Using the Internet to converse with customers is still a pretty innovative idea. It's new enough to still be questioned within companies, often because people fear the public criticism that could appear in those conversations. That mindset fails to appreciate the reality of today's networked world. That criticism is probably already happening somewhere on the Net, if not on the company's site. To not move forward and engage in those conversations is to remove the company from an increasingly important aisle of the marketplace.

Seth Godin is one of the pioneers of Web marketing. He is also author of Permission Marketing and Unleashing the Idea Virus, two of the more creative books about attracting customers through the Internet. In a column in Fast Company,^[89] he takes the reader through an analysis of how criticism stifles innovation. It may apply to your company. We think it applies aptly to the innovation of online customer conversation.

Companies that are market leaders are often the most afraid of innovating. Godin cites the following examples:

Microsoft is an example of a company that forges ahead with innovation in spite of almost constant, scathing public criticism, he points out.

The stakes get higher, he explains, when companies have been successful because they feel that they have more to lose—that all they have built might come crashing down if they take a risk and change something. The fear often lies within the top-level executives who might have been the original innovators in the company but have become conservative behind the success of their original ideas.

Godin believes the main sources of criticism are the people who staff the company. Companies, he writes, "are far more likely to hire people to do jobs, as opposed to hiring people who figure out how to change their jobs for the better." Those do job people are more likely to support the status quo that brought them there. Why rock the boat with new ideas that may affect your job status?

The result of these combined tendencies to stand pat are that when a new idea comes along, such as creating a forum where customers can talk to each other about the company and its products, that idea and its worst possible outcomes are compared to the status quo and its best possible outcomes. It's an unfair comparison, of course. To get approval for such an innovation, it must promise to be vastly superior to the current methods for relating with customers.

Opening an online dialogue with customers does involve some risk. Your company may do a poor job of designing the interface. It may drop the ball on responding promptly and candidly to questions posed in public forums. The forums may be poorly managed. But these negative possibilities must be compared with the new reality—that your company, if it's known at all, already is being talked about somewhere on the Net.

If you're not involved in that conversation on the Net, you've already lost control over your public relations. You don't get to respond to your critics. You don't get a chance to win the loyalty of skeptical customers. You don't learn from their experience, opinions, and viewpoints. Do you have to be everywhere on the Net, responding to everyone? No, and you don't have to try to be everywhere. There are plenty of more practical options.

The first wave of business presence on the Web was a very expensive and very visible experiment. Some people made a lot of money and more people lost a lot of money, but there was much to be learned in this first venture into such an interactive and public environment. One lesson was that the companies that took the best advantage of the Web's interactive properties to build relationships with customers stood the best chance of surviving the experimental stage. Two well-known survivors have included conversations among their customers as vital elements of their online presence and branding identities.

While most of the new pure play Internet companies were burning through their venture capital building name recognition, the established brick-and-mortar companies were learning and adapting. They were leveraging their brands and the loyalty of their customers as they tried to figure out their place in relationship to the Web and how to change their strategies to make the best use of it. Some sooner than others, they began to buy domain names, build home pages, and establish a presence on the Web. The smartest of them observed and learned from the waves of new companies as they spent gobs of money attempting to use the Web to provide better service to retail markets, selling everything from pet food to software to automobiles.

The lesson these observers learned is that customers and their loyalty can't be bought through advertising; they must be earned through service. Relationships grow out of trust, and a customer's relationship with a business grows largely out of the perception that the business is sincere in its efforts to please. If customers see steady improvement in the way they are treated (and spoken to) by the business, they are likely to remain customers. The Web provides a convenient way for many companies to speak to and listen to many customers.

It's not a very complex formula, yet so many first-wave companies failed to connect with their user-customers that the exceptions stand out. Companies that relied on advertising, for both revenue and for branding purposes, did not attract large enough loyal followings to make a profit. Companies that emphasized customer relations as essential to their business models tended to build loyal markets that carried them through as they trimmed expenses.

If you ask consumers today which dot coms have survived the great downfall of 2000-2001, most—even those who have never shopped on the Web—will probably include eBay (www.ebay.com) and Amazon.com. Those two companies stand out not only for their name recognition but because they have provided two of the most successful models for businesses relating with customers through the Web. We'll describe how they each use conversational techniques later in this chapter, but both of these companies illustrate a third lesson of the dot-com experiment: Act on what customers tell you and make it easy for them to reach you with their input.

Unlike the B2C models of eBay and Amazon.com, the early B2B models for the Web looked to eliminate inefficiencies in how companies dealt with suppliers, buyers, and partners. The idea of online business exchanges grew out of the recognition that old processes had become more and more inefficient over time; they had failed to adapt. Customer tastes were changing faster than new products could be designed, assembled, and provided. By the time products came to market, tastes had changed and competitors had altered the market. Companies found themselves stuck with large inventories; they had too little time to get competitive bids on supplies; competition was fierce to innovate faster and cut costs.

The relationship between businesses is different in quality and purpose from that between businesses and their customers. However, there is still a need for communication and trust that the software interfaces of most online exchanges do not support. Lessons have been learned here, too, in the wreckage of many first-wave ventures.

Exchanges were envisioned as open marketplaces on the Web where multiple buyers and sellers could find one another through a common interface and where the bidding, ordering, procurement, and shipping processes could be made more efficient to fit just-in-time manufacturing models. Parts could be bought more cheaply and quickly, inventories could be kept low, and shipping could be tracked more accurately; business, legal, and transactional standards could be followed. Exchanges were meant to be online shortcuts in the normal flow of business.

