As promised, you will find answers to questions (20 of them) from our most recent "Building a Business Case for Community" webinar (archive is available for stream/download here.)

As for the answers, we welcome additional feedback. I'll consider incorporating any of your answers into this post so comment away:

QUESTION 1: Can we hear examples of how companies deal with the new internal business processes that must be developed due to these Communities new needs and directions

ANSWER 1: This is a great question. Building and nurturing an online community requires a fresh look at how you mange your business. Some new processes are required, but it's also a matter of changing some of your existing practices. These changes are highly dependent on the business processes you plan to support with the community. Some examples include:

1. At Mzinga, we utilize the IdeaShare tool to solicit input on how we can do better (a virtual suggestion box if you will). Early on, we created a process for reviewing the suggestion box ideas every other week.. A cross-section of the company gets together and reviews, categorizes and responds to ideas. Overall one person is responsible for the overall management of that process.
2. For communities focused on innovation and market research, it's important for product management to revise their processes to include input from the community and share product decisions with the community prior to the final decision making process.
3. Another example focuses on how you disseminate corporate information. Traditionally, companies "spin" information and push it out via traditional channels (PR Newswire, etc.). In community, honesty and autenticity are incredibly important, so the standard marketing-speak just won't work and companies are required to take this into account when creating content for the community.

In summary, community is all about letting go of control and joining in a conversation with your customers, prospects, partners and/or employees. Layering this filter over existing business processes will identify the early issues you need to address when begin with the community journey. Please leave a comment if you'd like to see this as a future topic for an upcoming webinar.

QUESTION 2: I've seen a lot of open source products for free or minimal cost.  Is it really necessary to spend $300K annually?

ANSWER 2:There are many "free" open source tools out there, but it's important to note that community is a lot more complicated than buying a tool/technology. Community companies have invested years in developing cohesive tools, processes and services to help you succeed in building community.

Consider a golf analogy. If a good friend decided she wanted to pick up golf, would you just buy her a set of golf clubs and wish her good luck? Probably not. You'd bring her to the range, give her some pointers and perhaps purchase a few lessons with a golf professional. Once she understood the basics, you'd teach her the finer points of the game, like etiquette and how to hit a sand wedge from a tight lie (I'm still working on this one after 25 years!!). In golf, as in community, the tool (or clubs) is just a fraction of the overall cost to be successful.

Some companies will be successful building and implementing communities using free open source tools, but they are in the minority. The challenges you face in going this route are:

1. Understanding the community landscape and determining how to get started is a time-consuming process.
2. Most free/inexpensive tools are not optimized for business and lack the security and privacy required by most business.
3. Many IT departments are wary of "free-ware" because they don't have the resources in place to support it.

QUESTION 3: 'Market pricing for online communities'... how would these prices apply to a small business seeking to develop a community of  approx. 7,500 members?

ANSWER 3: This question is dependent on a number of variables. Contact Mzinga to develop a quote based on your needs.

QUESTION 4: Are we going to see a demo of an actual community ?  That's what I'm most interested in.

ANSWER 4:There are three ways to experience Mzinga's communities:

1. You can be explore one on your own. In fact, the community that you're visiting now, wearesmarter.org, is a Mzinga-powered community. You can also join one of our client communities by going to http://community.webex.com.
2. We run regular webinars where are communities are demo-ed. Visit Mzinga's webinar calendar to see an upcoming demo.
3. If you would like a personal tour of communities, please reach out to us and a community consultant will contact you to explore your questions. This can also be done via the Mzinga site.

QUESTION 5: What sort of committment does a company make to community participants regarding using (or not) the ideas?  How much editorial/creative control does the "sponsoring" organization maintain?

ANSWER 5:  This really depends on how much control you're willing to give up. Members are more likely to get involved if they think they're going to actually chaneg something. We find that clearly articulating up front how you plan to respond to and act on ideas (via a Rules of Engagement) is a good strategy. Set the rules and then follow them. Don't know what you want the rules to be? Say that up front and tell members you're just figuring out how this is going to work. They'll appreciate the honesty.

