Category Archives: community

Community Mini Case Study: Whiffies on Twitter

June 1, 2009 Dawn 3 Comments

I’ve been spending some time hanging out at several of the Portland food carts over the past couple of weeks getting to know some of the people behind the amazing food. Raven Zachary recently introduced me to Whiffies Fried Pie Cart on Hawthorne, and I started getting to know Gregg Abbott, the man behind those addictive little pies. The Twitter account for @whiffies is very community focused with many replies to conversations, retweets of other interesting posts, and is way less self-promotional than you might expect from a business. The first time I talked to Gregg, we were in a group of techies; we had our iPhones out; we were Tweeting; and we chatted about several obscure location-based technologies that few people outside of the tech community have ever heard of. When I asked him about his background, I expected him to say that he was a freelance programmer / designer or some other web-based profession and was surprised to learn that he’s been working in the food industry. At that point, I wanted to learn more about how he came to Twitter and what it has done for his business. Here’s a quick email interview with Gregg.

Dawn: A quick Google search for Gregg Abbott shows that you have been involved in online communities and social networks for a while. How did you get interested in social networking, and how did you use these technologies prior to opening Whiffies?

Gregg: When it comes to social networking via the web it’s really all I’ve ever done. I feel like I’m from the very first generation who grew up with ‘net social networking. When I was 12 years old you could find me on prodigy all night chatting and being social with other like minded people. My community has always sprung from the web. It’s funny to me because the major social networks, let’s take Facebook for example, are simply duplicating AOL circa 1994. Here’s a place to chat and be social while playing fun games and goofing around. I guess what I’m saying is this has been a huge part if my life for some time, and I really enjoy the fact that the number of users has increased so much lately. It has given me a whole lot of opportunities to expand my social circles.

[Dawn’s note: this is where I remind myself that I am not as young as I think I am, since I grew up before this generation who grew up having Internet access.]

Dawn: You have been very active on Twitter under the @whiffies account when you opened the new food cart. How has Twitter or other online technologies helped your business?

Gregg: Twitter has been amazing at connecting me with great people. When I’ve had questions or needed help with something Twitter has rarely failed to help me find what I need. The coolest thing about Twitter, and this is gonna come back to the barn raising analogy (I’m obsessed with Anabaptists forgive me) is the sense of community that it invokes. It’s amazing!! Coming into this I was way more cynical and jaded about people. The truth is, people (especially early adopting tech people) really want to help one another. Every chance they’ve gotten they’ve showed up and been amazing. It’s so inspirational to see. I think (maybe it’s hope) that Twitter is gonna help us move past the bowling alone phase in American culture. For a small business starting out often times the hardest thing is getting the word out to the community about the product and service that you offer. Twitter has been amazingly helpful in overcoming this hurdle. It’s also given me a way to connect with my customers directly. In restaurants (and food carts) on of the biggest obstacles you face is unhappy clients not giving feedback. As a restaurateur, getting honest feedback helps you create better products and a better experience. I think people are a little more comfortable giving feedback to a. someone who seems friendly and receptive and b. through an electronic intermediate. Twitter let’s me have real dialog (awesome to say about <140 character tweets) with people and helps me create better products and a better service.

Dawn: What are your tips for other new businesses who want to do something similar?

Gregg: Tips I have for other businesses are:

Join the community (this is key and is gonna play into all the rest.)
Offer your help anywhere you can.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Buy a new cart, not a used one.
Go down and talk to everyone you can in the carts. They’re all super awesome and super helpful.

Dawn: What made you decide to open a fried pie cart and what are your evil plans for world domination of the fried pie market (or maybe Portland domination)?

Gregg: My dad and I have been kicking the idea around for some time. He makes baked handpies in his catering business and being a little bit gluttonous I thought let’s fry these puppies up and see what happens and Whiffies was born.

Community Case Study Summary

As you can see from his tips in the third question, this is a community-oriented guy with a combination of online and offline community. Friends have been teasing me over the past week about my Whiffies pie addiction, but it isn’t just about the pies, it’s about the community. We go down to the carts to hang out and talk to people while we eat our pie, and within a few minutes of tweeting about going, we usually end up with a few friends at the carts hanging out with us.

While I focused on Whiffies for this mini case study, many of the other food carts in Portland (@koifusion, @pdxyarp, etc.) are also embracing Twitter in a good way with a focus on community, instead of spamming us with self-promotional tweets. It’s great to see traditional businesses jumping onto Twitter in a way that makes me want to follow them rather than wanting to run away screaming.