VerticalNet and the Community Theme

VerticalNet (www.verticalnet.com) was founded and designed to provide a software platform to build portals to serve any vertical marketplace. Besides tools for all of the processes involved in procurement and selling, its interface included features to support conversation and relationship building among participants. An editor would be hired to manage content for each vertical market place, and a message board was provided for use as a knowledge-sharing forum. VerticalNet almost got it right by providing a framework that could be used by many different markets, but its timing and execution haven't yet brought the success its founders had hoped for. It has upgraded its process-oriented features to include what it calls "Strategic Sourcing, Collaborative Planning and Order Management," but most of its clients have yet to make optimum use of the site's message boards.

In VerticalNet's portal for aerospace buyers and sellers, shown in Figure 9.1, the community forum appears to be a quiet place in spite of the good selection of resources. Note the few discussions and old dates of last responses. A perusal of other VerticalNet exchanges shows this lack of participation to be pretty typical. One possible reason for the slow adoption of VerticalNet's message board could be gleaned from a study done by IDC, discussed in Cahners-Interstat,^[91]of the acceptance of knowledge management practices across many vertical industries.

Figure 9.1. VerticalNet's exchange portal for aerospace buyers and sellers.

Reprinted by permission 2002 Vert Tech LLC. All rights reserved.

In an industry survey of companies serving 13 specific vertical market segments plus a category for "other," it was found that 10 of the 14 groups named "nonsupportive culture" as one of the two top challenges to implementing KM. Participation in the parts of the business exchange that involve person-to-person learning, as opposed to those that lead to closing deals and simplifying supply chain management, may not be deemed culturally important.

The study also concluded, "KM customers want to establish best practices to retain expertise, particularly related to customer support." So it may be that a platform such as VerticalNet can overcome cultural resistance to using its discussion boards by providing forums where users of the vertical portal discuss best practices discovered in putting the business tools to use.

Like many Web-based ventures from the 1990s, VerticalNet was early for its market, and in attempting to serve dozens of vertical marketplaces with one service, it may have overreached. But its founders understood the importance of social interaction in establishing a trusted trading environment. Vertical marketplaces define communities of interest. Those communities gather at conferences and trading conventions all the time. The challenge is not in proving to them that conversation is a valuable part of doing business; it's in convincing them that conversation in the online business exchange will work for them.

As the research paper cited earlier indicates, providers of business exchange sites need to be more selective in providing access to the exchange. Vendors and buyers must be committed to responding to transactions and interaction once they are members. And users—the buyers and sellers—need to learn how to maximize the potential benefits of their membership by understanding how the exchange can make a positive difference in their bottom lines.

Many people regard eBay as a consumer's business exchange. In our description of eBay later in this chapter, we point out the importance of building a culture of trust and open interaction among traders and between traders and site management. Marketplaces have their own cultures that define the rules of transaction and sustain their activity. Until business exchanges attract enough traffic and begin establishing social networks, most companies will continue to rely on traditional means of dealing with buyers and sellers, communicating through phone, fax, and email.

Businesses (and increasingly nonprofit organizations) spend tons of money learning about their customers' preferences and habits. For years, they've spent it on marketing studies, surveys, and focus groups. They once believed that conducting such research through the Net would yield invalid results; the population would be skewed toward the demographic groups who were more likely to be online. But now the online population is far more representative of the population as a whole than it was then. Online market research has arrived and is here to stay.

Recipio (www.recipio.com) provides what it describes as "the only Web-based customer relationship intelligence solution that allows leading companies to aggregate customer dialogue and turn the voice of their customers, employees and partners into a strategic asset." It may not be the "only" such solution, but in an article about the impact of online research,^[92] John Ellis described how Procter & Gamble—"the biggest buyer of market-research services in the world"—uses Recipio's software to support online surveys and customer participation in discussion, advisory boards, focus groups, and collaborative product design.

Hallmark's Community of Ideas

Hallmark, of greeting card fame, is another pioneer in using online conversation among customers as a strategic tool. To collect customer insights, Hallmark developed the Idea Exchange. In an interview provided for its software provider, Communispace,^[93] Tom Brailsford, head of Hallmark's Knowledge Leadership Team, explains the genesis of Idea Exchange.

Brailsford had long been involved in consumer research and "the voice of the marketplace" and had observed how technology developed for doing surveys on the Internet. He wondered if there was a way to use technology to get closer to consumers and to change the interaction from the episodic process of repeatedly asking a question, then doing a study, and then getting an answer, to a more ongoing conversation with the marketplace.

Hallmark understood that consumers are a constituency that companies sell to but not a group that companies actively involve on an ongoing basis with product development or other internal knowledge-based processes. Hallmark decided to allow its customers to become involved, and it set up the consumer communities of Idea Exchange to use as an experimental research tool.

Figure 9.2. Procter & Gamble's variety of customer feedback formats.

© Procter & Gamble

At first, Brailsford wanted to recruit volunteers to participate in this experiment and call them Honorary Hallmark Employees, but the company finally settled on calling them Consumer Consultants. Tom's group recruited the first 100 volunteers by contacting some people who had made purchases on the Hallmark Web site and calling some on the telephone. The volunteers were asked if they would like to participate—to answer questions and share their thoughts, feelings, and opinions about Hallmark products and ideas.

