How many times have you attended a meeting, forum, or event that had tremendous content, but the environment came up short and did not provide the right atmosphere for the right conversation?  Too noisy, too dark, too distracting from what you came to get out of the event…

Contrast this with a setting designed to keep you connected, enthralled and interested.  Many times in my career as a content developer and event planner, I have been delighted to overhear comments similar to this: “Everything was like magic and I was really able to focus on the conversation.”

This is the ideal state for a valuable meeting, where participants are released from examining the minutia of their surroundings and are able to focus on the content and the conversations.  And the atmospheric details need to be carefully designed to target the audience for your event.  One place in particular where I see event creators get off track is in connecting senior executives with their peers in an in-person setting.  The features and details that work well in larger events seldom translate and can undermine the power of your content in intimate executive settings.

As an example, when engaging senior executives, particularly in an intimate customer advisory council setting, there are important steps you can take to create a seemingly effortless experience and enable the conversations that really matter.

Bright lights, big sounds take away from big ideas.  Flashing lights and thumping music may be the backdrop to big sales meetings and tradeshows, but do not spell success for an intimate council gathering.  Sights and sounds can be distractions and detrimental to the peer dialogue that you are encouraging.  Ideal lighting features natural light and is neither too dark nor too bright, and also offers flexible lighting capabilities as needed.  Testing the room acoustics before the meeting ensures that participants will be able to hear each other from various points around the room.  Nothing kills the dialogue more quickly than yelling across the table to be heard.  Additionally – and equally as important – is to check that the sounds coming from outside the space are minimized as much as possible.

Pillars are essential to architecture, but should not be features in the meeting room.  An obstructed view may be passable at a baseball game, but not when you are bringing together your most valued customers.  The physical attributes of the room selected for your executive meeting are incredibly important to creating the right atmosphere and pillars and other obstructions can transform a positive meeting experience into a major distraction.

Take a look around the room: are there some seats where the line of sight is blocked, because of obstructions or just bad angles?  When possible select rooms that minimize obstructions and maximize the visual appeal.  In our experience with advisory councils, we find that an open square or large round or oval room enables participants to see each other and this visual contact really contributes to a richer, and more peer-oriented conversation.

Too big?  Too small?  Just right. The overall size of the meeting room can prevent a goldilocks moment and have tremendous impact on the meeting.  Many times you get the ideal amount of space for your meeting, but if the space is too small and cramped, meeting participants will feel claustrophobic, looking forward to the next break in the agenda when they can get up and stretch their legs.  If the room is too large, they may feel swallowed up by the space.  The more comfortable and appropriately sized the room, the less frequently your attendees will come up with excuses to leave the table during the conversation.

Careful planning is required to get the right size space months in advance of the meeting, but there certainly are some things that you can do if the space is less than ideal.  If the space is too large, hotels can often provide screens or tall plants to create a more intimate feeling space.  When the meeting space is smaller than desired, a completely different table set up can help maximize what you have.  Consider small clusters of tables with a handful of seats at each table – it may not be exactly what you envisioned but it can enable the kind of interactive conversation you were looking for.

Think about some of the meetings you have been to – where has the physical space created limitations on your goals and what are some of the aspects that you have used to create a meeting that works?  Pick out those atmospheric details for your next event and make sure it is ‘just right’ for your audience.

I look forward to your comments and suggestions.
Also, stay tuned for future posts where I’ll address additional aspects of best practices for customer advisory councils.

I was talking recently with an executive about the work he is doing around the strategy for a new service offering.  His comment characterizing their current state struck me as a telling- and insightful- metaphor for where many companies find themselves in trying to shift to a more customer-focused enterprise.  He described their positioning and go-to-market as “we are trying to lay down the tracks in front of the train on this one.”

 The image was so clear – I could feel the train bearing down, with clients hanging out of the window wondering what was up ahead to help them with their next challenge- and the track ready to run out before they got there!  And it occurred to me that many businesses find themselves frantically trying to stay a step ahead of where their clients are going, and what their next set of needs and challenges will be so they can develop the products and services that will drive new business. 

 Clearly it is better strategy and better business to build the tracks well before the train comes around the corner, but it is not always easy to establish a line of sight to allow that to happen.  Especially if you haven’t found a way to get your customers involved in helping to plan the route.

 This is where the power of a customer-focused or customer-first strategy can be the game changer.  If you find the way to tap the needs, insights and ideas when they are just at a nascent stage in your customers’ minds, you have some time to respond, innovate, and co-create the next set of solutions.  You can test the ideas, and help shape the market, instead of leaping into reactive mode whenever your customers ask you about the next big thing.  

 This is not a new challenge, and many businesses today have awoken to the importance of making the shift to customer-first.  But I find that this train metaphor is a useful- and somewhat entertaining- way to think about the upside to getting ahead of your customers’ needs, and the down side of getting slammed at some point if you don’t!

 Five things to consider: 

1. You don’t have to drive the train alone – your customers can help you determine a productive course. 
2. If you ask, your customers will tell you what’s on their mind now, and then it is up to you to take action.
3. The sound of the whistle and the clang of the bell may be a motivator for some, but on-the-fly product development and positioning leave no room for error, and lots of room to get squashed .
4. Co-creating and innovating with your customers gives you the flexibility to shift the route together as you go, if a more valuable destination emerges.
5. Your customers will go in the direction they need to get value, and grow their businesses – and they will go there without you if you don’t help show them the way.

 What are your thoughts on this?  How often do you find yourself laying the tracks in front of the train? What are you doing to get your customers onboard with you?

Amidst the myriad of predictions and forecasts for marketing in 2012, I was struck by a new blog post by Forrester’s William Band (@waband) entitled The Top Thirteen Customer Management Trends for 2012.  His predictions are right on for companies looking to stay competitive.  His post led me to question what marketers are doing to make sure they take advantage of the opportunity?

I suggest you read William’s post for the full list, but here are my thoughts on a few of the most critical predictions he makes, and as a marketer I believe these are important to help move companies forward.

Customer experience management will move from ideas to action.

I would hope that companies don’t wait any longer to define and implement clear and actionable strategies to holistically manage the customer experience.  The need to keep up the pressure on business growth and competitiveness should help showcase the need for implementation to the laggards out there.

Companies will move to break free from organizational silos to embrace the customer experience ecosystem.

Although one of the most challenging shifts to make, companies are already making moves to consider the influence of both employees and external partners on customer interactions.  Our experience is that once you establish a strategy and culture that is focused on the customer experience, the organizational silos naturally shift because the organizing principle is the customer not the internal process. 

As they break free of the silos, organizations will focus on the need to realign, improve and manage the wide range of processes that touch customers.

Processes are not the sexy part of customer experience management, but they are core to moving successfully from idea to action.  The imperative to improve the customer experience and eliminate the inefficiencies, disconnects and weaknesses in the customer experience chain – reinforced by high profile airings of customer service complaints and feedback on Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels – will drive more companies to care about their customer processes and touchpoints and move to take action.  And the increased focus on the end-to-end customer experience as an actionable program will make it easier to target priority improvements. 

Customer experience management will emerge as a systematic management discipline.

There is clearly increasing acceptance of the idea that customer experience management can be thought of as a discipline — a set of sound, repeatable practices.  The emergence of associations like the Customer Experience Professionals Association, a global non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of customer experience management practices, and customer experience management as a profession, underscores this evolution. 

 Getting to action in 2012

So where to begin, as we embark on this customer experience journey for 2012?  Customer experience management is by nature a holistic effort, involving marketing, sales, delivery, information technology, finance, product development, external partners – everyone in the chain of how you touch your customer.  Gaining competitive advantage by shifting your business to truly organize around the customer is a challenging effort, requiring systems, processes, programs and true culture change across many silos; but it also represents an exciting opportunity for marketers to take the lead.  Marketing has the opportunity to seize ownership of client experience management for the enterprise, and has the process focus, the data, the programs, and the insights needed to be successful.  Even if your company is not ready to change the way they do business overnight, you can take the lead by ensuring that your marketing efforts are truly “customer experience marketing”.  You can then pull others along as these efforts succeed.  Here are a few thoughts on places to focus. 

• Integrate your customer programs and touchpoints into a single customer experience program

Most marketers invest a considerable amount of time and money on the customer experience, including a range of activities: creating interesting client events; compiling content to help address client needs and changes; creating thought leadership for clients to leverage; soliciting input or testimonials; gathering intelligence on satisfaction, needs for new services, key challenges; conducting client conversations in social media channels; convening groups of clients to help advance strategies or products and so on.  Fewer integrate these activities into a cohesive program that leverages learnings from one component to the other, feeds back insights into a centralized repository and creates a higher level platform for customers to engage more seamlessly – and with more value – with your company.

Those marketers who invest the time to create the connections and build processes behind them to systematize both the inputs and the outputs of client experience activities will gain a quantum advantage in benefits and impact from the activities themselves.  They will also have more ammunition to go to others in the company to take control of the broader elements of customer experience management.

• Make your customer experience programs actionable

In his blog post, William underscores the importance of action in moving from aspiration to results.  Marketers are often frustrated with the lack of follow up or results that come from the various customer experience activities they employ.  As you move to integrate your activities into a program, it will be easier to extract where the learnings and the value are, and translate these into actions – whether for the sales teams, the account teams, for service delivery, or for your next round of programs and activities.  By shining a light on the need for action from customer experience activities, and serving as the bridge to make that action happen, marketers can gain momentum from the rest of the enterprise.

• Ensure your marketing budget investment priorities mirror the importance of listening to, collaborating with, and integrating the input of customers in your business

The large majority of marketing budgets go towards new lead generation; this is despite the fact that the majority of revenue tends to come from existing customers, and acquiring new revenue from existing customers – particularly happy customers – is much more cost effective.  Examine each of your investment buckets and ask yourself – how much does this drive understanding of and improvement in the customer experience?  How can I realign my programs to more effectively enhance that focus?

• Use marketing’s expertise in process, planning and execution to move the needle

If there is one area where marketers really excel, it is in how to build and implement successful processes and move plans from idea to on-the-ground execution.  Those outside of marketing seldom realize how much of the success of a marketing campaign, a good client event, a new set of impactful sales conversation materials is down to systematic application of a proven set of actions, and measurement of results.  Creative thinking of course plays a role, but it’s largely about repeatable process and follow-through.  Marketers have an excellent opportunity to leverage their expertise, and use that along with their access to customer insights and input to move the needle on the company’s experience management dial. 

So what do you think?  What else would you add to the list for advancing your role in customer experience marketing in 2012?

Of course it would not be December without a blog post that reflects upon 2011 – what we did and what we achieved.  But rather than focusing on our achievements and doings, we thought we’d reflect upon what we learned and heard over 2011 that helped our clients shape a different approach to their businesses, consider new paths and new opportunities.