Whiffies is open from 8pm – 3am Tuesday through Saturday if want to check them out. Make sure you say hi to Gregg while you’re there.

community

Impromptu Digital, Twitter Barn Raising CubeSpace Benefit Party at Whiffies

May 24, 2009 Dawn 2 Comments

I was exchanging some direct messages this morning with Gregg aka @whiffies after my earlier CubeSpace post, and he is generously offering to do an old fashioned barn raising for CubeSpace this evening sometime around 11pm at the Whiffie’s pie cart on Hawthorne and 12th. He has 40 sweet and savory pies left over from last night along with lemonade and iced tea. He’s willing to donate all of the proceeds from the evening to CubeSpace. It’s a 3 day weekend, and tomorrow is a holiday, so you really don’t have any excuse not to join us. Don’t be late, we only have 40 pies!

We’re also looking for a DJ who wants to come out and entertain us for the evening for a good cause. Ping me if you are interested.

Here are the details:
Time: Sometime after 11PM. Look for a tweet from @whiffies later tonight for a more exact start time.
Location: Food Carts on Hawthorne and 12th
Come hang out & buy a pie or some lemonade in support of CubeSpace
RSVP on Upcoming

community

CubeSpace: The Importance of Community

May 24, 2009 Dawn 12 Comments

Officially, CubeSpace is a local for profit business in Portland, OR with two sides to the business. They started as a coworking space where people can work or hold meetings with all of the amenities of a traditional office, but they recently expanded into consulting where they bring groups of freelancers together to bid on bigger projects. Both of these efforts generate revenue for the CubeSpace business.

Unofficially, they are the adopted home of the Portland technology community. They donate their space in the evenings to user groups and other technology gatherings without asking anything in return. They have generously let me hold Legion of Tech meetings, community manager meetups, and they have been a great partner in many of the bigger local events, like WordCamp, CyborgCamp, BarCamp, Startupalooza, and more.

Earlier this week, they put out an open letter to the community letting us know that they were having financial difficulties that would likely result in eviction from their space and / or bankrupcy. I was personally very concerned and sad and outraged by the way US Bank was responding and worried about losing CubeSpace and about the impact this would have on so many of my friends, particularly Eva and David. Most of my friends were experiencing similar emotions, and there was an outpouring of support and offers of help from far and wide within the technology community in Portland.

The community gathered online and offline to find ways to help. We were discussing CubeSpace in the halls between WebVisions sessions, at lunch, and everywhere else we gathered in real life. People started Tweeting with the #savecubespace hashtag. Several ways to help have been emerging: a site where you can donate money (they have raised over $5000 so far), an auction, and more. Various ways to help have been included in the comments of the Silicon Florist post.

All of these activities generated a huge amount of activity on Twitter, which attracted the mainstream media. Stephanie Strickland start putting in calls to US Bank for comment and later KGW did a news story about the incident. Mike Rogoway wrote a great article for the Oregonian. The grassroots support on Twitter led to mainstream media coverage, which finally got US Bank to the table to provide CubeSpace with some options.

Community Case Study

This level of support from the community, both online and offline, is not typical behavior when you are talking about a for profit organization having financial difficulties. Had this been a place where people rented office space and went home at the end of the day, few people would have cared if they went out of business. Because Eva and David have always been so generous with their space for the technology community – letting community user groups meet at CubeSpace for no charge, the community wants to give something back to them. They have been so generous with the community, and now that they are struggling, the community wants to help them.

They didn’t create the Portland technology community, but they joined the community and became active participants. They gave generously to the community, and now the community wants to give back. This is the way strong communities respond when one of their own is in trouble. This isn’t the first time the community has bailed someone out of a tight spot; one of the best examples was the Bram Pitoyo bike fund when his bike was stolen last year. Eva and David are in trouble, and the community is pulling together to help. I think the past few days in particular speak to the strength of the Portland technology community.

Next Steps

Eva and David have quite a bit to think about this weekend as they weigh their options and decide which path to take. I expect that they will need to take a hard look at their business model and cost structure if they decide to continue with CubeSpace to avoid ending up in a similar situation again. Personally, I think that they should get rid of some more cubicles and increase the flexible space or provide bigger, dedicate office spaces to small companies. So many of us left the corporate world to escape the cubicles and aren’t eager to jump back into one.