It was originally assumed that Hallmark would have to provide incentives for people to participate, and an elaborate incentive system was devised. They were surprised to find that people would have participated with no incentives at all because they were so happy—in fact, they were "starved"—to get the chance to have an active voice in a company they liked. The Idea Exchange is managed as a facilitated community. The facilitator, who helps guide discussion, is known to members of the community, and the members have become familiar with one another. The Exchange, as of the interview, had 200 members and would not be allowed to grow beyond that size in order to maintain that familiar atmosphere, but other communities were being planned.

Tom Brailsford is a member of the Conference Board Council on Knowledge Management and Learning Organizations and is a member of the advisory board of the "Mind of the Market Lab" at Harvard Business School. As he explains it, online consumer communities are appropriate for all companies because consumers these days feel a disenfranchisement from companies. He points out that consumers say they have a lot of information and ideas to contribute, and they emphasize to companies, "we're not dummies."

Brailsford believes that companies tend to see themselves in a sort of parent-child relationship with their customers, which does not motivate the customer to share knowledge with the company. Hallmark sees the relationship as more of a triangular system, consisting of feedback from the consumers to the company, news updates and information from the company to the consumers, and an ongoing relationship among the consumers themselves. This latter component has proven to be a big selling point in convincing consumers to participate and has resulted in participants telling their friends and family about the consumer communities. Now there are waiting lists of customers who want to sign up to be Consumer Consultants in Hallmark's expansion of new communities in the Idea Exchange.

The field (let's call it an industry) of customer relationship management (CRM) has focused company attention on using network capabilities to learn more about customers. As one of the first special applications to branch off from knowledge management, CRM seeks to use all available information about customer behaviors and interaction with the company to build better profiles of typical and (especially) high-value customers. Using those profiles, the company can better predict customer behaviors and, by improving its customer service, increase high-value customer loyalty.

The rise of e-commerce exposed organizations to the new phenomenon of a Net-savvy marketplace. Consumers, on their own, gathered on publicly accessible community sites to discuss topics of common interest. Many of those discussions contained veins of pure marketing gold in conversations, observations, and opinions that would have been of interest to almost every business, cause, and profession that cared to know what its customers, constituents, and colleagues valued. Yet for years, public online discussions went unnoticed by businesses preoccupied with figuring out how to effectively market themselves through the Web environment. Those were the years of blind faith in banner ads.

Citizen-consumers found each other online to converse about health and medical frustrations; they swapped opinions about cars, fashion, music, technology, current events, and celebrities. They emailed each other links to recommended Web sites. A microbudget movie, The Blair Witch Project, rode a tsunami of brilliant guerilla-marketed Internet buzz to a record profit margin. Viral marketing enlisted interpersonal relationships to spread the word about notable products such as Napster, the peer-to-peer software that enabled millions of music fans to download from one another's PCs. Relationships built entirely through online conversation formed the bases of networked, interrelated online communities. Through the Web, people were telling each other what they liked, what they didn't like, and why. The Web has become the world's biggest ever word-of-mouth network, where keyboards rather than mouths spread the word.

Before the Web came to prominence, companies accepted surveys, focus groups, and polls as "good enough" means for assessing consumer preferences. But those measuring tools missed not only the passion and analysis that many consumers devote to products; they missed the reciprocal relationship that more conversational formats could provide. The nature of an ongoing conversation is to lead what might be a single idea and a single response into a deeper, more detailed interaction. A few intrepid companies and entrepreneurs recognized this kind of conversation happening in public chat rooms and message boards and decided to help facilitate it.

Pioneering companies, including those we mentioned earlier, found it quite natural to engage with their customers online because many of them shared the same skills and professions as the engineers or programmers who designed the company's products. So, as we describe later in the chapter, Sun Microsystems was one of the first examples of a business supporting a strategic online customer community. But people by the thousands already had begun engaging with each other around products of common interest in spontaneous communities not related to any specific companies.

If any pure play Web business model stands as an example of perfect adaptation to the networked environment, it is eBay. Employing the Web's speed and ability to organize information and to support a product display and bidding process, it provides a virtual flea market interface, where anyone can register and sell goods for the highest offer. The main technological features of eBay are its categorized auction interface and the tools it provides for personalization and reporting the trustworthiness of participants in its marketplace. One personalization feature, illustrated in Figure 9.3, is the eBay member's My eBay page. The one pictured is of the author's personal page, showing how it keeps track of auction items of interest, items being bid on, and items on which the member has made winning bids. The tracking tools encourage involvement by active traders. The power of the individual member is enhanced by such features, but as its CEO, Meg Whitman testifies, the not-so-secret secret of eBay's success is in its support of community.

Community drives eBay's word-of-mouth marketing and its rapid adaptation to customer needs and preferences. It has built its reputation and its base of regular members through grass-roots selling and buying, and it's in the interest of members to attract new members and expand the marketplace in which they trade.

Many other auction sites, including Yahoo!Auctions, have been launched on the Web, and software platforms for supporting the auction model have been produced and sold, but eBay distinguished itself early in its history by deciding to steer many of its decisions based on the input of its members. Mary Lou Song was the third employee at eBay, and when she joined the company in 1996, it had 15,000 members; it now claims over 16 million. Song helped develop its young community, building the cooperative relationship between the community and the company through combining traditional product marketing—to attract the right people, with online community marketing to win their loyalty once they had joined. Her goal was, and still is, to make membership a fun and safe experience.

Figure 9.3. The author's My eBay page

Reproduced with the permission of eBay Inc. © eBay Inc. All rights reserved.

