the norm, and getting companies on board to move in new directions. Not only is Juniper a stellar and very impressive company, but the role is something I had only dreamed about. After ten years working in the developer community space, I now have the opportunity to really craft and build the vision, the infrastructure, and deliver on building out a brand new space for developers to connect, develop, and learn more about the products and solutions that we offer. Oh, and there's much more coming that I can talk about later in January after I start.

In addition, I get to work with a super smart team to drive this. During the interview process I was just blown away by the folks I met - so much passion, drive, and vision for the solutions and the product. I looked at a variety of roles in different industries, but this job really impressed me. I thought I'd be lucky to get the job. Then I got it - and accepted that day :)

Oh - and there's more! After almost 3 years in Seattle, I made the decision that it's time for me to be home - or what I now consider home - back in the San Francisco Bay Area. My boyfriend and I will be moving back down at the end of December and residing in Marin. Before I moved, I really took the Bay Area for granted. This opportunity at Juniper has allowed me to head back there. It will be GREAT seeing the old crew again and hitting up all the new tech and networking events. I've really missed them!

But back to Microsoft...

Microsoft has a stellar team and I have no doubt in my mind that they'll continue to move in the right direction around their web strategy. I'd like to thank so many people there for inspiring and educating me - those people who are still there, and a few of those that have recently left - - Brian Goldfarb, Guillaume Roques, Brad Becker, Zubair Murtaza, Steven Sklepowich, Michael Bach, Mark Brown, Laurence Moroney, Sheila Gulati (who hired me!), Janie Schwark, Adam Seligman, Eddie Amos, Dan'l Lewin, Matt Thompson, Neil Leslie, Turi Windsteen, Sam Ramji, Robert Duffner, Peter Galli, Grace Francisco, Eric King, James Senior, Daryll McDade, Brandon Watson, Michael Joffe, David Lowe, Scott Guthrie, Bill Staples, Mai-lan Tomsen-Bukovic, Cyra Richardson, Crystal Hoyer, Emilio-Salvador Prieto, Mitra Azizirad, Walid Abu-Hadba, Anil Reddy, Julia Tubino, Karl Noakes, Chris Wilson, Bradley Millington, and many, many more.

What a ride it's been - and I can't wait to start my next adventure!

In the meantime, you can reach me at [email protected] or follow me on Twitter @lcooney (I'm sure you'll be hearing plenty about that 14 hour drive we're embarking on shortly!).

Happy Holidays!

/LC

 

**Update: for some reason hyperlinks aren't working on Typepad, please see www.microsoft.com/web and www.juniper.net for correct links**

 

Measuring Social Media & Community ROI

A fellow social media "junkie" and I were chatting yesterday about different ways to look at the ROI of Social Media. Traditionally companies have looked at ROI very differently - for example, how much is invested in a campaign, or the promotion of an event - and then how many resulting downloads were achieved or number of people that attended an event. It was pretty cut and dry - very simple and to the point. Given the advancement of technology over the past five years and the introduction of true social media platforms, the concept of ROI has drastically changed, mostly due to the new (and improved!) ways that companies can reach potential users, build new communities, and drive revenue to their products.

Social Media and Community also affect brand awareness, recognition, and publicity of your product/service. This is probably another blog entry as I just want to focus on concrete reporting for this discussion.

As someone involved in social media and interactive marketing, this is a challenge that I face every day. At the beginning of the year, I set the goals for my business - how many people will download X product, how much new revenue can we bring in across Y platform, or how many people will join Z community to help us build out our user base. And then of course there's usually some sort of percentage increase I need to hit along the lines of market penetration or share of a certain market. Just to make it fun. From there I need to build out my plan and sell it to executive management - showing them that I will pay for a number of different services or campaigns that will *ensure* we hit these numbers. And then? I can spend. It's a difficult process - so I wanted to break down some of the ways I look at ROI and the methods I use to reach customers - and hopefully this will help you.

Here are some tracking methods and best practices for social marketing that may be helpful when measuring your return-on-investment:

(A) Community Metrics:

It's never an easy task to create a series of metrics that deliver on what ROI is here, but some ways that I look at how to measure success are the following:

- To start: How many current users do you have? What is your goal for the year?

- Measuring month over month increase, including repeat users and new users (separate these into 2 buckets, it's the only way to clearly distinguish increased number of community members). You can break out quarterly results easily as well, and alter methods you are reaching people given success/failure with current methods.

