Tag Archive for 'community'

Community 2.0

Published
by
Dawn
on November 17, 2008
in community
. 0 Comments

I’ll be the guest blogger this week on the Community 2.0 blog with a three part series on corporate communities. Community 2.0 is an annual conference that was held in Las Vegas last year, but will be moving to San Francisco this year from May 11-13. I also wanted to let you know that they will be accepting submissions for case studies and panels until this Thursday, November 21, so you should get off your rear and propose something if you haven’t already!

There were some really outstanding presentations last year at the conference. I covered a few of my favorites here on this blog:

It’s a great conference for community managers to attend. I had the opportunity to meet some really outstanding community managers at this event last year, and I am looking forward to attending again this year!

State of the Online Community 2008

Published
by
Dawn
on October 29, 2008
in community
. 0 Comments

Bill Johnston recently gave a presentation about the State of the Online Community 2008: Key Findings from the Online Community Research Network, and I encourage you to take a look at it. As you can tell from the title, the slides contain highlights and important information from his research over the past year. Here are a few of my personal favorites among his key findings:

  • Most organizations do not have a comprehensive online community strategy.
  • Marketing typically owns the community (I have some thoughts on this).
  • Community manager roles are still evolving.
  • Many communities are not meeting expectations.

The State of Online Community 2008 : Key Findings from the Online Community Research Network
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: strategy staff)


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Dr. Seuss and Online Communities

Published
by
Dawn
on October 27, 2008
in community
. 2 Comments

I recently gave my “What Would Dr. Seuss Say about Online Communities” Ignite-style presentation at the Love@First Website event here in Portland. I think this was a better presentation than the one that I gave back in February at Ignite Portland. It’s always easier to give a presentation the second time after you see what does and does not work.

The kind people over at iSite embedded the recorded audio from my talk into a SlideShare presentation, so turn up the volume and click play in the embedded presentation below to hear me give my Ignite talk while the 20 slides fly by every 15 seconds.

L@Fw2008 Dawn Foster
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: foster dawn)

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Rewarding Community Members

Published
by
Dawn
on October 20, 2008
in community
. 9 Comments

I spend quite a bit of time talking with clients about incentives and rewards for participation in their community, especially when they are launching new communities. I offer quite a few cautions against offering monetary incentives, because in my past experience, they tend not to be effective. This is especially true for communities where the members are technologists, since people working in the technology industry are already well compensated in most cases.

However, I hadn’t really spent much time thinking about the psychology behind it until I read a particularly interesting short post by Richard Millington. He suggests sending them a fruit basket:

Imagine I sent you a fruit basket for writing a brilliant comment.

How would you react? Happy?

You might mention it to others. You would write more brilliant comments. You would feel appreciated, it’s a great feeling.

What if I paid $20 into your PayPal account?

It’s just become work.

How much will you charge next time? Will you work less if you don’t get paid? Will others now want to be paid?

Money makes communities implode. So send flowers, fruit baskets, chocolates and invitations to special events. Surprise gifts bring out the best in people, money brings out the worst.

(Quoted from FeverBee)

The point here isn’t that a fruit basket is the right reward for excellent community participation, but a little bit of creativity goes a long way toward finding interesting ways to reward participants while staying away from monetary rewards. What kind of small gifts can you send people just to say thank you for doing something nice in the community? What is something exclusive that you can offer someone as a reward that they can’t get elsewhere? I know one person who often wears a t-shirt that is only given to people with commit status for this particular open source project. He’s proud of having special status within the community. You should think of ways that you can reward people with special status in your community that will make them proud of having achieved it. A special t-shirt or other ways for them to display this special status can help reinforce this reward.

It is worth spending some time thinking about creative rewards for community members. What rewards have you had the best luck with in the past? Have you ever had a company reward you in an interesting way for your participation?

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Importance of Place and Context in Online Communities

Published
by
Dawn
on October 16, 2008
in community
. 4 Comments

I realized something very interesting about my computer usage patterns a few days ago. For most tasks, I use the GUI environment on my Mac, since I mostly live in my web browser, IM, Twitter apps, and RSS reader. However, my background as a sys admin takes over whenever I am doing certain tasks, despite the fact that I haven’t been a sys admin since the mid 1990s. I found that I shift to the command line automatically for any tasks that I associate with Unix. For example, to edit any configuration file, I’ll go to the terminal window and use vi without even considering editing it using the various text editors that I would use to edit almost any other file on my hard drive. I realized that context plays a very significant role in my computer usage.

When I talk about “context” throughout the rest of this post, I’m referring to the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event or situation.

