Building Professional Peer Communities

Patricia Seybold Group
Trusted Advisors to Customer-Centric Executives
Building Professional Peer
Communities
An Interview with Vanessa DiMauro,
Principal, Leader Networks
By Matthew D. Lees
Vice President and Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group
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Patricia Seybold Group / Spotlight
Building Professional Peer Communities
An Interview with Vanessa DiMauro, Principal, Leader Networks
By Matthew D. Lees, Vice President and Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group January 11, 2007
BACKGROUND: PROFESSIONAL PEER
COMMUNITIES
In our reports “Enabling Customer Communi-ties”
1 and “Best Practices in Engaging Customer
Community Members,”2 we covered various aspects
of customer communities, groups that are built
around the members’ interest in, and use of, particu-lar
companies’ products and services. But other
types of online communities also warrant attention,
not least because of what can be learned from them
and applied to customer communities.
Professional Peer Communities (also known as
Communities of Practice), for example, are built
around a specific topic, industry, or discipline. They
share many characteristics with customer communi-ties,
but have important differences as well (such as
size of the community and restriction of membership
eligibility, among others).
To explore these other types of online communi-ties,
especially Professional Peer Communities, we
spoke with Vanessa DiMauro, principal of Leader
Networks. Vanessa has been a virtual community
builder for more than 15 years, having done innova-tive
work with organizations such as EMC, DCI, and
Cambridge Technology Partners. Her experience in
interactive learning environments, knowledge man-agement,
and social networking gives her a unique
perspective on why professional peer communities
are important, what they have to offer, and how best
to develop them.
1 See http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=736
2 See http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=745
BUILDING PROFESSIONAL PEER
COMMUNITIES ONLINE
Q&A with Vanessa DiMauro, Principal,
Leader Networks
PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP (PSG). What got you
into the online community space?
VANESSA DIMAURO. Well, my first job out of
graduate school was working for TERC, the Techni-cal
Education Resource Center. That was a govern-ment-
funded think tank that studied science and
technology in school settings for the National Sci-ence
Foundation. I worked on a really innovative
grant project called Labnet, that created an online
professional development community for physicists
and researched its implications from both social and
technical perspectives. (This was back in the days
before the Web.) Labnet was a social experiment to
learn the boundaries and advantages of professional
collaboration in an online environment.
We sent a bunch of teachers and physicists these
300 baud modems (they came in a giant box!) and
they participated in this research project. We would
have them undergo professional development activi-ties,
do knowledge transfers, and do all these won-derful
thought-leadership initiatives online, and then
we would study them to find out what happens.
After it was deemed a success, we transitioned
that community to America Online, when AOL was
just starting up. It became one of the Greenhouse
Projects in the early 90s.
Since then, the past 15 years for me have been
largely about building communities. I did extensive
consulting on community building while at Cam-bridge
Technology Partners, built a number of ex-ecutive
and professional communities, and recently
launched a boutique community consulting company
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2 • Spotlight
called Leader Networks where we enable companies
to build online communities for their customers or
constituents. Specifically, we focus on helping com-panies
figure out revenue models for online commu-nities,
how to best serve their core constituents, the
types of content needs their users have, the sponsor-ship
or marketing opportunities, and how to create
and deliver on trusted relationships with their com-munity
members. We also help companies figure out
the key metrics and measurements for determining
the returns on the community. Community building
is definitely a passion for me and I can honestly say
I have seen almost every permutation of community
over the many community-building experiences.
Early Research Issues
PSG. What were a few of the key issues your early
research looked to address?
VANESSA DIMAURO. Just as
we can see in today’s business
world, there’s always the prob-lem
or the puzzle of how you
In traditional forms of
knowledge transfer, shadowing
and training classes don’t
always translate well to the
can bring fragmented specialists
together to share information.
While the technology changes
rapidly, many of the driving
forces for successful community
remain constant.
Some of the issues that we grappled with were:
How do you create mentor programs for people with
a lot of experiential knowledge? How do you get
knowledge transfer to take place online?
For example, there’s frequently a need to take
experts and help make their tacit knowledge explicit.
In traditional forms of knowledge transfer—we
know it even in today’s business world—shadowing
and training classes don’t always translate well to
the online world. But what better way than to use an
online environment to get senior people, very knowl-edgeable
online world.
experts (in this case it was businesses, but
it can extend to any senior professionals), to articu-late
the foundation for their thought processes and
decision making? This can lead to very effective
relationships that require little work and reap great
rewards for an organization. Online was one of the
best channels for doing so. That was really the basis
of the research.
