One of our goals is to build knowledge that can help users with their businesses. The question we often ask ourselves is how can we build a community to accomplish this. Especially when we are getting random posts every day — random because they really vary in terms of subject matter.

One approach is to have our moderators and our AllStars be ‘packagers’ of content. For example, they will mine the community for the most popular or useful posts, turn them to FAQs. We did that with Vista related issues. We created a Vista landing page that contained the most read posts. These packagers are similar to ‘book packagers’ who are hired by media companies or publishers to assemble a book — they have to coordinate with all those involved and review tons of photos and designs — and determine to proper book layout. This is complicated work and is similar to what our moderators do.

Or the moderators might be connectors — introducing thought leaders or experts to other less experienced users. Sometimes, I refer to them as Switzerland because they should be able to get along with anyone and sometimes will have to step in and handle introductions. Intuit employees love to contact users and hear first hand about their problem. The job of the SWISS is to make sure we don’t bombard our users with lots of calls from the home office. So, we have our SWISS hosts contact the user first and see if they are ok with sharing how the use the product or any challenges they have encountered.

So we learn from the newbies as well as the experts and everyone in between. The moderators become researchers too, understanding root causes and extracting learnings so they can share them with other parts of the community

Take Away Post Its:

Moderators

- Package content for others in the community

- Act as the SWISS and connect different users together

- Research, learn and extract content

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Since my earlier days at American Express (AMEX), every company I have worked for has tried to create the uber-customer or knowledge database. AMEX, probably did the best job, though. Considering it was pre-internet when I was there. They recorded the transactions of all their card holders and then used that data to develop co-marketing programs with their merchants and then tailed offers to their members.

At Apple, it was difficult because most transactions went through a third party (Best Buy, Frys and the like). At Borders, only the WaldenBooks side of the house had a membership program to capture useful buyer information.

American Online wasn’t bad at building a knowledge database of sorts because they were a membership / subscription program, so it was easy to know what area of the proprietary services users were surfing in — Even though they had the data they were more into direct mail carpet bombing and sending out as many CDs as possible.

At Intuit, we have a knowledge database, which someday will incorporate most of our user created content. Today, our FAQs written by employees, etc. are separate from those written by the hundreds of thousands of communtiy users. It is worthy trying to create a customer facing, user friendly knowledge database that centralizes all this ifnormation and that can help deflect inbound telephone costs or customers concern about controlling their own destiny, by finding and figuring out the problem on the their own.

So, we spend a lot of energy on creating a clean (good data) and useful (you can find the answer you are looking for) Knowledge Database. Why not let users do this? Maybe you have to reward them, maybe you don’t. If you are facing a similar challenge, a decent short term solution, however, which we are doing on the Quicken Community website is just to ‘grab search strings’ and display the results on a web page. But… if I stop being skeptical, I do see some strong individuals driving for the master database concept. They key is to get your key evangilists — lead users — involved in the project. They are the one who have experienced the pains and gains of financial management. Through some sort of Community Darwinism, these users will float to the top.

Absorb knowledge + Share Knowledge + (have someone else) Absorbe that same knowledge

or Learn, Teach and Learn

It is amazing how a corporate philosophy, such as creating a learning culture, applies to the community and of course, to building a Knowledge Database. Imagine what happens when you put lots of users together in a community. Certain thought leaders take the lead. Our job is to make their information available. To also let these thought leaders just emerge from the crowd. They might be a few steps ahead of the rest of the community or the contributors to the knowledge base, but others will follow. That’s why it is also good to recognize these individuals expertise and knowledge — in a particular industry, etc. — and enable them to teach others. After all, they were once the students, whether they read the answer in the book, got it through trial and error learning on the job, or just asked someone else.

I am sharing this because we have learned that it is not really useful to just have a bunch of static FAQs. Especially when dealing with small businesses — where companies are in different industries, users figure out new workarounds, new versions of products are introduced, etc.

Another point is that ratings/usefulness needs to be a living piece of data that evolves and changes over time as more and more users interact with your product. (But similar to the number of people posting on communities, only a small % of folks are really rating posts)

Make sure that the ‘Helpfulness” questions you are asking will provide useful info to your users (of course you). So, you might want to ask more than ‘was this just helpful.’ How about ‘what industry are you in?’ ‘Did you try send another users to read this FAQ, etc.’