Bear with me, I am going somewhere relevant with this discussion after one more minor diversion. I was talking to Amber Case a few weeks ago about the role that context plays in human memory. We tend to recall past memories more accurately if we are in the place where we first heard them or in a similar context. I started thinking about the role of context in my strange computer usage patterns. In a context that I associate with Unix or sys admin tasks, I revert to the command line without a second thought even for tasks that could be done as easily using a GUI tool.

I started wondering and thinking about the role that context plays in our social behavior as we interact in online communities and social networks. These online communities and social networks are the location or place equivalents of the local pub, coffee shop, library, or university, but in a specific online context. They are the places where we hang out (virtually) with friends, colleagues, family, and even strangers with common interests. We use our online communities and social networks to learn new things, gather information, and keep up with news about the other people in our lives. These are the new places that become the context for our interaction with people online.

I have noticed that I tend to behave and interact in very different ways depending on the community or social network that I am using. My interactions on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are very different. I use Twitter for conversations and sharing information with people; Facebook for finding non-work information about my friends, and LinkedIn for find work-related information. Realistically, I could send people messages using any of those social networks, but I tend to use Twitter to send messages to people and engage people in conversations; however, I have friends who would say that they primarily use Facebook to engage in conversations. I suspect that all of this comes back to context. We each associate certain activities with our personal context for that situation.

OK, so this is an interesting abstract topic, but what does all of this really mean? For anyone tasked with building online communities for your organization, you need to focus on creating a sense of place, like the neighborhood coffee shop, where people want to hang out and chat with other people who have common interests. Spend some time thinking about how to create an environment focused on discussions and connections between people. Provide other relevant information for your community members, but keep the community as focused as possible on the people and discussions that facilitate connections and interactions between those people. Let your community members develop a sense of place in your community and with it a meaningful context for their interactions within your community.

I would be very interested to hear from other people in the comments about the role of place and context in your interactions with online communities and social networks.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Gail Ann Williams on Community from Love@First Website

Published
by
Dawn
on October 14, 2008
in community
. 5 Comments

I’m spending the morning at iSite’s Love@First Website Conference here in Portland.

I was impressed with Gail Ann Williams’ presentation about building online community. She was an early participant at The WELL and is currently the Director of Communities at Salon.com.

Here are my raw notes from Gail’s presentation. In other words these are my notes about her words (not my words), so hopefully, I managed to get most of it right with only a few typos.

What do we mean by community anyway?

  • Interactions and relationships: people who know each other very closely and are in your network along with the people who are loosely connected to each other. These connections are the most powerful part of community.
  • Complexity: people are members of multiple overlapping communities.
  • Continuity over time (which used to mean geographic proximity): our sense of place comes from the continuity and culture that is built over time. As the community evolves, they really become stakeholders in the community and feel like they own the community as much as the company and the developers own it.

What are your goals?

Always go back to the goals of the community. What are you trying to do and what do you want to accomplish? Salon found that allowing comments on articles started to build another community for Salon outside of the forums. These new members were interested in a community around the writers, but weren’t interested in the forums and were really a separate community that couldn’t be integrated with the other communities at Salon.

Set expectations

Being clear, upfront, and honest with your users, especially when you are making a big change, can help community members understand the reasons behind the change. They will also be more likely to support the change if they understand the reasons and have some time to vent about it.

Understand newcomer dynamics

Welcome newcomers in a friendly way, but don’t be overbearing and creepy about it. Existing community members tend to develop an insider / outsider mentality, which makes it very difficult for new people to engage in an enjoyable way. Community managers and other members need to be available to remind existing users that they were once new and that new people can become valuable members of the community and eventually become friends.

Spammers, Trolls, etc.

It really takes a lot of time to manage these annoying people. You can put some things in place to reduce spam and trolls (email verification, real names, etc.), but ultimately, real people need to jump in and moderate. Employees can clean it up, especially if you can get users to report the issues. Even when people don’t use it very often, the report abuse button might act as a deterrent to potential spammers who know that it will get reported quickly. Spam becomes a bigger issue on low volume sites, since the spam is more visible. Trolls are an interesting issue. They can be just trolls, but sometimes it can be a result of deeper personal / mental issues.

Collecting info at registration

Amazon has a good model. You can leave reviews with minimal information, but you can also be validated to get the real name designation. In general, ask for the information that you need to function as a community along with some information about why the information is needed. Add just enough of a barrier to reduce the spam, but not so much that people won’t want to join.

I only captured a few of the best points during the presentation, but it was great to hear from someone who has been continually participating and managing communities since the very early days of the Internet.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Companies and Communities at the Corvallis SAO

Published
by
Dawn
on October 10, 2008
in Uncategorized and community
. 6 Comments

I spent yesterday evening in Corvallis presenting at Corvallis chapter of the Software Association of Oregon on the topic of Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy. I always enjoying spending time in Corvallis. It’s a fun college town with some very interesting and innovative technology companies: Strands, ViewPlus, ProWorks, and many more.