QUESTION 6: How do you measure performance?

ANSWER 6: From a  personal perspective, we always work with our clients to define success, but at the same time reassessing once the community is launched. It can be both quantitative and qualitative.

A good resource on this topic is Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang. He has a great post on his personal blog, Web Strategist about some of the "new measures" we should be focusing on.

QUESTION 7: Maybe we have to define new measures of performance, based on customer interactions?

ANSWER 7: Yes!!! See answer to question 6.

QUESTION 8: Are there some "process models" defined to drive and facilitate collaborative work - for example, "how to write a book" or "how to design a product"?

ANSWER 8: A few suggestions would be to read the books “Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki, “We Are Smarter Than Me” by Barry Libert, Jon Spector and thousands of contributors and “Outside Innovation” by Patricial Seybold.

QUESTION 9: What would be a good first step? Forums, Wiki?

ANSWER 9: The answer to that question goes back to the questions of "what are you trying to accomplish?" Forums are a great place to start if you want people to increase informal communications. People feel comfortable with this medium. Blogs are also a great starting point if people in your organization are ready to join a directed conversation. A wiki can also be a jumping off point if you’re looking for document collaboration. All three have low barriers to entry depending on the membership and your goals.

QUESTION 10: Would you recomend placing your community inside your existing e-commerce site, or create a stand alone presence online, with linkage back to your site?

ANSWER 10: It depends. Amazon, eBay, Prosper.com and Zappos are good examples of when to integrate your community within your product. On the other hand Nike has several communities separate from their brand. Think of why you are building the community, what you are trying to gain and why your members will come. Answering those questions will help determine which approach will be most successful.

QUESTION 11: What is the general demographic of Community members?  More female?

ANSWER 11: This is really driven by the type of community you are talking about. Charlene Li of Forrester Research has some of these details at an aggregate level in her report "Social Technographics." Because this is a paid report, you'll have to purchase from Forrester to get access. However, I did blog about this a few months back and was able include some of the key stats.

QUESTION 12: If I was going to propose this to my superiors tomorrow, what would be the easiest initial step technology wise that would lead to more social technology use in the future?

ANSWER 12: Blogs tend to be the easiest from a technology perspective and the easiest to manage from a content perspective, so they tend to be a nice starting point for sr management to get comfortable with the concept of social technology.

QUESTION 13: Is there a point where the economy of scale in this becomes "too many cooks in the kitchen"?

ANSWER 13: The answer to this question depends a bit on your perspective. If your community does not have enough focus, yes. You can have too many members if there is not a common goal. If you have too many people trying to steer it, yes. The members get confused by multiple messages and not enough clarity.

QUESTION 14: In choosing a vendor and platform for a site are there any quality websites with reviews from companies that have already worked with them?

ANSWER 14: It really depends on who the vendor is. To our knowledge, an aggregated site like epinions does not exist for these types of reviews (maybe an opportunity in the making!)

QUESTION 15: Who are the other thought leaders, in addition to your pannel,  that are leading and driving innovation in the networking space (and commercial application of communities)?

ANSWER 15:The We Are Smarter podcast series is a great place to start. Many experts in this field have been interviewed. They all have blogs that talk about the field and often reference other experts.

QUESTION 16: What rewards/incentives for contributors beyond charitable donation, "belonging" to community, etc. e.g. shares in gold discovery?

ANSWER 16: This really depends. In most circumstances, it’s not a real community if they don’t want to be there because they’re getting something out of it, but I encourage incentives for participation. This can simply be recognizing their outstanding contributions on the site, also t-shirts, and other token rewards go a long way. Discounts to events, and special activities, like a luncheon, can incentivize members to participate.

QUESTION 17: Mass collaboration is great in theory, but how do you pull it off? What are there best practices for building, deploying and proliferating wikis within a fledgling e-community that show immediate benefits for community members and the sponsoring company?

