Tag Archives: community

eBook

Discount on my Companies and Communities Book for Community 2.0

I’m spending the next 3 days at the Community 2.0 conference, so I wanted to offer a discount for anyone wanting to order  Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy. For this week, you can get the paperback book for $3.00 off by using this discount code: QYW8QS6W to get it for $12.99.

The 130 page Companies and Communities paperback is normally available for $15.99. It’s small, light and easy to carry around with you or read on the plane. The book is also available on Amazon (they won’t let me give you the discount), but for those of you with Amazon Prime, you might want to get it from Amazon anyway.

If the dead tree paperback version isn’t your thing, you can also get the PDF eBook for $9.99, and you can also get it on the Kindle for $9.99.

As always, I appreciate any feedback about the book (typos, additions for future versions, etc.).

community

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

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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.emarketing1 emarketing3

emarketing2

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.

twitter growthtwitter age demo

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.”

twitter-chart2

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).

facebook_growth

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

online community ages

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:

eBook

Companies and Communities Available in Paperback

Those of you who have been holding out for a dead tree version of Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy are now in luck. Companies and Communities is now available as a 130 page paperback book for $15.99. It’s small, light and easy to carry around with you or read on the plane.

For anyone who needs an extra incentive to order it, you can get $3.00 off from now until May 2 by using this discount code: QYW8QS6W to get it for $12.99. I’ll even sign it if you can catch me at Beer and Blog or other local tech events. 🙂

I’ve also lowered the price of the PDF eBook to $9.99, and you can also get it on the Kindle for $9.99.

As always, I appreciate any feedback about the book (typos, additions for future versions, etc.).

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.

FastWonderPodcast

Online Community Podcast: Dawn Foster, Marshall Kirkpatrick and Alex Williams

If you missed the discussion that Marshall Kirkpatrick, Alex H. Williams, and I had in the Blogger Pavilion at the Business Leader NW conference yesterday, you can still listen to the conversation thanks to Luke Lefner of Broken Hours. You can visit his blog post about the discussion to learn more.

Podcast: Download

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

conference

Online Community Manager: Yes, It's Really A Job (Slideshare)

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Earlier this week, I did a blog post with this name on WebWorkerDaily talking about community management as a profession in preparation for my presentation at Oregon State University this afternoon.

The presentation covers several topics related to community management careers:

  • Defining Community
  • Community Manager Jobs (examples, job description and skills required, salaries)
  • Guiding Principles and Best Practices

Several people have asked for the slides, so here are the ones I’m bringing with me to the presentation. As always, I may take it in a different direction depending on the questions from the attendees, but at least this gives me something to deviate from.

community

Jan. 28th in Corvallis: Community Management & Yahoo Pipes

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I wanted to let people know that I will be in Corvallis, Oregon on Wednesday to present at 2 different events. I might also try to arrive earlier in the day, so let me know if you want to meet with me while I am in town.

Online Community Manager: Yes, It’s Really A Job
Wednesday January 28, 2009 from 4:00pm – 5:00pm
Kerney 112, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon
More details on Upcoming

Online community managers are being hired in more and more companies and organizations. In this presentation, I will talk about how communities are managed and why companies need community management. I’ll also provide some specific job requirements and skills that community managers need in order to be successful.

Corvallis Beer and Blog with Yahoo Pipes

Wednesday January 28, 2009 from 5:00pm – 7:30pm
Cloud 9 Restaurant and Bar
126 Sw First Street, Corvallis, Oregon
More Details on Upcoming

I will be there to talk about Yahoo Pipes and other things related to online communities and social media. Mainly, it is an excuse to hang out at another successful Beer and Blog!

A big thank you to Lance Albertson and Tim Budd for coordinating all of this!

community

Gyminee: Tracking and Social Networking for Nutrition and Fitness

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I rarely do reviews of individual sites here on this blog, but I wanted to make an exception for Gyminee. I made a commitment to getting back in shape about 3 months ago, and I have been inconsistent at best at tracking my progress until Todd recently found Gyminee. I really liked the idea of being able to track my workouts / nutrition, but I was even more excited to find that I had several friends in Portland already using Gyminee. I committed to using Gyminee diligently for one week to see how I liked it, and a couple of people asked me to do a quick review of it after a week, so here we go!