For the designers of both the interface and the business process (a company spared of the obligations to handle merchandise or shipping), eBay was an ongoing learning experience based on conscientious customer listening. And for the community managers like Song, the community was a source of essential feedback and an audience that needed to be kept informed. Even policy questions— an area usually dealt with by companies in locations far beyond the reach of customers—have been brought into the public forum as shown in Figure 9.4.

Figure 9.4. Members discuss policies and agreements on eBay.

Reproduced with the permission of eBay Inc. © eBay Inc. All rights reserved.

Through experience and attention, eBay has learned the following important lessons about including their members in decisions that affect their buying and selling activities:

Because of the open nature of its auction activity, eBay is frequently in the news for the items that some people attempt to sell—from bogus famous paintings to human organs. At one point, the company instituted a policy of not permitting the sale of firearms. It did this for its own ethical reasons but failed to include its members in the deliberative process before making the announcement. It learned from indignant customer reactions that, even in cases where its corporate mind was made up, it needs at least to confer with its member population before implementing a policy change.

The auctions on eBay also have been subject to occasional fraudulent behavior over the years such as sellers taking the money and not delivering the goods and buyers receiving the goods and not sending the money. At times, goods sold were not delivered as described. The software, in combination with the participation of members, has attempted to address these betrayals of trust by providing a means for members to assign other members a feedback rating based on the total of positive, negative, and neutral reviews of their transactions.

A prospective buyer will want to see the feedback profile of the person selling an item. The rating page will show the number of positive, negative, and neutral ratings given to the seller over the past 6 months and will display any comments written about the seller by people who have bought from him. Still, there is the possibility of fraud, as shills—associates of the seller or phony members created by the seller—might be providing the positive ratings. So eBay has devised more comprehensive fraud protection: insurance that will reimburse members a portion of the money they lose in a bad transaction (see Figure 9.5). Fraud had been perpetrated on eBay members on several very publicly visible occasions, so the company chose to address it head-on in discussions with members and in this policy.

Though eBay began as what would be considered a trading site, where individuals sold items to each other as if it were a virtual yard sale, it has adapted its technology and its culture to include retail sales, where companies offer goods for sale beginning at set prices. The trust-enhancing qualities of its community approach have been extended to cover small to large businesses, and many of the original individuals who once sold the occasional item now make their livings by selling through eBay. The culture has evolved, but the focus has continued to be on maintaining a trusted marketplace through encouraging conversation among members and between members and the eBay staff.

Figure 9.5. Fraud protection: another important trust reinforcement feature of eBay.

Reproduced with the permission of eBay Inc. © eBay Inc. All rights reserved..

We've used Cisco's NetPro community as a case study in previous chapters. Here we use it as an example of a company creating a place on its Web site to attract a specific group that already has an established, unaffiliated meeting place. In Cisco's case, the group consists of the networking professionals that install, configure, and maintain the kind of technology Cisco provides.

As we've noted previously, technical communities were the first ones to form on computer-mediated networks. Technicians just happened to be the people designing and building the networks, so it's natural that they were the first ones to inhabit them. To this day, technical people naturally form online communities to share knowledge, mostly using email or the conventions of Usenet. One newsgroup, comp.dcom.vpn, is all about virtual private networking (VPN), the technology that allows employees to connect to the corporate intranet through a secure remote modem connection. In this newsgroup, networking professionals exchange knowledge about VPN, and it doesn't matter what company they work for.

Cisco produces and sells VPN technology and equipment for many other aspects of Internet and intranet functionality. The company wanted to attract the same professionals who were using comp.dcom.vpn and other online communities to discuss networking hardware. They had to offer incentives to get them to change their behavior; most workers don't have the time or social bandwidth to be members of more than one community addressing a single interest. Cisco's main appeal was its status as the largest producer of networking equipment in the world. Since some of that equipment was regarded as the global standard for Internet connectivity, the promise of learning more about Cisco equipment and having a closer relationship to Cisco was important, career-wise, to many of the targeted professionals.

Similar situations can be found today among companies and professionals whose products and interest lie outside the technical realm. Users of products— cars, bikes, gardening equipment, stereo equipment—gather spontaneously on the Web, and the makers of the products they're talking about invite them to gather on their product support sites. If the conversation switches venue from the nonaffiliated message board to the company-sponsored message board, the context changes. The meeting place is no longer spontaneous and independent but is created, owned, managed, and maintained by the company.

A professional community, once it convenes on the company site, stands to lose some of its autonomy and ability to self-govern. The company, meanwhile, takes on a new obligation: to provide the meeting space while keeping the professionals happy with the trade-off they have made. Both the company and the professional community are seeking an arrangement of mutual benefit.

Cisco was cautious in its approach to the networking professionals. It first attempted to attract attention and stir interest by staging online events: slide presentations with live audio featuring product managers and engineers representing its VPN team. These experts answered questions from a moderator and from the online audience. Out of those events, Cisco identified professionals who registered and posed questions and then contacted them about becoming founding members of its planned discussion community.

As the initial online interface was designed and the back end of the system was assembled, the decision was made to begin the community with a narrow focus, VPN, but to be ready to expand into other technical topics likely to be of interest. IP telephony was one alternative and security was another. The system was launched with a small population that helped Cisco's community team iron out the bugs in the interface. As the design was tuned, more participants arrived and the community began to grow, driven by word of mouth. Cisco learned to manage the community to the satisfaction of its members.

Now the Networking Professionals Connection is a lively knowledge exchange where the professionals learn from one another and Cisco learns from their conversations. Members can choose from a variety of activities and information resources (see Figure 9.6) and are invited to submit input to Cisco about the community, its design, and its administration. The NetPro community, as it's called, began with one main topic: virtual private networking. As the community expresses its interest in other topics, the focus of the community is expanded. As Figure 9.6 shows, there are now topics on emerging technologies.