PSG. What did you see in the very early days of the
Web that led you to think “You know what, this
online community thing is something we should be
looking at, because there’s something powerful
here?”
VANESSA DIMAURO. Online communities are a
great opportunity to extend the relationships that
currently exist in the real world. In the early days of
the Web, we were able to use telecommunications to
transcend time and geography. Bringing people to-gether
from around the world via email and collabo-ration
tools was such a revolution that its value was
impossible to miss. It was all very exciting, and the
excitement of the opportunities hasn’t wavered. The
popularization of social networking, online gaming,
and other online and mobile experiences just rein-forces
the opportunities to leverage technology as an
additional relationship channel.
PSG. Continuing in a historical
context, with this group of
physicists and other profession-als,
you saw the promise of the
online space for sharing informa-tion,
for learning, for transfer of
knowledge. In the real business
world, that’s all important, but
how did this progress from
something theoretical to something practical?
VANESSA DIMAURO. When the Web happened, the
world went crazy. And that’s when business com-munities
started to crop up. The first business com-munity
that I really got deeply involved with was
Cambridge Information Network, which was a divi-sion
of Cambridge Technology Partners. And in that
community, the puzzles and the practical applica-tions
were very, very similar. The Web was happen-ing,
and there were thousands and thousands of
Chief Information Officers (CIOs) who needed to
create a community of practice to come together to
share information and best practices to learn how to
network and communicate, and to create supportive
ecosystems.
That transition was very natural, to go from a
theoretical sort of research project to a practical ap-plication,
because there was a need. There was a
need in the real world, as well, for people to come
together and convene, because there was no old-boys
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Building Professional Peer Communities • 3
network within technology. The CIOs needed to
share information and grapple with what the Web
was doing to their business.
This community really struck a chord with the
CIOs and we quickly grew it to be about 7,000 of
the top CIOs around the world. This community sup-ported
the changing role of the CIO, generated sig-nificant
sponsorship revenue, and was deeply
valuable to the community members (and to Cam-bridge
Technology Partners). We eventually sold the
community to EarthWeb in 2000, but many of the
members still meet online regularly seven years later.
Dealing with Sensitive Issues
PSG. When you’ve got executives and professionals
from other organizations, par-ticularly
competitors, how do
you recommend that the sponsor
of the space deal with sensitive
areas, such as topics related to
competition? How do you get
people to open up and talk about
things when there are other peo-ple
there who are in competitive
Just like a person wouldn’t
stand up in a room full of
10,000 of their peers and share
a secret, or ask a question that
reveals some of their intentions,
they wouldn’t do so in an
online environment.
businesses?
VANESSA DIMAURO. The key
requirement that surrounds the
formation of any professional or
business-to-business community is that there needs
to be a burning imperative—a driving need—for
people to share information. In the creation of any
professional community, that need must outweigh
any of the confidentiality issues that bring up reten-tion
of information. When dealing with executives,
it’s always a safe bet that they have a deep sense of
what is appropriate and inappropriate to share. They
didn’t get to be executives because they didn’t have
good judgment, right?
For example, right now one of the communities
that I’ve been very active with is called inmobile.org
(see Illustration 1). Inmobile.org is a fabulous com-munity.
It’s only 500 chief executives, be it CMOs,
COOs, or other wireless executives in the top wire-less
companies in the world. It’s peer selected, so
not everyone can join it. They have to be really sen-ior
and vetted through the group. These guys are in a
highly competitive space, with wireless and teleph-ony
and mobile, but the world is happening so
quickly that there’s a burning need to share informa-tion.
Right now there’s a fantastic drop-down, drag-out
fight going on around social mobile networking:
What are the key features and requirements? Where
is the industry going? There needs to be effective
moderation in order to help shape and guide the
conversations so that information can be shared. But
there’s also a need for a sense of security or safety.
That’s where the role of trust building in profes-sional
communities is really critical and where
things often go awry, because the role of trust, which
is critical to the formation of any group, is much
more difficult in an online environment.
And that’s where size becomes very important in
professional communities. If it’s
a very, very senior group, the
number of the participants needs
to be smaller for that sense of
safety. Just like a person
wouldn’t stand up in a room full
of 10,000 of their peers and
share a secret, or ask a question
that reveals some of their inten-tions,
they wouldn’t do so in an
online environment. But in
communities that consist of more
mid-level businesspeople, the
size of the community can get a
little bit larger and still feel safe, because the nature
of the confidential information that’s being shared
won’t be as deep. And developer communities can
be very large and very successful, because that’s a
constituency that’s accustomed to sharing informa-tion.
