Monthly Archives: March 2009

community

Social Media Training

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I wanted to share a quick presentation that I used to train a client on general social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Monitoring / Yahoo Pipes, FriendFeed and more. I’ve embedded the presentation and included a set of links that were part of the demos provided throughout the presentation.

Presentation

Demo
The demo links for this presentation can be found on Agglom.

Contact me if you would like to have me train your company on online communities or social media.

Related Fast Wonder blog posts:

shared links

Recent Links

Here are a few interesting things from this week that I wanted to share …

Marketers Moving to Social Media – eMarketer

FeverBee: Books, Blogs and Our Community

Commania – A nation of community builders since Jan 21, 2009

ROI of Social Networking for TransUnion

“The Power of Small” Book, SXSW | eROI Days Email Agency

Open source conference prerequisite #1: Space for hacking – Open Source Bridge

The AboutUs Weblog » Blog Archive » WikiBirthday 2009: 14 years of collaboration.

You can find my links on Delicious.

community

Online Community Training

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I haven’t been blogging much here this week, but I have been busy. I’ve been spending this week in New Jersey at a client site providing them with training on online communities and social media in addition to helping them plan for several upcoming online communities. I thought that some of you might also be interested in seeing a scrubbed version of the online community training that I delivered.

This online community training covers these topics:

  • Introduction and Guiding Principles for Participation
  • Planning and Getting Started
  • Content Roadmaps
  • Online Community Management

Contact me if you would like to have me train your company on online communities.

Related Fast Wonder blog posts:

community

Building Strong Online Communities Panel at SXSW

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Here are my notes for this session. These are the words of the panelists (not mine) as best I could capture them (please forgive the typos).

Building Strong Online Communities

Erin Kotecki Vest  BlogHer Inc
Drew Curtis   The Member,   Fark.com
Alexis Ohanian   Prod Mgr of Awesome,   reddit.com
Ken Fisher   Editor-in-Chief,   Ars Technica

Erin: BlogHer is the largest online women’s blogging network. It started as a conference after a flame war about where were the women bloggers. As a community, they decided where to go after the first conference.

Drew: Added comments to Fark in 2000. Prior to that, they didn’t realize that they had an online community. It was mostly organic.

Alexis: Started as a place for people to get news as a community.

Ken: Community started by wanting to replace email with comments to outsource tech support and have others answer questions. Wanted a high signal to noise ratio – Usenet started to become overun with trolls, so they wanted a smaller community to share knowledge, get answers, and retreat from some of the other places online to be a little different.

How do you balance your own vision for the community vs. where the community wants to take it?

Drew: there are so many voices and you have to make sure you are representing what most of the people want vs. what a few vocal complainers want. You have to balance those complaints vs the other comments or traffic. Tyranny of well organized minorities.

Alexis: When it came time to grow, they started to grow the subcommunities, but they were putting a lot of time into creating them, but they found that they could turn it over to users and let them create new ones.

Erin: They bring the community in to vote on conferences, etc. You have to listen to your users.

Alexis: It doesn’t scale when you have one person trying to answer all of the feedback emails, but most of the feedback comes in via email.

Ken: Twitter is a great way to get feedback about the community. Very few people are daily participants. Only 4% of readers visit the forums. Getting feedback is hard. They created a forum where you can post feedback. The benefit is that other members can respond to the feedback, so the company doesn’t have to respond to everyone. You need to care about what your community thinks and be transparent about the feedback. It’s important to give people a place to criticize you outside of specific topics.

How does the community influence or police itself and how did you get there?

Erin: BlogHer is unique because they have strict community guidelines. A safe environment with civil discourse without name calling. Community guidelines are stringent and the members help police each other.

Drew: Don’t be an asshole. They have a nark function where people can nark on each other, but sometimes people self-organize to try to get someone in trouble. The nark throws the comment into a queue where someone takes a look at it. They also lock people out for a specific amount of time for bad behavior – and they log bad behavior to give people a first notice before taking other action.

