Social by Design

@chrisbrogan kicked off a great New Marketing Summit at the Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, MA this morning. And what a unique setting! Our booth was three feet away from floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking the entire field (pictured).

At first, I wondered how the snug agenda would work out. Most talks were crammed into five to 10 minutes. Panels lasted a mere 20. But as the morning ticked away, it became obvious that the quick pace made for a more focused, dynamic, and fresh discussion.

Stage time alternated with table time, and (at least at the HiveLive booth), the conversations were engaging and downright interesting.

Thumbs up for the conference format. In fact, the quick pace reminded me of what folks say about the weather here in Boulder: “If you don’t like it, just wait 10 minutes.”

The downside: I won’t get to stay for the whole conference. It’s back to Boulder tonight, then off to Chicago next week.

The twitter stream is at #nms08.

I'm thrilled to announce that we've kicked off a podcast series featuring conversations with forward thinkers in online communities and interactive marketing.

Jeremiah Owyang, of Forrester Research, joined us for the inaugural podcast (now available).  It's worth a listen, particularly for his take on why flexibility and fit is so important in an online customer community platform.

Look forward to your comments/feedback.

Before jetting off to Austin, I was able to attend the first bit of the second annual Aloha Summit (credit to @andybeal for the photo), held this year in HiveLive’s hometown of Boulder, Colorado. A very dynamic group of folks gathered to discuss new ideas and best practices in social media marketing. Biz Stone (@biz), Twitter’s co-founder, and Charlene Li (@charleneli) of Groundswell and AltimeterGroup led discussions the first morning.

You can peruse the real-time notes of attendees by searching for #aloha on twitter.

A group of HiveLive folks flew out to NYC this week to attend the Web 2.0 conference. As you can see, our marketing team did a fantastic job on our booth design (pictured). If you were at the conference and stopped by, thanks for visiting.

Please join us this Wednesday (Sep 17th) for our first webcast on Customer Communities -- presented by the American Marketing Association.  I'll be talking with Ryan Martens, Founder and CTO of Rally Software, and we'll be talking AgileCommons.org, Rally's award-winning community.  Details (abstract & link to register) are below.

Webcast Abstract:

Join this webcast to learn how to use a company-sponsored online community to drive your business by making customers the center of your enterprise.  Hear from Rally Software, a high-tech company that implemented an online community to interact with customers and gather input that allows them to rapidly deliver the products and services their customers truly need.  Rally, the leader in agile development tools, created a Groundswell award-winning community called Agile Commons that’s now the largest online community dedicated to advancing Agile software.  Data from the community has guided the development of nearly half of Rally’s recently released features.

more...

The details (and how to register):

Fueling Routine Innovation with an Online Customer Community
Presented by the American Marketing Association

Event Date: September 17, 2008
Time: 10AM PST, 12PM CST, 1PM EST

Register to view the webcast:
http://www.iian.ibeam.com/events/amaa001/27433/?adid=website

Chris Kenton recently interviewed Serena's CMO Rene Bonvanie as part of his "What's Happening in Marketing" series.  The resulting YouTube video is worth a watch:  hear Serena's forward-thinking perspectives on social media + community + SaaS, and how they are mixing these ingredients to reinvent their business with innovative marketing and go-to-market strategies.

Rene mentions HiveLive in his interview.  The connection?  Earlier this year, Serena selected HiveLive's LiveConnect Platform to power their customer & partner communities, which they designed and launched in less than a month... screenshots below, visit at http://community.serena.com.



In the community, they are pushing the boundaries of how they connect with their customers and partners with the "Mashup Exchange" -- a marketplace for business mashups created with Serena's new composer tool.  See a recent write-up in BtoB Online for more information.  Also, our recent presentation at the AlwaysOn Summit included a brief vignette with details on how Serena's community works and how they're integrating it with their CRM and Leads Analytics systems.

Helen Walters, Editor of Innovation and Design at BusinessWeek.com, hosts a great podcast series: Innovation of the Week.  As part of this series, we had the opportunity to speak with Helen about communities + innovation.  Here's her summary of the podcast:

Conducting Quality Conversations: Tips on Managing Social Networks
As the momentum around social networks for business continues to grow, how can executives know what's appropriate and what systems to implement within their own enterprise? Social networks expert John Kembel offers a few ways of thinking about the issue.

Listen in (direct to mp3).  Look forward to your comments.

I mentioned earlier how we were preparing for AlwaysOn, and I promised to post the resulting presentation.  Though I put links up on twitter, I just realized that I had yet to post here that HiveLive's AlwaysOn presentation is now available online.  So here you go, two options to watch:

1. Here's the presentation as delivered on stage, recorded live by AlwaysOn
2. Also, here's another version on YouTube that we re-recorded to include the first couple slides

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Nothing explains the power of community to drive innovation better than customer stories.  At the recent AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford, I shared a couple of customer stories to demonstrate how communities can be used to co-design products, crowd-source insights, provide peer-to-peer care, fuel word-of-mouth marketing, and even bring entirely new products to market.  I'd like to share the details of one of the stories here:

Rally Software, the leader in agile development tools, is using community to collaborate with its customers and drive product design.   Using HiveLive's LiveConnect Platform, Rally has created a Groundswell award-winning community called Agile Commons.  It is now the largest online community dedicated to advancing Agile software development practices.  In this community, Rally customers, product managers, and industry experts interact and fuel Rally's innovation process.  Here's a brief description of how their community works (note that you have to be an AC member or Rally customer to see some of these areas of the community):

In Agile Commons, customers provide feedback on Rally's roadmaps and generate new concepts for products and features.  Members can build on ideas and crowd-source priorities through voting.  Rally product managers pull ideas from the community into their life-cycle management system. They weave customer-created concepts directly into their real-time roadmap -- without having to run traditional focus groups, use off-line surveys, or wait for an annual user conference.  It all happens 24x7.  Rally engineers can then more efficiently develop the right features, already vetted by customers.  In fact, by Rally's last count, nearly half of the features recently released were attributed entirely to community participation.  Customers can participate through the entire process -- they track the features they care about, and are notified when they are released.  Full cycle.

And, this is just one of the activities that energizes this vibrant community. There are more:

• members spin up on agile by educating and supporting one another
• they share integration examples, and best practices
• the community even attracts new members (and Rally new customers) by invitation and by word-of-mouth

By placing customers at the center of its product development process, Rally is rapidly delivering the products and services its customers truly need.  What excites me about Rally's effort is that they are actively designing and shaping their community to drive change in their business.  The result?  Increased business agility and a company culture of routine innovation.

Today, I'm thrilled to announce HiveLive's first ever Community Design Challenge!

When preparing for our AlwaysOn presentation (today!), we came up with this crazy idea.  As you know, I've got a product design background, and a "DP" (design project) seemed like a great way to demonstrate the flexibility of our LiveConnect Community Platform.  We will take the design challenge ourselves:  you get to challenge us with your community ideas.

We will rapidly design and build a custom-fit community for the company with the most intriguing business challenge.  I invite you to tests the limits of our design skills and the flexibility our platform, as well as your imagination.

If you have a unique and compelling concept for an online customer community, but are frustrated by the limitations of the rigid point-solution paradigm (blog + wiki + forum) presented by most community platforms, please enter our Community Design Challenge.  If you win, we will bring your concept to life, and provide free consulting, training, and hosting.

A great panel of thought leaders in social software + design thinking + business innovation will help us choose the winner:

• Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
• Diego Rodriguez, Partner IDEO
• Alex Kazaks, Consultant, McKinsey&Company
  

To enter, and for more details, visit our Community Design Challenge page.  I look forward to your ideas!