Jeremiah pointed me to an audio interview with Scott Wilder, one of the champions behind the Intuit customer communties, like the Quickbooks community. I really liked Scott perspectives and encourage you to listen.
A couple of things that caught my ear...
He tells a story about the early days of Intuit where product managers were encouraged to go to stores and ask customers if they could follow them home and see how they use the product. The online community was framed around this idea of being able to follow customers home.
Scott discusses how Inuit partnered with Legal and developed a policy of community interaction for Intuit employees that were what he called "guardrails". I like that term. Speaking of terms, they also found that the term "podcast" was misunderstood (people thought you had to own an ipod) in the community and changed it to "radio on demand". Much better.
I'm moderating a panel (Tuesday 1:45) at the Community 2.0 Conference titled "Report from the Trenches – Discussions on Community Best Practices". One of the members of the panel is George Jacquette who is an Intuit employee and a devoted member of the Quickbooks community.