Ann All spoke with Ed Moran, director of product innovation at Deloitte and one of the authors of the second annual "Tribalization of Business" survey, which examines how companies use online communities and social media.

All: One of the things I believe you found was that companies were devoting more internal staff resources to managing online communities. In addition to the additional resources and the continued investment  (94 percent of respondents plan to maintain or increase investment in their communities), any other signs worth mentioning of companies’ commitment to online communities?

Moran: In addition to those two metrics, some other things we’re getting from the interviews is that more and more companies, even if they aren’t thinking of developing their own communities, are starting to listen to what is taking place [on social networks]. That’s kind of the first step for a lot of enterprises. You’re starting to see investments in areas we don’t necessarily capture in this survey, like listening platforms. People are using things like Dow Jones Insight and tools from Visible Technologies to get their toes in the water, to listen and get an idea of what people are saying about them. That might not show up in your community efforts. But as I talk to these companies, what I’ve heard from companies selling the listening platforms is they can’t keep up with the demand.

All: So companies are more aware conversations are occurring and are actively monitoring them. That seems smart.
Moran: If you’re dealing with a corporate culture internally, sometimes promoting awareness among the right people that your company is being talked about helps communities become more of a “need to do” instead of a “nice to have.”

All: The lack of such dedicated resources at many companies was one of the biggest takeaways from last year’s survey. With companies seemingly better addressing this, what are some of the continuing opportunities for improvement with their communities?
Moran: One that still shocks me is the companies don’t define what success looks like. The online people think so much about advertising and hits, that right away they gravitate to page views and time on site [as measures of success]. So they say, “If people aren’t registering or spending a lot of time on the site or clicking through to a lot of pages, we aren’t successful.” But you might take a step back, ask what was the original goal of the community and find it was to bring new ideas to the forefront. When you ask how they capture that, they might say, “We really don’t look at that.” So they might be getting a lot of ideas, but they might not be recording them because it’s not part of the marketing function.

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