Community forums that build human connections: Episode 41

This week we talk to an IT Community OG, the founder of the VMware Community, Daryll Swager. We talk about community forums, being customer-centric, and about Twitter forcing brevity as a communication style. Daryll, who by his own admission has no brevity within him whatsoever, now leads a customer engagement team at an enterprise software company.

• Why Daryll started the VMware Community site, and why he didn’t like John at first
• Forums vs Blogs as participatory platforms
• Your intent is shown by the content you produce, and explaining that to marketing managers
• Getting geeky with metrics: Visitors via social media had about 2.5x time on site and 3x pages viewed. Communities are top social referrers to the corporate web site
• Daryll’s Dad’s rules for starting a community: 1. Customer-friendly employees; 2. Cool technology; 3. Nothing to hide
• Don’t buy technology when you can’t see their user forums; communities as a health check in the buying process. Influence marketing affects the layer below PR and above Support. If you hide your forums, customers will go talk trash about you somewhere else
• Community culture — keeping it civil. Keeping out the trolls and hard sales spammers. Emailing forum threads to executives: “Just read what the people are saying about us”. An actual human responding to a complaint is amazing in its power to defuse the situation
• The broken window theory of community policing. Users as forum moderators. Your community on other people’s forums
• Twitter as a not-so-good conversation vehicle. Going beyond Twitter to get human contact. Your community will defend you on other communities. It’s always better to be someone who lives there and is familiar with cultural norms
• Consolidation of brand accounts. “… a series of negotiations with all the account owners and you have to get some top-down support too”. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter change their rules without warning
• Your org chart is showing: Conway’s Law “organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communicationstructures of these organizations”
• Daryll is heartless about new social channels without plans
• “Every time I’m sure somebody proves me wrong”
• Community and the last 4 years of push-marketing
• Daryll is not a fan of the brevity of Twitter, unlike the Geek Whisperers, but you can reach him at @dswager or his blog.

The earliest snapshot of the VMware Forums from the Way Back Machine – Dec 16, 2003:

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