Online Communities Doing Good and Well Offline

- December 12th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

Creating a community of evangelists
Integrating online and offline community activities
What every business can learn from a Christmas toy drive

Let’s not call them “virtual” communities anymore. The people interact, they speak with passion, many create friendships, and their strength together can create action both offline and online.

Virtual communities are real communities built online.

And in a time when many more people are in need, online communities are calling people to action in the real world in ways that are faster and more effective than just traditional word-of-mouth, speaking engagements and mailers.

Case in point, the vibrant online community at Willow Glen 2.0, which is made up of over 500 residents of this San Jose suburb (total population 46,782) has called its supporters to action for the local Toys for Tots drive at the Garden Theatre in downtown Willow Glen.

This community has done what many businesses that have opened online communities haven’t been able to do: succeed. The fact is, according to Deloitte’s Ed Moran as published in the Wall Street Journal, most online communities fail. And the main reason cited is that “businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.”

For Oracle, in the early part of this century, I started one of their first online communities and signed up members from over 5,000 companies around the world without an extensive budget in marketing or technology.

I’ll talk about some of the approaches we used and the lessons we learned that contributed to our success — and how all businesses can learn a thing or two from the integrated marketing done by in Willow Glen 2.0.

Creating a Community of Evangelists

The charter for our community at Oracle was to create a vibrant community for our product’s users (web portal developers) that would encourage them to:

Succeed with our product and use it in more depth
Share what they’ve learned and things they’ve done with other users
Champion our product within their company and to their peers at other companies

We focused primarily on what these potential evangelists could gain by joining our community and built a relationship based on the three points above. Each one built upon the previous: after all, they couldn’t share what they’ve learned if they hadn’t succeeded, and they couldn’t champion the product if they weren’t willing or able to share what they knew.

Making an Initial Commitment to the Community

People who consider joining a community are thinking about making an investment in their time. This could be time spent doing other work, playing with the kids, relaxing or any number of activities that compete for people’s attention.

So there had to be an implicit agreement — social trust — where we, as the sponsors of the community, would give something back if they participated.

Our commitment at Oracle was to create a discussion forum where people could get their product questions answered by actual members of the product team in a timely fashion. We used a customized version of off-the-shelf software.

Every thread would receive a reply (either an answer or an acknowledgement) in one business day for several months with the goal of moving people from success with the product to sharing their knowledge. If community participants didn’t feel comfortable sharing their knowledge with others, we would need to write-off the project.

The Wall Street Journal article talks about how 30% of business communities have “only one part time worker in charge”. They rely on the community to grow without cultivating it first.

Our strategy was different. We rotated the responsibilities for answering questions between members of the team so that everyone got used to participating, and made sure everyone spent a small portion of the day helping others so that no one person was overwhelmed. We also enlisted resources from other parts of the business in support and consulting to participate, talking about how they would benefit too.

Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Sharing

After about three months, we noticed that many frequent participants were answering other people’s questions. At that point, the time was right to move to helping people share not only what they’ve learned, but what they’ve created.

This was a world before YouTube so we ran into some internal resistance, but eventually we launched a set of “lockers” that would allow community members to publish the software they used to extend our product — along with a profile page talking about the authors.

Over the course of a year, we received hundreds of these extensions from as many community members. We’d developed some good relationships with many of the contributors and we asked them what they liked most about giving back to the community. The overwhelming answer was that they were proud of what they’d written and wanted others to be able to use it.

One of the reasons for the success was how we spotlighted the authors and displayed the total number of downloads their creations received. It was like an online scorecard that encouraged people to improve their extensions and continually revisit the community.

Integrating Online and Offline Community Activities

I believe that the main reason for our success, though, was how we’d gotten to know many of the authors face-to-face at trade shows and user groups. One of the ways we rewarded our best participants was to setup focus groups and previews for them at trade shows they were attending. That way, we’d get to know them and what they needed. This individual feedback greatly helped with broader research for prioritizing what to work on next.

A more systematic approach was to develop a set of software only available to community members and demonstrate it locally at our events. We refined the demo so that the audience was almost always enthusiastic and ready to sign up.

To capture interest then and there, we made sure we got their signup information immediately after the presentation was done. Most of these events had card readers and interested members were signed up for our community and monthly newsletter after their show IDs were read. This grew membership fairly quickly and ensured that community members knew the faces behind many of the names.

What Every Company Can Learn from a Christmas Toy Drive

Which brings us back to the Willow Glen 2.0 Christmas toy drive. This is an event by lifelong Willow Glen resident Sara Greenwood of Rainmaker Properties. As the sponsor of this event, Sara is using some key integrated marketing techniques that companies can learn from.

First, she’s mobilized a hyperlocal online community to a specific call-to-action in the real world: bringing a new, unwrapped toy to the Garden Theatre in downtown Willow Glen. She is an active member of this community and it’s a natural fit for her. I’ve seen many companies try to emulate this by trying to post an announcement without being an active community participant, or even being interesting to the community, and the publicity isn’t always good.

This good deed not only helps generate direct exposure for her real estate business, but also natural inbound links that will help her credibility with Google in search engine rankings. She’s contacted bloggers she knows to write about the event and because she’s well-liked, she’ll gain extra publicity and more links from their support. And on top of that, anyone going to the Garden Theatre building for the drive or walking past it on Lincoln Ave. will see that she and the online community Willow Glen 2.0 are sponsoring the event.

Online to offline to online again. This natural cycle of integrated marketing generates more brand awareness and exposure while contributing back to the community where it began.

Tags: Online Community, Product Management