In these communities, there’s a deep need for
group-think, because technical solutions are often
based on experiential best practices, and the more
people you have, the better the answers are.
Community Design
PSG. Talk about the design of a community.
VANESSA DIMAURO. There are two components:
there’s social design and technical design, both of
which play an important role in establishing trust
and creating vibrant online communities.
From a technical perspective, bells and whistles
don’t always make for an engaging community. The
features and the different technical offerings on the
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4 • Spotlight
Illustration 1. Having launched in Spring 2006, inmobile.org is a sponsor-supported online community for busi-ness
executives in the wireless communications industry. With more than 400 members, it is selective in its mem-bership;
fewer than 50 percent of applicants are accepted. (Journalists and salespeople are not accepted.)
community must be closely aligned to the needs and
the goals of the group. So if a group needs to work
on documents, there needs to be document-sharing
capabilities; blogging, for example, and some of the
newer, cooler features may not really be needed.
From a technical design perspective, trust can be
established and displayed by matching the goals of
the community with the functional features that they
offer.
More importantly and often forgotten are the so-cial
aspects of trust. One great example that I use
quite frequently is the idea of Disney World. When
you go to Disney World, there’s an awareness of
what the needs of the constituents are before their
needs become bothersome. They know exactly
org
© 2007 inmobile.org
where to put the snack bars and rest rooms, and they
let you know how long you’ll probably be waiting in
line for your rides. That is a very important aspect of
online community building as well, really to under-stand
the psychographic and demographic profiles of
the group that you’re building for.
You need to ask “Who are these people? What
are their needs? How do they like to interact?” Break
your constituencies into different groups of personas
to predict some of their requirements, both informa-tional
and social. For example, “How much modera-tion
do they need? How much handholding? Are
they a self-sufficient group that can look up how to
do things in a technical wiki? Or do they need more
interpersonal interactions with the community build-inmobile.

ers? How do they like information? Are they deeply
interactive and going to do more volunteering?”
One of the communities that we recently built
was a developer community, where the client, EMC,
wanted to evangelize a new technology. We pur-posefully
created an online environment that looked
very familiar to the developers. It was text heavy, it
had a lot of information on it, there were a lot of ar-eas
for self serve. That community is going to take
on a different look, feel, and behavior than, say, an
executive community.
Brand extension also plays an important role. If
an organization has a strong and trusted brand, it’s
very important to extend that look and feel and other
branding elements to the community. A common
misstep that companies often make is that they don’t
view an online customer care initiative as an exten-sion
of the brand. That’s just unfortunate, because
there’s a real opportunity to cap-ture
the online constituencies’
hearts and minds a lot faster if
there’s already a positive experi-ence
with the company.
Sins of Commision/
Ommission
PSG. What missteps have you
observed, whether a sin of com-mission,
by having something
There’s a real fragmentation
occurring within the blogger
communities around those that
will accept payment and be
influenced in order to
influence, and those that
remain pure and removed.
that wasn’t appropriate, or the
sin of omission, where there was an opportunity that
they lost?
VANESSA DIMAURO. The one example that comes
to mind was a common tactic that occurred right be-fore
the bubble burst where a number of companies
attempted to create online communities, for competi-tive
intelligence reasons, that was completely dispa-rate
from their brand, under entirely different name,
nomenclature, without a strong association or any
mention of association to the sponsoring organiza-tion.
There are a number of technical companies that
did this in the late 90s. That was a problem, because
people are intelligent, and they quickly figured out
that the community wasn’t being created for the
right reasons.
And now, in today’s world, with the advent of
blogging and social networking, the opportunity for
those types of behaviors can spread even more
quickly, and do reputational damage to the company
a lot faster.
We’re seeing a little bit of that happening right
now in the blogosphere, I believe, as PR agencies
are trying to influence bloggers for pay, to endorse
products or companies. And while it may have
worked the first couple of years of blogging, people
are getting smart, and there’s a real fragmentation
occurring within the blogger communities around
those that will accept payment and be influenced in
order to influence, and those that remain pure and
removed.
Types of Communities
PSG. How do you think about the different kinds of
online communities?