Alexis: they have a wiki etiquette page for the community. The up and down errors tend to take care of most of the issues, but they have turned most of the control over to the users who have created the specific subsite (moderation, etc.)

Erin: They pull down inappropriate comments and email the member to let them know what they did wrong.

Drew: They pull stuff down & can always reverse it if they made a mistake.

Ken: They don’t moderate any content unless it’s spam. They don’t want anything that might be perceived as censorship and don’t want to abuse the trust of the community by silencing people instead of letting them have a say and a voice.

Erin: Rarely have backlash, since they rarely need to pull anything.

Drew: They permanently ban a bunch of people who have behaved badly. They have a system that prevents people from just signing up again.

Ken: They have a list of rules and if they do  moderate, they specify exactly why their comment was pulled. This removes the impression of having a bias or censoring, since they have specific rules about what people can / can’t do. This makes it transparent. They also try to rehabilitate users. Start with a one week ban, then a month, then perma-ban (not quite permanent for those who want to come back). Most won’t come back as a different user, since they don’t want to abandon the identity that they built on the site. They rarely ban (1 a month or so).

Erin: Community guidelines help community managers maintain sanity even during hot times like the election season. It got heated, but it was civil discussion in a respectful manner.

What are some of the big mistakes that community managers make?

Erin: They tell rather than ask. They make changes without getting any input from the community and don’t involve the community in decisions

Drew: Alternate identities to troll users. You don’t want to listen to the community too much during times of change. Give people time to get used to the changes and “get over it”. You have to discount some of the complaints to factor out the external stuff and focus on the things that really should be changed.

Alexis: The vast majority of users are a silent majority. The people who view and consume, but never tell you how they fell. You can reach out to them and at some point you have to trust your gut and make the tough calls.

Drew: If people are still complaining after 2 weeks, they start to make changes.

Ken: Always share the results of surveys and other feedback. It shows what people really think and helps people understand where you are coming from. They started with 3 forums and now have 26 forums. They add them as they were needed. A huge mistake is to create a bunch of subtopics and forums, which makes your community look like a ghost town and reduces participation. It’s really important to start small. When you are managing a community, it can be hard not to let your ego get away from you. They learned not to let the egos get in the way by punishing people and getting vindictive. Can’t get sucked in.

Erin: BlogHer has a great community manager. You need to be patient, levelheaded, calm and neutral to handle people yelling at each other with grace. Need to be able to multi-task and look at many things at once.

Erin: The conferences are community driven, which makes it easier to organize the conference, since the community picks the content.

sxsw

Change Your World: Making Breakthroughs Happen with Kathy Sierra

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Here are my raw notes from Kathy Sierra’s session. Let me preface this with a note about how amazing and energetic she is, which also means that it was exceedingly difficult to take notes, so I expect you’ll find a few mistakes. For example, my numbers don’t quite match up 🙂

Change Your World in 50 Minutes: Making Breakthroughs Happen – Kathy Sierra

Start with where you are now and then the goal of where you want to be. There is usually a big f-ing brick wall in between. You can’t break the wall down with step by step incremental progress.

Incremental vs. breakthrough. Incremental step by step is awesome, but this presentation is for when you need to do something drastic to break down the wall.

Incremental = arms race with users and competitors. marketing, viral, whuffie arms race can be exhausting.

Breakthrough ideas or breakthrough performance (being way better at something).

Your USERS need breakthroughs.

Being an expert is a function of ability and time – you have to have both if you want to kick butt.

Being better is just better. Word of mouth (WOM) vs. Word of obvious (WOO). If you are better, you can take advantage of it. Being better is better than saying you are better.

Are your users stuck in in “P” mode (like cameras) – people won’t become passionate about something that they don’t take advantage of and they resist upgrading because of the loss in productivity.

Anyone can compete. If you can help people kick butt better than your competitors.

