My outside your firewall, shared listening and engaging Community Product Manager service offering for social software vendors/providers.

Sharing does have its advantages

According to wikipedia

Shared Services refers to the provision of a service by one part of an organization or group where that service had previously been found in more than one part of the organization or group. Thus the funding and resourcing of the service is shared and the providing department effectively becomes an internal service provider. The key is the idea of ‘sharing’ within an organization or group.

As the title suggests, this is the third and final part of my Lessons Learned series and where I’ll propose the business model I’ve come up with. Here’s my previous related posts:

1. How to infuse Social Content 2.0 into your social software lifecycle
2. Trial offer to test the Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life
3. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 1
4. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 2

1. I will assume the overhead costs associated with:
   1. Monitoring the social software market. Using Radian6, I would create a Topic Profile including keywords for social software vendors / providers like Socialtext, Atlassian, Blogtronix, MindTouch, Cynapse, Liferay, Vignette…
   2. Filtering out and tagging relevant buzz about product features and directions across the market
   3. Offering free service exporting tagged content and publishing on blog
2. Offer monthly fee-based services where I would:
   1. Net out tagged content with respect to product features and publish on permission-based site (Say for example there’s a few posts about “permissions”. I would then write a 1-liner describing the “permission feature” and link to the original supporting content published Step 1.3)
3. Offer hourly, or, tiered fee-based services where I would:
   1. Collaborate with respective social software vendors’ / providers’ (Customers’) Product Managers to determine which features described in Step 2.1 should be elaborated
   2. Engage with original content authors and elaborate on product features selected in Step 3.1
   3. Privately share results of Step 3.2 with respective Customer Product Managers
   4. Collaborate with respective Customer Product Managers to determine which features described in Step 3.3 require further assistance / services

Other variations
I could resell Radian6 Seat licenses – governed by certain permission restrictions and share my Topic Profiles for those:

1. Customers whose only pain is the cost of Radian6 (who can then determine later on if they want Steps 2 and/or 3)
2. Potential colleagues who would collaborate on Steps 1, 2 & 3

What do think? If you’re a social software vendor/provider, is this a service that may be of interest to you? Do you currently have a Product Manager? If so, is your Product Manager able to keep up with the social content? Do you see the any value in consolidating the redundancy? Do you see where it really is just a matter of per·spec·tive? Where …

one piece of content can yield dividends for many investors 

I’d love to hear from you folks in the field & prove there is a way we all could succeed at doing more with less.

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 2 The most important pattern that emerged and lesson I learned...
2. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 1 Distinction between a Community Manager, Product Manager and a Community...
3. Trial offer to test the Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life More on infusing community and product management for social software...

per·spec·tive n. Subjective evaluation of relative significance; a point of view.

Perspective

In an earlier post, How to infuse Social Content 2.0 into your social software lifecycle, I reiterated a common theme I noticed in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software. That theme basically stated that many social software providers’ ability to execute may suffer due to their lack of resources, or, size does matter – according to Gartner. To address this issue, I posted my Trial offer to test the Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life where I proposed the services of a new player – the Community Product Manager. And finally, after receiving some much appreciated feedback, I followed-up with my Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 1 where I clarified the distinction between a Community Manager, Product Manager and a Community Product Manager. In this post, I’ll focus on what I discovered during that trial week by presenting some concrete examples and how I think it fits into the big picture.

Recently, there’s been a lot of news about Space Junk;

In June 1983, the windscreen of the U.S. space shuttle Challenger had to be replaced after it was chipped by a fleck of paint measuring 0.01 of an inch that impacted at four kilometers per second.