This SlideShare presentation is what I used last evening to lead the discussion:

Companies And Communities: Participating without being sleazy
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: online media)

Trend: Community Vendors Who Eat Their Own Dogfood

Published
by
Dawn
on October 6, 2008
in community
. 6 Comments

Several Tweets today from Jeremiah Owyang got me thinking about community vendors and how they do (or do not) use their own platforms to build communities for their customers and users.

Quoted from @jowyang’s Twitter stream:

My advice to community platform vendors:

  • If you don’t already have a public user community or support community for your customers running on the latest release of your platform, start planning one now.
  • Get your product management and engineering teams involved in the community and spend time learning what your customers like and don’t like in addition to the features they want in future releases.
  • Spend some time monitoring what your customers are saying about you online (Twitter, blogs, and other forums) to avoid being caught off guard by negative feedback.

My advice to anyone selecting a community platform vendor:

  • If they are not running a public community for their customers and users that is built on their platform, run (not walk) away from that vendor.
  • Spend a significant amount of time in that public community getting a feel for the issues that other customers are having with their software. Also take note of how long it takes for them to respond to questions or issues.
  • Ask for some customer references. Call the references and chat about their experiences with the vendor. Ask them for specific examples of both positive and negative interactions and experiences.

While Jeremiah says that “Many of the vendors in my community platform wave ironically do NOT offer a community to their own customers to support themselves”, the best vendors do use their own software to build external communities for their customers.

Here are three examples of vendors who eat their own dogfood:

There are plenty of others who run vibrant communities for users of their platform; however, I was surprised by how many do not. While I was working at Jive, we learned so much about our software by using it to host our own communities. We found bugs early, felt the pain points along with our customers, and celebrated when new features were introduced in the product. Any vendor who isn’t eating their own dogfood is using you, their customer, as a testing bed. I’ll take my chances with vendors who use their software over ones that do not any day.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Community Managers and Reporting Structures

Published
by
Dawn
on October 6, 2008
in community
. 7 Comments

There are many differences of opinion about where the community manager or the community team should fit into the reporting structure of any organization. In general, I think that it depends on the type of community. The community management function should report to the team most closely connected to the audience you are trying to serve.

Too many companies automatically put the community function under marketing, which works well for certain types of communities, but can be disastrous for other types of communities. For example, developer communities or customer support communities should rarely, if ever, report to marketing. However, I do think that marketing should manage the communities for certain types of customer communities or communities that support a specific marketing campaign. Communities focused on a product line could be driven out of a product marketing group.

Developer communities and open source communities should be driven out of a technology or engineering group, since developer and open source communities tend to work best when they are created by developers for developers. Developers in general have very little tolerance for marketing and anyone who lacks technical credibility.

Support communities should be driven as part of the broader support organization to ensure that the customers in the community are getting an appropriate level of support. The support staff deals with support questions all day and are the most appropriate group to be answering the questions in the support forums and making sure that support customers have what they need from the company.

In some cases, the community should report to the senior management of the organization. Some communities cover multiple functions including developers, support, customers, and product information. In those cases, the community team should be placed high enough in the organization to be able to effectively interface with all of the other teams in the organization. If the community is a critical part of the the products or services offered by the company, it might need to be it’s own function within the organization.

It is worth spending some extra time deciding where the community function should be placed within the organization. You need to take a careful look at the audience for your community and place the community in the appropriate organization.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Online Community Thought Leader Search

Published
by
Dawn
on October 2, 2008
in community
. 10 Comments

During Marshall Kirkpatrick’s session at WordCamPDX last weekend, he talked about some of his customized search engines, which inspired me to create one of my own.

Google does a great job of finding everything for a keyword, but it doesn’t really know how to filter for posts matching less measurable criteria. For example, a standard Google search can’t filter for the blogs of people that I think are really smart and interesting. The idea behind the custom search engine is that I can tell Google which sites I want it to search, and then Google does its magic to find the best posts within the limits that I provide. Marshall uses his custom search engines as a starting place for research to get quotes for blog posts or learn more about a topic he’s researching.

I have plans for a few others, but I wanted to start with a custom search engine for online community thought leaders. I’m hoping it will help me when I’m doing research for blog posts or consulting clients. In order to keep the results relevant, I’m limiting the number of sites searched to a very small number of blogs from people that I think are thought leaders in the online community space. While I have a huge respect for many people who work at companies that make community platform software, I’m deliberately not including blogs from vendors to attempt to keep the search vendor neutral.

Here are the first blogs to make the cut:

You can try the Online Community Thought Leader search for yourself and let me know what you think:



Now the big question for you:

Who did I miss? Did I leave someone amazing off of the list? If so, you can leave suggestions in the comments.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts: