scooblog by josh ledgard : ocu2007

OCU2007 Notes: Establishing Culture and Guidelines in Community

jledgard — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 09:13:27 GMT

There was a lot of good discussion in this one, but I tried taking notes on my windows mobile phone. I'd say it was an experiment to see what would happen if I had "twittered" a session or if I just wanted to make sure I thought about the notes I took... but the truth was that my notebook was dead and I couldn't find a pen on the short notice when the good ideas came out. :-)

Good communities create cycles of community rituals. One example was a community where the influencers all decided that they would see who could post the most from 4:40 to 4:50 on Thursdays. :-) It's up to community managers to both instigate good rituals and reward the ones created by influencers.

The next question is about what's the least software you can create to enable rituals. Can the software be flexible enough to support the rituals and guidelines that have been established over time?

Move people with agendas to another community... "perhaps AOL is a good place for them." :-)

Registration screens can be a great tool with proper wordsmithing to convey your sites culture. Color and flow also help. By all means... avoid ugly communities. Ugly communities lead to argumentative members.

Don't ever attempt to stifle or limit the conversations.

OCU Notes: Increasing User Particpation in Online Communities

jledgard — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 22:26:46 GMT

Incentives

Influencer relationships such as the MVP program

Connect them to your product teams so they get insider information
Software coupons and give-aways. New reward every year.
Need rigorous process to qualify the MVPs
Visual, Branded, recognition is important.
Meet in person at the Microsoft Summit.
Help your customers be successful by helping them develop new business opportunities.

Cisco site does rewards via the visibility... if you've reached a certain point level you are a Pro.. Then you can do interviews with them where they get to show off their chops.
Give people more functionality and access to private clubs that are outside of the main community. Make them feel special
Make it very easy to do what you want them to do. Model the behavior for them. Seed the behavior. Give people real time results and feedback on what they've done so they don't waste their time.
Earning rewards doesn't work. But you can create a network of people that are willing to help you. Be a facilitator to content.
Identify people that are active in the community to empower them.
It's really important to help newcomers because lurkers will look to see how new questions are handled before deciding to post themselves.
Giving people a chance to start smaller groups can help get people engaged.

Others have tried many times, but they don't have critical mass and the small groups don't take off.
Does this hijack traffic from the main lists that people use?

Idea: Ask questions back to the people that show up looking for answers. get them locked into participating beyond just asking questions. You could make it a requirement to answer some silly questions when they get an answer.
Idea: People don't land on your welcome pages. How do you use elements of the welcome page to the thread pages that people do land on.
Idea: Audio prompt or animation that shows newcomers how they can get engaged. Make it more accessible for people to make that first interaction.
Make sure your site is optimized for search engines.
Idea: Put a certain amount of content that people can see in front of private communities. Maybe an area for non-logged in people.

Designing for your goals

Idea: Give people "their page" to start from rather than a default home page.
Generate points and reputation that match the creation of content you are trying to incent.
Idea: Need to overlay social networks to create localized knowledge networks where people become more comfortable.

Internal versus External participation

Getting people in the company to participate...
Cisco gives people monitory rewards to get employees to participate in thier communities.
Others have tried goals for employees, but it's hard to get people to participate.
Really need to let employees talk to customers about what they are working on.

Create private groups with influential customers if you are afraid of leaks, but you have to be willing to accept some risk.

Users needing permission

Fear of public speaking online

Setting the Stage for Participation

Important to meet and greet newcomers to establish culture and trust. Flickr did this when they started. You have to give people their start.
You set the scene for people in your community that gives people social que.
Show people what good behavior, appropriate topics, looks like
People can be more creative when you give them some boundaries.
Idea: You need to create hooks that frame the discussions. "I don't have time for 'boards'", but pull quotes from the community draw people in as they are browsing sites.

Great book called "Company Command" - On the "Front Porch" you visit with colleges and peers. Need a dynamic "here's the draw" pull into the communities.

Meeting people in person early and often welcomes people to online venues, but how do you get more of this online? Make sure to gather community members at conferences.
Instant engagement means you need "instant feedback" that guides the discussion

Concept: Communities are less about content and more about connection people to people. Give them people they are comfortable to speak in front of.