I have also been holding off on making any donations until I see how I can best help. Donating money isn’t always the best option depending on which path they choose, so I want to make sure that I can help in a way that would be most productive. Whatever Eva and David decide to do, I will be there to support them in any way that I can as a member of the community that they have been so much a part of. I wish them the best of luck whatever they decide to do.

Update June 16: The end result is that CubeSpace has decided to shut down their business, but I wish them the best of luck in future endeavors.

community

ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

May 14, 2009 Dawn 4 Comments

I was lucky to get a review copy of the new ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management, which was just released this morning. I was also interviewed for the report, so you can find tidbits from my experience sprinkled throughout the report.

My favorite thing about this report is that it isn’t just a PDF document, it comes with a companion site, the Community Management Aggregator, which provides great ongoing resources for people interested in community management. It has a custom search engine for the best community management content along with 3-10 new community management articles per day from some of the leading community management practitioners. I’m already finding great content that I hadn’t yet discovered on my own throughout this companion site. It also has other useful tidbits including OPML files with lists of great blogs, links to Twitter accounts for the top community management thought leaders, and more.

The report is also really interesting. It contains basic information, discussions about whether you really need a community manager, return on investment for your community, job descriptions, dealing with difficult members, interviews and more. The report also has plenty of links to other content, links to reference materials, and other pointers to great content. You can also download a free sample section of the report to get a better feel for the type of content being included.

The whole package is priced at $299. You can learn more about the report on the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management page.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

community

Social Media Users Are Older and More Business-Like Than You Think

April 27, 2009 Dawn 11 Comments

I had an interesting conversation with a client recently who was expressing doubt about whether their audience, less technical business professionals over 40, was participating in any meaningful way in social media. As a result of this conversation, I spent some time digging into the data, and I wanted to share what I learned.

Your Competitors Are Investing in Social Media

Companies are continuing to invest more money in social media, which will continue to fuel the growth of social media technologies. At least some of your competitors have plans to invest more resources and increase spending on social media. Here are a few examples from eMarketer and Forrester.

Twitter Users Are Trending Older

According to Nielsen, Twitter is growing rapidly and people using Twitter tend to trend older than you might expect with 35 – 49 year-olds making up almost 42% of the traffic to Twitter.com.

Nielsen has also found that the majority of Twitter users access it from work:

“Twitterers (a.k.a. Tweeters) are not primarily teens or college students as you might expect. In fact, in February the largest age group on Twitter was 35-49; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 percent of the site’s audience. We found that the majority of people visit Twitter.com while at work, with 62 percent of the combo unique audience accessing the site from work only versus 35 percent that accessed it from home only.”

comScore has also noticed a similar trend in Twitter users:

“18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.”

Facebook Users Are Trending Older

According to Nielsen:

While social networks started out among the younger audience, they’ve become more mainstream with the passage of time. Not surprisingly the audience has become broader and older. This shift has primarily been driven by Facebook whose greatest growth has come from people aged 35-49 years of age (+24.1 million). From December 2007 through December 2008, Facebook added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million).

According to Inside Facebook:

Looking at Facebook US audience growth over the last 180 days, it’s clear that Facebook is seeing massive increases in adoption amongst users 35-65. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is still women over 55 – there are now nearly 1.5 million of them active on Facebook each month.

The biggest growth in terms of absolute new users over the last six month came amongst users 35-44. Over 4 million more US women 35-44 and nearly 3 million more US men 35-44 used Facebook in March 2009 compared to September 2008.

Online Community Participants Also Increasing in Age

There you have it. A big data dump of various research into social media and online community age demographics. If you know of other research, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

community

Online Communities Fail Publicly

April 8, 2009 Dawn 2 Comments

I’ve been spending a significant amount of time thinking about the difference between traditional, static websites and online communities as more companies start to make the leap into online communities. In the past, when you created a traditional web site, only your employees could tell how many people visited and interacted with your site. You could hide the dirty little secret that only 10 people per day visited your website, since only the employees with access to your analytics would ever know the truth. In other words, websites fail privately.

Online communities, on the other hand, fail publicly. When you launch an online community and nobody participates, you fail very publicly. Anyone visiting the community can see that people aren’t participating, and it can be damaging to your brand.

