Building Exceptional Product Help Communities

Building ExceptionalHelp Communities
@roebot that’s me on Twitter;
pssst…you should follow me.

Product Help
Should be more exceptional than marketing materials

help1.0

Social Impacts All Markets
Reinvigorating tired and even declining markets
Requires exceptional experiences

help2.0

MindTouch makes the world's most respected social knowledge base.
We power purpose-built help 2.0 communities that connect companies with their customers.
Millions use our software every day.

Help 2.0 Bridges Traditional Tools with Social and Analytics
Desktop Authoring
and Traditional Support Tools
Analytics
Providing a bridge for social/community capabilities and analytics
People and Social Tools

The Help 2.0 Revolution Will Be Documented, Socially.
Lower support costs
Ticket deflection, call time
Improve quality of support
Actionable insights into
Customers and users
Help effectiveness
Product, Marketing, Sales

Personalized
Help
Marketing
Sales

Strategies for Global Audience
But how does “social” impact HELP when we have a Global audience?

Machine Translation
Machine Translation

Empower translation
Empower your community.
They expect it.

Cultural Accuracy comes from community (em)powered translation

Machine Translation
Crowd Source Translation
Combine Machine and Crowd Source
…when appropriate

Polyglot:Search
Polyglotism
Relate articles by language
Stub articles and machine translate, but notify users
Change UI to user preferences
Language specific search
Tell users when articles are available in other languages

Pivot About Product/Language/Release

Community Junctions

Autodesk screen shot here

3 Community Principles

Ladder of participation
Provide a ladder of participation
Ease and encourage participation

Loosely coupled layers
Less risk
Better experience

Context
What’s clear to you is likely not to others in a diverse community
Prevent context switching—control the experience to deliver an exceptional one

5 Community Rules of Engagement

THE BIRTH OF A
COMMUNITY
Requires a constitution
LAWS
Encourage user generated content
Establish a social contract
Recruit community members
Content is king
Analyze, measure and change

LAW #1
Encourage user generated content
Identify the early adopters – Ask them to contribute, provide feedback
Badges, social recognition, leaderboards

Organize leaderboards pivot points
These are community junctions

Community Junctions

Ladder
Make it easy to contribute
OK with losing some control
Participate in discussion
Let the community decide

Recognize your top contributors
Badges work
Allows you to focus on top contributors

LAW #2
ESTABLISH A SOCIAL CONTRACT
The Customer/Company Pact
Enforce your rules
Lead By Example

Define your community guidelines in plain English (and all other languages )

You’re the conductor – ENFORCE your own rules

Lead by example
Practice what you preach

LAW #3
Recruit community members
Go where your customers are already engaged, confused, or having trouble
Advertise it in product
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn channels

& VAR’s

Promote community in your software products

FIND THEM ON SOCIAL NETWORKS

LAW #4
Content contentcontent
Great content drives traffic
Tutorials, videos, how to guides
Curate user generated content back to community

Example of engaging
content
Community

Tutorials and guides drive a ton of traffic
Also reduce support costs
Act as due diligence and/or product research

curate
digital content to provide more relevant audience experience
Tagging
Search
Brand Website
Contextualizing
Commenting
editing
Rating
Curated
Content
Content
Content
Curators
Brand
Audience

LAW #5
Analyze, Measure & change
Derive intelligence and meaning from how content is being consumed
Create Key Community Metrics

What are people searching for and not finding?
How old is our content across the site?
Are the support articles meeting our customer’s needs?
SEARCH
AGING
QUALITY
RATINGS
Allow content to be rated by users

Know what’s
RELEVANT
to your Community

Use Content Analytics to quickly understand the
ACCURACY,
QUALITY,
AND AGING
of the site’s content.
Watch
CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR
through search patterns.

EXAMPLE

Deliver a quality experience

AND WATCH AS THE COMMUNITY REDUCES YOUR SUPPORT COSTS

F1
Subtitle for F1 section to start

Ladder of participation
Provide a ladder of participation

Loosely coupled layers

Context

One source—used everywhere
Gradual ladder of participation
Layered
In context

A Social Knowledge Base
Wiki-style collaborative authoring
Content moderation and workflows
Community scoring and feedback
Content Curation Analytics
Adaptive Search

Code name: F1
An embed away
Button (or page fold)
Stylized hyperlink

Code name: F1
Contextual social help

Code name: F1
Quora X Digg
I have a question, or answer
I know where there is relevant content on this topic

Code name: F1
Content recommendation
Based on behavior
Based on social insights

Code name: F1
Spotlight tour
Based on dictionary of terms
Based on a modified web UI

Badging

Questing

This is portability!
This is reuse.
This is multi-channel
(CALIT2 TOPSAN protein structures shown in virtual reality)

Building ExceptionalHelp Communities
@roebot that’s me on Twitter.
Pssst…you should follow me.

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Building Exceptional Product Help Communities

by MindTouch on Mar 20, 2011

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Building Exceptional Product Help Communities — Presentation Transcript