VANESSA DIMAURO. I break communities out into
three different types (see Table
A). The first one I call Informa-tion
Dissemination, where the
organizing body creates content,
messages, and really shapes the
outcome. They’re really con-trolled
environments, and one
great example that comes to
mind is WhiteHouse.org. It’s an
interactive space: there are feed-back
forms. I think I even saw a
blog on there a couple of weeks
ago. But they don’t really care
what I think. And they’re really not trying to connect
me to other people that share my views or perspec-tives
around issues or things like that. The site has
some collaborative experience built in, but really the
goal and mission is to share and disseminate infor-mation
outwardly.
The second type of community is Shop Talk,
where discussion groups focus on accomplishing a
task, or exchanging transactional information, or
getting help, like “How can I do this?” or “Where
can I find that?” (Customer support communities
would fall into this category.) Technical communi-ties,
or even WebMD or Slashdot, are great exam-ples
where a deep community of practice isn’t
necessarily being formed. People come on a need
basis, and, while they may have an ongoing relation-ship
with these communities, it’s not in a deep, pro-fessional,
and longstanding way. They’re not really

6 • Spotlight
trying to deepen their practice, they’re trying to
solve a burning problem or issue in the moment, and
only a small percentage of the visitors or the con-stituencies
actually create a true network or commu-nity.
And then the third type of community, which I
call Professional Collaboration. Those are often
found in communities of business professionals. A
lot of these communities are smaller by nature. They
are safe and somewhat private online spaces de-signed
to foster conversation. They tend to be more
membership driven or subscription based; they tend
to cost money or have sponsors; and they consist of
people who meet on a longstanding basis in order to
learn about and engage in a certain practice.
An example is WITI, Women In Technology In-ternational
(see Illustration 2). There’s a senior
group that sort of splintered off of the larger public
WITI site, where you have to be of a certain level to
participate.
Types of Online Communities
Community Type Description
1. Information Dissemination • Typically largest type of community
• May include feedback forms and other interactive elements, but is
essentially about providing information
• Minimal level of trust and affinity
• Participation tends to be sporadic around a needs basis
• Requires limited moderation of community activities
2. Shop Talk • Includes customer support or developer communities
• Can be B2B or B2C
• Tend to serve as a go-to resource over time
• Engenders a degree of affiliation
• Requires active moderation (members hope someone responds to their
posts…)
3. Professional Collaboration
(a.k.a. Professional Peer
Communities, a.k.a.
Communities of Practice)
• Relatively small in size
• Requires a high degree of trust
• Often integrated into work life
• Engenders a sense of belonging
• Thought of as a membership organization, not just a Web site
• Requires diligent moderation (members expect that someone responds
to their post…)
© 2007 Vanessa DiMauro
Table. A three-tiered categorization of online communities.

Women In Technology International (WITI)
Illustration 2. Founded in 1989, WITI is a community with both an online and an offline presence. Its mission is
“…to empower women worldwide to achieve unimagined possibilities and transformations through technology,
leadership and economic prosperity.” It generates revenue from both sponsorship and membership (with individ-ual,
small business, and corporate memberships at different price points).
This is not a value statement. All three of these
types of communities are very important; they all
serve important roles. When people talk about online
communities, they tend to think of them all rolled up
into one. But really there are three different types,
and they serve three different purposes. And they
have three different sets of metrics, goals, outcomes,
and revenue models as well.
The Value Proposition
PSG. Why do people join professional communities?
What value do they see? And why would they spend
their dollars to be part of an online community?
VANESSA DIMAURO. The reason people join busi-ness-
to-business communities is because it helps
them do their jobs better. It gives them access to
© 1989 - 2007 WITI
people or information or dialog that they couldn’t
get in their regular course of business, or that they
can’t get on a frequent or sustained basis.
Communities are great extensions of conferences.
Take the average conference, in which you meet
once or twice a year. You’re always thrilled to meet
up with your colleagues and fellow practitioners. But
then you go home, and the new ideas, the excitement,
the brainstorming, and all of the great learning re-wards
of face-to-face conferences is dissipated, and
you have to wait until the next conference to get it
back. Communities are a great extension of profes-sional
relationships, so that a semblance of that can
be sustained throughout the year.
A lot of times when we do user surveys with pro-fessional
communities, one of the great questions is
“Why don’t you participate more?” The common

8 • Spotlight
answer is “Because I don’t have time.” When that is
the popular response, it means the community isn’t
serving its users’ needs to the fullest, because every-one
has time to do a better job. When a community
is truly useful to its users, then people log in, espe-cially
when they have a work problem or informa-tion
crisis, because they have learned they can count
on the community to help them meet their needs.
