(cc)  Bush)ck:  h,p://www.flickr.com/photos/bush)ck/7225994354/

A Potted History of Community Management

Robin Hamman, Director, Edelman Digital

2Whilst the focus of my presentation today is going to be the past, I wanted to start with a quick introduction to the work I’m doing today. In 2010, after around a dozen years professional experience, I joined Edelman Digital as a Director. Since then, our London practice has grown from around 30 people to 84. Around half of our revenue comes from community management and related activities such as strategy development, social media monitoring, content planning and production, and measurement. The other half comes from design and build activities.

We’re the EMEA hub of a global Communications business. Our typical social media engagement operates across multiple markets, with our colleagues in other markets delivering tactically to their audiences.

We’re based in Victoria and are nearly always recruiting for a range of roles...

OUR SERVICES

RESEARCH• Insights & Intelligence• Social Conversation Analysis• Influencer Identification• Survey & Focus Groups

PLAN

TRANSFORM

CREATE & DEVELOPENGAGECOUNSEL

ANALYSE

• Social Business Planning• Organisational Design• Policy & Governance• Technology & Workflow

• Strategy • Education & Certification• Program Planning & Integration

• Design & Development• Mobile/Tablet App Dev• Digital/Social Advertising• Digital Creative Content• Technical Development

• Community Management• Online Influencer Engagement• Social Search Optimisation

• Online Engagement Counsel• Issues Management• Crisis Preparedness

• Conversation Analysis• Social Media & Brand Monitoring • Listening Programs• Measurement Framework

We’re pleased - I’m pleased - at our ability to deliver end to end across the digital and social media spectrum. Some of what we do is what you might expect a leading PR agency to do, some of it perhaps unexpected.

Mobile Properties Internal Properties (Intranets etc.)

External Social NetworksExternal Websites

Paid + Earned

Owned + Earned

sear

ch e

ngin

essocial sharing

BRAND WEBSITES

CORPORATE WEBSITES

MULTIBRAND WEBSITES

RICH MEDIAPARTNERSHIPS

CORPORATE

MULTIBRAND BRANDS

BLOGGER OUTREACH BLOGS

ADS BANNER ADS

THE DIGITAL ECOSYSTEMWeb, social, mobile, search—our philosophy is to look

at the bigger picture and how it all integrates.

We take a holistic view of our client’s requirements, connecting their business strategy with internal and external facing activities supported by processes, platforms, and tactics developed and deployed on a case by case basis. It’s like one big puzzle that we try to understand before piecing together a programme of activities that pull it all together.

SOCIAL BUSINESS PLANNING

PEOPLE PROCESS

PLATFORMS

ORG & GOVERNANCEOrganisational DesignGovernance & ControlCulture & Leadership

STRATEGYVision

Business ObjectivesRoadmap

MEASUREMENTKey Performance Indicators

Analytics & Methodology

ECOSYSTEMAudience

EngagementRisk

Our proprietary methodology is designed to help complex organisations navigate social at scale.

One area I personally find really exciting is social business planning. When I worked at the Dachis Group, in a previous role, we actually had clients come in asking us to transform their business using social technologies - usually a mix of internal collaborative platforms and publicly facing initiatives. At Edelman, we tend to stumble across businesses where digital and social media have exposed challenges caused by the siloed nature of business functions. It’s at that point, we do what we can to fix them - from devising new processes and introducing new platforms, to running purposeful planning exercises aimed at enabling more sweeping change. We call that latter social business planning, and have developed a methodology for it.

Marketing Assets

Best Practices

Training Modules

Cascade Docs

GLOBAL SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE

Global organisations need to integrate social at scale both regionally and globally.

We call this “Glocal”—putting a social architecture in place that allows a business or brand to scale content and engagement efforts, centralise and coordinate calendars, and standardise KPI’s, social enterprise technologies etc.

GLOBAL MEETS LOCAL

Local Markets Local

Markets

Central Platform

Edelman Global

ClientGlobal

I mentioned that our typical social media engagement involves our London practice being the “hub” with spokes in a number of markets, based on client requirements. This is a really simplified view of what this look like. Basically, in London, we create content calendars and engagement strategies, which are then delivered, in a coordinated way, by our people in each of the markets. For one client that’s 45+ markets globally, whilst for others it can be a handful of markets or, in a small number of instances, a single market.