- What does your traffic look like? How long do users stay on your site? What number of page visits are you looking at compared to number of pages looked at during each visit (you can tailor content based on this information as well).

- Users. How active are your current users? Do they reach out to other possible new users to bring them into the community? (Tracking community member's blogs is an easy way to do this, you can get estimates of this number). Also, offer community members incentives for bringing in new users: a discount on a certain product or a month free of a certain service if they bring in X amount of users is very helpful.

- The pull method. How are you bringing users to your site? Advertising? Facebook pages? Twitter? Emails from your field marketing team to potential users? Partner and Channel outreach programs? How much are you spending on this and (assuming you are tracking links) what is the increase you're looking at month over month for each method? How many dollars are you spending on each method? Recommend giving each outlet a different tracking link to see how successful each one is.

- Tracking & Reporting. Use something like WebTrends to track (this is the service that most companies use) but there are other services out there that track users as well - Mint is a good service, and there are quite a few others.

- SEO. Look at SEO as an indicator for success - have you optimized your site? When you do, is there an increase of visitors based on this that are coming from Google or Bing? Get rid of those 404 errors as well - they make users leave the sites immediately.

- Finally, downloads. How many product downloads did you get? Do you see an increase to these month over month as you focus on community? How about purchases? This will be critical to track.

These metrics obviously depend on if you have users officially sign up for your community or if you just track them via how much they use your community resources. Historically I'm not a fan of having people register until they sign up for a trial or a download. I usually estimate a 50% drop-off rate by forcing registration unless there is a clear offer or incentive for them if they register. Recognizing them as active users by an icon or something similar is a nice to have, but more and more this is not enough as other community sites are offering incentives for participation.

(B) Social Media Metrics

Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Digg? What do you use to reach out to users socially and how do you measure this?  

- Running a Facebook campaign. There are a number of ways to do this. You can create a page on Facebook for your product/service. From there, you can track monthly users, how many people have liked your page, comments, and weekly visits. They'll even send you a nice report each week that summarizes your efforts here. Recommendation: Keep updating the content. No one likes a stale page. Provide incentives like discounts on products/services to keep folks coming back.

- Twitter. Period. Regardless of how people judge Twitter (many people think it's just an awareness engine) it can be used to boost your brand and your revenue. Look at Dell for example. Twitter drove over $3 million in revenue. And you can't beat those results. They provide special deals and coupons only through Twitter to their followers. You can track these results as well. Optify has a great set of tools that can help with this, as well as other social media tracking. comScore is also a good resource to consider.

- Integrating Facebook and Twitter into your web properties. This is relatively easy to do and you can track how well it works by most likely using the reporting you already have on your website. Integrate Facebook and Twitter buttons on the top of your site, but also integrate these directly into your site - have a relevant Twitter feed for anyone that tags (#) your product/service, or have people directly "like" your product on your site through Facebook. For examples check out Starbucks or Levis. These guys know how to do it right. They bring the user right to the site, and allow them to participate in the site through social media.

- Ad buys. Some companies use large campaign and advertising companies for this effort purely due to scale, and if you're a large enterprise, it may make sense. But if you're a SME, consider experimenting on your own. You can buy sponsored Trending Topics and Tweets on Twitter now. From the research I've done, you pay a lump sum for this, but you can easily track how successful you are. Facebook ads are extremely cheap compared to other ads as well, and you can always use Adsense or AdCenter to round out your campaigns. Note that all these efforts will give you direct results that you can report. I always recommend piloting first to see which engines you want to use.  On average you're looking at approximately $5 per thousand views on Facebook, and about $15 or so for the same on Bing or Google.

- Blogs. You can't forget this. Use your internal channels, your community, and other loyalists to help with the outreach. Peer to peer recommendations are always more relevant and seem to be more honest than direct marketing from your company. Give folks different tracking links. See how internal blogs do versus external blogs.

- Social Tracking Tools. Other tools you can use to track success are Google Alerts (which I am a big fan of when looking at the products my team is managing and bringing to market) and HowSociable.com - which gives you a great idea of how well you are doing across several social media sites.

- Look global, but think local. Make sure your international sites are using these techniques. Create best practices for them to use, package them up and deliver a webcast on how you're implementing these. Know that the international teams may need to tweak these efforts due to cultural differences. Ask them to track and report back to you on a monthly basis so you're standardizing on one scorecard. Sometimes creating a contest or something like this can be helpful here - or mapping your efforts to the immediate sales goals each subsidiary needs to achieve for the year works as well.