Gyminee has a freemium business model. You can make great use of the service for free, but they also offer pro accounts for people who want a few extra features (similar to the Flickr model). You get to set your own goals (weight loss, resting heart rate, arm size, etc.) and track your progress toward meeting the goals. You can track every workout and everything you eat in Gyminee, and it calculates calories in vs. calories out along with a bunch of other measurements in a daily dashboard.

Fitness Report

You can also set up custom workouts and favorite foods to make it easy to record your workouts and add foods that you eat regularly. I’ve also heard that the iPhone app for Gyminee is outstanding and makes it easy to track while on the go. One interesting feature is the add a new recipe where you can enter in your recipes, and it will calculate the nutritional properties (calories, protein, etc.) for you. I was talking a couple of people today, and we were talking about how you could use the recipe feature to record common meals to make them even easier to record. For example, you could create a favorite breakfast “recipe” containing a cup of cereal, a half cup of soymilk, and a banana that you could add as one meal.

While the tracking features are great, the real reason I’m covering it here on this blog is because of the social networking features. You can add your friends and track their workouts and progress to encourage each other to meet goals or create friendly competitions among friends. Anyone can create or join a group, Stumptown Stompers, for example, and they have forums for just about any topic. Users add the foods they eat, and other users can access those same foods, so after one person enters your favorite brand of cup of soup into Gyminee, all other users can find it and add it to their nutrition tracking. The community elements of the site make it much more than your typical workout tracking tool.

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Now that I’ve told you everything I love about Gyminee, here are the negatives:

  • It’s a free service, but the ads and the up sell to a pro account can be obnoxious.
  • Tracking nutrition can be a huge time commitment, especially if you cook for yourself. Most prepackaged foods can be found already entered on the site to use, but your custom recipes have to be entered manually. I’d love to see more flexibility around ways to enter estimated calories for a meal without having to add a new food or recipe.
  • I would love to be able to set my own nutrition goals. It uses a very rudimentary calculation based on weight and exercise to set your nutrition goals for you. In my case the amount of protein it recommends is ridiculously high, and I have yet to meet their “goal” for my protein consumption, nor do I want to meet it. If you aren’t tracking nutrition or the goals don’t make sense for you, you can’t adjust them, so it shows your friends a big red ‘F’ (which is what I suspect is happening with maestrojed above).
    [Update 9:12 on 1/13/09: As Stephen points out in the comments, you can adjust these settings. My feedback now is that this should be more intuitive to the user. I was looking for it on the goals page, not the log page.]

Feel free to add me as a friend on Gyminee if you are using it. I would be curious to hear what other people think of it.

technology

Web Technology: Impact on Social Media and Community

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In a recent Wired News Article, 6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now, Michael Calore talks about several web technologies that are already important for social media and online communities, but will continue to be increasingly important in 2009.

Identity Management. With all of the buzz behind OpenID, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect in 2008, will we finally be able to better integrate our profile data, friend lists, and other identity data to be able to better manage our information in 2009? While the big social networks have already been looking at ways to implement these technologies, smaller and niche social networks and communities (including corporate communties) will need to start thinking about them in 2009. How will you make it easier for your members to join a community while bringing any appropriate identity information along with them?

Lifestreaming. Most of us have accounts on dozens of different sites, so services like FriendFeed have been popping up to help pull our updates and those of our friends into a single stream where they can be more easily consumed. Does your niche social network or corporate community have an rss feed of each member’s activity and have you encouraged them to add this feed to their FriendFeed account?

Location Awareness. I spend quite a bit of time thinking about interesting ways to use location information as a part of my work with Shizzow. For me, location awareness is all about merging our online identities with real world interactions with real people. While it might be interesting to know that a friend of mine is visiting some exotic far away city, I am more interested in being able to find friends right now to get together for coworking, tea, or a couple of drinks at happy hour. How can you use location information to help your community members get together in the real world for meetups?

I hope this provides a little food for thought as you think about your social media and online community plans for 2009.

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