How to know someone:
1) iPod playlist and …
2) Flight vs. invisibility (superpower)

What superpower do we give to our users? What could we provide and how would it change what we do? What would we put on the suit? (Pivot table guy / Photoshop channels guy). Auto-correct spelling man is not a superpower. Would it work as an action figure? Twitter man doesn’t look like a super power, but it is. Increasing productivity is not a superpower – they want something cool that comes as a result of increasing productivity. Productivity is the broccoli; the result is a rich dark chocolate.

14 ways to make breakthroughs:

2) Superset game – Think about something bigger and figure out what it is and go after the bigger superset. What cooler thing is my thing a part of? If you blog about your company, this isn’t cool to your readers.

3) shortcuts – 10,000 hours to be amazingly world class good at something. 2 ways to shrink it: Learn the patterns & shorten the duration (accelerate those hours).

4) deliberate practice – kicking butt in less than 1,000 hours if they do deliberate practice. How can you do it and how can you help your users do it? After 1-2 years, experience is a poor indicator of performance. Offer exercises, games, contests, tutorials that support deliberate practice of the right things. Work on improving your strengths more than your weaknesses. Much of what we do needs a sell by date: 1st hits on google for a solution are old, outdated, and not updated.

5) Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard. What would it take to do this? make it easier for the users to have a breakthrough than to stay stagnant.

6) Get better gear (and offer better gear). Expensive equipment is usually more expensive because it is much better and can help people make breakthroughs. Help them justify it. Find, make and offer higher end gear that bumps them to the next level, If you don’t do it, partner with someone who does.

7) Ignore standard limitations. How would it work if you didn’t know the limitations.

8.) Total immersion Jams. 16 hours over 2 days is better than 16 hours over 2 months. Goal is not to be good, but to just get something done and profound things can happen. “the surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume that you already know how to do it” Less *Camp, More *Jam.

9) CHange your perspective. Look at something differently. Don’t make a better [X], make a better [user of X] (don’t make a better book, make a better software developer who reads the book).

10) What movie are your users in? Look at your user’s journey with your product / service. Who are your users allies and mentors? What role to you play? Your tech support? “Your company is to your user as ____ is to Frodo. Exercise: What movie are your users in? What movie might they want to be in? Don’t forget the soundtrack.

11) Don’t ask your users. They will give you incremental improvements, but not breakthroughs. You need to ignore everybody to make the real breakthroughs. What users says is usually different than what they want. Individuals vs. consensus. You can end up adding too many features that alienate the happy users. Breakthrough: ask other people’s users and get inspiration from elsewhere.

12) Be brave. Concepts often get filtered down by fear and you end up implementing something mediocre out of fear.

13) Easy to use isn’t always better. Difficult and challenging can be OK.

14) Rethink deadness: reexamine things that you sent to the dead pool. Sometimes things that seem to be dead aren’t always. Look at how popular Etsy & Make are.

14) Change the EQ. EQ sliders: Price, number of features, quality, services, performance. these are incremental changes. Incremental changes the position of the slider. Breakthroughs add new sliders that weren’t being used before. Modify and change what’s on the slider. How @garyvee changed wine businesses

15) Don’t mistake narrow for shallow. lolcats translation – ridiculously narrow, but not shallow. People become experts in narrow areas. Passive aggressive notes blog. The “Blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks.

16) Be amazed. Think about how much things have changed and how amazing things are now. It’s all about perspective.

rss

Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web's Best Content at SXSW

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Here are my notes for this session. These are the words of the panelists (not mine) as best I could capture them (please forgive the typos).

Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content

Panelists:
Marshall Kirkpatrick   VP Content Dev,   ReadWriteWeb
Louis Gray   Author/Publisher,   louisgray.com
Gabe Rivera   Founder/CEO,   Techmeme
Melanie Baker   Community Mgr,   AideRSS Inc
Micah Baldwin   VP Business Dev,   Lijit Networks Inc

This was another full session with people packed into the aisles.

Louis: limit sources to those things that are highly relevant. Uses Google Reader as a starting point. Read fast, share fast, decide fast. Know where it goes when you share it & engage there, too. Louis beats many of the top tech blogs with startup knowledge using these techniques.