So here’s my fleck of paint: For the purposes of discussion, I purposely selected trivial content in order not to distract from the point I’m trying to articulate. For now, you’ll have to trust me about the volume of content flying around in cyberspace

Here’s some content I found using Radian6 during the trial period and a few different perspectives:

Scenario 1: Broadcast of new feature to anyone listening for Socialtext
Tweet from pascal_venier on Feb 28, 2009 02:48 PM

Studying Socialtext wiki automatic “Email notification of Recent Changes” to your inbox. A nice feature. http://twurl.nl/ypcmoj…

Scenario 2: Broadcast of feature request to Liferay & anyone listening for Liferay
Tweet from helmblogger on Mar 03, 2009 12:34 PM

@Liferay Our business problem… “News” both organizational and departmental. Need to display “all-in-one” and “by department”.. thoughts?…

Scenario 3: Blog post targeting sought after project management features and referencing a few social software players
The Best and Worst Project Management Apps posted Feb 08, 2009 05:17 AM

… But there are a number of organizations that command large amounts of cash who need to procure project management systems for their divisions around the world. This includes NGOs, Government Agencies, International Schools, Non-Profits and more. In these harsh economic times, businesses should be looking for ways to tap into new markets. Most emerging economies still have nearly 100% room for growth, if only developers take into account their needs and circumstances.

Do any project management products exist that are ready to serve this multi-billion dollar sector?…

Assuming the organization has a Community Manager then there may be an overlap in responsibilities with a Community Product Manager. However, this can be easily addressed with a little bit of collaboration. However beyond the overlap, a Community Product Manager could potentially extend the above scenarios by:

1. Reviewing User Stories with their counter-part Product Manager & determine any course of action
2. Engaging with the source and/or user community to elaborate and document the feature requirements
3. Supporting the Product Manager in the feature development lifecycle thereby completing the Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life (see post title)

Panning the River of News for gold

However, the most important pattern that emerged and lesson I learned was the one of Perspective. No doubt, even with the help of Radian6′s River of News, there’s a lot of work involved in mining for gold nuggets in cyberspace. But the beauty of striking these nuggets is that they’re environmentally friendly – they’re reusable! As illustrated in this post, one piece of content can yield dividends for many investors. It’s just a matter of perspective.

My next post will propose a Community Product Manager business model. I’d love to hear any of your ideas and will be more than happy to attribute and share them here.

Reflection
Do the above scenarios and quotes help in providing concrete examples of where a Community Product Manager can add value to your development process? Do you need more? Do you have any examples of your own you could share with me?

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 1 Distinction between a Community Manager, Product Manager and a Community...
2. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 3 My outside your firewall, shared listening and engaging Community Product...
3. Trial offer to test the Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life More on infusing community and product management for social software...

Distinction between a Community Manager, Product Manager and a Community Product Manager

Feedback

First of all, thanks to all of those who shared their thoughts with me on my last post – Trial offer to test the Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life. In general, there were two common threads:

1. Disticntion between a Community Product Manager and a Community Manager
2. Can’t justify business case for that role

Despite my attempt at defining the former, most thought I was offering the services of a Community Manager. To be clear, my understanding of a Community Manager is based on Chris Brogan’s post Essential Skills of a Community Manager. Here’s a quick summary: Community Managers

• are like a good party host mixed with a fine restaurant host.
• must be experienced communicators
• are ambassadors and advocates in one
• are bodyguards and protectors
• must build actionable reports
• cultivate internal teams for further support

On the other hand, there’s Pragmatic Marketing’s Product Manager definition which can be illustrated as;

Pragmatic Marketing Framework

In my opinion, while a Community Product Manager is in between these two roles, it’s much more aligned with the Product Manager’s, except, it’s outside the development organization’s firewall. Which means, a Community Product Manager could potentially assist the Product Manager with the highlighted areas illustrated above.

In an earlier post, How to infuse Social Content 2.0 into your social software lifecycle, I reiterated Gartner’s findings that many social software providers / vendors may suffer from lack of resources. And while I received a bit of flack for the “size matters” point, I still believe the Community Product Manager role need is there – to some degree, which I’ll save for another time.

In my next post, I’ll focus on the content by presenting some concrete examples of what I discovered over the past week & how I think it fits into the big picture.