Then you can add your ‘helpful’ info to your search results. Where users can search on items that customer voted to be most useful.

In Steven Johnson’s excellent book Emergence, The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software, we are invited to learn about about the complex engineering feats and research management of building ant colonies. All this is done with any sort of dictatorship — except for the MaMa Ant once in a while. And as the colony is being built ants are dying off and new ones are replacing them. This is analogous to the community and to the contributors of the knowledgebase

The behavior of one ant is based on the behavior of all the other ants, which is based on random events. And No one will be participating for ever. And when they leave (hopefully not due to death), others will replace them and follow the written and sometimes unwritten laws.

Johnson points out that if you are building a system frm the ground level — like a KB system or a community, there are learnings at the global/macro level, but also at the local level. I will touch upon them below and take a little bit of creative license in explaining them:

1. More is different: You need to have critical mass in order to study the colony, but more important to make sure you are getting proper representation — which will highlight the most common issues…..I guess this is similar to making sure you have both a statically significant sample and that the more data you have, the easier it will be for themes to float to the top.

2. Ignorance is useful: Build a simple system — sometimes we try and over-engineer our databases — design for dummies — or the lowest common denominator, your lease experienced user.

3. Encourage Random Encounters: Let the users connect the dots between the type of product they are using and how they are using it. We learn so much from our community about how they use our products — A great example is Workarounds. So many of them are discovered and shared out of the blue

4. Look for Patterns in the signs: You will see some common themes float to the top.

5. Pay Attention to Your Neighbors: “Local information can lead to global wisdom’ — We learn so much by looking beyond our own borders — our own websites — and seeing what other small business owners are saying on the web.

Your Knowledge Database should be thought of as self-organizing and living organisms. Don’t try and control it…(how many times have you heard that about communities? The difference here is that I am also saying it about Knowledge Databases)

Start simple and don’t try to centralize all your existing data. Let your users be like ants and work on it together, whether it is intentional or unintentional. All you are doing is providing the infrastructure for them to play and stay a while. I might be alone here — and be perceived as someone who is against extensive planning and design. Lets just say that while I believe in some design of the KB, the power will be to let it evolve on its own. How many of you are struggling to build your own super customer database or knowledge database, eh?

(For a good enterview with Steven Johnson)

When I first arrived at Intuit, everyone was talking about Process Excellence, which was Intuit’s phrase for Six Sigma. There was a lot of GE influence in the company and it seemed as if that the time that you had to walk the talk and be at least a Green Belt to get promoted. One of my first projects was to work with a Black Belt, a team leader who was responsible for measuring, analyzing, improving and controlling key processes that influence customer satisfaction and/or productivity growth. Together, we tried to figure out what prospects really looked for and what they wanted to accomplish when they visited our main ecommerce site, QuickBooks.com, which I was managing at the time. We used a Fish Bone analysis (also known as the Cause and Effect analysis or Ishikawa Diagram) to break down, analyze and prioritize what these prospects look for at the site. We broke down the type of information users needed for 1) setting up their QuickBooks software, 2) uploading/downloading additional information, 3) etc. This approach is being used to determine how we can build a useful website for our users.

How is a fishbone diagram constructed?

1. List the problem/issue to be studied in the “head of the fish”
2. Then list the ’cause’ of the problem
3. Then list the details behind the cause — if a user abandons from the search results page, it might mean they can not find a useful response or there might be too many responses and therefore, the user might be overwhelmed, or…

Below are some steps to figure out — some of the ’causes’ behind the problem. At Intuit, we are always asking ourselves, ‘what is the root cause?’

By repeatedly asking the question “Why” (five is a good rule of thumb), you can peel away the layers of symptoms which can lead to the root cause of a problem. Very often the ostensible reason for a problem will lead you to another question. Although this technique is called “5 Whys,” you may find that you will need to ask the question fewer or more times than five before you find the issue related to a problem.

Benefits Of The 5 Whys

When Is 5 Whys Most Useful?

How To Complete The 5 Whys
1. Write down the specific problem. Writing the issue helps you formalize the problem and describe it completely. It also helps a team focus on the same problem.
2. Ask Why the problem happens and write the answer down below the problem.
3. If the answer you just provided doesn’t identify the root cause of the problem that you wrote down in step 1, ask Why again and write that answer down.
4. Loop back to step 3 until the team is in agreement that the problem’s root cause is identified. Again, this may take fewer or more times than five Whys.

source: Isixsigma.com

Our Online Community Team uses the Fish Bone to analyze such as issues as 1) Why are users registering, but not posting, 2) Why users can not find the answer they are looking for (a post with a helpful reply) or 3) Why X% of users abandon the site from the search results page.