2.5M 12M 9M FANS FANS FANS

10M 250K LYNX

FANS

SHELL

MOBILE APP DOWNLOADS

PUMA

FANS

250K

We’ve had huge success in developing and implementing social media strategies for our clients - the numbers here are a few months old, with some of these tallies having doubled since we created the original graphic. We’ve also got a lot better at measurement and reporting - gone are the days when clients are impressed with fans and followers alone. Now they want to understand trends, know whether fans and followers are worth more than non-fans in terms of revenue over time, whether they’ve achieved cost reductions by deflecting customer care inquiries, whether they’ve been able to identify and recruit a high value candidate through social media, etc.

We’ve come, and the community management industry has come, a very very long way...

(cc) Crazybarefootpoet:http://www.flickr.com/photos/15198978@N04/7974395358/The Electronic Frontier

Then along came the internet - the Electronic Frontier. Described by some as the modern day Wild West: full of opportunity, but also largely lawless, unregulated, and uncontrollable... their words, not mine.

PRE-INTERNET OF THE 80’S

M1

ATD (attention, tone, dial) 6929348

CONNECT 1200

Login:

>Cybersoc

Password:

>******

Welcome to Koala Country!!!!!

There’s no doubt we’ve come a LONG way. In 1985, as a 12 year old who lived at the back of a corn field, I set up my first BBS. Back then there was, fairly obviously, no internet. New BBS services were advertised in computing magazines, on notes pinned to bulletin boards at computer retailers, at computer clubs, and of course on other BBS’s.

My Apple IIe had two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, one for the OS and the other for any programmes I might have wanted to run. If you took a hole punch to the edge of the disk, you could use both sides.

To gain access to a BBS, you connected your phone line to a modem, entered a set of command line instructions, and waited to be prompted for a password. Some of the services required payment - which, back then, meant sending a cheque by post to the owner’s home and waiting for it to clear the bank.

My BBS mostly contained “cracked” versions of software for download, but users could also create a profile (a few lines of text), leave messages in each other’s mailboxes, and post public messages on a sort of message board.

THE INTERNET 1995

In 1991, I went away to university where, in my dorm room and at computer labs sprinkled around campus, I could access the internet. Back then, it was largely a text based experience.

Shown here is an IRC chat interface and a newsgroup. There were, along with these and text based web pages - the Lynx browser had recently been developed - a number of universities offering bulletin board like systems.

My friends and I quickly found a use for these services - finding people who could make, or were interested in buying, fake ID cards to get into bars around campus. We didn’t make much money, and the risk was enormous - I count myself lucky we didn’t get caught.

WALLED GARDENS: MID-90’S

The Autumn of 1995 was when online community became a significant part of my life again. I used the University of Essex campus network to Telnet into AOL and, during it’s short life, eWorld (Apple’s first stab at creating a branded online community, which had a more graphically based interface than any proceeding service).

As a student of Sociology, I realised that this new world, which at the time had not attracted much social scientific scrutiny, was a fascinating mirror of the offline world. People created identities, trust was formed despite the lack of visual or audible queues, connections blossomed into meaningful friendships, and built communities were built not based on the accidents of location and time, but around specific interests.

There was a strong split amongst the academic community as to whether this was a positive or negative development.

On the pro-side were people like Howard Rheingold, Sandy Stone, Barry Wellman, Stewart Brand... who enthused about the way that “virtual communities” enabled participants to find meaning and a sense of belonging in spaces that transcended the barriers of distance and time. Many, but not all, of these people had played a role in The Well, a community I dabbled in myself at some stage.

There were many on the negative side, including a group of researchers in Pittsburgh who, with much fanfare, published the results of a study suggesting that use of the internet makes people feel sad and lonely.

Lizzie Jackson

EARLY DAYS AT THE BBC

By 1998, I’d become friends with Howard Rheingold who, when invited to give a talk about online community at the BBC, got me invited along as his guest. At the end of his presentation, a senior editor asked, “This all sounds great in a sort of left coast liberal World, but would something like this work here in the much more reserved UK and, if so, where would we find someone to help us do this?”. Howard pointed to me, sitting in the front row, probably wearing a hastily purchased and poorly fitting suit for the first time in my life, and recommended they speak to me. At the end of the event, Lizzie Jackson, a former radio producer who had been working for a few month’s on the BBC’s message board (I think The Archers and EastEnders were the only one’s at the time), walked up and invited me to come to Bush House the following week to begin work as the BBC’s first Community Producer.

