Impact Interactions Welcomes Experienced Social Media Professionals Lauren Bittner & Adam Crawford!

With our continued growth here at Impact Interactions, we’ve recently added two experienced professionals to help our clients’ social media and online community projects succeed. Please join us in welcoming Lauren Bittner and Adam Crawford to our team!

Lauren Bittner (Social Media Consultant) brings over nine years of professional experience in the social media and loyalty programs to help our clients drive deeper, meaningful relationships with their members. With consulting and management experiences ranging from IBM and McGraw-Hill to Allstate Insurance and Ace Hardware, Lauren has a strong foundation in the B2B social media world. She will initially support the Hall of Fame and Expert member recognition program at Cisco’s CSC as well as support additional projects both for Cisco and our other B2B clients.  Prior to joining us at Impact Interactions, Lauren helped improve usability for client sites as well, bringing another dimension to our services for clients. Lauren got her start in social media at online community pioneer Participate.com.

Adam Crawford (Social Media Consultant, Business Development) is an experienced social media professional with over ten years experience in helping large organizations with their social media and online communities. In his experience, Adam has managed teams of moderators for such diverse companies as NBCi, ATT, AARP, and Ace Hardware. Further extending his social media experience, Adam was an Account Development Manager for Open Text, a leading Enterprise 2.0 content management and social media software company for the past five years. This gives Adam a wide understanding of not only the processes and procedures for social media programs, but also a solid understanding of the technology requirements needed for success. Prior to Open Text, Adam worked for Participate.com as well. In his new role, Adam will help Impact Interactions with Business Development and consulting work.

Please join me in welcoming Lauren and Adam to our team.

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Who Needs It? Dealing with Unwanted Content and Conversations in Your Online Community

by Matthew Lees

Every day seems to bring increased buy-in and understanding of how social media and online communities can positively impact organizations. But there’s still pushback around certain things. For example, community platform vendors, consulting firms, and agencies still regularly hear concerns such as “What if someone uses profanity?” and “What if they say bad things about us?”

Most of the content in your community – and throughout the social Web, too – is stuff you want. These are the questions and answers your community members share with each other and with you. They’re their problems and solutions, their interesting and relevant comments (even their uninteresting and relevant comments), their ideas, wish lists, and perspectives.

But there will also be things that you really don’t want, the content and conversations that you and the community could surely do without.

These things should make up a small percentage of the overall content, but it’s all but impossible to avoid them completely. (You’ll typically find a smaller percentage of unwanted posts in B2B communities than in B2C communities, and you’ll usually see a smaller percentage of such things in support-related communities than in affinity and engagement communities.)

Thanks But No Thanks
To be more specific, the unwanted stuff is posts and content that contain…

1. Inappropriate Language or Content. No surprise here…these are comments, images, or videos of a sexual, violent, abusive, or otherwise inappropriate nature. Note that this is about more than the use of foul language. There are a lot of mean and nasty things that can be said with perfectly acceptable words.
2. Advertising or Spam. Some advertising may be fine in your community. Often, though, it’s not. And I can’t think of a situation in which any community would want spam. (Is there a Spam community? If so, that would prove me wrong.)
3. Incorrect Information. You can’t fully control the quality of user-generated answers, solutions, and comments. Members will, on occasion, post information that’s incorrect. Usually it’s unintentional, but it can cause confusion or worse. Blatantly incorrect info is relatively easily fixable; gray areas can lead to disagreement, dissent, and (hopefully) healthy discussion.
4. Sensitive or Confidential Information. Some customers often have access to inside information, as do your colleagues, of course. If people aren’t careful, or if there’s miscommunication on when and where certain information can be shared, they can inadvertently say things they shouldn’t. This doesn’t happen often, but the cat does sometimes get out of the bag.
5. Off-Topic Comments. Such posts may be benign, but they’re either entirely irrelevant or relevant to another place in the community.