Top 3 things we learned from our clients in 2011

1. Your customer is the future of your business

Recently a CMO argued that she really didn’t believe in tapping customers to drive direction or test strategy. She continued on to quote Steve Jobs as her reason for feeling this way “you can’t just ask customers what they want and then give it to them.”  But Steve Jobs also said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward technology – not the other way around.”

Hands down, the number one thing we learn in our work with executives is that they know what they want from their partners and the big news flash to those still believing that they can make it without the customer is that these executives of Fortune 500 companies will just go work with another partner that will listen.  While you may know the future, you have to engage your customers on your journey to get there or your great innovation and ideas won’t gain traction.

2. New forms of leadership are required

We had the great honor of helping IBM create its Centennial THINK Forum where we worked with CEOs, VCs, academics and heads of state to create an agenda on the future of leadership.  What we heard confirmed what we’re already seeing in some of our client engagements – new forms of leadership are emerging that are focused on optimism and collaborating using a variety of tools to innovate more than ever before.  We see examples of this with P&G and their innovation tournaments that were set out by CEO Bob McDonald to deliver on his bold promise of creating renewable energy goals for the company.  As we traverse the insights shared by many of you with us we know that new forms of leadership will come from your customers who are looking to define a future of leadership.

3. Optimism is the greatest act of rebellion

In 2012 we will experience leadership changes across the world with the U.S, Mexico, France, Russia, China, Venezuela, Taiwan, Kenya and Egypt are entering elections.  And likely we will also see changes in private sector leadership around the globe.  But amid all of this change and economic turmoil we were struck at the incredible optimism that we heard from our Board and community members that sit in every corner of the world.  The former Deputy Director of the CIA, Carmen Medina, recently shared that “optimism is the greatest act of rebellion.” And as we listen, it seems that most business leaders couldn’t agree more. They believe that with change comes the chance to make a difference in the world and they see great potential to partner with the businesses that they invest in to build new processes, open up new ideas and explore new approaches to work, leadership, progress and growth.

We hope that you too are looking ahead to 2012 as a year for progressing alongside your most valued clients and a year for optimism.

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Guest blog post by Katharyn White who serves as IBM’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for its Global Business Services.

Our first blog post about the IBM CMO study findings showed that CMOs – like CEOs – are experiencing increasing levels of complexity in their businesses.  In addition, it touched upon the power of analytics in harnessing this complexity into value for the organization and the enterprise.  This post goes on to explore CMOs’ increasing need to focus on relationships to drive value.

Customer intimacy must be a priority
According to IBM’s 2010 CEO study – 88% of CEOs believe that customer intimacy is critical to their futures.  We found in the CMO study a similar set of findings and yet we also found that while CMOs realize this need, they are not clear on how to make this happen.  The CMOs interviewed identified three key areas for improvement:

1.       Building strategies to empower customers: As many of us know, the digital revolution has forever changed the balance of power between the individual and the institution requiring CMOs to deliver value to and empower their customers by using strategies that help them to get to know the individual as well as they currently understand markets.

Inside of IBM GBS we have used online and offline approaches to create client-engagement strategies that drive significant value to our business.  We work with Farland Group in facilitating a strategic advisory council, which gives IBM a clear view into how our clients in specific industries are using analytics.  With this insight we can tailor our larger programmatic approach to ensure that our clients are receiving tailored and individualized attention to their needs.

2.       Establish connections that are long-lasting: To cultivate meaningful relationships with customers, CMOs indicated the need to shift engagement strategies to focusing on the customer lifecycle, which will require building online and offline communities of interest and collaborating with the rest of the C-suite to ensure a consistent the internal and external face of the enterprise.

Using the intimate in-person advisory councils, we have gained deep customer relationships and insights and we use that setting to gather targeted input to our strategy and as a view into where our strategy has gaps.  This helps to inform a categorization of our clients that we then use to drive engagement at scale.

3.       Capture value, measure results: Lastly, CMOs identify the need to quantify and analyze the financial results of their marketing initiatives and communicate them to the wider organization to enhance the marketing function’s credibility and effectiveness.

At IBM, we have established a very strong partnership between marketing and the CFOs office.  This requires us to have an strong point of view and understanding of the analytics behind our investments and has forced marketing to build strong business cases for the investments that we make.  By engaging finance early in the cycle we establish a clear understanding and alignment around our strategic intent and a partnership in identifying the ways to make those investments deliver results.

As you consider the role of customer intimacy in your organizations, how are you planning for success?  What are some strategies that you are using to engage your internal stakeholders in creating stronger, deeper, more individualized relationships with your customer?  How are you engaging finance in your ROI strategies?

Katharyn White serves as IBM’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for its Global Business Services.  Katharyn and the IBM Institute for Business Value interviewed 1700 Chief Marketing Officers earlier this year to understand what CMOs are doing to help their businesses understand, manage and lead through the transformations that are facing most businesses today.  Farland Group and Katharyn are partnering on a two-part blog series to uncover some of the findings from the IBM CMO study. In the spirit of full disclosure, Katharyn is a valued client of Farland Group’s and we hope that you find the insights she shares as compelling as we did.

