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Snack Breaks & Hot Takes: Community Benchmarks for 2022

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Published on ‎11-03-2021 11:23 AM by Khoros Staff | Updated on ‎12-07-2021 05:14 PM

Watch the on-demand recording here: https://khoros.com/resources/community-benchmarks

Additional questions can be posted in the forum thread on this event below. 



Resources for Rich Millington@FeverBee :  
https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-millington-5a32782/?originalSubdomain=uk
https://www.feverbee.com/
https://www.feverbee.com/resources/
https://www.feverbee.com/product/community-benchmarks-and-standards/
https://www.feverbee.com/richs-blog/
https://www.amazon.com/Richard-Millington/e/B009YW6NHY/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1

 

Thursday, December 2

12pm ET | 11am CT | 9am PT

 

Snack Breaks & Hot Takes is a digital series connecting you to experts in customer experience, brand owned communities, and digital contact centers. Running only 30 minutes, this event offers you an opportunity to get a snack on Khoros through Uber Eats, gain valuable insights from leading experts, and ask questions in the event chat.

 

Join our upcoming Snack Breaks & Hot Takes session to hear Richard Millington, Founder of Feverbee, share benchmarks and key trends distilled from over 5 billion community visits on Khoros communities and Feverbee clients to help you plan for success in 2022.

 

The last two years have seen tremendous transformation, and one of the bright spots has been the growth in online communities - specifically brand-owned communities.


Harnessing this momentum to accelerate community growth means drafting budgets, HR plans, and strategies to drive growth next year. Doing this well requires strong success stories AND data to convince even the most skeptical executives.

 

Unfortunately, such data is impossible to find, and community leaders have to rely on industry surveys and anecdotes from peers. Aggregate data and insights from the industry as a whole is nowhere to be found - until now.

 

Richard Millington has spent the past decade helping 250+ companies develop some of the world’s largest online communities. He is the founder of FeverBee, an international community consultancy, and the author of Buzzing Communities. Richard’s clients have included Google, Facebook, Oracle, Wikipedia, EMC, Greenpeace, and many more.

 



Start:
Thu, Dec 2, 2021 11:00 AM CST
End:
Thu, Dec 2, 2021 11:30 AM CST
7 Comments
Khoros Expert

That was an awesome captivating and energizing talk! Many thanks to you @JakeR and Richard @FeverBee  👏


.................................
Arnaud Lerondeau
Principal Solutions Consultant
Khoros
Khoros Staff

Thank you to our attendees for all the awesome questions during our live session! There are a few we didn't have time to answer live:

  • Have you developed a successful model for measuring ROI for a super user program? I've just launched our new super user program and want to track the ROI for the business moving forward. (I have a couple ideas but wanted to hear your POV) -Austin Grimes, Flexera
  • Is the fact that "community" has become a defined term across many industries is it limiting itself in encompassing more experiences? e.g. "forums" where the thing 20 years ago, but have lost a lot of their hotness since. What'll be following on "community"?   - Claudius Henrichs, Dataiku

@JakeR & @FeverBee - Could you respond to the above in this thread?

Hi MollyJ, could I get your contact email? had some questions on the event

Yes! You can email me at molly.judge@khoros.com

Khoros Oracle
  • Have you developed a successful model for measuring ROI for a super user program? I've just launched our new super user program and want to track the ROI for the business moving forward. (I have a couple ideas but wanted to hear your POV) -Austin Grimes, Flexera

It is easier to track the ROI for SuperUsers (in some form or another) if the business is either B2C High-Tech and/or Retail.  However, with your company, there are different challenges for you because have a B2B High-Tech Community.  One thing that tends to be almost always true is that Community SuperUsers spend more.  This is relatively easy to prove in B2C High-Tech and Retail oriented Communities (well, easy to prove if the Community is integrated into the CRM system), but these additional 'spend gains' are not so easy to prove in B2B High Tech. 

Here are the the Value Levers I would start looking at within your B2B High-Tech SuperUser group (in no particular order):

1.  What do the SuperUser's accounts look like?  Has there been any upsell or cross-sell activity for their account that seems to correspond with all the activity out of the SuperUser (i.e. - were they inquiring about a product or service in a thread, etc)?

2.  It can sometimes come down to the win/loss reports that a Marketing or Sales Operations team sends out when a deal is closed.  Asking the question, "Did you explore or consult with our Online Community to help inform your decision to purchase our software?"

3.  Sending out very specific / custom surveys or even running focus-groups for the SuperUsers can be helpful in determining whether their participation and engagement in the Community was influential in an upsell / cross-sell

4.  Though not a 'hard ROI' finding (indeed, we call them 'soft benefits'), you may want to look a bit more closely and the CSAT or NPS of your SuperUsers.  If your business is already able to monetize improvements in CSAT or NPS (and BTW - I do find it uncommon for businesses to have a good handle on measuring the actual monetary yield when there are higher Satisfaction scores), taking a closer look at the higher CSAT or NPS of SuperUsers can be a good way of looking at the ROI of the group

5.  Referrals!  Another thing that a SuperUser group can be for B2B High Tech brands is a potential new group for customer testimonials, panelists and/or speakers at a Customer Conference, or even the more intimate customer-to-prospect calls that can be arranged by the brand.  This, again, is much more challenging to translate into 'hard ROI', but there is certainly value there

Hope this helps!  And thank you for attending and asking this question, Austin.

Khoros Oracle
  • Is the fact that "community" has become a defined term across many industries is it limiting itself in encompassing more experiences? e.g. "forums" where the thing 20 years ago, but have lost a lot of their hotness since. What'll be following on "community"?   - Claudius Henrichs, Dataiku

Hmmmmm.....this is a very good question that takes me into more philosophical waters. 

In the old days (1990s) we did not even call Online Communities, 'communities'.  They were mostly called boards, message boards, BBS (Bulletin Board Systems), or forums.  When Blogs came along (with their accompanying 'comments'), I think people started to loosen their grip on what was called a 'Community' in net speak.  When Dell came along with the Idea Storm, I think that was another shot across the bow for how we as a culture, define 'online Community'.  Last but not least, KnowledgeBases that allow commenting can be considered 'Community' now.  

And to add even a little bit more chaos to the nomenclature;  when Brand Communities really started arriving on the scene (as opposed to classic 'hobbyist' communities that were the most well-known), a lot of these brand's already had a concept of what 'Community' meant for their brand and how they defined it on their website...and those definitions of 'Community' had more to do with what the brand was doing to assist struggling. neighborhoods and assisting non-profits.

Language is an ever-evolving thing, and so is the internet.  It probably only gets even more complicated when somebody like yourself, Claudius, that speaks 3+ languages tries to make sense of all this.  Personally, I regularly clarify with our customers and/or prospective customers from the outset that when I am speaking about Community, I am primarily talking about 'forums', but I am also tangentially including all those other interaction styles I cited above as well.

Thanks for the question, and thank you for attending, Claudius.  Always great to cross paths with you. 🙂

Khoros Staff

Watch last week's session on-demand here: https://khoros.com/resources/community-benchmarks