- Direct Correlation. Over a period of time (I use month over month for executive level reporting) how many downloads or purchases did this lead to? Directly correlate dollars spent with the goal you want to achieve. If you're successful in technique and seeing an increase but didn't hit that goal, it doesn't mean failure necessarily - but it may mean you need to invest more dollars to get to that expected result - or you may be overestimating your market and need to tweak these efforts based on what is working the best.

All of these are trackable and provide direct results that you can show to your management - and will help you map to your ROI.

 

A few other things to consider as well - you will be looking for quantitative data much more than qualitative. When I've worked with executives across the numerous companies, we're not looking for fluff, we're looking for hard numbers that can really show success. Where estimates are nice to have, you need to look at the numbers. I always look at my dollar numbers invested and the results that I get from them. That's the bottom line.

Hopefully this is helpful as you look at how you measure the success of your business. Feedback and other ideas welcome, as this is an ever-evolving process.

/LC

 

*Note: this is my personal analysis and research of how I collect or would collect data, and is not a reflection on how Microsoft or IBM (companies that I work for or previously worked for) use data collection or analyze success.

The Future of Social & Digital Marketing? You Tell Me.

Over the past few weeks I've been digging into a plethora of new digital marketing and social media tools. No longer can we look at a "Share this on Facebook/Twitter" button on a web page and think we're really going social - with the new tools and technologies out there we're not. Digital and Social Marketing has grown exponentially in the past few years, and even as I look back at some of my posts on Web 2.0 (From my "Why do I Twitter" post in 2008 to my Web 2.0 Predictions post) newly available technologies have really pushed social and digital to a new level.

When I was working with Anant Jhingran over at IBM in Information Management, one of the things we constantly thought about was how the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 were going to affect the social, digital, and development landscape. Surprisingly enough, this was in 2007 and now these practices and principles are now just coming to fruition. Not only are these ideas moving to the forefront - they are being applied and utilized - and not only by software developers - the end users are largely not technical.

Right now, I'm seeing a few trends from smaller companies in this area - most likely soon to be adopted by larger ones - that embrace these technologies & practices.

In no particular order:

(1) Using new web technologies, companies can now create very detailed SEO and SEM strategies specifically tailored to customers. Why is this important or different than how it's done now? Because this can now be implemented much more quickly than individuals or firms doing this with people. It's automated (with some companies even using artificial intelligence) and it takes away the guess-work. Right now it can take months for an agency or  individuals to establish a plan and execute this across websites and through campaigns. With these new technologies, it will take a matter of weeks and will be able to scale better than before. Think webmaster and SEO tools on steroids - and  automated. Plus it costs less, and we love economies of scale.

(2) No more guess-work needed. Reach out to potential customers when *they* want to hear from you. So many of us have been on the tail-end of this - and it's painful. You're driving a campaign, trying to get leads by getting folks to download a product, then attempting to figure out when it's best to contact those leads after you *think* they've experimented with the trial version enough. Or using social media to reach customers - when is the best time to tweet, Facebook, or blog about a launch, update, or product feature? Yes, we can take educated guesses or use basic analytic engines to figure out the timing estimates here, but that's still heavy-lifting and lots of experimentation. Right now I'm seeing companies focus down on how to actually figure out when is the right time to reach out to customers - using a mix of technologies and analytics engines. Right now some agencies have built scrapped together tools that do this, but we'll be seeing much more "do-it-yourself" tools and larger companies embracing these technologies moving forward.

(3) Your information will be out there, whether you like it or not - and companies will be utilizing it to market to you. You've probably been following the privacy debate for awhile now, but last week it hit new levels as it was unmasked that Facebook applications (and their companies) had been collecting user data - breaking Facebook policies. Now Facebook has pretty good principles around privacy, but some companies are in business purely to get information about you - and sell it. Rapleaf, for example, is one of these. Om Malik did a great write-up last week on this, focusing on how these firms work. Rapleaf's CEO Auren Hoffman has addressed this concern, and focuses on how the company is providing a safe environment for consumers (while still collecting data and creating user profiles based on this). Just to be transparent, I do know Auren and I think he's got a great thing going here - Rapleaf is a smart company in a market where there's a lot of demand for user data. Do I think it's right? Not necessarily, but it is business.