ANSWER 17: The site that houses this blog, We Are Smarter Than Me, is a good example of a wiki collaboraion project thate delivered some great results for Wharton, MIT, Pearson, and Mzinga. As we mentioned during the web seminar, wikis were used to write the content for this ground breaking book. The result is a book ranked by the editors of Amazon.com as the #6 best business book of 2007. To pull this off, we had to give up control and you must be prepared to do the same which is difficult for companies to do. If done correctly, both the community owner and member benefit from access to user, peer, and expert generated content. Wikipedia is another fantastic example of one of the best wiki success stories.

QUESTION 18: Rewards are specific to the community... in most open source projects, its prestige and social currency.   In business, perhaps being the deal maker?

ANSWER 18: Yes, each community’s members have different incentives for participation, just like in business. Often, one of the biggest motivators across any community is simple peer (or manager) recognition.

QUESTION 19: My focus is on workforce development - do you have any examples of how to start/where to get started.  Org tendency is to "command & control" which defeats the purpose.  Any good stories from a training & dev perspective?

ANSWER 19: Look at books on Agile Methods....  use Agile project methods and Scrum.... but then I am a Scrum Master so I'm biased. Another good example for workplace and learning communities -- http://www.contextmag.com/archives/200012/Feature2TheRightTool.asp?process=print

QUESTION 20: Could you briefly discuss how you've seen Communities used in Healthcare?

ANSWER 20: Healthcare professionals in group practices – whether located in single or multiple facilities – can benefit enormously from using online communities to collaborate, to schedule, and to maintain records. Physicians can use the community calendar to allow colleagues to see their schedules. In group practices, such as Emergency Room Doctors who cover multiple hospital emergency rooms, the community calendar would be especially effective. Even when ER physicians are at home, at work, or on vacation, they can check the calendar and confirm their shifts online anytime. And, they use the calendar to seek out colleagues who might trade shifts with them.

Physicians and their assistants can also use the calendar to schedule meetings related to the group practice itself: such as presentations or demos of new medical techniques. Physicians/group management can use the file repository to store HR documents for their employees, to store the latest versions of forms for patients, or possibly even to store patient information, including digital x-ray files, using permissions to protect access in accordance with HIPAA – Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Physicians can use the Discussion Forums to consult with colleagues about the latest medical practices, or about any topic relevant to their work. For instance, a group practice may or may not include academic physicians, who could contribute online to an ongoing discussion, no matter whether they are located - at a university across town or across the country.

Blogs could be used to maintain a directed conversation on a very focused topic or as a leadership tool by the management of the group. Announcements in text boxes on the front page of the community can be used for all sorts of news geared towards employees of the group practice. Beyond the group practice, if a large group of geographically dispersed physicians decides to create an online community, then they can share their professions’ best practices using a variety of online community tools. As a result, doctors at small rural hospitals can benefit from the expertise of doctors at the teaching/university hospitals in large cities. Thus, online communities can significantly help facilitate the spread of new and better practices among physicians nationwide.

In addition to the reasons already listed. The healthcare arena is certainly a very colloborative area by the nature of the "common good" approach to their work. Specifcially, the area of medical research including drug trials can benefit from Communities and Colloboration. The field of medical research often has multiple people or teams of people who are all working on the same or similar projects and can utilize a variety of the web2.0 tools, discussions, blogs, wik's to facilitate the overall research process.

One other area within healthcare is that can benefit from Community and Collaboration is that of facility construction. There is a great deal of construction that is currently ahppening within the US Healthcare system, and there is a tremondosu need to have multi-discipline teams within a hospital, hospital system or across hospitals or systems to work collaboratively again to improve efficiencies and outcomes.

A couple of well-known examples of healthcare communities are: WebMD, Sermo

A huge thanks to Heather Strout, Maureen Condon, Pauline Brannigan, Mark Wallace, Ed Skonecki, Dave Wilkins and Jim Storer for help with the answers to these questions!