Within a year, together we were able to work our way around a range of editorial policy and legal issues, put professional moderation in place, and develop and roll out a message board training session. In late 1999, I led the launch of the BBC’s first web chat - for which we invited Howard Rheingold and the newly appointed “E-Minister”, Patricia Hewitt, as our guests.

(cc)TerryGeorge: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30974608@N02/7804685482/

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT AS A SPECIALITY

Getting message boards and chat through editorial policy was a daunting task. At the time, very few editors felt comfortable with the idea of audiences members, who may or may not be using their real names, posting their comments on bbc.co.uk.

One of their first concerns was as to whether the use of usernames would somehow “cheapen” the BBC’s content. On radio and television, whenever an audience member was invited on air, their identity was verified and their full real name used in the broadcast. Editorial Policy initially wanted us to have the same policy online, with postal verification that users were actually who they said, and lived at the physical address they’d used during sign up. It took weeks of meetings to sort that one out - our argument was that although a screen name might not be the same as a user’s legal identity, it was something they invested time and effort in building a reputation for, and therefore was just as “real” as their given name.

We had to work closely with the legal department to work through many of the potential issues - not just libel, copyright and data protection, but also the duty of care potentially owed to those with vulnerabilities, harassment, the legal requirement to “remain neutral” during an election, and other issues.

To manage the BBC’s communities, we came up with two distinctly different roles - moderators, who police the community, and “hosts”, who were there to build engaging discussions. Our first moderation team was in the basement of Bush House, in a department called Information and Archives. Basically, staff were on a rota to moderate in between servicing requests for programme material and research insights. Hosts were almost exclusively editorial staff, either from a programme brand website or the programme itself.

We developed a comprehensive training course for moderators and hosts, and rolled that out across the Corporation as more and more programmes launched message boards. We also developed a training course for web chats - some of which were essential audience interviews with an expert or celebrity, others of which were themed chat rooms.

Quite quickly, the moderation of message boards became such a large job that we hired and trained a team of in house moderators, and eventually we turned to an external provider - in a deal worth £100s of thousands of pounds, which I find it amazing we were able to secure at the time.

This was an important development for the online community industry - the awarding of the BBC contract, for a number of years, was the pot of Gold for moderation providers.

1ST MULTI-DOMAIN MODERATION TOOL?

I left the BBC for a while and joined Granada Broadband, ITV’s digital operation. Jasmine Malik, one of the founders of Tempero, was already there, growing audience communities for Coronation Street, Emmerdale, ITV Football, and the first edition of PopStars (won that year by Hear Say). Dominic Sparkes, the other founder of Tempero, became our boss at some point in time.

Although we’d been quite successful at building up a moderation team - mostly mothers who wanted to stay at home to raise their kids, teachers, and postgraduate students - we began looking for efficiencies and found one with the conceptualisation and build of what may very well have been the first multi-domain community management tool, the “super moderation tool”, which allowed us to basically hoover up the moderation queues of multiple message boards, across multiple sites, for a single view. The tool also allowed us to allow moderators to rota on and off certain communities when and as required.

Once we’d built the tool, we realised we had around 50% more capacity than before, so began selling community management services to partners (Boots, for example) and third parties.

/join #soho/nick Cybersoc/list/me waves hello

“TWITTER” IN 2001

After a couple years at Granada, I took a gamble and joined TalkCast, which was essentially an online niche publishing start-up that had been created by former bosses of the Sun’s free ISP, CurrantBun.net. We reportedly blew through over £45 million - and this is a company that never employed more than 140 people - in 15 months. Amongst our services were blogs - although we didn’t call them that - that focused on specific target audiences including ex-pats from Australia and the Gay community.

We also launched what may very well have been the first true multi-platform mobile chat service, Textr. The service was essentially an SMS gateway bolted onto a customised IRC server. Users could participate via text message (£2.50 per message), WAP or a web based java interface. Although we had high hopes for the service, end of the month bill shock meant we had horrific user churn. The top use case, we found in our analysis of the chat logs, was hooking up on Friday night when bars shut.

Tayfun King - “iPresenter”

· first purpose built live chat studio in the UK open to public interaction

· is one of very few buildings in the UK to have interactivity built into the architecture via "thru glass" technology.

