Now, I don't pretend to be an expert in social media or crowd sourcing. There are tons of people who claim to be experts in these subjects, and there are a few people who are really outstanding in this field. I encourage you to read their blogs, follow them on twitter and read their books. One of the best I've seen is Chris Brogan. Read his blog and be sure to check out his new book Trust Agents too.
But back to your business. If you want, you can really get a lot out of a community of followers for your business. Social media is more than just a marketing tool. Let's look at some other ideas.
Product Innovation
Find a way to engage your community of users in the development of new ideas for your product. Build a gated online presence for your power users and let them suggest ideas or vote on ideas that you come up with. Get them engaged in helping you determine the direction of your product. There is an awesome tool called Ideascope that can help you manage this type of community. But you can also use just about any content management system if you are clever and have a plan.
When getting product feedback from a community, remember that you don't necessarily need to do everything in exactly the way that your community suggests. Look for trends and themes. Figure out what problems your users are trying to solve with their suggestions. And when you put some of their ideas into your roadmap and get them into your product, be sure to let them know. Show them that you listened and foster a trust relationship.
Product Development
There are a lot of ways to access a community of developers and engage them. The most obvious way is to create an open source product or a set of open source tools to customize your product. This can be risky and you need to have all of your ducks in a row before you open up a codebase to the public. Make sure you have your licensing set the way you want. And make sure you have some experience in managing an open codebase. Once you let this type of beast out of the cage, it's almost impossible to get it back in. If you do it right though, you can reap some huge rewards. Check out Coupa as one example of a company who has had some success using this model.
Another great way to engage a community of developers is to have a great API that allows the development of third party tools and products that can use your product. There are tons of great examples of this. Twitter is probably the most often cited recent example of a web-based product that has a rich and open API allowing developers to create really great products and services around the core application.
If you do decide to develop an open API, make sure it's meaningful and not just a toy. If all you can do with your API is create web page widgets that provide a data feed, it might be interesting; but you won't see the type of innovation that a fuller, richer API can generate.
Product Support
Create a forum where users of your product can share ideas and help each other. Let them ask questions. Let them answer each other's questions. Let them post about their own experiences and how they have solved some problem using your product. Your support desk probably provides solutions to some of the same problems over and over. Get that information into a forum where other users can access it too.
If you can use your product to solve some problem that is common to many of your users, don't tell them one-by-one, have your subject matter experts tell everyone in your user community at the same time. This type of community can also be used as a forum to explain new features in upcoming releases and how they can be used as well. There are a lot of great forum management tools out there that are very inexpensive and easy to manage.
Manage your community
Getting your community engaged is more than just setting up a server and letting it run. You need to do some planning. It's probably a good idea to have someone dedicated to managing and maintaining the community. Figure out what the goals are for each of your communities and then put together a plan for getting from ground zero to your target. Spend some time thinking through the stages you will need to go through and what you think it will take to get through each stage. Don't make your plans overly complex though. If they are too complicated, you probably won't be able to sustain it. Keep it simple and sustainable.
When choosing the tools you want to use to manage your community, make sure you choose the tool that fits your goals. Don't try to force your goals onto a tool not designed for it just because you think the tool is cool.
You also need to put some plans in place to keep things civil in your community. I don't really like the word "police" when talking about managing a community, but you do need to set some rules and make sure you enforce them. Maybe "govern" is a better word. Either way, make sure you have guidelines and have thought about ways to ensure that conflicts that might arise don't destroy the benefits that a community can bring.
Be sure to watch other communities to see what the trends are. Those same trends are likely to affect you as well. Look at how Wikipedia is managing the "noise" generated by requiring more moderation as their community grows. Look at communities of different sizes. What percentage of the users are generating the content? Does that change as the communities grow? How do people like to interact with communities? Do they like to go to the website? Do they want to get daily summary information in their inbox? Watch the trends and adapt.
When you're ready to go, market your community just like you would the rest of your company. A great community can be just as much of a value-add as anything else your company does.
How have you used crowd sourcing to help your start up?
photo credit, michelini
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