Transforming the CMO and the Organization through Analytics

In my role as CMO of IBM’s Global Business Services -  I have noticed the increasing complexity in our business and that of our clients.  IBM is constantly working to understand how the velocity, variety and volume of data can be used to empower better, faster and more informed decisions.  As IBM learned from CMOs across the globe, this challenge is one that opens up enormous opportunity for those who learn to use information effectively.  Yet we also know from the CMO study that many feel overwhelmed by data and analytics overload and struggle to know where to begin.  This is a fair question and one that is even more complicated for my CMO peers who are in companies (unlike IBM) where analytics is not a core competency.

But IBM was not always in the position of using analytics in the marketing that we did.  In fact, while many of us have long believed that information-based decisions were of most value long-term to the business, we-the marketing team- didn’t always have what we needed to back up our intuition.  Now, like IBM, many businesses have more data than they can manage and the question is:  how do CMOs meet the increasing complexity with increased effectiveness?

We know that we cannot run on the treadmill any faster.  Most CMOs and executive leaders are doing all that we can in the waking hours of a day.  But yet we have to be smarter.  We must challenge our teams to use analytics to help us make better, more informed decisions.  We’ve found that by analyzing information we’ve been able to double down efforts in certain areas and even create new markets based on this new information we’ve gathered.

IBM’s recent CMO study showed that the most successful enterprises are using analytics to shape their marketing investments, new product directions and business strategies.  Below are my top 5 tips on how to use analytics effectively in your organization:

1. Questions are the key: Having the right questions is more important than having all the data.  And, having the right questions is actually more important than having all of the answers.  We know that by asking the right questions, the data will lead us to answers that matter to our clients and our business.
2. Relationships drive results: Relationships are even more important in an analytically transparent world/organization.  It is not the data or even the insight you have, but who does what with that data to deliver business impact that matters.
3. Less is more: Since we know we cannot do more in the time we have in a day, we must make smart decisions.  Accessing the right insights and acting on those brings faster and more relevant results.  We don’t have time to do everything and we know that not everything will yield results.
4. Plan for change: The intelligence gathered from analytics will open up a new set of insights that inevitably require change.  Prepare for change by considering governance and change management early in the journey.  This investment is as important as the tools you have and capabilities you build.
5. Lead by example: It is easier to continue to use intuition to lead your decision making, but we know that your competitors are winning the day because they are using information to uncover deeper insights that your intuition won’t identify.  The single best way for me to drive analytics-lead marketing decisions is to use a data-driven approach to leadership and empower my organization to do the same.

Where does analytics fall in your marketing strategies?  What tips have you learned along the way?

In this post – one of a new series on the future of community that we will be featuring on this blog in the coming months  – we are delighted to have as our guest Vanessa DiMauro, CEO of Leader Networks, a leader in creating social strategies and online communities for B2B businesses.  We talked to Vanessa recently about how the concept of community for businesses will evolve and how marketers, strategists and community managers and leaders should think about community in their strategies to connect with customers, peers and others.

Here are the insights Vanessa shared in our conversation.

What are your overall observations on the future of community?

The future of community is definitely an exciting topic and one that has been a long time in the making.  As online communities have only recently become popular, many people don’t realize that they have been around and thriving for more than 35 years!  Primarily used to support virtual knowledge sharing in professional settings (academics, IT executives, research), they have a proven strength in supporting information exchange and collaboration.  So, I believe the history of community will continue to influence their future.  The biggest trend I see on the horizon for online communities is the advent of specialized private online communities

In my view, the specialized online community’s day has come!  The last 2-3 years have been awash with social network launches and the race for dominance.  For most, even the phrase ‘online community’ currently evokes mass professional networking tools, as those tend to be most professionals’ first exposure to online community.  And while Twitter, LinkedIn and Quora, for example, are not going away anytime soon, there is an increase in the demand for specialized private online communities which has emerged in part from the success of the broader social networks.

While these large professional networks have been fun and productive to experience, they have grown to unmanageable sizes if they are to be used as a learning environment.  This can be noted as LinkedIn has recently launched groups for more targeted connection, and Google’s claim to fame is the ability to create context circles so you can organize your network into different categories and offer them different levels of access and information to your profile.  Clearly open communities and large networks are not meeting all the needs of professionals.  And this is understandable, as professionals need to engage with peers around specific topics, seek pointed information about those topics and are selective in their collaboration efforts with those peers.

Instead, it is within the gates of private, smaller communities where meaningful peer connections, idea exchange and collaboration can truly take place.  Not surprisingly, this mirrors the utility of a strong, intimate in-person meeting versus a large industry conference.  Specialized online communities are now coming into their own because more professionals have evolved their requirements through experience with large networks.  And there is certainly a growing trend of organizations to create private gated online communities to service the specialized needs of their customers.

How are communities driving the future of marketing?

That is an interesting question – today, I see that people often confuse the role online communities can play as a marketing strategy with a place to market to members.  The true business opportunity for online communities to serve marketing is as a channel for customer engagement and as a thought leadership platform with and for the community members.  What this means is that when well done, online communities can serve marketing to discover information, trends and opportunities with customers that marketing (as well as other lines of business) can leverage.  From gathering information and feedback on new trends, discovering an issue with a product or solution that needs to be addressed, to even identifying unmet needs that could be tended to, online communities can serve all of the functions and more.

Communities also offer a new and more sophisticated opportunity to develop and showcase true thought leadership from the organization that is founding the community and to feature the customers and members who are thought leaders.  The goal of using online communities to market to customers is at odds with the expectations of the members who join the community typically in search of information, peer networking, and collaboration – this is especially true in the B2B world.  Marketers will need to balance the evolution of how they connect to keep the goal of the community strategy aligned with members’ values and drivers for participating, as well as the company’s for engaging with customers.