Reflection
As always, all comments are welcome.

Thanks again to those who shared their thoughts and a special thanks to Alora Chistiakoff over at Social Computing Magazine for suggesting a few concrete examples will help clarify matters.

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 2 The most important pattern that emerged and lesson I learned...
2. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 3 My outside your firewall, shared listening and engaging Community Product...
3. Trial offer to test the Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life More on infusing community and product management for social software...

More on infusing community and product management for social software development. Read on and email me at steven@stevenmilstein.com if you want to participate in my free trial offer.

Circle of Life

Background
I recently posted How to infuse Social Content 2.0 into your social software lifecycle where I mentioned 38 social software companies reviewed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I then went fishing for Comments by tweeting all those names and more (see tags listed below), with a link to the post. Good, or, bad, almost immediately, three of them left comments plus one sent an email plus another responded with a few tweets. I’m guessing that means their listening for their brands. I’m also guessing that the others may either not be listening, or, are too busy to get engaged – even with the post being resyndicated at Social Computing Magazine the very next day! As a result, I feel its time to stop blogging about it and start delving deeper into my theory.

Definitions

Social Content 2.0: Content derived from the spontaneous, effortless, contagious and insightful use of social software. This content flows independent of the networks, platforms and tools themselves and is solely driven by the interests, concerns, opinions and experiences of the community and their desire to contribute.

Community Product Manager: A new type of product manager whose primary task is to listen, engage and represent the stakeholders outside the software development organization and help communicate this nurtured Social Content 2.0 into the agile development process.

Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life: Harvesting Social Content 2.0 from both the outside and inside of the organization to feed further development and support of it’s products and/or services, in turn producing it’s next generation.

Tools supplied by Radian6
I’ll be using Radian6‘s social media monitoring solution to harvest the social content.

Free Trial Offer Iterative Process

1. Select social software vendors based upon their interest, ability to assign owner on the inside to collaborate with me and timeliness in replying to my offer
2. Configure Radian6 for social software market place and filter for selected vendors
3. Discover the content and it’s contributors for five business days
4. Analyze trends, keywords, level of engagement for five business days
5. Blog about market-level results on my site
6. Blog about vendor and product level results on vendors’ extranet, intranet, or some other private space

Service Offering – Post Trial Offer Iterative Process

1. Collaborate with traditional product manager representing outside stakeholders
2. Participate in development process as required
3. Engage with community contributors as required
4. Reflect with respective community contributors

Trial offer
So how pragmatic can a Community Product Manager be? If you’re a social software vendor and prepared to collaborate with me, let’s measure the fruits of our labour. To be clear, my resources are limited, as I’m sure yours are too, and I cannot possibly agree to help everyone that responds. So if you’re as serious about this stuff as I am, then please do not hesitate to respond and lets get going. You can email me at steven@stevenmilstein.com.

SERVaaS – Service as a Service?
If all goes well, then I hope to have a better understanding of the demand for Community Product Managers and the viability of offering the above services. Once I have a few customers in place, then taking it to the next level is already the subject of sleepless nights in Montreal and will have to be saved for another post down the road.

Reflection
What do you think? Are you in development? Do you think there’s a place in the software development lifecyle for Community Product Managers? Or, are you a stakeholder on the outside yearning for a(nother) voice on the inside? Either way, please comment, share with a colleague, customer, developer and help get those email requests coming in.

Many thanks to the good folks; Amber Naslund, Cory Hartlen , Marc Whitchurch, Chris Ramsey and Marcel Lebrun at Radian6 for all their time and consideration.

And another Thank You to Alora Chistiakoff over at Social Computing Magazine for reaching out to me and offering my first resyndication.

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 1 Distinction between a Community Manager, Product Manager and a Community...
2. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 2 The most important pattern that emerged and lesson I learned...
3. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 3 My outside your firewall, shared listening and engaging Community Product...