Figure 9.6. Cisco's Networking Professionals Connection home page

© Cisco Systems

Michael Ruettgers, president and CEO of EMC Corporation, a $4-billion provider of intelligent enterprise storage systems, software, and services, claims to be "relentless" in keeping up to date with what his customers want and value. The challenge, as he describes it in an article on the Chief Executive Web site,^[97] is in implementing practices to learn from customers "consistently and methodically." In answer to that challenge, his company follows four principles, which he claims "not only look outward to our customers, but also bring customers into the heart of our product development process."

The first principle is that customer closeness should start in the boardroom. At EMC, the chairman and founder, even though retired from management activities, spends considerable time meeting with customers one-on-one and in "chairman's dinners." By getting customers—from the easy-to-please variety to the most demanding—to confide in him, he learns about what they really need and care about. His obsession with knowing the customer has rubbed off on upper management and the entire organization. The need to get closer with all of the company's customers has led to the development of IT systems and online means for finding out what they want.

The second principle is to create a customer trust loop, which involves "listening, responding, validating, refining, revalidating, delivering, fine-tuning— and then repeating the process. Only through constantly going through this loop will the organization know that its perspective of what the customer wants is, indeed, the customer's perspective. In our experiences managing online communities, we have kept this trust loop going continually, listening and then validating, acting on suggestions and then asking customers, "Is this what you meant?" Just as you would with your employees, you keep the communications channels open and respond promptly to input. Only by staying responsive and delivering on the suggestions you are hearing from customers can you win and maintain their trust and valuable feedback.

As eBay does, EMC invites customers that it identifies as highly motivated to come to its headquarters and meet intensively with EMC executives and managers, who listen to what they have to say and then go through the response-validation-refinement loop to make sure the customers' needs are truly understood. This is face-to-face stuff, where relationships are built that will remain strong when the communication reverts to virtual channels. A core of loyal customers who understand the sincerity and motivations of the company can be a strong influence on the majority of online customers, who may only know the company through conversation on the Net.

The third principle followed at EMC is to strike a balance between leading the customers and following their leads. As Ruettgers points out, it was not customer leadership that brought the invention of the electric light, the laser, intermittent wipers, and the minivan. The same could be said for the World Wide Web. Customers tend to ask for refinement and improvement in what they already have. They want things to be faster, cheaper, easier to use. But innovators within companies need the input of customers to know if the products they are developing are on the right track for usability, convenience, and design. Likewise, companies need to be able to collaborate with their suppliers in designing parts and components as new products are created.

Investing for customer activism is EMC's fourth principle. The investment is in terms of executive involvement, primarily, for the CEO can create a tone in the organization that is welcoming to customer input and fosters strong relationships between the company and its customers. The investment also includes making it as easy as possible for customers to provide input into the product design process. The company invests in quick turnaround of product improvements that are suggested by customers. And it invests in providing products that have been well thought-out concerning the customer's life cycle with their products, simplifying their purchase, use, and upgrading. EMC believes in reinforcing the innovative intelligence of its customers and investing to tap into that resource.

Observant pundits and analysts recognized the rise of spontaneous consumer communities as soon as they began forming on the Web. One of the first attempts to aggregate communities and content according to special interest was called The Mining Company. It provided a template for building focused Web sites and invited people with experience and expertise in a subject area to become a combination online community leader and editor, organizing the sites, linking to relevant information, providing original content, and managing online conversation. These so-called guides were paid a percentage of the company's advertising revenue, and the best sites became known as expert knowledge-sharing communities where users exchanged techniques and opinions about various products. The company later changed its name to About.com (www.about.com) and still stands as a good example of what user-driven portals can be.

Topic-focused communities on About.com cover hundreds of hobbies, interests, skills, and fields of knowledge. Included in the site's contents and discussions are thousands of products and services that serve these subject areas and attract people with varying amounts of expertise. A visit to the Fresh Water Aquarium community reveals product reviews and online discussions about different types of fish, tanks, water conditioning, and diseases. The experience represented by participants is much broader than could be found on any one product provider's site. But product review is not the main mission of About.com. Other Web sites have been created to specialize in that area.

In 1998, Consumer Review magazine brought its professional product testing and evaluation services online as ConsumerREVIEW.com. Through the Web, it began accepting input from paying subscribers to complement its own objective studies and ratings. In 1999, Epinions.com (see Figure 9.7) was launched to provide a specially designed gathering place for people to submit their own reviews and ratings of products and to research what others thought about those and other products or services. The Epinions interface allows every registered member to build a personal Web of Trust made up of credible reviewers and the people who also find them credible. Trust is important to offset any mis-leading ratings and reviews that might be posted by corporate shills—unidentified company reps posting good reviews of their own products.

Figure 9.7. Epinions lets consumers comparison shop and advise each other

© epinions

Consumers began using these review sites as important shopping guides, reporting the results to each other. Eventually, companies whose products were critiqued positively or negatively began to get wind of the feedback. Some began regularly monitoring Web sites where their products were being discussed. In the case of strictly ad-supported review sites, there is no guarantee of survival, but Epinions now earns revenue by generating leads for retailers to whom it provides links from its product review pages. ConsumerREVIEW.com, on the other hand, has two steady revenue sources: subscription fees for both their print magazine and their Web site. Together, this income supports its publishing activities and its product evaluation work.