What does that mean for marketers looking to the future of marketing innovation?

Using online communities, marketers now have a prolific setting to engage with customers on an interactive playing field.  Because of the widespread reach of social media at-large, and online communities in specific, the days where a company can declare victory due to market size are over because customers can now talk and share their experiences publically.  Every day brings new challenge for companies to demonstrate their excellence – online.  The opportunity to engage customers in a trusted relationship 24X7 is a perfect marriage to online communities.

What is the role of content in creating value in communities?  How will that change?  Will value come in other ways?

People come for content and stay for community.  Access to valuable content (content that people can’t get elsewhere) is the single most compelling driver for participating in an online community.  Content serves as the trigger to join, and fuels the community over time by providing contexts for conversations between peers / members.  Through the use of social media, and especially online communities, professionals now have the ability to reach, connect with, learn from and influence other professionals who share an interest or a passion in the topics of interest.  Thought leadership is the new currency of credibility.

Over time, the role of content and specifically thought leadership content will continue to increase in importance especially for B2B firms as they often use thought leadership platforms to establish and sustain credibility.  Many B2B firms struggle to keep up with growing customer demands and more-nimble competitors anxious to capitalize on those nascent needs.  Waiting for the annual conference to announce key new-product introductions can now penalize a firm with being very late to market.  Holding webinars or publishing journals quarterly or even monthly can risk giving customers information long after others have filled the void.  Therefore, these companies increasingly look to real-time customer intimacy channels such as online communities as a new approach to reach and engage their customers.

Will community and social media diverge or converge?

Online communities are the centerpiece of social media.  When you think about the goals of social media (or social business as a whole, for that matter), building relationships among people is critical.  Online communities are the ultimate manifestation of relationship-building activities.  They are the best way to build deep online relationships with the people and organizations that matter to your company – customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and others.

What are your thoughts?  Do you agree with Vanessa’s view that online communities are the centerpiece of social media?  Where do online communities fit within your future strategy to engage and grow your customers?

Thanks to Vanessa for sharing her insights.  You can follow her on Twitter @vdimauro or LinkedIn.

About Vanessa DiMauro

Vanessa DiMauro is the CEO of Leader Networks, a research and strategy consulting company that helps large organizations succeed in social business and B2B online community building. DiMauro is a popular speaker, researcher and author. With over 15 years experience in social media leadership positions, she has founded and run leading online communities for CXO Systems, Cambridge Technology Partners and IDG, and has developed winning social strategies for influential companies such as Cisco, Cognizant, EMC, Palladium Group and SAP.

Vanessa DiMauro is an Executive-In-Residence at Babson College’s Olin School of Management, and holds both a B.A. and M.A. from Boston College. She blogs at blog.leadernetworks.com.

Farland Group had the honor of working with IBM on its Centennial THINK Forum, which took place in New York at the end of September.  One presenter who provoked a lot of discussion was MIT professor and thought leader Tom Malone, who presented his research on collective intelligence.

There was a great deal to learn from his study for those establishing and building communities in offline and online environments.

Malone’s research set out to understand and measure how intelligently a group behaves.  And while most of us do believe that a group would be ‘smarter’ than an individual, the measurement of group cognitive ability has never been undertaken.

Malone’s research found that there are a three factors that help to predict the intelligence of groups.

1. Social perceptiveness: The ability to ‘read’ the emotions of the others in the group.
2. Consistency of participation: The evenness of conversational participation versus one person dominating conversation.
3. Gender matters: The proportion of women in the group increased its intelligence.
   Malone noted that there is a strong correlation between the first and third factor.

Community Intelligence

This led me to think about the advisory boards, executive forums and online communities that we operate and whether we are optimizing our groups to be intelligent.  Or perhaps we shouldn’t really care.  But some of the factors are very clearly important to facilitating a strong setting for engagement and maximizing outcomes.  For example,  we know that we can optimize the value of these executive client communities by ensuring that we create environments that will create shared and ‘even’ discussion.

In online communities, where you cannot see people, the question gets a little trickier — Is there a way to set your community up to be intelligent?   I would argue yes.  Through offline discussions with community members we can determine a lot about their interests, personality and areas of interest.  With this knowledge community managers can help those members engage in the discussions that will be of highest value to them and thereby create smaller communities of interest within the larger group.  These subdiscussions can become intelligent in their structure as long as the content and engagement are moderated actively.

Should we care about optimizing our communities for intelligence?  Share your thoughts on what makes your community engage successfully.

FutureM, founded by MITX begins in Boston this week to celebrate the future of marketing and convene leading thinkers in a discussion about how marketing is shaping the future of organization and business. Farland Group and experts from the Community Roundtable (Rachel Happe), Children’s Hospital (SarahMahoney)  and VistaPrint (Jeff Esposito) will debate and discuss the future of community at an event this afternoon where we will ask 150 Boston marketers and community leaders their perspectives.

We would like to seek a broader online discussion about this question and to encourage debate, Rachel and I have provided a couple of thoughts on the future of community and the impact it will have.  We encourage you to offer your thoughts and / or debate the provocations below adding your opinions and advice.

