Passageways Blog : Transforming Enterprise and Industry Knowledge into New Success

I live in Milwaukee the home of Harley Davidson. Every summer I get a reminder on how Harley Davidson has built one of the most loved brands and a passionate client group in the business world. So in learning about customer loyalty and world class brands, I recently invited Sara Hanaway from Harley Davidson to West Lafayette for a lecture at Purdue University. She was a real treat for the class and her lecture is the inspiration behind these observations:

1. Harley Davidson (HD) has always tried to make "dreams" come true. The HD team is always focused on: Fulfilling dreams, riding, and having fun and enhancing the ownership experience.

• This is just brilliant; how they have taken a product and equated it to a lifelong dream for their customers. Far too many other companies miss out on this idea of creating a longing for their product, going far beyond creating a demand.

2. It's no secret that the magic lies in the community HD has created around their products. They call them Harley Owners Groups (HOG) and there are no less than 1400 chapters worldwide. These have over 1 million members, all paying annual dues to support these HOGs.

• Notice how they are not called User Groups, they are called Owners Group, empowering their customers. Every software company could do the same, call their user groups -"___ owners groups"
• This is a paid group and is certainly not a cost center for Harley Davidson.

3. There is an online presence to these HOGs but the offline meetings are truly the secret sauce and allow them to stay in touch with their customers regularly.

• HD has planned this to perfection. They don't have to run these HOGs, they just participate in them, as their staff owns the bikes and ride as often as they can as fellow HOG members. Of course an excited and knowledgeable staff creates great products.
• Also, imagine having multiple client conferences everyday somewhere in the world and your staff always being there...PowWOW everyday of the year!
• In fact, they once got the prince of Jordan to attend their HOG meeting. Imagine attracting royalty as a colleague in your user groups.

4. HD does not own these HOGs. This allows HD to focus on just having fun at these meetings and not make them into a forum to get feedback on their products. They have other ways to support their products and these meetings are strictly about fulfilling dreams, riding, and having fun. The goal is to always enhance the ownership experience.

• So your online community has to be separated quite well from your client care department or else the community with be just another channel for supporting your products.
• The element of fun has to be present for these communities to produce evangelists that stay giddy about your products long after they first used them. Just give such clients an audience (i.e. community portal) and watch them go from there.
• HD organizes events such as the "Riding Route 66" event which was sold out in 45 minutes and got riders from across the world.

5. HD has a lot of customization options for their bikes. This open system they created, which is rather unusual for his industry which is clamoring for standardization, is one of the main points of pride and discussions in these HOGs as no two bikes would be alike.

• If your offering can be customized, then the customers will have a greater sense of ownership about it due to their choices and customizations.

 

Harley Davidson has achieved their status not just because of their great products. They have also thought through providing an on-line and off-line experience that makes their customers share their excitement with each other. There are several lessons here for every one of us to learn and apply to our client care, yet the biggest one is planning and nurturing a vibrant client community!

These past 6 months I got an opportunity to teach a semester on entrepreneurship at Purdue University, Chris co-piloted this with me. Apart from gaining a few friends and followers, I learnt a lot from guest speakers we invited and this blog is a result of one such session. As part of this program, the class had to do a write up on Verona, our shinny new collaboration solution.

So what did you find interesting about these observations?

Chris recently got a chance to talk with Kathy Houghtalen from Beacon Credit Union and found out how she uses the Passageways portal both at Beacon and for the OSI Client Association.

If you have trouble viewing this video, click here.

At Passageways we call our teammembers Pathfinders.  We put this little video clip together to show you what makes up a Pathfinder.

If you cannot see this video, click here.

This year at PowWow, we will have a live and interactive Twitter feed.  Nathan is here to tell you on how you can take part.

If you have trouble seeing the video, please click here.

Have YOU voted for America's Best Portal Page?  If not, get out there, take a look and vote!

No idea what I'm talking about?  Check out this link! 

It continues to amaze us how creative and innovative our customers continue to be.  The ways that they use the Passageways platform to collaborate and communicate internally is simply amazing.  But, in addition, the way that they put these pages together and design them in such fun and artistic ways blows me away.   Some time back, we decided that we wanted to find a way to share these pages with others.  This would allow our customers to get their creative juices flowing and see what other customers are doing..... as well as show our prospects and communities the endless possibilities of what can be accomplished using Passageways.  As an added incentive, maybe it should be a fun and engaging contest..... and the winner should get a prize.  Who doesn't like a prize, right?  The latest craze?  An Apple iPad.  Certainly this would appeal to everyone.  Right?  And with that, the America's Best Portal Page Competition began!

Our goal in establishing this contest was to allow our customers, and even our non-customers, to share their favorite and best designed portal page (or "Pages", as some of the organizations entering the contest couldn't pick just one, and submitted multiple entries) with us, our customers, prospects, friends, family, etc.  So, we started soliciting for entries.  Immediately the excitement around this was huge, and we even had several people who used the two-week entry period to create NEW portal pages that they could submit.  (I like to think that it's just because they like using their portal so much that creating new pages is FUN..... but I'm sure that the iPad increased the desire to have America's Best Page, too!)  At the close of the two-week period, we had 45 entries!  WOW!

The images were compiled and organized, and a survey was created to allow the viewers to vote on their favorite.  We decided to use QuestionPro online to create the survey.  If you've never seen this software, and have a need for surveying/polling/testing, you should check it out.  It's a quite flexible software, and viewing the results is simple, simple, simple!  I can log in at any time and see a snapshot view of who is in the lead, and who is close behind!  (And believe me, the votes are REALLY close!  However, I'm not sharing the rankings until next week!  I wouldn't want to ruin any surprises!)  On Wednesday of this week, we pushed out an email to our customers, giving them the details on how to view the entries and vote.  We also encouraged them to pass this along internally, externally, to anyone and everyone that they thought might be interested, or who would like to vote!