· will initially run up to 12 Live Chats and 12 Chatrooms each week

· 2.5 miles of video and audio cables, 250 inches of state of the art plasma screens

· encompasses the record breaking Live Chat team which recently logged 14,000 unique users for a single event featuring Louis Theroux

BBCi Studio, Bush House, 2002 Jordan Launches BBCi Studio

BBC INVESTS HEAVILY IN COMMUNITY

The role of the BBC in laying the foundations for the UK’s online community industry really can’t be under-stated.

We were the first major international broadcaster to invest significantly in developing and delivering community management training, and about the only one in the UK doing it.

We created, in the form of our moderation contract, which was re-tendered every two to three years, the cash cow account that furthered the fortunes of a number of UK based moderation providers.

And we invested heavily in services and technologies that pushed the boundaries of what we could do - the BBCi Chat Studio, which was rumoured at the time to have cost well over £1 million, was just one example of this. A year before that, I had access to two “streaming boxes”, stripped down Windows NT machines that could stream live video during web chats and which cost, I was told, around £35,000 each.

We also had developers working on next generation community management tools - message board software that allowed us to identify new users, or past trouble makers, for further scrutiny, for example, whilst allowing trusted users to publish live to the website without interruption.

BBC Press Release, Sept. 2002: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2002/09_september/05/studio_fastfacts.shtml

18

“JOINING THE CONVERSATION”

In 2007, the BBC started to pay attention to what bloggers had to say - primarily, that our acts of content and engagement were not isolated events that only took place on BBC.co.uk, but that there were similar conversations we should be a part of on third party social networking and content sharing websites. Ben Hammersley was sent off to Turkey to blog, flickr, youtube and tweet his away across the country as is voted in elections.

Jeff Jarvis, and others, were invited in for talks....

OPENING THE FLOODGATES

At first, Editorial Policy was nervous. Managing online communities on third party services seemed risky, and brands - and the moderation industry - we’re only just beginning to do this.

I recall one discussion with Editorial Policy in which they told us that we couldn’t possibly embed flickr images and YouTube videos on BBC.co.uk due to copyright reasons. I came up with the argument that the embed code simply created windows on content elsewhere, a bit like knocking a whole in the wall to get a better view. Much to my surprise, this argument won the day, and we were allowed to take baby steps into the world of managing communities on third party services.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrerib/3276544494/(cc) Acrib (Original by Monocle)

Now, back to the present... and a quick look at the future.

http://www.toprankblog.com/2012/08/optimize-b2b-content-across-the-sales-cycle/

BEING STRATEGIC

Community Management is now an understood necessity: An industry that de-risks social communications for brands and organisations, whilst helping ensure that, through building audience engagement and participation, there’s demonstrable ROI...

DEMONSTRATING ROI

deflecting customer care inquiries

increasing sales conversations

driving awareness

using insights to improve delivery

increasing share of voice in search results

engaging partners

nurturing advocacy

enhancing loyalty

reducing costs

managing risk

employee engagement

increasing click throughs

building trust

And now that we’re a grown up industry, we need to get grown up about the metrics we report to clients. We must move beyond mere tally’s of fans and followers, retweets and likes, and look for other measurable outcomes - tied to strategic business objectives - where we can demonstrate the value of our activities.

EMERGING COMPETITION?

There may be, however, new competition in a business that we’ve had pretty much to ourselves for some time: the Advertising industry is bound to start taking notice of brand spending in social media.

Research suggests that social advertising works - with one analysis showing USD $3 revenue for every $1 spent on Facebook based campaigns: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443862604578029450918199258.html

Research by WeAreSocial and SocialBakers has, worryingly for the community management industry, suggested that as few as 12% of a brand’s Facebook fans will see an particular update in their activity feed: http://wearesocial.net/blog/2012/10/react-halved-reach-facebook/

What does this mean for the community management industry? Ads are set to play a much more important role in building fan bases and engagement. Where Facebook goes, others are likely to follow.

Infographic: http://editorial.designtaxi.com/news-socialspend2809/2.jpg

Robin HammanDirectorEdelman Digital

robin.hamman@edelman.com

@Cybersoc

http://www.edelman.co.uk

http://www.cybersoc.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/robinhamman

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I’m convinced that there are many great opportunities for community managers - not just to toil away, pushing content and building engagement, but also at making their capabilities as communicators and connectors essential to clients and employers.

It’s an exciting time to be involved in the industry.