What are some of the caveats of these trends you might ask? I'm still a bit skeptical on how well these technologies work - and if they're stable enough to scale across large enterprise organizations. And regarding privacy? If the government decides to put some restrictions on it, things will possibly change, but that said, it *is* the internet and how can government actually control that? Haven't they tried this before? There's also been some good discussions on how companies must balance old marketing practices with the new ones - which I think most enterprise companies are doing now.

 Regardless, Web 3.0 and the semantic web are affecting the way we do social and digital marketing in a way that Web 2.0 didn't. And it's time to embrace these changes or be left behind.

/LC

 

Fighting the Good Fight (for the Community)

I love this term. Yes, it tends to be overused and sometimes misused, but essentially for me, it means one thing: doing what’s best for developer communities. I’m not talking just about the Microsoft developer community, but the community as a whole – all developers with lots of different programming backgrounds – from HTML and CCS to PHP, ASP.NET to Java – and more. And usually I find that if we can do what’s right for the community, it’s a win-win for both organizations and communities out there.

At Microsoft I find it’s sometimes a mixed bag. The terminology that I use is that we’re a huge ship – and it takes awhile to get people in line to move that ship in the right direction. Cal Evans outlined this beautifully in a blog entry recently – and I think he gives a fair assessment of where we’re at and some of the things we could do to improve. 

That said, our teams that are driving the Microsoft Web Platform are really working to nail this. We started out with a vision – a very simple statement with lots of work that goes on behind the scenes.

 

 

It’s been 10 months since we kicked off this effort, but we have seen some amazing results to date, including:

- The introduction of the Web Platform Installer (WebPI), which streamlines the download/install process of our web stack (no more 10 websites to visit – only one!)

- The delivery of the Windows Web Application Gallery with the most popular open source applications out there – for installation on top of the Microsoft Web Platform (no more configuration pain!) – and, if you have an application you’d like to showcase – we’ll do it – marketing & distribution included :)

- The inclusion of PHP into the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (we do listen, I promise)

And the community is responding – we’ve had over 1.5 million downloads of our products through the WebPI since January of this year (!!) and almost 150,000 applications from the Windows Web Application Gallery downloaded since March 17th.

But let me get to the point that I’m trying to make here about the success of what we’ve done:

With greater success comes greater responsibility. And we want to deliver to you a better, more interoperable community-driven platform going forward.

What does this mean? Well, for starters it means that we’re going to be looking into the broader community to create guidance around certain things – such as OpenID (yes Chris Messina, we’re getting there) and other standards-based efforts. We’re also going to be continuing to work closely with the PHP community on different things we could do better for PHP developers working on Windows. We also want to include various tooling options that help developers build web projects faster and better – even if these don’t come from our own engineering teams.

That said though, as my team embarks on planning out our next steps – we need your help. What do you want to see? How would you like to participate?

Some of the things we’re looking for specifically are:

- Feedback on the WebPI: What’s missing? What would you like to see included?

- Feedback on the Windows Web App Gallery: What apps would you like to see? Could we improve this experience?

- On the Microsoft Web Platform as a whole: how can we make this better? What products do you want to see better integrated? We’re planning on integrating more with Azure, but are there other products out there we could provide guidance for and/or include?

- Guidance: What tutorials would you like to see?

So the action item here? Let us know what you want to see. We’ve been pushing hard to make this happen internally at Microsoft, but the community feedback is absolutely critical for us to take the next steps to make this a true community platform.

So on that note – you know how to get a hold of me – [email protected] or www.twitter.com/lcooney – or even better, let’s discuss here on my blog. We’re open for business. /LC

 

(photo credit: Jim Grisanzio, Sun Microsystems) http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgris/542408040/

Tips and Tricks for Building your Personal Brand: An Insider’s Perspective

Last week I presented to Women@Microsoft, a group of about 100 or so women that hold monthly meetings down at the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley. It was an awesome group, and I thought I’d post the presentation here.

As a side note – I got called from one of the General Managers at Microsoft to take this job almost based entirely on my blog and also on my twitter account… so you never know what can come from something as simple as building your own personal brand. :)

 

Brand-ology:Tips and Tricks for Personal Branding

View more presentations from laurencooney.

Brand-ology: Tips & Tricks on Branding Yourself from a Chick who Lives It!

Building your own personal brand used to be about a logo, or a tagline. Today it’s changed – now it’s about the picture you have posted on your Facebook account, or the Tweets you send via Twitter during your workday (and sometimes in your off-hours!). Can something this simple make you successful – personally and professionally? How do you build your own personal brand both internally and externally through these Web 2.0 communities? Thought you’d never start a blog? Well, time to think again.