Provocation #1:  Customer community (online and offline) will be a significant foundation for revenue generation strategies.
As communities evolve and become more central to marketing strategies, businesses are recognizing a clear connection between communities and brand value.  Today, we are beginning to see those businesses and organizations that are embracing community are also starting to test selling strategies with their customers in these environments.  Tomorrow we predict that marketers, sellers and operations executives will recognize that customer communities serve as a holistic approach from which to drive revenue generation strategies.  While communities may never serve as places from which direct sales are made, they are an ideal forum from which clients will test and validate value propositions, new business models and will vote on go to market approaches.  An integrated customer-first strategy will be integral to how businesses will generate revenue in the future.  Those that fail to find a way to engage customers  will lose competitive advantage and ultimately market share.

Provocation #2:  Community is the organization:
Community Roundtable founder Rachel Happe believes that community in the future will become the organization.  Rachel argues that hierarchies, because of their structure, disproportionately reward those at the top levels of the hierarchy and take from those at the bottom levels. It turns out that this does not result in producing good incentives for either those at the top (who will get rewarded because of their position) or those at the bottom (who lose regardless of their effort).  Rachel predicts that organizations that operate as communities will be more productive, achieving higher revenue with lower costs.

What is your prediction for the future of communities?  Do you agree with the provocations above or do you have a different point of view.

With over 3,000 SXSWi panel submissions this year, picking panels that are interesting and worthwhile can be totally overwhelming. We have helped you out by doing our research and offering suggestions to you. We chose the following set of panels for you to consider based on both the panel topic and the presenters. We hope you’ll hop on the PanelPicker site and give a thumbs up to all of these great sessions. Voting closes September 2, so make your choices heard!

The List

We would be remiss if we didn’t suggest the panels Farland Group put together, so we’ll start with those. Then you will find an additional set of panels that we are looking forward to attending which also promise to be great additions to the SXSWi program.

1. Panels Farland Group submitted for SXSWi this year

While I have been to SXSWi for the past four years, last year, I was on a panel at South by Southwest Interactive for the first time and I had the fortunate opportunity to present with several people I respect in the industry. I learned a lot more from being a panelist than I did from attending any other panel. I did plenty of research on the subject of lurkers in a community and learned from my fellow panelists, as well as from the audience. We had a great discussion and the questions they asked allowed me to further my understanding of how people perceive community members.

Based on this great experience, this year, I submitted a panel and I encouraged my colleagues at Farland Group to submit one as well. Beyond the education we’ll gain from presenting, we are also very excited to have the opportunity to share some of the experiences we have had in community building with an exceptional group of peers, clients and companies.

The community revolving door: staying a step ahead
Some say getting started is the hardest part – and it can be, but often this is a phase of excitement organizationally and a time where everyone is focused on the shiny new toy. Year two, those internal stakeholders are on to the next new thing, your customers are back to their regular day jobs and you are stuck having to push that community rock up the steep hill of engagement. Welcome to the biggest challenge presented by community. From continuing to seek out new members, to finding the next evangelist, membership evolution can be an unexpected challenge, but so is content evolution and most importantly, strategy evolution. The first year or two of your community takes lots of seeding and seeking out content, and fine-tuning core areas of value. While you can’t forget those important elements, your next couple of years will be more about member nurturing and making fine adjustments to the focus of your community based on member interests, engagement, and shifting expectations of value.
Panelists: Heather Strout – Farland Group, Jim Storer – The Community Roundtable, Mike Pascucci – Ektron, Mark Wallace – Environmental Data Resources, Inc. (EDR)

Customer Communities: Connecting to the Future
Companies of all types are beginning to embrace community as a critical channel to integrate the voice of their customer into the business and deepen relationships, co-create new ideas for product or service development and evolution, and collaborate on strategies for business growth. While business communities are still an evolving concept, those that successfully secure deep customer relationships have great potential to disrupt how companies go to market. So what is next for communities in business? Will they become a necessary component for customer-centric competitive advantage? Will they be a commodity? What best practices will emerge as this value-based collaborative approach to the market becomes prevalent? How will communities be used and what does that mean for marketers looking to the future of marketing innovation? We will look at the future of closed versus open communities; insular versus distributed communities; at the evolution of co-creation and crowd-sourcing, and how you can prepare for the evolution.
Panelists: Roanne Neuwirth – Farland Group, Rachel Happe – The Community Roundtable, Daniel Brostek – Aetna, Matt Johnston – uTest

Community Scorecards – Metrics that Matter
You’ve finally launched an online customer community, you have the buy-in of key decision makers and your customers have arrived. Congratulations – now how are you measuring impact? This is a familiar scenario for many community managers and executives who are trying to understand the value of community and how it will have direct impact on their business that is measurable. This session will provide practical lessons and cases on how community managers and leaders are establishing successful scorecards that communicate the value of community to critical stakeholders.
Presenter: Jane Hiscock – Farland Group

Community Management at a Crossroads*
Community management is not a new discipline, but as traditional organizations work to evolve into social businesses, community managers are finding themselves in the spotlight. No longer relegated to back rooms, scanning message boards, community managers are finding their way into the boardroom to help executives understand this dynamic new reality. But community managers can’t claim victory just yet. The same changes that brought them from the back room to the boardroom could send them right back again. Services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and the next great social app (insert name here____________) require community managers to constantly evolve the way they think about their organization in the social space. This panel will discuss how community management continues to evolve and how community managers can stay on top of it all.
Panelists: Jim Storer – The Community Roundtable, Heather Strout – Farland Group, Mike Pascucci – Ektron, Mark Wallace – EDR

*Farland Group didn’t submit this panel but I am a panelist

2. Other panels you should consider giving a thumbs-up

As I said in the beginning, there are lots of great panels out there. We have chosen these for content that is interesting and for the panelists who are compelling. Because SXSW’s panels are crowdsourced, it is up to us to pick panels where we know the panelists will work hard and do their homework to bring us a good presentation. In many cases, I have heard these people speak and I know they’re good. There are a few panels here where I haven’t heard the people speak but I know they have something valuable to say.