Gabe: Techmeme is powered mostly by automation to find the top tech stories. Relies mostly on links to determine newsworthiness. It also looks for clusters of news on the same topic. Helps to surface most of the good news, but he recently introduced an editing process into the mix to add / remove headline.

Melanie: AideRSS focuses on social interactions to determine the best content (links, bookmarks, comments, Twitter, etc.). Best posts show the top articles. New beta product will be more focused on content discovery.

Micah: Start with trusted sources. Read the posts plus the links. Includes Lijit to aggregate these sources.  Focused on trust relationships to drill down until you find the content you need.

Marshall: “How to find the weirdest stuff on the Internet” Used Delicious, PostRank, Yahoo Pipes, and Feedburner to find the weirdest stuff. Delicious to find the content, PostRank to find the best, yahoo Pipes to splice filtered content together, and Feedburner to give people a feed of the content.

Micah: For those looking to be found online. No matter how good you are, if you don’t interact with people, no one will find you.Many products take RSS, filter it, find the interesting content, and make it easier to find. Look for the products that have a human element & are not just algorithmic (Google vs. Delicious).

Melanie: Even for the tools, those are built by people and each one does something a little different & you need multiple tools to solve a problem, so you can’t take the human side out of the equation. It’s more important to find what people are actually reading and bookmarking vs. what they are recommending.

Louis: Follows other people’s Google Reader shares. Uses FriendFreed to put people in specific lists to find the best of the day within a specific list. Finds new information that he didn’t have before.

These techniques work best for tech, politics and a few others. It only works when people link to each other, comment, etc.

Gabe: This is why he hasn’t launched any new sites for a while. The data just doesn’t exist to do a Techmeme for many other topics. He might tackle something in a more traditional business / economic / finance area, but these topics alone are too small and aggregated might be too broad, so he’s looking for the right mix.

Louis: MacBlips has a family of sites with tech and a few other topics branching out past tech / politics.

Melanie: Disagrees that it doesn’t exist outside the tech space. It’s smaller and different, but it’s still there. Religions, knitters, etc. They are harder to find.

Micah: Launching content networks grouping like-minded bloggers to aggregate content (Security Bloggers Network). There are ways to utilize the tools outside of technology bloggers. We’re too close to the technology to see what is outside of our world. Does not think that you can automate recommendations. We take recommendations from actual people that we trust.

Marshall: He creates elaborate systems to find the lists of top blogs in a topic, but sometimes forgets to just Google it to see what lists other people have created.

Melanie: The way people think and search and make lists is on a personal trust basis. Be able to scan information to find the trusted sources.

Louis: What is your goal for finding information? Do you want to be first? Find new content? Find interesting things to read? Your methods will differ depending on your goals.

Micah: How do you find the next meme. FriendFeed is a river of information. You should try to find a new blog every day to find something new. Each one should drive you deeper into new things.

Melanie: Many of us are using Twitter more to get information at the expense of our RSS readers.

Louis: People are live tweeting (it’s easier) rather than writing blog posts.

Marshall: Twitter real-time search in Google (Greasemonkey script). He also builds custom search engines to search only within a defined list of sources. He also uses a FF plugin that allows him to get a grid of places to search.

Louis: Don’t be afraid to unsubscribe and prune content.

Marshall: Prefers to oversubscribe and prioritize. Never unsubscribes, just moves things lower in priority.

Secrets

Gabe: Information overload is a problem, but if you want an audience, they don’t always have the information overload problem. You have the problem, but your readers want interesting stuff.

Louis: FriendFeed best of day (I missed part of this)

Marshall: Looking at the bookmarking history and finding the people who bookmarked them first to identify some key people who are the first people to disover content, and subscribe to them.

Melanie: Ping her to get a beta code for the new PostRank feature.

Micah: Close to releasing a way to score individuals based on influence and connections. It should be released in the next 30 days.