When we looked at the first one — why users register, but did not post, we came up with the

- Problem/Issue: Registered users are not posting

- Cause: 1) Afraid of asking a silly question, 2) Afraid they will not understand the question, 3) etc.

- Detail: Our products are complex ….. and users feel pressured to get an answer right away — and lets face it, managing one’s finances can cause a lot of anxiety.

These are just simple examples… try it out… share what you come up with.. and remember, don’t chew on the bones too long. Too much analysis can paralyze the team.

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6 months after we launched the community site, I was provided assistance and loaned 30 employees from other parts of the company. The goal was to help jump-start the online community and also put some systems and processes in place so that it could easily scale.

Unfortunately, I think too many cooks were in the kitchen, and that we got a lot more done — got a lot more traction later on when I was able to hire 10 employees. One of the ‘loaners’ was a Six Sigma Black Belt. While I am a big fan of Six Sigman, I think we made the mistake of over-engineering our dashboard when he came on board. Below is a snap shot of all the items we wanted to track. 18 months later, we do track almost all of them.

The problem is that if you can’t your point across with 10 different numbers (or even less) than you haven’t really defined the important drivers of your business. I guess one could argue that it is important for me, the general manager to have my pulse on all aspects of the business. I believe, however, that it is important for a community team to define the ten most important items to track and establish a process where learnings can be shared with other parts of the company and that users can either get their questions answered or obtain valuable and useful information to help them in the personal and / or professional lives. Below is a list of some different types of users:

1. Streakers: Seriously, there are many users who come on the site and just go to 1 page and never come back

2. Unregistered Lurkers

3. Registered lurkers: Users who register at the site, but never post

4. Users with X number of posts within different time frames (weeks, months, etc.)

5. In-active registered users: Registered users who hanve not posted in a while

6 High Resolution/Answer Person (Answering 50+ or more posts)

The original problem with this is that someday 50+ will have to change plus some users do not just answer posts. Some just reply and then it is up to the other users to determine if the posts are useful or not

7. Users who ask and answer multiple questions

8. Registered and Active

- Active was defined based on activity, which I think is a good proxy. The activities included doing a search, posting, subscribing, etc.

9. AllStars or Key Answer People:

- This could be based on X number of posts or replies OR someone who the community or a moderator has annointed as a person who adds tremendous value to the community

10….. WELL, I know that I am leaving out several. What group(s) do you think I should add?

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This all depends on whether or not you are a believer. This depends on the WHAT — what are you solving for. And whether or not you believe that Community can add value to your organization. Obviously, this brings to mind the tough ROI question. There is no golden answer — just like there is no golden answer for general awareness advertising. I always preferred direct marketing and ecommerce because I could track to the dime the amount my revenue my campaigns drove. I hate those ‘general awareness’ brand ad agencies that told me how much I was spending for eye ball. What do impressions get me? So what if someone sees my ad. I guess you could test their ability to recall the ad, but…. So, questions to ask yourself about how you spend your dollars:

- What does it cost to get someone to post (how much money have you put into the damn community and how many posts is that generating

- What does it cost to get someone to respond (separating our an initial post to a reply)

- What is the movement on the NetPromoter score for the site (it is tough to say that your community is really moving NetP for the brand)

- What is the speed (timing) to get product development ideas — vs. traditional usability and market research (how long does it take from the time you decide what questions you want to answer — to the time the ideas and priorities get back to your engineers?)

- What about the assumption that for each post — you avoide a $5+ call to the call center — OR you can just look at the number of posts responded to with a favorable rating and multiply that by the $5+  (it costs a lot more to answer a person’s phone call unless you using skype :  )*

- What kind of learnings are coming from the community? This is worth putting a formal structure and process around.

More to follow in the ROI section.

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Thought I would go off on a tangent for a sec.

If you need to generate links to Technorati and some of those other cool sites. Check out the link below:

http://www.archaeoastronomy.co.uk/bookmarklet.html

This guy is brillant! ….. he saved the day for me.