Community Management is the New Black
Community managers wear a plethora of hats these days, from community ambassador to storyteller and back again. There is no one job responsibility or hat. Each organization has to find the right mix and balance of hats a community manager must wear, but don’t be mistaken, a single hat does not define the species. Similar to a chameleon, a community manager does not change colors or hats to blend in, but as an act of communication. The position title, community manager, is relatively new, but the role is not new and is evolutionary of the public relations practitioner, customer service representative, and marketing consultant. It is the networks and subsequent transparency of those networks that have changed and will continue to change. Social networks, both online and off, will come and go, yet the conversations making up the content of these networks will remain the same. It is the responsibility, not just the role, of the community manager to participate in the communities of conversations and focus on the people behind the engagement, not the technology. Community management is not the ‘management’ of a community response, but the awareness and educated engagement of the community manager and organization represented. To succeed, community management begins as a mindset, the seed of strategic change and open communication within the business culture, then progresses into unique processes for smart community participation.
Presenter: Lauren Vargas – Aetna

The next Generation of Ideation
Remember when “ideas” sites were all the rage? IdeaStorm, My Starbucks Idea? Media attention to these communities declined, but the communities’ themselves evolved, and the second wave of customer-led innovation is fast-approaching. The panel will explore the first generation of ideation sites, and talk about how they are evolving their ideation communities to take full advantage of the social web, create more meaningful and impactful dialog amongst stakeholders and ensure that ideation is a key activity in their community engagement model. The panel will be punctuated by real-time online ideation activities with attendees. Panelists include social media executives that drove strategy for IdeaStorm, My Starbucks Idea, as well as a key industry analyst.
Presenters: Bill Johnston – Dell, Vida Killan – Starbucks

Community by Accident
Sometimes the best things that happen aren’t planned. The same is true for successful online communities. Facebook started out as a closed network of Ivy League students. Today, it’s a global phenomenon shaping our age. The Spiceworks community was a software engineer’s pet idea that was almost nixed by the CEO. Now it’s the world’s largest community of small business tech professionals. While it’s important to actively care for your community, the most successful flourish by learning how to capitalize on happy accidents. In this session, community experts from Spiceworks will share ways you can recognize and make the most of happy accidents. From picking an orange dinosaur as a mascot to using chili peppers as a rating scale, come learn about all the accidents we’ve had along the way and how we’ve made lemons into lemon hand grenades.
Presenters: Nicholas Tolstoshev – Spiceworks, Tabrez Syed – Spiceworks

Community & Influence: How to not piss people off
Marketing is social. We’re all sold. But how do you maximize your return in social without appearing like a douchebag? One the one hand, top influencers in the social space are the ones who can truly drive action back to your brand. Yet, on the other hand no one likes a brand who refuses to interact with the little person. As social marketing becomes more serious, more serious metrics are being demanded — learn what works and what doesn’t. And what about service — should influence affect whom you help first?
Panelists: Megan Berry – Klout, Evan Hamilton – User Voice, Maria Ogneva – Yammer, Frank Eliason – Citibank

Get Lucky: Create Serendipity to Spur Innovation
Call it chance, luck, or juju, serendipity is the act of unexpectedly finding something of value. It is the muse of innovation and a silent driver of business; consider how Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of the antibiotic penicillin revolutionized medicine, reducing suffering across the entire world. From the world changing to the mundane task of finding relevant information on Google+ or Twitter, serendipity is the mysterious force that gives us the breaks that many of us seek. But what is serendipity? How do you encourage it? Is there a downside to it? How does it apply to work, art or play? Can you design for serendipity? We say you can and should. Whether you’re building the next super social network, doing scientific research, or building a community, there are steps you can take and skills you can develop to help you recognize and act on it. It is more than just naturally being fortuitous; rather, it takes practice to get lucky.
Presenters: Rawn Shah – IBM, Rachel Happe – The Community Roundtable

Down in Front! How to Control Bad Fans
The customer ISN’T always right. You want to love your fans (customers, commenters, activists) but sometimes they don’t deserve it. The bad fans who tore up Vancouver after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup deserved jail time, not a Kumbaya approach. The same is true for the social-media-enabled communities we count on to buy our products and promote our causes. An analogy: Major League Baseball games are a lot more fun to these days because ballclubs started cracking down on fights and drunkenness in the stands in the 1980s. Have no pity for the jerks who got tossed: the rest of us are better off for it. Just as organizations should “think before they click,” users of social media have a responsibility to respect the very organizations that they demand respect from. This panel will follow the fast-paced, ultra-interactive style of 2011’s “The Steroid Culture of Social Media” to call for new thinking about the implied social contract of social media, for organizations and fans alike.
Panelists: Tim Walker – BreakingPoint Systems, Aaron Strout – WCG, Troy Nalls – Third Cousins Media, Kate Brodock – Other Side Group

