Where do your volunteers work? Are they kept to the filing and tidying tasks, the directing traffic and making cakes brigade, perhaps they work on the front lines, directly delivering the services you supply. But what about managing your online community or helping people find the information they need?

And when you are trying to create an online community, are you aiming for bulk numbers or supporting the crucial 1% of super users?

An experiment at Verizon Communications ... suggests that company-sponsored online communities for customer service, if handled adeptly, hold considerable promise. via Unboxed - Verizon’s Experiment in Volunteer Customer Service

Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon, is a software engineer by training and an avid consumer electronics tinkerer whose home projects have included installing high-end audiovisual systems. In those projects, he has often visited Web sites where users offer one another tips and answer questions. Verizon, Mr. Studness determined, needed to find a smart way to try to tap into that potential resource for customer service.

In talking to people and surveying the research on voluntary online communities, Verizon concluded that super-users would be crucial to success.

[...] Natalie L. Petouhoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that online user groups conform to what she calls the 1-9-90 rule. About 1 percent of those in the community, she explained, are super-users who supply most of the best answers and commentary. An additional 9 percent are “responders” who mainly reply and rate Web posts, she said, and the other 90 percent are “readers” who primarily peruse and search the Web site for useful information.

“The 90 percent will come,” Ms. Petouhoff said, “if you have the 1 percent.”

Verizon explored the alternative of building the Web site and managing the forums itself, but it decided to call on outside expertise. ... Verizon chose Lithium Technologies, and its chief executive and co-founder, Lyle Fong.

[...] The mentality of super-users in online customer-service communities is similar to that of devout gamers, according to Mr. Fong. Lithium’s customer service sites for companies, for example, offer elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges and “kudos counts.”

“That alone is addictive,” Mr. Fong said. “They are revered by their peers.”

[...] Venture capitalist Peter Fenton says that many of the most popular consumer Web sites and services, from Wikipedia to Twitter, are animated by a relatively small percentage of avid users.

[...] At Verizon, Mr. Studness says he is pleased with the experiment so far. He calls the company-sponsored customer-service site “a very productive tool,” partly because it absorbs many thousands of questions that would otherwise be expensive calls to a Verizon call center.

But the online forums, he added, also provide customer ideas for improvements in hardware and software for the company’s fiber optic service, as well as a large, growing and searchable knowledge base online.

“One answer can help thousands,” he said.

Corporate communications is an area that has been locked down for a long time as organisations try hard to "control the message", but in tougher economic times, and in an open information environment, that strategy is pretty well dead. There are people out there who have more client experience of your organisation than you do, if they are also well disposed to help, why would you not enlist them to support others who need your services and offer them social capital in return?

The online tools are easily available as forums, discussions groups, blogs, how many of them are working for you? How do they meet your client support objectives?

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