We’re excited to launch a series of Q&As and discussions with thought leaders on Social Enterprise Software. We’re kicking off this series with Sameer Patel, managing director at at SpanStrategies – an integrated consulting practice focused on business execution via enterprise social computing– and blogger for Enterprise 2.0 execution and social software at Pretzel Logic. Sameer has done a lot of thinking around Enterprise 2.0 strategy, and we recently engaged together on the importance of customer communities and the emerging role of the community manager. Check out his Q&A with us, where he discusses the opportunity for customer communities to embrace true innovation.

What's your general feeling on the importance of building customer communities for companies today?

A customer community is one of the more promising components of the emerging enterprise design that’s powered by social computing technology. In a world before online communities existed, insight into customer intent and sentiment was limited to the few people on the organizational front lines. In contrast, most community initiatives today offer an open format that enables everyone in the organization to see what customers expect from you. But that only signals the very beginning of the promise of the open enterprise. Eventually the best minds across your organizations’ supply chain, employee and customer base, and distribution partners will be able to truly rally around the needs of your prospects and customers - often in real time, to accelerate business performance. A critical initial step to realizing such a work model is a well-conceived customer community.

What do you think of the emerging community manager role? Will we see more of these roles develop? What sort of backgrounds and skillsets are required?

There’s no doubt the emerging community manager role is extremely important. As far as skills go - beyond “must haves” such as the ability to listen and facilitate - it’s a mistake not to consider strong business and functional domain skills, to effectively connect community efforts to specific business activities. From a career standpoint, my take is that today’s brightest community managers will not grow into VPs/CXO of Community or Social Media roles, etc. Rather, the very best ones will actually take over as leaders in charge of primary functions such as marketing, product and customer support. The catalyst will be successfully making relationships (as opposed to process) central to driving awareness, innovation, lead generation, support and the like.

What functional areas will get the most value from customer communities and what are your thoughts on defining and measuring that value?

Customer support has been the first area to show hard savings when compared to expensive contact center operations for Tier 1 support. Outsourcing / off-shoring T1 support has shown mixed results. Customer community - integrated with process - can successfully evolve to cover T1 support and use the contact center for escalation only. That can mean significant savings.

Innovation is another area that is ripe for customer communities. The risk in product development processes today is mind-boggling. Changing product direction late in the development process can be very expensive or even result in failure. Customer communities let you rope in your customers very, very early and iteratively in the process, thereby mitigating significant risk. That’s easy to prove ROI.

Finally, with respect to marketing, most of the community focus today (especially B2B) is on brand awareness and engagement. Certainly, there’s value to be gained there, however, lead generation is the elephant in the room most don’t want to tackle or acknowledge. Regardless of the economic times, the closer your marketing activity is to generating revenue, the more strategic your program remains to your organization. That’s where customer communities need to go - fast.

What questions should companies ask when it comes to timing on building a customer community program?

There’s plenty of superb material out there to help you get a community effort off the ground. From an execution perspective though, enterprises need to think through a) intent and b) operational considerations early on.

Think about where you want to end up from a business standpoint early on. The potential brand damage from re-setting the nature of the relationship later on is far worse than not engaging in a community at all. Today’s community efforts are characterized by building relationships, being hospitable, creating a sense of approachability etc. These are all good things to aspire to. However, it’s a potentially rocky slope to go down if you don’t know exactly what you’re trying to achieve. For instance, if you decide mid-way that you need to aggressively generate leads from this effort but the community you’ve created is one that fosters an informal friendly relationship, it’s going to get very awkward. It’s like suddenly pulling out Tupperware at a party you hosted for your best buddies.

Online communities also need to be cognizant of the larger business initiative. Looking after your customer, knowing their needs and engaging with them are all existing initiatives at most organizations (long before the concept of online communities showed up). Communities just let you do a lot of this, better. The last thing you want to do is create another standalone touch point that’s not aware of how the rest of your organization is connecting with a given customer or prospect. While the plumbing to start a standalone community is very cheap, you need to understand the true cost, technology and effort required to offer a unified experience and to generate one set of customer profile metrics. That means really good community analytics and an integrated community effort with structured process systems.

Do you think we've reached the "social tipping point" in which companies are no longer asking, "why customer community?" but "how?" and "why or why not?"

Generally speaking, yes. At the most basic level, organizations have seen how services such as Yelp and Trip Advisor create conversations around consumer businesses, with or without input from the business in question. Larger businesses need to be ready for that as well and participate accordingly.

Early adopter organizations and a few consumer industries, such as CPG, are beginning to ask “how.” However, the benefit from soft return(s), such as brand awareness and engagement, can carry the day for only so long. For customer communities to really get on the execution radar for most mainstream enterprises, there’s a need for a more detailed analysis around hard return. Most smart business managers are skeptical, and they want to know how this lowers cost for a given business function, generates revenue or reduces risk for their business.

So while we have graduated from “why” to “how” in many cases, it’s a different “how” that we need to be prepared to respond to, far beyond technology platform selection.

About Sameer Patel

Sameer writes at Pretzel Logic, a blog about Enterprise 2.0 execution and social software. Along with a team of experts, he also consults with Span Strategies to leading organizations on business acceleration via social computing and collaborative technology. Typically, customers include marketing and sales, support, product development and HR. His client roster has included leading organizations such as Sun Microsystems, Ingres, Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co., BitTorrent Inc., McKesson and The Sabre Group. Sameer can be reached at sameer.a.patel@gmail.com.