Aristotle Shops @Wal-Mart | CSR, Ethics & Community
Aristotle is known for his establishment of what we consider “value ethics” and five years ago Aristotle would NOT have stepped foot into a Wal-Mart. At the time the company was under fire from environmental and labor groups. In fact, a 2004 report found that between 2 and 8% of Wal-Mart’s customers had stopped going to their local Supercenter because of the negative press they had heard about the chain. Today, Aristotle would be a Wal-Mart greeter, or perhaps manage its online community. What happened? The company changed their vision when CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. launched a massive Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) campaign to, in his words, “…create a better story”. CSR can take many shapes, from environmental to socioeconomic, and it often can grow revenue and profits. CSR has also become a main marketing vehicle for establishing communities, online and offline, centered around the company. Though not every company has the size, reach and resources of a Wal-Mart, all companies need to consider how CSR can help build and strengthen online and offline communities. This session will dive into how to build CSR programs and use them to help build online and offline communities.
Presenters: Kyle Flaherty – BreakingPoint Systems, Alex Hahn – Vox Global

Future of Location Marketing: Dummies Perspective
Three years after the launch of foursquare (at SXSW no less), the business world is starting to warm up to the idea of building loyalty, discovery and deals through location-based services. While many companies know that there is some “there” there, they have no idea how to leverage the concept of location-based services. During this informative session with the authors of Location Based Marketing for Dummies [http://amzn.to/lbm4d], Aaron Strout and Mike Schneider will walk through the 5 golden rules of location-based marketing, the key players along with several business case studies (big and small).
Presenters: Aaron Strout – WCG, Mike Schneider – Allen + Gerritsen

Can growing a moustache change the world?
Movember is a global movement committed to raising awareness and funds for critical men’s health issues. Over the last seven years, Movember has grown from a handful of friends in Australia to the largest non-government funder of prostate cancer research in the world, with over $174 USD million in funds. This has been accomplished in part by creating and nurturing a passionate online community of brand ambassadors. Join Adam Garone, CEO/co-founder of Movember, as he discusses how Movember leveraged the support of a few daring partners and pockets of loyal fans to generate a global movement that saw 450,000 moustache growers in 2010. Learn how Movember captivated the attention of a demographic infamous for not discussing their health, converted them into evangelists by turning the brand over to them, and sent them off to build the campaign. Discover how inspiring supporters to become ambassadors helped Movember stay lean as it expanded globally. If you work with a non-profit, this is THE panel to attend. If you want to turn customers into ambassadors, this is THE panel to attend. Just grow it – get inspired and change the world.
Presenter: Adam Garone – Movember

Elastic Waist Entrepreneurship for Women 40+
Some of us running a startup-type business online also have families, mortgages, minivans, hot flashes….and years of work experience and savvy. Although we do order a lot of pizza like those young’uns, we don’t ever sleep under our office desks (hey, that’s hard on our back.) Did you know that 80% of the total entrepreneurship activity during the teeth of the Great Recession (2009) was from people over 35? TourismCurrents.com co-founder Sheila Scarborough and serial online entrepreneur Wendy Piersall (the Woo! Jr. network and author of “Mom Blogging for Dummies”) will talk about strategies and lessons learned for 40-ish women and older who are interested in taking advantage of tech and social media to launch online businesses that bring their passions, knowledge and life experiences to the web. We may need reading glasses for our smartphones, but we can still kick butt. Step aside, young pups….Mama’s starting a business on teh interwebz!
Presenters: Sheila Scarborough – Tourism Currents, Wendy Piersall – Woo! Jr.

Can You Tweet That? Social Media and the Law
A resident tweets about a moldy apartment; the apartment company sues her for libel. An employee is fired because of a photo on Facebook. A monkey takes a self portrait on a digital camera accidently left in the forest by a photographer. Who owns the copyright – the monkey or the photographer? A month after the court verdict, there are more than 40 Facebook pages entitled F*ck Casey Anthony. In today’s digital age, technology is advancing faster than the law. Do old-school laws apply to new-school technology? Don’t we have 1st Amendment rights online or should we be scared about what we post? In this thought-provoking session, we’ll look at legal issues, such as defamation, copyright, the 1st Amendment and hate speech, and how these issues apply to social media. We’ll discuss the definitions of these issues and examine recent court cases around social media and let the audience decide if these cases have merit.
Presenter: Dara Quackenbush – Texas State University

Marketing vs. IT: How to End the Bloodshed
IT is frustrated by Marketing’s constant changing direction. Marketing wants to fire IT because it’s too slow and limiting. What’s going on here? The rapid growth in digital channels are increasingly the intersection between technology and marketing departments. This increased interaction frequently causes friction as Marketing becomes more focused on digital channels and IT seeks to gain relevance through alignment with business partners. The two departments usually have very different perspectives on priorities, decision making and cost management. Further, they are subjected to different internal pressures that drive them to view the world differently. In this session we’ll review the situation in more detail offering insights in how Marketing & IT can co-exist in better harmony.
Presenters: John Refford – Natixis Global Associates, Rob Brosnan – Forrester Research

Other SXSWi panel lists for your consideration

I hope you found the list of panels valuable and that we have made it easier for you to find interesting and useful panels for you to vote on. We are not the only ones to put together panel lists. In fact, I used these lists to help me choose which panels to vote for.

2012 SXSW Interactive panels worth your vote
By Bryan Person

Bring on the Content at SXSW 2012!
By Aaron Strout

SXSW PanelPicker 2012: What Boston Companies Are Doing
By Kaitlin Maud

I’m looking forward to seeing you all in Austin next March! Did I miss a great panel? Let me (and readers) know in the comments.