Because communities fail publicly, it is important never to launch a community that is empty or nearly empty of content. You need to provide some content and set the tone for the community. It’s like attending a party with a dance floor. If no one is already dancing, it can be hard to get people started, but once you get a few people on the dance floor, others will take their lead and join in a similar fashion.

Here are a few quick tips to help make sure that your new community succeeds:

Have a content roadmap and plan for content. Participation takes work, and it won’t magically happen without a little work on your part.
Seed some content prior to launch. Create a few discussions with questions designed to stimulate conversations, and post other content that participants might find interesting.
Run a beta with your favorite 10-25 people (depending on the size of the effort). These could friendly customers or people in your industry with interesting ideas.
Promote your community and encourage your early beta testers to help get the word out about the community.

Spend the time during the planning phases of the community to make sure that you have a plan for the content and the resources to execute your plans over the long term. If you can’t get the resources or don’t have enough time to devote to the community, it might not be the right time to launch a community, and a static website might be a better choice for now.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

community

Online Community Training

March 26, 2009 Dawn 1 Comment

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

March 17, 2009 Dawn 3 Comments

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.

community

Making Whuffie: Raising Social Capital in Online Communities – Tara Hunt

March 15, 2009 Dawn 1 Comment

Here are my unedited notes from Tara Hunt’s session (please forgive the typos). These are her words, not mine (assuming my notes are accurate).

Making Whuffie: Raising Social Capital in Online Communities by Tara Hunt

It was a packed house for Tara’s presentation

Whuffie comes from Cory Doctorow’s book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In his future word, instead of money, they had whuffie, which is basically social capital. You ping someone’s whuffie and get a reputation score.

Many people produce content and have audiences online. If you join these networks to pitch, people will respond negatively. Credibility matters and you lose the ability influence people when you spam people.

It takes time and attention to build this.

5 key components to raising your whuffie:

Turn the bullhorn inwards – shouting at people is impersonal. You need to listen to people and get feedback by focusing on individuals to better understand your audience. 8 tips: 1) get advice & input from experts, but design for the broader community. 2) respond to all feedback, even when you respond by saying, “no thanks” 3) Don’t take negative feedback personally 4) give credit to the people whose ideas you implement. 5) when you implement a new idea, highlight it and ask for feedback. 6) make small continuous changes rather than implementing everything at once. 7) don’t wait for feedback to come to you, go out and find where people are already talking about you. 8) no matter how much people like you, there will always have someone who doesn’t – mind the haters.
Become part of the community that you serve. Get out of the boardroom and into the community. Who do you serve & how do you find them. What problem are you solving and who has that problem? When you figure this out, join them in an authentic way as an ordinary participant. Figure out why people would give a darn.
Create an amazing customer experience. You need to be remarkable so that people care & create amazing customer experience that lead to joy and admiration, and then you will have connection with people 1) dazzle is in the details (moleskin) 2) go above & beyond (Zappos) 3) appeal to emotion (Vosges chocolate) 4) Inject fun into the experience (Virgin America / Flickr – with a screenshot from Josh Bancroft’s Flickr images!) 5) make something mundane fashionable (Method soap). 6) Let people personalize (moo cards). 7) be experimental (threadless). 8) simplify (37 signals / basecamp) 9) make happiness your business model: increase autonomy, competence & relatedness (Zappos) 10) Be a social catalyst (Intuit – connecting customers with customers).
Embrace the chaos – don’t try to control the message. People will fight back and say what they want. Instead of trying to control it, you can collaborate with people on messages and lay the foundation to discover the opportunities that can be created. 7 ways to embrace the chaos: 1) stop moving and look around you until you can see everything clearly. 2) transfer the knowledge 3) every time you feel anxiety, acknowledge it. 4) define your own measure of success. 5) Get outside of your personal circle 6) everything is out of your control anyway 7) have patience
Find your higher purpose. You have to give back to the community. The more whuffie you give away the more you gain. What can you give away without going broke. 5 gifts you can give back without going broke 1) doing well by doing good (sustainability / Stonyfield Farms) 2) This customer centrically (not what you need, what your customers need). 3) Help others go further 4) Spread love (akoha.com) – pay it forward 5) value something bigger than yourself = whuffie.

These five = whuffie rich.

Slides will be uploaded today on Slideshare.

Update 3/16/09: Added the embed from Slideshare below

Making Whuffie

View more presentations from Tara Hunt.

Open source, Linux kernel research, online communities and other stuff I'm interested in posting.