And it worked!  In the first 30 minutes, we had 250 views.  After an hour, we had nearly 500.  At the end of the day, we had OVER 1,000 people who had viewed the slide show!!  I couldn't wait to check the progress this morning when I came in, and was pleasantly surprised to find that we had collected 592 votes, and had 1314 views!  We are accepting votes until Noon (Eastern time) on Wednesday.  The winner will be announced at our Best Practices Award Ceremony at our annual PowWOW Conference in Indianapolis on Wednesday evening.  (No, you need not be present to win, but I'm not going to guarantee you that the iPad won't somehow end up in MY suitcase home.  J)

So if you haven't already, get out there, view these awesome entries, and VOTE!  Pass it along to your friends, family and co-workers, and have them vote, too!  And if you won't be joining us in Indy next week, check the website to see the winning page!  J  AND, do you have ideas for other contests that we should organize?  If so, leave your comments and suggestions here! 

 

Nathan and Stephanie discuss the OSI client community and OSI's latest conference.

Nathan and Chris do a review of the iPad.  Check it out and get some information on how you can win one for your very own.

 

Two recent phenomena make this age old question very relevant, especially for businesses.  Businesses have traditionally relied on Experts or Consultant; the phone a friend option, if you will. This is first reaction is fast changing in business, as well as in every aspect of life!

First phenomenon- business communication has increasingly turning social. This is clearly evident at industry conferences accompanied by the now essential tweetups, and  also in the scores of social tools being announced in business software suites every day now equipped with social networking tools.

Second phenomenon - our collaboration tool sets are getting closer to real time at allowing activity streams to be incorporated in the way we work. Whether it is status updates being incorporated in software or businesses learning how tags are a great way to organize knowledge; just examples of how enterprise software is getting better at collaboration in real time.     

These two phenomena are leading to a more collaborative enterprise which in turn is driving a demand for industry wide communities. In fact, Passageways is proud to be associated with several such industry wide communities and observing the interaction in such communities truly insightful.

In our experience and from all empirical evidence, it appears that if you have a large wise crowd (diverse and independent), the crowd WILL beat out the experts in calling it right. Of course the crowd has to be somewhat knowledgeable, without being experts in the subject.

In the popular game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, the "phone a friend" (expert) strategy has resulted in the right answer 65% of the time, quite impressive indeed. But if you really want to be a Millionaire, "poll the studio audience" strategy has been right an unbelievable 91% of the time! We have already seen how Google, Wikipedia, and the stock market, all of whom rely on the large groups of people, are already teaching us how "poll the studio audience" is a better option that "phone a friend".  

So, next time you have a question such as "which is the best industry conference to attend in 2010", you should try posting it to the biggest crowd you have access to,  and not default to the phone a friend option. Can this also be your best bet for next new product idea, for new recruits, vendor selection etc?

These results and the fact that we now have the tools to harness the collective wisdom of very large groups of people are fuelling the next phase of innovation at Passageways. Your business can't snooze on his one, as such community portals are already being planned across our industry. After all, individual and businesses can use this studio audience several times a day!

Yes, I admit - when you are a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. But right about now, "Y'all need communities", or so I heard at GAC. So, what's the one community you really wish existed, online rather than on emails and forums?

We know some of you are still trying to decide about PowWOW 2010...well here is a good list for staters! 

1. Hang out and meet Passageways Staff - Don't you want to learn why we are called Pathfinders? You need to come and shake hands with the people behind your portal. It's more fun to work with friends!

2. Learning about award winning projects and products- Did you know Passageways won 7 awards last year? And 4 different products won these awards...come join in the celebrations.

3. Be the first to get all major Passageways Announcements - Don't you what to learn how P4 fared last year? Want to know about Community Portals are we now working on?

4. Peer to Peer networking - Need to talk to peers who have the same goals and challenges? PowWow is the place to do it! You'll gain a few Facebook friends at this conference for sure!

5. Best Practices - You know some other organizations have some nuggets you can borrow and look smart back in the office, right? Or perhaps you come and share your own success stories!

6. Developer Track for Dev - want to learn more on how stuff comes together, meet the crew themselves. Object Oriented Programming is the name of the game! .

7. Indianapolis is more than just a race track! Check out downtown Indy and a enjoy America's newest airport! The conference is walking distance from a mall and several restaurants!

8. Get to broaden your horizons and be away from the office all at the same time! How does a casino night full of surprises followed by quality gaming time sound?

9. Just the Speaker line-up and some prominent attendees are reasons to come!

1. Mark Meyer, CEO Filene Research Institute

2. Randy Karnes, CEO of CU*Answers

3. Prof. Patrick Duparcq, Kellogg Management School

4. Doug True, CTO, Forum Credit Union

5. Bob Falk, CEO, Purdue EFCU

6. Ken Burnett, Director, Bank of American Fork

7. Thad Hutcheson, CIO, T Bank

8. Andrea Stritzke, Regulatory Counsel, Policyworks

9. Gordon Gregory, VP Technology, Mazuma Credit Union

10. Jackie Buchanan, CIO, Genisys Credit Union

11. Mike Atkins, CEO of OTS

10. "How to" Lounge - Hand's on learning -lounging is good, especially at this one. We don't teach you how to lounge around.We teach your how to get things done!

11. Meet the Developers- Don't you want to hang with the developer of our new Sales management Module and Vendor Management Module?

12. Certification Programs - Want some tangible credibility points? You're the portal expert. Earn something that proves it too...just 6 seats left!

 Here is the conference page and of course the Registration page

What did we miss?  share you thoughts if you have some more ideas..