In the difficulty encountered by companies searching for feedback about their products and services in the vastness of the Web, another business opportunity was recognized. New ventures were created to perform the searching and monitoring of the Web for companies hungry for knowledge of consumer thinking and journalistic mentions. Going by names such as Cyveillance, E-Watch, CyberAlert, WebClipping, or NetCurrent, they provided a kind of digital clipping service, sending their clients daily electronic reports of quoted conversations and mentions in the online press.

An online service called PlanetFeedback (see Figure 9.8) makes most of its revenue by providing these services. Its Web site also provides a single point of access for consumers to send complaints and suggestions to businesses. As the company's CEO, Pete Blackshaw, explained as financial justification for companies making use of its services, "If you totaled the money the Krafts, Unilevers, P&Gs and [Johnson & Johnsons] spend listening to consumers tell them how to improve a product, you're going to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars."^[98] Subscribing businesses get to see the feedback but don't necessarily respond to any of it. And as we described earlier in the chapter, P&G has its own online methods for soliciting customer input.

PlanetFeedback recently merged with another technology firm called Intelliseek, which originally provided a service for dealing with two problems facing companies: the overabundance of information and the variable reliability, importance, and impact of that information on the company. Intelliseek not only found relevant information, but it filtered out the "noise" from the truly useful stuff. Now the merged service can deliver relevant and meaningful reports from online conversations and publications to its clients.

Services like PlanetFeedback are useful when there are active conversations happening on the Web about your company. But they don't provide you with a convenient opportunity to respond—to make amends for a customer's dissatisfaction, to assure customers that a problem has been corrected, or to invite the customer to describe how your company could improve itself. And with the collapse of the business models that have supported many of the public discussion sites, there's no guarantee that those useful conversations will continue to be available for harvesting by these special purpose search engines. Yet the value of that feedback is such that forward-looking companies must provide their own channels for it.

Figure 9.8. PlanetFeedback, where consumers talk and companies listen

© PlanetFeedback Division of Intelliseek, Inc.

The social aspects of initiating and supporting conversation across the fire-wall—between representatives of the organization and external groups—are trickier than they are on the intranet. There is less room for error in relationships between a business and its customers or between an organization and its constituents. In effect, they are the guests and the organization is the host to the interaction. The host is obliged to extend courtesy and to be tolerant of transgressions. With internal conversation, there is room for conflict, multilateral disagreement, debate, and even the occasional insult. Vigorous debate may, in fact, be encouraged. Try any of that with a customer and the ripples of bad PR will spread far and wide, with the speed of email.

Interface design is more important in supporting external relationships for the same reason: There is less room for mistakes like downtime and clumsy navigation. The company can't be constantly tweaking the interface when the users are guests; that would be considered inconsiderate at best and incompetent at worst. The interface must be designed with the convenience and needs of the customer or constituent in mind rather than the needs of the internal groups doing the listening and outreach. Staff members don't quit their jobs because the discussion board is tricky to use, but customers will abandon a Web site that forces them to go through a tricky learning process.

You can invite people to give you feedback and help you to satisfy them, but there are costs and preparations associated with acquiring their deep input and ongoing collaboration:

With a wise investment of time, research, and training, combined with good execution, a company can turn the initial trickle of curious and hopeful participants into a population of loyal and regular collaborators. Building the relationships that anchor that loyalty takes commitment and purpose.

The Wharton School not only studies businesses; as a prestigious academic institution, it is itself a business. In an article on its Web site^[99] (knowledge.whar-ton.upenn.edu), it describes how companies learn from online customer dialogue and how it uses message boards as a recruiting tool.

One of the school's marketing professors says, "even if negative comments come up in the online discussions, companies seem willing to live with that for what they feel is a positive overall experience of talking about products and services." (That occurs if they overcome the initial internal resistance to the idea.) Another marketing professor is not so optimistic, venturing the opinion that online word-of-mouth is nothing special. Of course, that's not to say that online interaction doesn't work; it just may not be more effective than offline talk. We'll grant that, except that companies can talk to far fewer people offline.

The Wharton School itself provides message boards for students and prospective students. Alex Brown, associate director of MBA admissions, says these have proven to be a great way to help market the school and its programs. MBA candidates are no longer captive of dialogue controlled by the business schools and their admissions departments. Candidates, he says, "are talking to each other about what we offer and how it compares to other schools."

After setting up their discussion boards, Wharton wondered if it should "take the next step and host those discussions or ignore them." They decided to participate in them and embrace them "rather than let the rumor mill take over." Students and prospective students interact and answer questions for one another. Those who are looking for a place to continue their studies get a taste of the culture of the student body and staff. They get beyond the surface promotion of brochures and the superficial physical impressions of buildings and classrooms.

The debate between the professor who favors organizations hosting online dialogue with stakeholders and the professor who is skeptical of the value of such dialogue revolves around the trustworthiness of the input. As the skeptic expressed his doubts, "I would hesitate to draw any conclusions about chat on a company-based Web site. Those are squeaky wheels seeking grease on those sites. And who knows if the company is monitoring the discussion or steering it in a direction that the company desires?" Of course, when done right, the company fosters candid relationships and is monitoring discussions and responding truthfully when appropriate. The squeaky wheels may not represent all customers, but they do represent a motivated portion of them. And motivated customers provide especially valuable input.

In Chapter 2, we described the early users groups of Apple computers and how they exchanged rare information first in face-to-face meetings and then through computer BBSs. Technical populations, enthusiastic about using technology to communicate, led the way in giving advice to each other and to product vendors about innovation and improvement.

Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com) has long relied on the ability of programmers and computer engineers to communicate through the Net. It was one of the first companies to provide space on a Web site for users of its products to converse with one another. Today, it continues to host a variety of what it calls "developers forums" for discussion of different products and their applications. These range from communities for system administrators of Sun-powered installations to software developers using Sun technologies like Java and Jini. Figure 9.9 shows the Java Developer Connection, a kind of peer-to-peer knowledge exchange similar in purpose to Cisco's Networking Professionals community.

As Sun describes another of their forums, "Dot-Com Builder Discussion Forums are an interactive area where Sun's Web developer community can share knowledge by posting messages to a message board. Messages on the message board are organized by topic, cover all aspects of server-side architecture and Web development, and include community member comments, opinions, questions, answers, and technical tips." Of course, Sun also benefits greatly by having access to the creative conversations that go on among experts in using its products.

For one of its software technologies, Sun has provided a community site away from its home site. Jini allows dissimilar processes and devices to communicate and work together. Its potential uses are so numerous that Sun initiated a special development community, complete with a constitution, for sharing new solutions. The community (at www.jini.org) was begun with several high-level Sun engineers serving as facilitators. The goal was to make the community self-governing, and to that end, a community constitution was composed by its members to state the agreed-upon procedures for sharing solutions and setting standards. The participants in the Jini community preferred to stick with email as their platform for interaction. They were comfortable with it, and combined with the ability to create Web pages that could be shared with other members, it was the most appropriate technology for their collaborative needs.

Figure 9.9. Sun Microsystems' Java software language has relied on collaborative innovation by its users.

©Sun Microsystems

Only a cohesive group with a goal of mutual benefit can reach this level of agreement. However, there are many products that would lend themselves to such an arrangement if only the companies that produce them would recognize the potential. Clearly, the more solutions that are devised by the Jini community for applying the technology, the more Sun has to gain.

At one time, online community was envisioned as an ad-supported revenue center. When this failed to pan out, the focus shifted to view online community as part of customer relations—a cost of doing business like marketing and PR. But some companies see it as a cost-cutting activity, replacing some of the expense of customer support. If done well, customers not only provide each other with advice that the company was once liable for, but customers provide better advice because it is experientially based and the customers are professionals.

Click on the Technical Support link on Hewlett-Packard's home page (www.hp.com) and then on the link to Forums for IT Professionals and Businesses. You reach the IT Resource Center (ITRC), a Web page that leads you to what HP identifies as its four main categories of customers: IT professionals, business professionals, developers and solutions partners, and home and home office customers. And as HP states on this page, "Different forums may have different rules and guidelines."

It's significant that home and home office customers aren't provided with actual discussion forums in ITRC, whereas the other groups are. Managing a discussion community composed of tens of thousands of owners of hundreds of models of HP PCs and printers would be a daunting and expensive task. All of the customer communities get indexed troubleshooting menus, search tools for solutions, and company support provided through email. The forums aimed at professionals in the other three support areas do encourage interaction and knowledge exchange.

HP recognizes the potential bottom line benefits of users helping other users to the extent that it set up a points system to recognize users who answer a lot of questions. The leaders in accumulating points are recognized on the forum's home page and by symbols displayed by their posts in the discussion space. By accumulating points as valued knowledge resources, they can rise in rank from Pro (symbolized by a baseball cap icon) to Graduate (a mortarboard icon) to Wizard (magician's hat) to ITRC Royalty (a crown). HP claims that it may (but is not obligated to) award gifts to such participants.

In its terms of use, HP describes, in part, its relationship to the Communications—the content of user discussion in its forums. The terms say, "HP may, but is not obligated to, monitor or review any areas on the Site where users transmit or post Communications or communicate solely with each other." This relieves it of responsibility for inaccurate or offensive posts written by users, but it's very likely that Communications containing information of value to HP will be noticed and made use of. Indeed, as on most corporate sites, the company claims the right to make use of whatever information its users post. "HP and its designees will be free to copy, disclose, distribute, incorporate and otherwise use the Communications and all data, images, sounds, text, and other things ..." in any way it chooses.

One of the Web's most effective uses is as a reference resource for people with questions about health and medicine. With the rising cost of health care, people are using the Web to research their own conditions and treatments. The more serious the health problem, the more vital the information. The motivation to collaborate with others around different conditions is very high compared to almost any other topic, whether business-related or personal. The trick is in providing reliable information and managing helpful online conversation.

The American Cancer Society (ACS) recognized the importance of fostering a sense of community among cancer patients, survivors, their families, and ACS's donors and volunteers. Coping and survival are at the core of these groups' overlapping missions. So, in redesigning their Web site at cancer.org, they studied their users, especially cancer patients, to find out how best to provide them with connections to their most relevant support communities. They wanted to know how visitors to their site moved through it and where they would need links to community-enhancing features.

Most Web sites that include message boards segregate them under a "community" link that, if followed, leads the visitor to an environment quite different from that found elsewhere on the site. There is likely to be no information other than the topics and responses of the participants—a discussion ghetto. ACS wanted to weave the idea and the access to community throughout its site so that visitors, no matter where they were on the site, would have easy access to chat rooms or message boards. As Figure 9.10 shows, the site also links to compelling stories and an invitation to donate. ACS hopes to convert eager volunteers into eager donors.