Why do people pay money? The pay model of
online communities has seen a rocky road but that is
definitely changing. There have been many attempts
to create subscription-based communities. Some
have succeeded; some have failed. In most cases,
people pay for the exclusivity for the group. It gets
back to the whole trust element. For example, one of
our clients is a community of physicians. There’s a
value exchange there, where people pay to join the
community. But what they’re really paying for is to
join a membership group, where
they have access to only their
peers. Sure, they could go to
more broad-based or ubiquitous
sources on the Net for informa-tion.
But you don’t know who is
in that room, or who you are get-ting
advice or suggestions from.
So when there’s a pay-for-participation
revenue model,
Silent readers are very active
members of the community.
They just make decisions not to
make themselves visible in the
permanent online space.
very often that revenue exchange guarantees a like-mindedness
that only people who are serious or are
practitioners will pay the money to participate.
But there are other revenue models that are at
play as well. There’s been a great advent of sponsor-ships
as well as advertisements. The sponsorship
model in professional communities seems to be the
most robust revenue model. We’re seeing a big
change in the industry right now, where the media
buyers and the ad agencies are starting to really un-derstand
this medium, and understand that PPM
(price-per-million) is not a viable model in the
online environment. The mindshare and the thought-leadership
translation is a more important aspect.
There is great value in sponsoring business-to-business
communities. While there aren’t thousands
of viewers necessarily per white paper or thought-leadership
element, there is an opportunity to have
100 percent market share. Everyone who is in that
community has a care for wireless, or has a care for
this type of storage technology, or that medical prac-tice,
and so on.
We work with sponsors of a lot of the communi-ties,
and one of the great pieces of advice we have is
“Make it meaningful; make it special.” Here’s a
great opportunity. You have a captive audience of
learners and thinkers and industry experts. Educate
them and enhance their online experience. And put
forth information that is special to them. That seems
to be the stickiest model.
Active Readers (a.k.a. Lurkers)
PSG. What do you mean by the term you used before,
“active reader”?
VANESSA DIMAURO. In the 90s, a colleague and I
did a really interesting study3 to answer the research
question “What do people, who don’t actively post
in an online community, do with
the information in the commu-nity?”
We so commonly use the
term “lurker,” which has nega-tive
connotations. But if you
look at the statistics of online
community behaviors, only one
to four percent of all community
participants actually post a mes-sage,
and only about 20 to 30
percent of all private community members make
themselves visible by taking a poll, posting a mes-sage,
being interviewed, or showing some sign of
active presence, so that leaves a really large percent-age
of people who repeatedly visit. They have use
patterns that are sustained and predictable. What the
heck are they doing, and why do they keep coming
back?
So my colleague Gloria Jacobs and I decided to
study what people do who aren’t actively and visibly
participating. Are they just reading and lurking, as
that negative word connotes? What are they doing
with their repeated logons?
3 See
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal?_nfpb=tr
ue&_pageLabel=RecordDetails&ERICExtSearch_Search
Value_0=ED390024&ERICExtSearch_Sear
chType_0=eric_accno&objectId=0900000b80130345

What we found was a really robust usage of the
information and connections that people make in
professional online communities, even if they never
make themselves visible. They actually have a ten-dency
to use the information that they learn in their
real life, in some cases more actively than the active
posters or participants.
We were able to track behaviors such as printing
out information or emailing it to others (when it was
appropriate); using information in meetings; con-necting
with colleagues or people that they met in
the online community via phone or at conferences or
through email. So the silent readers are very active
members of the community. They just make deci-sions
not to make themselves visible in the perma-nent
online space.
That was a really interesting finding for us, be-cause
it rounded out the great question “Why are
these people coming if they’re
not doing anything?” But they
are. They are choosing to mani-fest
their connections in the real
world, in the public-facing world,
just not online.
Soliciting Content
PSG. But there still needs to be a
core that is creating content, ask-ing
questions and helping to
It’s very important that
the company figure out what
success looks like, what is
the success definition to them,
and what are the metrics
and measurements
in defining success.
solve problems. You can’t have
100 percent active readers, because then the only
content is from the company. So what balance do
you look for to ensure that there’s enough going on?
VANESSA DIMAURO. That’s where the art and sci-ence
of active moderation becomes critical to the
success of any online community. So often when
you think of moderators, you think of people who
post and guide discussions and send out newsletters.
But we have found in building scores of online com-munities
that at least 60 to 70 percent of the role of
an effective moderator takes place behind the scenes.