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This past week, we relaunched the Quicken Online Community website. In preparing for the launch, we worked very closely with our users to figure out ‘what we should solve for’ with the new site, how they want to be ‘kept in the loop’ on the launch (yes, you should tell them them when the old site is being taken down), when the new site will launch, etc. We also tried to share with them our road map about what new features and functionality will be on the site.

So, what was our internal process? Our team put together a simple database — we used our own product, QuickBase — to track items to be tested and reviewed, who on the team would be assigned to QA these items, and where each ‘part’ was in the QA process (reviewed once, reviewed twice, changed by an engineer, etc.).

So everyone on the team touched (QA’d) their areas of expertise. The moderators tested out our forums. I pounded on the Expert Locator, etc.

Key ‘posts (takeaways)’

1. Have everyone on the team and beyond (coworkers, users, etc.) QA the site
2. Count on doing sme clean up after the launch, especially because your have a forum for users to easily tell you what is not working
3. Have a dedicated place on the new site to keep users in the loop on what is going — updates, changes, bug fixes, etc.
4. Have a dedicated place for users to log issues — they can be your best QA testers (could be the same as item #3)
5. Build in some human redudancy and test certain items multiple times by multiple people
6. Don’t take away any existing functionality users are already comfortable with… but this can be a challenge
   • because the loudest users might not be using the most popular tools
   • because there are few good community platforms on the market and no matter who you go with, you will have to make tradeoff

So, we can’t reall do any fancy Web 2.0 without thinking seriously about QA (Quicken Assessements)!

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                          I will never forget my first day at Intuit. After sitting in a three hour training meeting (which we call ‘onboarding’) about the company’s benefits, leadership practices and products, my manager brought me to a meeting with Scott Cook. We shared with him some ‘data on how the site was doing and how we planned to change the site.’ His initial response was ‘what are the website’s users saying.’ Instead of just looking at the numbers, he wanted verbatims. He wanted VOC – he wanted to know the ‘voice(s) of the customer.’ I have to admit that this was very different from what I had experienced at some of my other companies, where management just wanted to ‘see the numbers.’ Since then, I have noticed that our product managers relay on what customers are actually saying and what types of words they are using.’  

Now the Online Team reports not only on the numbers, such as unique visitors, posts, posts replied to by forum, but also share the actual verbatims with our product management team….not only from Intuit sponsored online community websites but also third party websites for information about our products.

Recommended read:

Mindset, The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. It is a little academic, but is really interesting read for anyone that works with teams — with children — or with others. The book focuses on people having two type of mindsets: growth or fixed.

If you have the fixed mindset, you believe that your talents and abilities are set in stone–either you have them or you don’t. You must prove yourself over and over, trying to look smart and talented at all costs. This is the path of stagnation. If you have a growth mindset, however, you know that talents can be developed and that great abilities are built over time. This is the path of opportunity–and success.

Growth mindsets views life as a series of challenges and larning opportunities vs. people with fixed mindset who believe they are ’stuck’ with what they were born with. Which one would you rather have on your team.

Dweck demonstrates that mindset unfolds in childhood and adulthood and drives every aspect of our lives, from work to sports, from relationships to parenting. She reveals how creative geniuses in all fields–music, literature, science, sports, business–apply the growth mindset to achieve results. Perhaps even more important, she shows us how we can change our mindset at any stage of life to achieve true success and fulfillment. She looks across a broad range of applications and helps parents, teachers, coaches, and executives see how they can promote the growth

Why is this important?

- When building a team, I prefer individuals who are in learning mode and don’t get frustrated by obstacles, who don’t accept ‘things the way they are.’

- When managing a community, you see a significant percentage of users who don’t want to dive in and post. There’s nothing wrong with being a lurker, but.. I have seen knowledgeable customers and even knowledgeable employees afraid to make a mistake online. That’s why we try and provide an opt-in training program for both groups, so they can feel comfortable ‘playing and particpating’ online. On our Small Business Development Center site, for example, we created a little demo video, on how to use the site. It is not that great — maybe not even YouTube material — but it is one way to help prospects feel more comfortable. Well, at least those in a growth mindset vs. those in a fixed mindset.

Other tactics about how we try and get users and employees engaged will be discussed later on….

I will write more about this later, but the important take-away is that we try to get users engaged in our community, we need to be aware of their Mindsets.

In the meantime, here’s an interview with Carol Dweck