There are also a few types of posts that some may see as unwanted. But community managers and moderators worth their salt see these as acceptable, if not desirable (at least in low volume), since they demonstrate transparency and authenticity, and give community members opportunities to chime in on your behalf. These are post that…

•    Say Negative Things about Your Organization, Brand, Products, Services, etc.
•    Say Positive Things about the Competition

Be Prepared
So how do you deal with all these situations? Best is to have your ducks in a row beforehand. Here are some suggestions:

•    Have a good moderation plan, and a great community manager and moderation team. When dealing with unwanted content and conversations, moderators should be observant, understanding, firm, and fair. And know what you’ll do when you get each type of unwanted post.
•    Create appropriate community policies and guidelines, not only for community members, but for subject-matter experts and other internal stakeholders and participants.
•    Make friends with colleagues throughout your organization. It’s worthwhile, if not essential, to check in with the folks in legal, corporate communications, and pretty much all other business units. They can help with the Action Plan items that pertain to them, and help deal with unexpected things should they arise.
•    Have a library of stock replies at your disposal. This will help you respond to issues quickly.
•    Leverage the tools in your community platform. The moderation tools and accompanying workflow are important here, of course. I’m a big fan of content filters (for catching obscenities and other text strings) that trigger email notifications. And the ability to enable or disable anonymous posts can be helpful, as well, since people tend to take more liberties when they can participate anonymously.
•    Be aware. Be very aware. Technology won’t catch everything. There’s no substitute for paying attention.

Most online community best practices deal with how to engage with community members and get more of the good stuff. Knowing how to minimize and deal with the unwanted stuff is important, too.

And the best way to assuage execs’ concerns is to say “Yes, there will be some amount of unwanted and inappropriate content and conversations in the community. We can’t avoid that. But here’s how we’ll be handling them when they do arise…”

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Migrating an Online Community is Like Completing Someone Else’s Sudoku

by Matthew Lees

Maniac Sudoku Puzzler on the Loose
Sitting in seat 15D of my homebound flight yesterday, I opened up the airline magazine to work on the Sudoku puzzle in the down time between take off and beverage service.

Unfortunately, to my near horror, someone had already started the “Gentle” Sudoku, entering around 20 numbers, or about a third of what still needed to be filled in. Although the magazine gives three versions to choose from (Gentle, Moderate, and Diabolical), air travel doesn’t make me especially receptive to challenging mental workouts, so I figured I’d just start where the other person left off on the Gentle version.

My initial assumption was that the previous solver knew what they were doing, but either got bored or ran out of time before landing. While my personal puzzle preference leans more towards crosswords, I’m not too bad at Sudokus, so less than one minute into things, I realized that this assumption was a bad one. One nine-by-nine square had two 8s! There were two 9s in another! And how on earth could you write a 4 in that box, when there’s only one 4 given as a starting clue in the whole puzzle?

After some deep breathing exercises to calm me down from this outrage, and spending a few minutes thinking up scenarios that might explain such a poor attempt – not really knowing how Sudokus work, but giving it a whirl anyway? insanity (temporary or otherwise)? intoxication? pure mischievousness (in which case, they got me good)? – I decided to work on it anyway. After all, it was the easiest level, their pen had been black while mine was blue (so I could distinguish who did what), and they hadn’t filled in too too many numbers. So how hard could it be?

I’ll leave out the exciting details, but I completed the puzzle after about 30 minutes. It wasn’t pretty, though, as you can see from the image above. Along the way, I found that, while some of my unknown co-solver’s answers had been wrong, others were indeed correct.

Building a community from scratch is like solving a new Sudoku.
Migrating a community is like solving a Sudoku that someone else already started.

I’m currently working with a client on migrating an online community from one platform to another. Their B2B community has lived for over three years on a homegrown platform that, while impressive three years ago, is now seen as lacking essential features and functionality that the company’s users want and expect, and that the company requires to effectively manage, grow, and maximize the community’s value.

So we’re knee-deep in thinking through the ins and outs of the migration, planning how best to (1) move data (community content and conversations, member profiles, etc.) to the new platform, (2) configure the technology (reputation system, moderation workflow, single sign-on, etc.), and (3) communicate with key enthusiasts/influencers and rest of the user base. Some of these elements are informational in nature, some are technological, and others are social.

What Came Before
The social aspects are particularly apt for the Sudoku analogy. By definition, an online community that’s migrating to a new platform isn’t starting from scratch, which means it already has a culture, a shared history, and certain ways of doing things. The migration can’t help but change some of these. Ideally, all changes will be for the better, but the important thing is, successful migrations depend on knowing what came before.

If you’re involved with a community migration, you may feel that some of the things that came before were good – in the way that some of the original Sudoku solver’s numbers were correct – in which case you’ll replicate them as closely as you can. And some of what came before may not be aligned with the direction you’re going – in the way that I had to change the incorrect Sudoku numbers – so you’ll adapt.

For sure, the analogy (like all analogies) is imperfect. Puzzles have correct answers, but there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to approach online communities. There are only degrees of success based on your and your users’ criteria. But there are best practices based on approaches that tend to work.

Still, you shouldn’t be surprised if things get messy, like my smudged, cross-out-filled Sudoku. A few hurdles are okay if you still get to where you want to go.

A Final Note: If you really don’t like what came before, finger pointing doesn’t solve anything. Experience, expertise, effort, patience, and iteration, however, go a long way. That said, if you recognize your handwriting in black ink in the Sudoku above, I’d like to have a word with you…

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Why Community Management is NOT like Parenting

Community Management = Parenting? Really?

There has been a recent upsurge in community management/moderation blog posts comparing the care and nurturing of a community to that of a parent. As both a parent and someone who has helped companies build and moderate successful communities for over ten years, I couldn’t disagree more. Here’s why:

• The best moderators and community managers are passionate about the success of their community in meeting its goals. They are not passionate about or emotionally attached to the individual members.

Think I’m crazy? Look at the photo above. When two members go at each other in a community an emotionally attached community manager will take sides based upon who they feel is more important to the community or worse, based upon their interpretation of what happened. So rather than staying above the fray, they take sides. We’ve seen it time and time again. We work hard with our client teams to understand the downside of this behavior by the manager or moderator. What’s the fall-out from this behavior by the manager/moderator? Simple, it intensifies the problem rather than defusing it. Members want moderators who are impartial to settle disputes. So unlike a parent, the most successful community managers and moderators must remain emotionally detached.

• Getting too close to a member emotionally reduces your credibility as a moderator/manager in the eyes of the other members who aren’t close to you.

It matters what others think, even if incorrect. The most vocal and longest lasting problems in B2C communities that we’ve managed always revolve around the initial problem being compounded by claims of unfair treatment and support for one side over the other.  If you enter into a situation like this, your credibility will suffer in the eyes of many members. For example, at AARP the political action is fast and furious. We’ve seen members attack each other over many issues. (Liberals against Conservatives. Democrats against Republicans. Capitalists against Socialists. Wingnuts against Moonbats. ) Each time our moderators have stepped in, it has been to enforce the terms of service rather than take sides. While we are often accused by someone of taking sides, other members are quick to point out to the community that the moderators take action against them as well. That achieves a certain balance that while fragile is non-partisan. If you are emotionally attached to a member who is attacked, you are likely to over-react and set off a chain reaction. So unlike a parent you must stay above the fight and be partial. (Yes this sounds like a parental ideal, but in practice it’s almost impossible to pull off with your own kids because you are still too emotionally invested and want to settle the fight NOW!)

• The myth of not needing moderation continues to stay alive

This one is really interesting in my opinion. How can you compare community management to parenting and then say that:

“In fact moderation is rarely necessary where an effective community manager runs the community.” – Simon Phillips

Clearly, he’s never dealt with a two year old throwing a tantrum or a member doing the same in a community. As I mentioned in my comments:

“At the early maturity stage of a public community, the community manager must moderate in order to establish the community norms of behavior. That means removing offensive content or language or attacks. It also requires that the community manager contact the members whos content he/she has removed/edited. Otherwise the wrong example is set and the behavioral expectations are going to be harder to realize. If you don’t step in early, the bullies and soapboxers will dominate and reinforce the behavior that you don’t want to see (or that your client doesn’t want to see). Once that happens, your growth in realized value will slow as members join more to fight or spam or advertise rather than to contribute to a meaningful goal.