So the role of an effective moderator, or moderating
group, is really to outreach to participants, to invite
them to share their thoughts and ideas, to opinionate
about things, and to bring them into the community
through various mechanisms. That’s an often forgot-ten
aspect of moderation, and one of the reasons why
many communities do not succeed, because they
don’t understand the critical nature of that dynamic.
For example, with a lot of our clients, we’ll put
together outreach cycles that are very programmatic
in nature, but really break down the constituencies
and say “You need to outreach to this group of peo-ple
when this trigger event happens.” Private per-sonal
emails, or quasi-personal emails, are a great
way of connecting people and engaging them to find
out what’s on their mind.
Very often, active readers and silent participants
will respond to another human, to a phone call, or an
email. That’s where you can do a lot of trend analy-sis
and find out what topics are of interest, or how
they can deepen their use and value for the commu-nity.
That actually has an ability to convert a per-centage
of the active readers into participants
because they have been actively invited into the fold.
PSG. So this kind of outreach
can help to move people along
the spectrum of participation.
VANESSA DIMAURO. Exactly.
Take customer care communities,
for example, which are built
around a specific product or ser-vice.
People’s opinions about a
dissatisfaction with a product or
service that gets communicated
to the governing body of the
community is just as valuable to
the company, and in some cases more valuable, than
a similar message through another channel. From a
client-facing perspective—and we’re all very deeply
dedicated to serving customers in meaningful
ways—it doesn’t matter how you find out what the
customer really wants, as long as you get the mes-sage
and can act on it.
And, from a competitive intelligence perspective,
the log analysis provides deep insight from a high
level, such as what content is important to what per-sonas.
So you can really learn a lot about what’s im-portant
to the group by looking at what they visit on
the site, and making sure to meet their needs from
that perspective.

10 • Spotlight
Ensuring Sufficient Resources
PSG. You’ve talked about moderation and analysis,
all of which takes time for someone to do. How do
you advise clients to ensure that, post-launch, there
are enough resources to keep the community vibrant
and successful?
VANESSA DIMAURO. One of the things that is
really important is to figure out what success means
to the company, and what are the behaviors and the
outcomes that are anticipated and required from the
community. In some cases, it might be increased
sales, for others it might be to get customer feedback.
For others it might be sales objective—sell more
products and services, cross-sell, and up-sell. For
others it can be to evangelize and deepen market
share.
So it’s very important that the
company figure out what success
looks like, what is the success
definition to them, and what are
the metrics and measurements in
defining success. From there, the
staffing, support, content, and all
the aspects that go into creating
an online community must be
weighed and balanced to these
measures of success.
Getting back to the idea that there are different
types of communities, it’s important to discern what
type of community you want, move into what you
want the goals and outcomes to be, how you’re go-ing
If a company isn’t really good
at customer care in real life,
they probably won’t do such
a good job online.
to track and measure those successes, and then to
staff accordingly.
Overcoming Hurdles
PSG. Say you’ve defined what kind of community
you are and what you want the outcomes to be for
you and for the community members. You’ve got
some goals and metrics. You’re setting dollars and
staff accordingly. What are some of the other hur-dles
that can prevent you from being successful?
VANESSA DIMAURO. The most important thing is
to begin with the end in mind. Very often companies
will fall in love with a tool (for example, a commu-nity
platform or a collaboration tool, such as a wiki
editor). “Isn’t this tool great? It’s got the neatest fea-tures
in the world.” And then they try to retrofit their
strategic elements into the tool. But the tools are
constantly changing. And it’s so much more impor-tant
to figure out the strategy of what you want as
the outcome of the online community, and then to
integrate the learnings from the community into the
organizational.
A lot of times these communities wind up as the
red-headed step-sister hanging off the side of an or-ganization.
This even happens in billion-dollar or-ganizations,
where the project is not taken with the
degree of seriousness that it should be, despite the
reputational risk of these things failing. Further, the
company then doesn’t integrate the knowledge assets
that come out of these communities throughout the
organization.
You ask about common problems. When I think
about advice, it’s really that the “Build it and they
will come” philosophy really just doesn’t hold true.
Enough learning has been done
in the social networking and
online community space. This is
really similar to any other Web
project and needs to have that
degree of budget, staffing, and
timeliness around maturation,
with effective goals and metrics
aligned to it. Commonly, com-panies
will build communities and not know what to
celebrate, because they haven’t done the ground-work
to say “This is what we need it to do, and this
is how we’re going to measure it, track it, and pro-gress
it.”
Also, the bells and whistles don’t always matter.
It’s really about taking face behaviors and group
dynamics and extending them to the online envi-ronment.
So if a company isn’t really good at customer
care in real life, they probably won’t do such a good
job online.
A lot of times, we have clients come to us and
say “We have problems. We have angry customers.
We want a community.” Great, that’s one step. The
customer care philosophy and behaviors need to
come from within the organization and then be re-flected
in the online community. But it won’t fix
customer care problems.
A customer support community is a great way to
harness the voice of the consumer and the voice of
the customer. After all, they’re out on the Internet

and blogosphere talking about your company any-way.
There is a lot of benefit to harnessing that en-ergy,
whether it be positive or negative. But it won’t
replace poor customer care practices in the “face
world.”
Organizational Buy-In
PSG. How and when should thinking be done on
how to generate organizational buy-in for an online
community? How do you work with your clients to
involve different departments appropriately, particu-larly
if there are ones that are extremely busy and
may only go kicking and screaming to a new thing
that’s on their plate?
VANESSA DIMAURO. We find the most successful
communities, at least from a strategic element, de-rive
the metrics and measurements and success man-tras
from all facets of the organization. Sometimes
it’s as simple as sending out a questionnaire to key
constituents within the organization; sometimes it’s
just a planning meeting. But it’s very important that
all key constituent voices from sales, marketing, IT,
product development, and business strategy get
heard in the formation of the community, or at least
when identifying some of the key high goals and
objectives for the community.
In the olden days, what did we do? We went out
and we hired marketing and survey companies, who
then hired junior kids to go out and survey thousands
of customers, type up what they found, and report it
back. Companies made important decisions based on
thick reports of information gathered by third-party
firms. But now we have this absolutely phenomenal
opportunity to actually talk to the customers in a
longstanding and repeated way, in group dialog, as
opposed to one at a time.
Communities don’t need to be a crippling en-deavor
for the organization. It doesn’t take a lot to
build and sustain them in terms of person power and
time. Oftentimes, it’s important to get the customers
involved, so that they help run the community, put
up content, and moderate. But there has to be aware-ness
of the goals among key stakeholders within the
organization.
Communities Are about Relationships
PSG. What haven’t we touched on?
VANESSA DIMAURO. The only other point that’s
important for people to think about, and why a lot of
communities failed when the bubble burst, is that
people misunderstood communities to be purely
about marketing. It’s not really about marketing, it’s
about relationships. What usually works in the in-person
world will usually work in the online world.
But where these things tend to go awry most com-monly
is when marketing takes over and views the
community constituents as objects to be marketed to,
not people who have a relationship with the organi-zation.
And that’s a fragile balance. A lot of respect
needs to be given to the constituents of a community,
because they can choose not to come.
Community Lifecycles
PSG. How do you think in terms of community life-cycle,
in terms of key stages?
VANESSA DIMAURO. People come for content and
stay for community. In the formation of any
community, they are naturally content heavy. But as
the group grows in size and maturation, then they
start to become more interactive.
A typical community program has four different
elements. Normally, when people think of
communities, they think of forums. An important
distinction, and one I probably should have
mentioned up front, is to think in terms of a digital
ecosystem. Communities have 1) Content, including
member-generated content; 2) Events, everything
from guest events to virtual and in-person events; 3)
Member-to-Member Interactions, like discussion
forums, blogs, wikis, podcasts, phone calls, and; 4)
Outreach, pushing information, whether via newslet-ters,
polls, surveys, and gathering qualitative as well
as quantitative information. (See Table B.) Commu-nities
have a balance of those four aspects; it’s not
justT fhoer urmolse. of governance is really important. Of-tentimes,
communities get envisioned without a deep
understanding or planning for what it will take to
sustain it over time, including defining roles and re-sponsibilities,
establishing continuous improvement
metrics, or budgeting cycles. For whatever reason,
people tend to be very shortsighted with communi-ties
and only focus on the first six months. They as-sume
“and then magic happens.”

12 • Spotlight
Elements of a Community
Content • In many and varied formats, from text to media (e.g., podcasts)
• Includes both company and member-generated content
Events • Both online (such as Webcasts/Webinars) and in-person (such as
conferences)
Member-to-Member Interactions • Online: includes discussion forums, blogs, wikis, email, private
messaging
• Offline/Face-to-Face: includes phone calls, in-person meetings
Outreach • Pushing and pulling qualitative and quantitative information, both online
and offline, via newsletters, polls, surveys, and other methods
© 2007 Patricia Seybold Group Inc.
Table B. Successful communities have a balance of these four elements.
Examples of Success
PSG. It’s not necessarily easy to check out some of
the private communities, but who’s doing this well?
VANESSA DIMAURO. I appreciate Dell as an ex-ample
of a transactional community. The Dell sup-port
communities (see Illustration 3) are really
strong. You can get the answer to your questions
quickly and in meaningful ways. I’ve also been im-pressed
with the About.com model, although it’s a
little untraditional, because they are creating topical
sub-communities out of the larger group. So you can
find an area of deep expertise and exchange around a
very narrow topic, which is very hard to do in a large
public-facing Web community.
And there are some communities within the legal
profession that are interesting. There’s one, Law-yers.
com, where lawyers provide advice to people in
a broad-base way, and help steer people who are
trying to understand certain legal issues.
And I love The Vault’s ability to provide HR
content and community to small and mid-size busi-ness
HR professionals. This is an example of a
trusted source that is also a public-facing community.
TAKEAWAYS
Many of us have at least observed, if not partici-pated
in, different types of online communities.
Vanessa DiMauro’s insights may have you nodding
your head in agreement, as the context she provides
resonates with your own community experiences.
For example, have you dealt with issues surrounding
organizational buy-in of an online community? Are
you an “active reader”? Have you ever gone hungry
at Disney World?
(If you’re not nodding in recognition, please let
us know how your online community experiences
have been otherwise.)
It’s not easy to build a successful professional
peer community. While the guidelines discussed in
this report can be of great help, a few things have
particularly resonated with us.
• TRUST. Note how essential it is to build and
maintain trust, especially in professional peer
communities. And keep in mind the inverse rela-tionship
between the size of an online commu-nity
and the importance of trust between
members.
• ONLINE AND OFFLINE INTERACTIONS.
Take seriously the additional value of comple-menting
online with in-person events. The effi-

Dell’s Online Support Community
Illustration 3. Dell’s online community features discussion forums for helping registered members (membership is
free) find solutions to their problems.
ciency and efficacy of virtual communications
have come a long way, but there’s nothing like
face-to-face interactions.
• COMMUNITY SPONSORSHIP. Media buyers
are recognizing the value of connecting with
professional peer community members.
© 1996-2006 Dell Inc.
• MEMBER RELATIONSHIPS. The closeness and
focus of online communities can be a marketer’s
dream. But let the group evangelize at their own
pace, and on their own terms. As Vanessa says,
“It’s not really about marketing, it’s about rela-tionships.”

14 • Building Professional Peer Communities
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATTHEW D. LEES is a Consultant and Vice President at the Patricia
Seybold Group. He brings over 15 years of experience in helping
organizations leverage technology to build stronger relationships with
customers. As an Analyst in the group’s Strategic Research Service, his
current research is focused on customer communities and social networking.
Matthew was previously the principal of Lees Consulting, a provider of
strategic and tactical services to businesses and not-for-profit organizations
on their use of technology and the Internet to communicate and collaborate
more effectively with customers. He worked with clients to identify and implement technological
solutions and develop organizational processes that were not only consistent with the missions
of their clients, but also measurably and successfully met their needs.
Prior to his work as an expert in technology-based community and communications, Matthew
taught physics and astronomy at the Pomfret School, a college preparatory school in
Connecticut. He has also worked as an optical engineer for the Technicon Instruments
Corporation (now part of the Bayer Corporation), designing the optical systems for medical
blood analyzers.
Trusted Advisors to Customer-Centric Executives
If you're a visionary customer-focused executive, the Patricia Seybold Group should be your first
choice for ongoing strategic advice, business and technology guidance, customer experience best
practices, and help with customer-centric initiatives.
Founded in 1978 and based in Boston, we provide consulting, research and advisory services,
peer groups, and interactive workshops. We help clients to design and continuously improve
their customer-focused business strategies and processes using our proven consulting
methodology, Customer Scenario® Design.
The CEO and founder, Patricia Seybold, is the New York Times best-selling author of
Customers.com and The Customer Revolution. Patty's latest book, Outside Innovation, is
available now.
210 Commercial Street
Boston, MA 02109
Phone: (800) 826-2424 or (617) 742-5200
Fax: (617) 742-1028
Email: feedback@psgroup.com
Web: http://www.psgroup.com

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