Lauren Cooney will be discussing her adventures on Facebook, Twitter, in blogging, and also in building her internal and external brand at Microsoft. Come prepared for some great (and easy) tips you can use to build out your network, some laughable stories that you can learn from, and great takeaways and suggestions for building your own personal brand.

I need some design help! Any takers? Rewards offered!

I've decided that I need to get a cool new blog now that I'm at Microsoft and I hang out with all these Silverlight and Expression designer folks. Not only that, every time I pull up my blog, it makes me not want to blog because of how truly drab it seems... and I think it needs a little pick me up, especially given all the news I'm going to be talking about over the next few months (very, very exciting stuff, I promise you all)!

Would anyone want to take a stab at helping to design a cool new blog for me? I'm sure I could figure out an Amazon gift card or something in exchange... and of course, your work will get properly promoted all over this blog as well as my wonderful Twitter account (laurencooney).

So, any takers? Please feel free to ping me directly too - [email protected]. I am open to anything. :) Oh, and by the way, it's not a prerequisite to build it with MSFT technologies. Any cool design ideas will do.

Thanks! /LC

The scoop on my new gig at Microsoft... and why I made the leap

Last weekend I packed up my house in SF, shipped my cats (who almost were lost, but that's another story for another day), filled a few suitcases full of clothes, and hopped a plane to Seattle! It's been an exciting adventure so far, full of new faces at Microsoft, and lots of new and fun challenges to face.

For those of you who are interested, I'm now working in the Application Platform and Developer Division at Microsoft, running the Web Platform team. My team (who I'll snap pictures of this week and introduce you to) is responsible for Internet Explorer and ASP.NET product management, Web 2.0, Web Influencer engagement, developer Open Source efforts, and standards engagement. It's an amazingly smart team with lots of enthusiasm, and it's just great to be working with people who truly have a passion for the community, and just "get it." It's been awhile since I've been in an environment where folks truly care about the people that use their software, and it just rocks. And, not being on a team that looks at revenue for a success metric is also amazing.

When I chose to go to Microsoft, there were a few key things that helped convince me to make the jump:

(1) When I was interviewing, I made it very clear that I care about the community first, and the company second. Every single person I talked to (from VPs like Dan'l Lewin and GMs like Sheila Gulati, right down to the business manager in the office, I kid you not) understood that this was critical to success. And that while other divisions might care about revenues or competition, our key job is ensuring that developers are successful, regardless of the circumstances or products they are developing on. And thus far, I've seen that message delivered to our team. This is something that has always been of number one importance to me, and I'm committed to keeping our teams focused on this moving forward.

(2) The acceptance of the vision of Microsoft as a more open company was crystal clear as something that has to be done both internally and externally at Microsoft. It's always been a principle at Microsoft to give transparency to what we do, but now, we're fully committed to being a more open company (as can be seen here). I sat down with Sam Ramji, Robert Duffner, and Brian Goldfarb just this week (Sam who I worked with at BEA, and Robert who I worked with at both BEA and IBM; Brian's my new boss) and we have some good ideas of where we need to go and what we need to do to get this done. Will this happen overnight? No. But the shift is happening, and I'm really excited about what we can do. There's so much opportunity here, it's just incredible. And people are committed to making it happen, and to see the change in that thought process is terrific. Please do send me thoughts and ideas, as always ([email protected]).

(3) Putting the fun back into the job. I've never seen a group of people that have more fun with their jobs than I have at Microsoft. There are lots of really bright folks over here, and no lack of great ideas flying around. This is one of the most important things I factor in when making a job leap. My first day, we actually had a team building activity (Whirly-ball) where I got to know folks from all over our division. The following day, we had a team offsite where I got the low-down on all of our teams' activities and what we're planning for the next year. And let me tell you - the level of enthusiasm throughout this offsite was great. And it's so nice to be back in an environment where this happens - all the time.

(4) Free drinks and coffee (wait, kidding, kidding). That's just a nice to have. :)

I'm excited and I can't wait to see what the coming year will bring. A lot's going to happen, and I hope that I can use my experience working with the Java, PHP, and OS Dev communities to help Microsoft build a better, honest, relationship with it's "non-traditional" developer base. But to do that, I do need to hear from you, so keep the feedback coming.

