LEVERAGE SOFTWARE’S COMMUNITYCONNECT PLATFORM
Hosted Solution for Customer-to-Customer “Matchmaking”
By Matthew D. Lees, June 21, 2007 

Online communities can be dynamic environments for solving problems, strengthening relationships, extending brand reach, fostering innovation, connecting customers, and more. While a community is much more than the technology that supports it, it’s tough to build a lasting, vibrant community without the right tools. As customers’(and your own!) demands for features and capabilities increase, the importance of having a good platform—and the expertise of the company behind it—only increases as well.

Leverage Software was founded in 2003 with the express purpose of improving customer-to-customer communication. Its primary product, CommunityConnect, is a community platform that is built around its matchmaking engine. It comes “out of the box”with an intuitive, user-friendly interface that offers a broad, if not especially deep, feature set that includes member groups, discussions, blogs, chat, private messaging, scheduling, and matchmaking.

A hosted service, CommunityConnect requires little or no technical expertise to configure and manage. Its templates, syndication engine, and Web Services APIs allow for relatively easy extensibility for those with the resources, the inclination, and (perhaps) the need to go beyond the basics.

CommunityConnect currently supports over 150 communities, ranging in size from 300 to 50,000 members. These include InfoWorld’s “ITExec-Connect”and Salesforce.com’s “Connect On Demand”communities.

CommunityConnect’s price tag puts it in the running for most organizations. Some improvements are certainly warranted—we’d particularly like to see better search functionality and reporting tools—and much is reportedly in development, with Version 5.8 to be released soon. But we do recommend CommunityConnect as a platform best for supporting focused, topic-based communities for which connecting with other members is a core requirement.

EVALUATING LEVERAGE SOFTWARE’S ONLINE COMMUNITY PLATFORM

Building a Community Using Leverage Software

To build a successful online community—whether your members are looking primarily for answers to questions, for fellowship, for opportunities to interact with your brand, or for fun—it is crucial to match your business goals to the platform you use.

While your long-term goals should be large, your community will likely start out small. (In fact, it’s almost impossible not to start out small.) In this regard, the technology platform you use should comfortably support the needs of your small nascent community. But the platform should also be able to grow with your community in terms of both functionality and technological infrastructure.

This report applies our online community evaluation criteria[1] to the CommunityConnect platform, from Leverage Software. Keep in mind that we have developed our criteria to evaluate platforms for enabling any type of community, whether the focus is on service and support, developer collaboration, social or professional networking, and so on (or, what is typically the case, some combination of the above). Solutions that we analyze have often been optimized for just one of these specific uses. Leverage Software’s online community platform, CommunityConnect, has been built primarily for small- to medium-sized communities for which networking and matchmaking are fundamental. These are online communities in which members expect to have focused conversations around specific topic areas, and to meet and connect with other community members. Professional-Peer Communities (or Communities of Practice), for example, fit this bill.

OVERVIEW OF LEVERAGE SOFTWARE

Leverage Software was founded in 2003 by Mike Walsh, CEO, and Joe Kleinschmidt, CTO. It was developed in response to the poor company-to-customer and peer-to-peer communication and collaboration that Mike Walsh observed while managing a boutique software consulting firm.

Leverage Software’s products are its CommunityConnect and EventConnect platforms. The platforms have similarities, with EventConnect enabling communities that are specifically related to events such as conferences. If your company wants to surround customer events with online communities for pre- and post-conference engagement, you might want to consider adding EventConnect to your evaluation. However, this report focuses on the CommunityConnect platform (which does have some event-specific capabilities, such as scheduling), for an apples-to-apples comparison of online community services.

Online communities running on CommunityConnect range in size from 100 to 100,000 members. A typical community is on the order of 2,500 members.

Leverage Software’s clients are found in a variety of industries (see Table A), clustered primarily in high-tech, media, service firms, and associations. Clients include Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Salesforce.com, The New York Times, Time Warner, Ziff Davis, InfoWorld, The American Marketing Association, and the Institute for International Research.

Select Leverage Software Technologies Customers
(Please download the formatted PDF for the table at http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=832.)
Table A. Leverage Software’s customers cluster primarily into four market segments: associations, high-tech, media, and services.

In April 2007, Leverage Software made it easy to purchase CommunityConnect by offering a Web-based 15-day free trial of its Enterprise Edition for up to 300 members. Standard services offered in this package include “Visual Social Networking”(see Illustration 1 for the People Map from Salesforce.com’s “Connect On Demand”Community), personal profiles and community contact management, calendaring, private messaging, community search, and RSS and email notifications. Optional features at no additional cost include group collaboration with file sharing, live chat, polls, and blogs.

