Enterprise Social Media

One month on, Cadence user community gaining momentum

Posted on 13. Aug, 2008 by Tom Diederich in Community Management, Corporate Blogs, Social Media

It’s been nearly a month since the launch of the Cadence user community. Summers are generally slower in terms of traffic for many online communities, as folks tend to take vacations, so I was somewhat concerned about getting the necessary momentum to ensure success.

At the Online Community Unconference in June, one of the tracks was called “Community Year One,” hosted by Joe Cothrel, a pioneer in the online community space. Joe was instrumental in helping me get the discussion forums on the right track for the Symantec Technology Network, which I launched in 2007. The gist of his recent presentation focused on ways of ensuring that your new user community is successful within the first year of launch. Since his advice worked the first time around for me at Symantec, I attended his presentation as a refresher.

Joe started by introducing a couple of key “rules”: the 90-9-1 rule and the 30-10-10 rule. The first is that 90 percent of visitors will browse the forums; 9 percent will participate casually; and 1 percent will account for most content. And, within any 30-day period, 10 percent of people who see an invitation will come, and 10 percent of those will post. Joe calls these “planning assumptions” rather than predictions. You may do better than this, but don’t plan on it.

In other words, community is a numbers game. Get the numbers right, and you’ll be successful. Get them wrong, and you’ll struggle.

Now you might think that this news bodes ill for a company like Cadence, which like many successful business-to-business companies isn’t exactly a household name, and doesn’t have millions of eager customers – just many thousands. So how did we do?

Since our July 14 launch – that is, in just 30 days — 6,534 people have registered, and they’ve contributed almost 1,000 posts. Pretty good!

Here’s how we did it. Understanding 30-10-10, we realized that visibility would be critical. As I mentioned in my last post, our new Web site puts community front and center – right on the landing page of cadence.com, so that was one big plus in terms of getting people’s attention.

But getting broad outreach was only part of the battle. Knowing also that every successful community depends on a small number of active members – those “one-percenters” — we reached out to customers as well as bloggers who cover Cadence’s industry: electronic design automation, or EDA (the software used to design the chips and circuit boards for computers and electronic devices). We also reached out internally at Cadence. As at Symantec, Cadence’s discussion forums are peer-to-peer but employees check in when they can with advice. We’ve also recruited customer and employee “moderators” or “experts” to help ensure that advice meted out by the community at large is accurate – and to lend a hand, too. Finally, we’ve recruited a small army of Cadence bloggers to engage customers through that important medium.

While encouraging internal participation continues to be challenging (as I wrote about here), we think we’re well on our way to success. Joe noted that in his presentation that when a community reaches an average of 5 to 10 new posts per day per forum, long-term growth is usually assured. With nine primary forums, we’re almost there already.

Is there more to know? Absolutely – see the 10 “secrets” to success I shared in a previous blog post.

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang, in a recent blog post on the topic of Cadence’s new community, asked “what’s next in terms of potential next steps for Cadence?”

He offered this advice: “To continue to reach to their community by aggregating all of the discussion in their market, not just Cadence centric content. By becoming an industry discussion hub, they could take expand mindshare from other competitors and customers.”

That is a compelling thought and will take some selling to internal stakeholders on my part. In the meantime, I’ll be working to make sure our community takes root, flourishes, and continues to evolve.

Tags: Add new tag, Cadence, discussion forums, Jeremiah Owyang, Joe Cothrel, online community, Symantec, Tom Diederich

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