In redesigning its site, ACS provided a good example of how to go about identifying the needs and tendencies of the user community. It hired a consulting company, Sapient, to help it with the analysis. As an article in CIO magazine¹² described, Sapient "had clinical psychologists and cultural anthropologists spend time with cancer patients at various stages to develop an 'experiential model'." Based on that model, they imagined scenarios that would describe how different hypothetical individuals would move through the Web site.

Someone recently diagnosed with breast cancer would, for example, come to cancer.org looking for information about the disease, its prognosis, and its treatment. So links directing that person to that information should be prominent on the home page. Once informed, the patient would be interested in finding local support groups (see Figure 9.11) of breast cancer patients and survivors. A place for the patient to enter her zip code also would be located on the home page, as would links to general information about breast cancer. The patient, at this point, would be looking for an opportunity to ask questions, so links to chat rooms and message boards also would be posted on the home page. The invitation to join a network also offers the option of connecting by telephone for those who prefer that medium to online conversation.

Figure 9.10. The American Cancer Society's site directs visitors to appropriate conversations in its message boards.

Reprinted with the permission of The American Cancer Society, Inc.

ACS is devoted to supporting patients and families in their dealings with the disease and its aftermath, so its design keeps evolving to better support that purpose. The organization also expects to reap some bottom-line benefits from helping people share knowledge and caring. They hope to grow relationships with people that will lead them to donate to the organization, if not in money then in volunteer time. If the Web site and its communities can build a sense of loyalty among members, ACS can expect some of them to be regular supporters of the organization. And as James Miller, ACS's director of Internet strategy, put it, "that means you're always going to be at the top of a person's mind when they start thinking about donations."

The following story may not address the post-9/11 state of affairs in air travel, but it does illustrate what can happen through the Web to companies that don't do a good enough job of communicating with their customers.

In June 1996, Jeremy Cooperstock had some terrible traveling experiences on United Airlines. Over the next 2 months, his unsuccessful attempts to get a response from the airline through two polite letters of complaint led him to create what he called a "poor show" Web site that soon began attracting support from other disappointed United customers. In April 1997, after almost a year of trying to get the airline to improve its customer service policies, Cooperstock launched the-Untied Airlines site (www.untied.com), unabashedly mocking the logo and style of the airline's own site and providing a forum for people sharing his frustrations.

Months after the new site went online and after some legal threats, Cooper-stock received an apology from United. Then, with donations received from other dissatisfied customers, he built a complaints page (see Figure 9.12) that forwards messages to the director of United's customer relations department. An insider at United later admitted that the company was circulating complaints received from Untied's site. As "evidence," Untied.com keeps a database of both customer complaints and United Airline's responses to them.

Today, a visit to the United Airlines site at www.aul.com reveals a heightened attention to customer service including a Statement of Customer Commitment and services ranging from baggage liability to ticket refunds to information about dealing with delayed flights. Maybe these improvements in service would have happened without the nagging of Cooperstock's community, but the probability that disgruntled customers on the Web will find a way to raise their voices in unison should be a sobering reality to all businesses.

The lesson: Customers can and will demonstrate creatively what they need from businesses. If not supported in demonstrating this on the company's own site, they are likely to build or make use of another venue on the Web to "get things off their chests."

In the spring of 2000, Daimler-Chrysler released a new car model called the PT Cruiser. We were among the people who loved the design as much as many others hated it. There was such great advance demand for the car that dealers were told to take orders with thousand-dollar deposits. On an impulse, we put down our money in May and were told not to expect delivery for about 6 months. We were so enthusiastic that when we got home we went to the Daimler-Chrysler site and looked for some current information on supply, demand, and projected delivery dates. We found nothing but a glorified advertisement.

Figure 9.12. You won't find a form like this on the United Airline's site, but on the Untied site, your complaints will be forwarded to the airline with its agreement.

©Untied.com

So we did a search on "PT Cruiser," found the PT Cruiser Club (www.ptcruiserclub.org), and began monitoring its public discussion boards. We found a spontaneous gathering of PT Cruiser owners and people like us who had made deposits on vehicles. There we learned about the confusing practice of "dealer allocation," which could result in people who ordered their cars after us getting delivery before us. We learned how to track orders using a special sheet that dealers might or might not share with us. We learned from people who had gotten their new Cruisers that the automatics were sluggish accelerators and the five-speed versions weren't much better, but that the attention people on the street paid to your car made up for the poor performance. They looked faster than they actually were. We found people sharing tips on boosting the performance of their Cruisers (see Figure 9.13). We also learned that some dealers had raised the guaranteed MSRP sticker price once the car arrived on their lot.

As it turned out, the company ran out of the 2000 model year cars before they built ours, and we canceled our order, angry at the dealer, angry at the car company for not being more open and honest with people who were—as Daimler-Chrysler had hoped—passionate about the vehicle. The company did hold several public chat events, responding to customers and prospective customers, but did not provide a clear way—displayed on their Web site—for people with cars on order to check on the status of their orders. The PT Cruiser Club invited representatives of the company to visit their forums or to listen to their comments, but without success. Daimler-Chrysler so far has missed this chance to learn from the customers who truly care about their products and make efforts on their own to customize and improve them.

The lesson: Especially if your new product is expected to attract a passionate community of buyers, provide a place and invite them to get together on your Web site. Daimler-Chrysler could have won a lot of customer loyalty by doing so with the PT Cruiser, but instead, it failed to leverage the enthusiasm for its new vehicle and thus earned a lot of new enemies.

Figure 9.13. Where to get advice the company will never tell you: a forum about after-market exhaust systems for the PT Cruiser.

©PTCruiserClub.org. Used with permission.