People Map from Salesforce.com’s “Connect On Demand”Community

Illustration 1. CommunityConnect’s People Map helps members find others in an interactive, visual, and fun way, using filters (checkboxes) based on member profiles.

Leverage Software has close ties with Salesforce.com. One of its investors is also a leading investor in Salesforce.com, and CommunityConnect can be found in Salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace.

EVALUATING COMMUNITY PLATFORMS

Evaluation Criteria

Our framework for evaluating online community platforms includes the following six top-level categories (see Illustration 2):

•Capabilities within a Community
•Community Participation
•Moderation and Administration
•Architecture
•Product Viability
•Company Viability

Online Community Evaluation Framework

Illustration 2. This illustration shows the top-level criteria and their subcriteria for our online community platform evaluation framework.

Requirements from Key Customer Scenarios

As we do our evaluations, we think in terms of Customer Scenarios—sets of tasks that customers (or, more broadly here, stakeholders) would ideally like to do in order to achieve desired outcomes. These scenarios become the foundation on which our platform evaluation criteria are based.

We see five distinct groups of people that become involved in your community, look to get something out of their participation, and have a stake in its success. They are 1) your customers, 2) community moderators, 3) community administrators, 4) subject-matter experts, and 5) business sponsors.

Table B lists Customer Scenarios for each group. In the third column, we assess how successfully CommunityConnect addresses each of these scenarios.

How Leverage Software Addresses Online Community Customer Scenarios
(Please download the formatted PDF for the table at http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=832.)
Table B. This table presents Customer Scenarios for five groups of key stakeholders that are dependent on an online community platform (our online community platform criteria are derived from these customer scenarios). The third column contains our assessment of how successfully Leverage Software’s online community platform addresses each scenario.

CAPABILITIES WITHIN A COMMUNITY

An online community platform should support a variety of communication channels between and among members and your company. It should make it easy for your customers to find whatever they’re looking for. And it should provide a mechanism for members to rate the value of the content they create, and for people to be recognized for their contributions.

Our framework contains four criteria for evaluating a platform’s community capabilities:

•Communication Channels
•Collaboration Methods
•Search
•Reputation Systems

Communication Channels

We informally define a communication channel as “a medium for conversations.”A robust platform lets community owners choose from a variety of communication channels—discussion boards, blogs, chat, messaging, and scheduling—to meet the needs of the community. Each channel has its own strengths and limitations. A platform needs to provide at least one channel, but more offerings are better, even if the community manager decides not to implement them all.

Our Take on Leverage Software’s Communication Channels

Before addressing communication channels, it’s important first to explain the framework in which CommunityConnect’s communication channels exist.

CommunityConnect enables communications both among groups of community members and between individual members. The construct that enables communication and collaboration is the group. Discussions are held within the confines of a group, files are submitted to a group, and meetings can be scheduled for the group. Illustration 3 shows a selection of groups from InfoWorld Magazine’s “ITExec-Connect”community.

What’s different and interesting about this construct and that of other community platforms is that the community members create the groups, and, therefore, they create the organization of topics. In most other communities, the community administrator predefines how discussion topics are organized.

It’s easy enough for a member to create a new group. The member who creates the group is the owner and decides if the group is public or private. For private groups, owners receive requests for group membership, which they can approve or disapprove. For public groups, new members are added automatically when they join. Both group owners and group members can choose to be notified via email or RSS when there’s something new in the group (see section below on Notifications).

What’s not so straightforward is determining whether or not a group already exists that is similar to the potential new one. This is one of the disadvantages of having a member-created organizational construct. So, if a member is interested in a specific topic, she can simply create a new group on this topic, even if one already exists. To check this first, she would either need to search for appropriate key words that may be in the group’s name, description, or content within, or scroll through the entire group listing (which is chronological by creation date). Leverage Software reports that it is working to make this process more intuitive.

DISCUSSIONS. As mentioned above, discussions within CommunityConnect are associated with, and found within, the community’s groups. On one hand, this provides consistency, by aligning groups and discussions together. On the other hand, it means that discussions are not centralized, the way they commonly are in other platforms, with hierarchical category listings. This makes it more time intensive to browse through discussions, especially across groups.

In addition, discussions are linear; there is no threading of conversations. This limits the complexity and scope of discussions and makes them more difficult to navigate. Members do have several methods for finding and participating the conversations of interest to them (i.e., via search and RSS and email notifications), but we’d still like to see the option for threading discussions.

That said, the discussion interface is crisp and clear, so conversations are easy to read, rate, and add to. Social tagging features slated for an upcoming release should help even more.

*Endnote*
1) See “Framework for Evaluating Online Community Platforms: How to Evaluate Solutions that Enable Online Customer Communities,”by Matthew Lees, October 12, 2006, http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=761.
*Endnote*

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