Our Pre-Launch Plan

The research that we had done prior to launch (in addition to having a bit of common sense) made us aware that there is nothing worse than having a visitor come to a new community, only to see that there is an almost complete lack of interactions, members, and other content.  There are a few solutions to this, both ethical and unethical, but of course, we never considered populating MyCancerHub with “dummy” content – I’ve seen it done before, and it’s really easy to see through it most of the time.

Instead, we decided to work with a group of cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers who were interested in trying out the community and engaging with each other, writing blogs, reading articles, and using other interactive features.  We worked with Leede Research Group here in the Minneapolis area to find and connect with the contributors, and on launch day, they began a three-week trial of the site alongside any public visitors that came to the site (although we were doing no formal marketing at that time).

What Happening in Our First Community?

On the first day of launch, our contributors were already very active on the site, and the interactions and content grew substantially in the following weeks, far surpassing even our highest expectations.  Along the way, other visitors who found their way in through search engines and referring links, and with our numbers today, we have about a 50/50 split between the number of new public members vs. those from contributor group.

The formal contributor period ended over a week ago, and while a few members have stuck around and are fairly active, we’ve seen a big decline in site activity.  In general, we just aren’t getting enough members and unique visitors to the site as we would like.  Although we know there is a growing number of spectators, it’s been difficult to foster content creation. MyCancerHub is definitely a very open community where a lot of personal content has been shared by many members, so we don’t see any problems with a lack of communication.  Overall, there isn’t enough traffic to work with, and with $0 for our marketing & advertising budget, things aren’t getting any easier.

Now What?

With no other marketing support (save for some press releases that our internal interactive marketing and design firm, Carrot, is helping us with), Shannon and I have had to work outside of our roles as product and community managers to really focus on online marketing and networking initiatives, which include Twitter, Facebook, blogging (of course), and a few more.

Today we spent some time looking into some new ideas for YouTube, ICYOU (a new health video site), and Digg.  Of course, it’s easy to just throw your content on those sites, but without a goal and audience in mind, the strategy is bound to sink, so we’re making sure our presence will actually be valuable for us and others on those networks.

We’ll be covering on marketing process and progress next week, but in the meantime, we’d love any advice, criticism, or ideas, so send them our way!

Just as publishing was the “1.0″ predecessor to participation in “2.0″, statistics like page views and unique visitors in communities should take the backseat to measurements like engagement, sentiment (which I am covering next week), and social technographics.  To understand social technographics, I highly recommended reading Charlene Li‘s post on “Forrester’s new Social Technographics report.”

User Engagement in Online Communities

Although it’s somewhat open to interpretation, I understand engagement within the context of a community as “the level of interest in an idea, person(s), or brand that depends on the content and environment within.”

Within a community, social network, or a participation-enabled website, tracking engagement is much more effective than page views and most standard metric data in many cases.  The latter can easily be skewed by the site activity of community managers, moderators, and developers.  Even putting high value on the number of discussion posts, members, groups, etc. can be a mistake if the quality of the content isn’t there.  This is where engagement and sentiment measurements prevail: they take quality, depth, and feelings of member content into account to measure success based on the core goal of any community: interaction.

The Real Question: How Do I Measure Engagement?

Francois Gossieaux‘s (President of Corante) pre-conference workshop, “How to Measure Progress and Success in Business Communities”, provided an overview of measuring success, but it didn’t really get into the “how-to”.

As it turns out, it’s not easy.  Engagement can be measured as lightly or as heavily as you wish.  It can be based simply on loyalty and return visits, which is only a quantitative approach that doesn’t account for the quality of content.  A much more comprehensive calculation is covered in this post by Eric T. Peterson on WebAnalyticsDemystified.  Eric’s measurement compiles the following indexes (to get more details on each, I’d recommend reading his post):

• Click-Depth
• Recency
• Duration
• Brand Index
• Feedback
• Interaction
• Loyalty
• Subscription

Even from my fairly inexperienced point-of-view, this seems like a perfect way to measure overall member engagement within a community.  However, I know that within our Online Communities team (which is just Shannon and I at this point), we don’t have the resources/time to put together reports based on these indexes.