As the community matures, the need for behavioral moderation remains. Why? Because members don’t want to self-police and if they do, they often go after people they disagree with rather than true violations of the community norms or ToS.”

So here is the bottom line from Impact Interactions’ view of the online community world. In order to succeed in driving the results you want, act like a professional facilitator not a parent. Remain emotionally detached from your members to stay impartial. Focus on the results and in maintaining the norms and behaviors you want in your community rather than on the personalities. And don’t act like a parent, act like a professional.

Here are a few other takes on this idea:

Raising Good Communities – The Community Roundtable

You teach what you accept: As true in parenting as it is in online community management – FreshNetworks

Leading a Community is Like Parenting - Connie Bensen

Please feel free to add your thoughts on this analogy…

Mike Rowland, President

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Do You Use Social Media? Guess What…You’re a System Administrator

By Matthew Lees

The New York Times recently ran an informative article by Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb called “The 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now.” It’s about changes that Facebook made last December that affected user privacy, and what you can do about a few key pieces of personal information.

The article got me thinking about a Patricia Seybold Group report I wrote in 2007, entitled (rather cleverly, I thought), “Helping Customers with Self-Control…of Their Own Content.” The discussion and perspective in that report are even truer today than they were a few years ago, with the trend toward user control only increasing.

The upshot of the report was that, whether you blog or spend time on social sites or online communities, you’re doing more than participating in conversations, seeking out people and information, and creating content. You’re probably also deciding (1) who can see what, and (2) what they’re allowed to do with what they can see.

Well, guess what. That’s what system administrators do. Did you know you’re a sysadmin?

(Tell your parents. If yours are like mine, they won’t understand what it means, but they’ll be impressed. Actually, if your parents are on Facebook or any other social network, they’re sysadmins, too!)

Of course, professional sysadmins are trained and experienced in the subtleties and ramifications of managing access rights, setting up group/subgroup permissions, and troubleshooting things when problems arise. The rest of us are doing this as amateurs, whether we’re…

• setting permissions on our Flickr photos
• managing the privacy settings in our Facebook accounts
• determining what our public and private LinkedIn accounts look like
• deciding if your blog will accept anonymous comments or if people need to be logged in to comment
• deciding which groups of people (e.g., everyone, friends, or family), if any, can comment on our YouTube videos
• deciding what URLs in del.icio.us to share and what to keep private (for example, I’ll let most of URLs I tag be publicly viewable, but not the ones of my financial accounts)

As the Internet has enabled more and more of us not only to be Content Consumers, but also Content Creators and Publishers (the simplicity of blogging laid a lot the groundwork for this), the natural evolution has been for us to have control over this content as well. And it’s not just the content itself (your blog entries, forum posts, comments, video clips, photos, pictures, animations, etc.), but also the information about you (such as your profile information, both personal and professional).

The advantage of all this is that systems are increasingly giving us more control over both our content and profile information. Some platforms offer impressively – perhaps overwhelmingly – granular control of pretty much everything. This is a great trend, since it’s generally better to give people control over their own stuff.

But the disadvantage is that most of us don’t naturally take to this role or have the time to do it well. It takes attention to think through things and set them up the way we’d really want them to be. Most of us don’t have the bandwidth to do this for one site, let alone all the social sites and communities where we spend time. (Plus, things change over time, as with the Facebook situation above.) Therefore, as inexperienced and part-time sysadmins with a few other things on our plates, we may not be setting things up as well as we could. We typically rely on the defaults, which may or may not be in our best interests.

Why is this important?