Idea: Send people compliments, let users be transparent with each other to help reputations develop.
Move from "here's the content" to "here's the content & the people" - Welcome pages need to show more user centric information.

Meme: Oldtimers get clickish and insular and don't like newcomers. You have to always designate areas for newcomers. New helpers need to start by rotating through he newbie area first before they can get to the advanced niche groups.

Feature your contributions from your ideal contributors to get more of that type of user that generates that type of content.

Having a location for anonymous participation can help shy people get engaged.
Blog comments have a low bar and forums the bar is higher to start discussions.

Censorship

Trust plays a role in registration and participation

Idea: Get real pictures for people to post photos of themselves. Create discussions around the photos.

Ads in Online Communities Session at OCU 2007

jledgard — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:39:17 GMT

Question: Should there be ads in the community?

Some people don't care, some people are really opinionated. The consensus was that "if they are done right".

Question: What are the different methods of putting ads on new Community Sites

Babycenter.com owned by Johnson and johnson so banners are injected every tenth post.
Big enough companies will have an ad department that sell ad space. These are the most effective ads, but also require more investment to make work. In these cases you have a high amount of control over the ads.

Topic: Can the community control the ads instead of Google?

Ad serving networks aren't sophisticated enough to create a good matches and often create poor or offensive matches. There are hundreds of high profile ad serving networks and not all of them work best.
No proactive ad filtering can be bad.
What happens when Slingcommunity.com serves Slingbox alternative ads.
People have issues with Google. Community for Babycenter.com had a discussion on abortion and the ads for abortion clinics came up. This led to mis-trust of the ad filtering from google.
Smaller, closed, private communities... could the community control the advertising? Self service advertising that had approval process and ran on a regular basis. This is non-trivial for smaller/niche communities.
What about Digg for your community moderators where they can mod up or down ads that are relevant for their communities?
Another tab in the community could work for this type of service.

Question: Are there ads in the newsletters?

Some have no ads in the newsletters
Some have different departments to serve ads so there is no tie between site ads and newsletter ads.

Topic: Payperpost?

Opinion: This is a horrible idea to allow in communities because it's bound to get out of control.
Are larger companies just better off giving their best customers blogs as a reward for their contributions instead?
People jump all over shills in discussion forums, but not in the blog world.

Topic: How are the community guidelines established?

Does the community want to slap down the "google guy"?
Open source community sponsorship ads are worthwhile?
Everyone would love a site that incorporates a community controlled ad network.
Create a community ad review area.
What about digg for community ads?
What about people that don't participate in any other way.

Suggestions: Dealing with people that inject ads into your community.

Creating an outlet for the "ad-injectors" such as a "show and tell" forum.
Another idea was "Shameless self promotion day"!
Banning
Create a rule about not using ads in signatures
3rd party recommendations are a grey area. What's an ad and what's helpful advice and linking?
What about letting posters choose who sponsors their post? Then their post gets a theme from the advertiser that's tasteful.

Question: What is working for ads?

Large concern for relevancy. There isn't a great targeted solution.
If the ads match the reason then you can go from .5% click rate to 3-5% click rate.
Two challenges:

Profiling users to target ads. Is there integration between the profiles and the targeted ads.
relevency isn't that sophisticated.
Do logged in users click on ads? Do you want them to see ads?

Pop-up ads or ads that extend over the content cause more user complaints than the reward makes worthwhile.
People interact via boards via e-mails and then the miss out on the ads.

Yahoo groups has done a terrible job monatizing the opportunity they have for niche ads.

What is a new model for ads? Who are the innovative ad companies?

How can users or companies create the viral content and serve that content through ad networks?
Is the limitation technology or ideas for clever ads?
30 Rock and The Office do product placement right... spoofing product placement while doing it... eating at chili's... scrubs does this too.
Myspace is starting to do rich content in your ads that pulls eyes in.

Hello from the Online Community Unconference

jledgard — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:15:41 GMT

I'm at the computer history museum in the valley attending the Online Community Unconference. I'll try and blog notes as a take them, but the pace looks to be fast and I'm not sure I'll be able to capture much in a consumable form for anyone other than myself. I'll try.