This is where new “Measurement 2.0″ companies come into play.  We met with Networked Insights at the Community 2.0 conference, and we learned that their all-in-one community product compiles a fast-paced, discussion-based community platform with their Insight Platform measurement product, which is its real competitive advantage.  Their algorithm, which I’m sure is somewhat similar to Eric T. Peterson created, scans the community content in real-time and provides highly-customized, on-the-fly reports.  The disadvantage is that their Insight Platform isn’t able to “plug in” to any other community platforms but their own.

Networked Insights’ Interface

I’d like to see Networked Insights work with the larger white-label community vendors to enhance the existing reporting features.  This would allow NW to expand the business model to fit more community types – not just market research – and add value to platforms that need expanded reporting features.  We love Clearspace Community platform, but to be honest, the reports and metrics it provides are extremely lacking.

Where’s the Value in Measuring Engagement?

This is a harder question.  I think it’s easier to answer for community types like market research and customer service.  For market research, there’s already cost savings from less face and phone time from focus groups and studies.  Measuring and aiming for a higher level of engagement means deeper insight for research, and therefore added-value for the community, maximizing the ROI.  For customer service communities, a higher level of engagement means cost savings from a high level of engagement that might normally be on the phone….again, maximizing the ROI.

For entertainment and support communities, it’s more complicated.  I’m still forming an opinion, but this brought up a heated debate during the “Customer Engagement: The New Metric and What it Means to Your Business” presentation from Networked Insights founder, Daniel Neely.  The audience seemed very doubtful about the value of engagement, which really surprised me.  I would think that social media enthusiasts would be embracing this measurement with open arms, but maybe the concept is still ahead of its time.

Asher’s Journey with Brain Cancer

Redheaded Bald Chic

Kicking Cancer’s Arse

True Beauty Never Hurries

Freddy’s Cancer Blog

Radiation Daze

Chemopalooza

Miss Melanoma

Another great site is I’m Too Young For This, which has a lot of resources and support for young adults who are affected by cancer.  They also run The Stupid Cancer Blog, which covers cancer-related news and does a really great job of injecting humor into almost every post.  You can read some interesting interviews with the founder, Matthew Zachary, here and here.

After sharing our knowledge and thoughts on the workshops, presentations, discussions, and networking, here is the first of our biggest takeaways:

Define Your Goals and Needs Before Selecting Your Technology

This may seem obvious to some, but when juggling a lot of different projects and roles, simple rules like this are easy to forget for community managers and owners.  It’s easy to think that you need blogs, discussions, tags, groups, friends, wikis, etc. for any community to benchmark against the latest social networking technologies.  The presence of these features may be a make-or-break when selecting a vendor.  However, the technology features that are necessary depend on the type of your community (market research, support, entertainment, or customer service) and your audience.

For example, blogs might not make sense for a customer service type of community, and wikis might not make sense for a medical support community, where reliable information is very sensitive and necessary.  However, the key to developing a community is not think about thing in terms of selecting or developing features.  Instead, think about how to most effectively enable people to express themselves, and share knowledge and experience with each other.

At the conference, we noticed a few companies that were applying this lesson to their business model.  Amir Kishon, the CEO of Wellness Layers, develops health-related communities for clients, and customizes every layout, feature, and widget to each customer’s need, which is a unique direction that seems suitable for a low-volume distribution to more high-profile companies.  We’re hoping that there is some potential for Wellness Layers to partner with and develop a few tools for OptumHealth‘s up-and-coming MyOptumHealth.com website.

How Did We Select Our Technology?

To elaborate on our experience, Shannon had to pick a community vendor (Jive Software‘s Clearspace Community) before defining the goals and needs of our community.  However, I can’t see how this could have been done any other way since we are looking to develop multiple communities of many types and for many audiences over the next few years.  Each community will be vastly different, so the choice to go with JIve was based on how versatile and comprehensive their technology was, along with how quickly their product is evolving.

