I had a long chat today with Barry Paperno, Community Manager of MyFICO.   In the Social Media world, MyFICO is a great B2C success story, and was recognized last year with a Groundswell Award in the “B2C Supporting” category.   Barry is a very friendly, people-focused, “non-technical” (his words) chap who talked to me candidly about the 3 year history of MyFICO.

FICO (the Fair Issac Corporation) are widely known for their credit scores and enterprise decision management systems.  They are huge, they are regulated, they are well-known, they are very successful, they don’t seem to be the type of company to take many risks.  And, they receive an enormous amount of inquiries from customers (people like you and me) on how to make their credit scores better.

Since they are governed by the U.S. Consumer Credit Protection Act (a.k.a. Credit Repair Organizations Act), they can’t directly advise clients on how to improve their credit scores.  Barry’s brain-child, was to create a community where FICO customers could help and advise each other.  Better for them, better for FICO.

The numbers’ side of the house are quite impressive.  To name a few:

=> A significant reduction in the ever-increasing support calls they field (23% increase down to 1%) => Product spending increases 66% after a customer joins the MyFICO community => MyFICO forum postings accounts for 39% of search engine traffic to the FICO web site => MyFICO page views accounts for 20% of overall web traffic in the organization => Community membership growth is in the 10’s of thousands every month, and is now at about 340,000

But any regular readers of our corporate blog know I hate incomplete success stories , especially when they are labelled “case study”.  So I asked Barry about the set up and maintenance costs of the community.  Rather than revealing dollar amounts, I’ll frame it up this way:  establishing the community paid for itself in 6 months.  That’s vendor and internal costs included.  Ongoing conversions of community membership spending also more than pays “the really small amount,” as Barry puts it, to maintain the community.  And the further marketing opportunities that are available from there.

ROI?  QED.

But I took Barry a bit further, away from hard data into the “soft” stuff we use to judge things like ‘mood’ and ‘personality’ and ’sentiment’.  I’ve been asked to speak with the San Diego Software Industry Council next month about how to analyze the Community Experience.  Part of that will be presenting the Social Media Balanced Scorecard we’ve been working on.

“I’m glad you’re asking about that,” (the soft data), Barry says.  As it turns out, it seems to me, that this is something that Barry is most proud of.  And, I can see why.  It’s the overlooked success story, in my opinion.

If someone said to you, “I’m going to build an online community where people are going to openly discuss, advise, and reveal things about their poor credit scores,” what would you say?  Likely, “Yeah, right.”  When I asked Barry what upper management at FICO thought of his idea, he said, “Well, there was a lot of head-scratching.”

But here’s what actually happened: the community members very quickly used the platform to provide support for one another, when peer education was what was anticipated.  Super-Users, or “VIPs” in MyFICO-speak, began spending hours online, on their own time with no compensation, just to help other community members who were concerned about their own credit scores and what to do about it.  This behaviour has continued to grow.

I said to Barry that it sounds like community members feel like it’s a ‘safe’ place to discuss such sensitive information. “Yes,” he said, “That’s exactly it.”  “All members have a sense of ownership, and I just spend about a quarter of my time guiding the community leaders.”

There are many other aspects to this story, if fully described, would take a book chapter to explain.  Things like the steps he took and discussions he had internally to get the system up and online, how he established and maintains good behaviour, and how the community discussion is becoming a source of information in the financial world.  Not to mention, more ‘hard data’ regarding internal marketing and customer support.