And get ready for an exciting year! /LC

PS: And to all you nay-sayers who said the weather would be awful in Seattle, it's been pretty damn nice out lately! I'm kind of glad the rental car they gave me was a convertible (my choice was either that, or a minivan... yeah).

Building a Successful User Community

About 2 weeks ago I attended the BIG (Bay Area Interactive Group) Holiday Party in San Francisco. They had a panel that included several professionals in the marketing field that discussed audience driven communities and focused specifically on community building, both in technical and non-technical industries. I thought it was pretty well done, and some interesting campaigns were discussed, including those around Volkswagon, Campbell's Soup, and a few others. BuzzLogic actually has an algorithm that will track the success of community, which I thought was pretty interesting. But the one thing that bothered me a bit was how much some of these folks were actually using the forum to pitch their companies' successes and services rather than actually discuss the "how" part of building the community.

I've spent about eight years now building and developing technical communities, both for BEA dev2dev and several Apache projects (Beehive, XMLBeans, Geronimo), and now I work in the CTO's Office focused on fostering relationships with early technical adopters and industry leaders in Web 2.0, as well as take part in some developerWorks initiatives. I think it's okay to pay an outside company to build some sort of infrastructure or website around the community itself that fosters a positive user experience and forum for feedback and collaboration, but I'm not a huge fan of hiring outside a company to find the influencers themselves.

Since there were a ton of folks at this event that asked me about how to build a successful user/influencer community and track success for this, here are a few quick pointers I thought I would share to those new to this area:

(1) Get inside the user's head. Familiarize yourself with the industry/product and know your stuff. Talk to the leaders in this area, and watch their blogs, read their articles, etc. Ask questions, and don't pretend you know something you don't. There's no shame in asking a question if you don't know.

(2) Talk to your "inside" guys. Who are the folks/devs at your company that built this product (esp. if it's a technical community)? Why did they develop certain features? What do they think is the coolest/most useful feature of the product, and why? Get the scoop from the people that know the product the best. Back when I was at BEA I spent hours upon hours just kicking back in developer's offices and discussing WLS and other products, and that time spent was invaluable.

(3) Be honest. Never try to sell a user or early adopter on the product if it doesn't have the features they don't want. Building community can't be about sales; it's about relationships. Get feedback from them, and never, never try to sugarcoat a product issue. Get this feedback from the users/early adopters and bring it to your development teams - and let your users know that you have done this. It's important to get user feedback to your product teams anyways, but also important that your user knows that you did. And be honest with your management; if there are major issues with the product, let them know. And also work with your team/management to figure out a feedback system that works and that's scalable. You don't want to be bringing issues to them at all times. Sometimes a monthly report can be useful for this type of information. And remember, all information is good information - both good and bad feedback is essential.

(4) Be a connector, not a barrier. Your job is to connect users to other users, and your developers with users, firsthand. An extra few hundred bucks to throw a dinner for users and your internal team members at a conference is a great idea, and Lunch 2.0s are a great thing to have. Work with your internal team to figure out the best way to make them available, directly, to the users - and make sure to streamline it to have it be easy for everyone. Whether it is through newsgroups, a feedback email alias (that folks actually respond to), user groups, a weekly email, or some other mechanism, this is necessary. And make sure you or someone from your team actually responds to these inquires. I'm a huge fan of free support (which most big companies unfortunately don't offer anymore), so trying to foster an environment that replaces/supplants support in some instances can be very valuable.

(5) Collaborative online environments are key. You need to have a website or online area that is user friendly, updated with new information often, and provides information in a way that's easy to access and easy to find. Don't have a website that's difficult to navigate - this will discourage users from even checking your product out. Make feedback easy through newsgroups and email aliases, and make sure your product guys are easily able to access this information as well. Don't bother with trying to collect leads from this site - providing a quick form where folks can give their email addresses will be enough. If you want to *try* to get more information from your users, most of them will just fill out the form with fake names and companies, and it tends to be a waste of time to sort through the fake names and the real ones anyways - plus, fewer folks will sign up to receive information. Obviously with Web 2.0 this is getting much easier as well. This is one area where I can see companies spending money. If you can't create this infrastructure inside your company, then outsource it. This online area is a must.

My 2 cents for now. Some folks that I think have done a great job on this front are O'Reilly, Floyd Marinescu (TheServerSide and InfoQ), and the guys from JBoss. Adding an online personality (not boring) to the mix (a la Marc Fleury) definitely will give you some good PR too, whether you love them or hate them. Because remember, WE LOVE YOU. :)

/LC