We’ll have to see how our experience with Clearspace Community holds up as we develop and launch new communities, but with its high emphasis on flexibility and lots of new features on the way in July, we’re optimistic that we made a good choice.

Like most, my first impression of Twitter wasn’t exactly positive. I first checked into it about a year and a half ago, and a few thoughts immediately came to mind:

It’s exactly like status updates on Facebook.

Who cares what other people are doing all the time?

Isn’t this just a way for the Web 2.0 revolution to make internet users even more egocentric?

Don’t worry, I don’t normally sound that pessimistic. Unfortunately, anyone that tried to explain Twitter to me wasn’t using it for the right reasons, and mostly had messages like the following (yes, I made these up):

This obviously didn’t help to improve the image of Twitter in my mind. As time passed, a few former coworkers and business acquaintances told me that they had started using it to link to their blogs and to try to expand their network, but they never seemed to last more than a few days.

Making Sense of Twitter

However, a few weeks ago, as Shannon and I started to think about some online marketing initiatives for MyCancerHub and our future online communities here at OptumHealth, I remembered a few conversations that I had been lucky to sit in on with Garrick Van Buren, a Minneapolis-based experience design consultant who puts great emphasis on effective use of blogging, feeds (check out his new shareable feed tool, Cullect), and Twitter.

Viewing Garrick’s Twitter opened my eyes to how social media enthusiasts were using it to connect with others in the industry, to share interesting news and resources, and to help out friends and business acquaintances by sharing their accomplishments and cross-linking. This might make Twitter sound way too business-like, but it’s not.

It’s a way to genuinely and organically connect and discuss with others, and the 140-word limit almost ensures that spam is non-existent (well, not completely) and forces each user to think carefully about their words.

The word limit also adds a lot of value and meaning if a friend or acquaintance dedicates all or most of their 140 words to you, your blog, your site, etc. It’s so much more to appreciate than a comment or a wall post on other social networking sites.

How Are We Using Twitter?

We first started off with a Twitter account with the username “MyCancerHub”, but Shannon and I both found it to be limiting and we weren’t able to feel like we were being ourselves. It’s hard to define a personal vs. professional online identity (here’s a great blog post on the subject), and being identified as a brand rather than a person just didn’t feel right. Luckily, it took us only a few days to realize this, and as a result, we split into two personal accounts.

We’ve personally been using Twitter to follow and connect more with our partners at Jive Software. Sam Lawrence, the Jive CMO, has a great blog and Twitter that are examples of a perfect blend between personal and professional identity. We’ve also gained a lot of insight from social media professionals like Jeremiah Owyang (his blog is also a great web strategy resource).

Our Next Steps

As our community launches, we hope to be able to connect with more community- and health-related bloggers and those whose lives have been affected by cancer. We are confident that the design and features of our MyCancerHub are top-notch, but an online community is nothing without a thriving pulse from member-generated content like blogs, discussions, comments, tags, and much more.

Twitter has been a great start for our online networking, but in the next few weeks, we’re going to really focus on more ways to get the word out, so we’ll have more updates on our potential and upcoming strategies, so we’ll keep updating!

MyCancerHub runs on Jive Software‘s Clearspace Community software, which is very comprehensive and includes full features for discussions, blogs, documents, tags, and a lot more.

Progress Updates tend to be a bit dry, but hopefully this first one will put everything in context:

We just got back from a relaxing weekend and it’s been a busy day with brainstorming meetings and resolving a lot of issues that came out of left field this afternoon. Technical and security-related delays have pushed back the launch of our first online community here at OptumHealth, so as of now, our public launch is planned for May 20, 2008. We will have an initial test group using the site for the first three weeks, but registration will be open to all who stumble upon MyCancerHub.com. We should begin online marketing in early June, but we’re doing a push of some viral and social network marketing in the meantime.

We’ll have a lot more interesting things to share just about every day, and you can also keep up with Reed and Shannon on Twitter.