• If you’re a technology vendor, you’ve got to figure out how to balance giving users granular control while making things easy for them to use. More tools, capabilities, and control is usually good, as long as you don’t confuse people, and having control over too much stuff can easily become overwhelming. Having an intuitive user interface can certainly help, but product managers have to draw the line somewhere.
• If you’re a social media user (and who isn’t?), you’ve got to decide how much time and brainpower to give the various settings on your content and personal/professional information at all the sites where you have an account. Most likely you’ll rely on the defaults, making changes only when a friend or colleague brings an issue to your attention, or when you come across a relevant article (or blog post!) that prompts your taking action.
• If you’re a community business sponsor, manager, or moderator, you’re looking to generate participation and sharing, while at the same time maintaining a safe and friendly environment. Participation can be enhanced by more open settings – the more people who can view things, the more discussion and collaboration will ensue – but if things are too open, particularly if users don’t realize or understand, conflicts can arise. How you set defaults, and how you communicate privacy and control settings is crucial. (Think about what can arise when a Facebook user doesn’t understand the consequences of giving visibility to Friends of Friends, for example, who you may not know…or trust.)

We haven’t even touched on other, non-sysadmin-related choices social media users have to make, such as how your content looks (control over design and layout; e.g., your blog header and Twitter background), and what people can do with your content (e.g., what license do you select to govern the photos you upload to Flickr?).

Decisions, decisions, decisions. For better or worse, though, in this do-it-yourself, connected, and increasingly social world, we’re all sysadmins now.

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2009 Trends — It’s Not All Doom & Gloom

It has been a very busy summer here at Impact Interactions. We’ve added more work with our existing clients like Cisco and SAP, added new clients, added more staff, launched a new small business service (Impact Social Media), and have received many more calls about our services. Taking a step back from the activity to analyze the social media/online community industry, we’re seeing the following trends emerge:

1. While enterprise level organizations are being very careful about spending money, there is a lot of interest in the social media area. We are seeing budgets freeing up, new projects starting and excitement about using social media to market products and services.
2. Enterprise online communities continue to launch at an amazing rate. We haven’t seen this type of growth in corporate sponsored B2B communities since 2000 when the concept was very new. The difference is that now there are third party sites like Twitter and YouTube to integrate into the communities.
3. Every one wants to avoid making mistakes, placing real best practices at a premium for enterprise companies. While there is always some learning by mistakes made in any venture, the companies we are dealing with always tell us that they want to avoid making the basic mistakes that others have made.
4. Analytics are at a premium, but not understood very well by some marketers running communities. We continue to see interest in base level metrics around traffic and basic engagement, but less understanding of value. Part of this is due to the over-reliance on Google Analytics as the main tool instead of a more powerful solution like Omniture. Google Analytics is a basic tool not a true enterprise level analytics tool in our opinion and experience.
5. In conjunction with number 4, we also see clients and prospects changing platforms in part due to poor reporting and administrative control pages. Many vendors seem to put reporting and analytics into their platform as an afterthought. Platform providers moving sharply ahead of the field in providing reporting and analytics for their software are Telligent, Lithium, and Jive to a certain degree.
6. Outsourced providers of social media expertise and management in areas such as moderation, social media monitoring, reporting, and integration are gaining more interest among enterprise level companies. With headcounts frozen or worse, organizations are looking outside their company for experienced help at an reasonable cost.
7. Lastly, the social media consulting industry remains very fractured. There are simply too many small businesses, individual consultants, and former software personnel chasing deals resulting in lower pricing and no concentration of expertise in a meaningful way. In other words, this industry is ripe for a consolidation play. This is what Jeff Dachis of the Dachis Corporation in Austin is slowly building towards. We think that there are multiple opportunities for consolidation and are actively looking for non-software companies to acquire or align with to gain a larger share of this growing market. (It’s only a matter of time before the big guys like Accenture, IBM, or big advertising agencies buy up the industry’s expertise to consolidate their market share.)

So far, 2009 has been far from the doom and gloom year that most were predicting in our industry. Certainly there has been some shakeout, but overall 2009 is shaping up as a really good year overall for social media and online community service companies.

Do you agree with these trends we’re seeing? What else are you seeing in our industry? Please share your comments below.

Mike Rowland, President

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Online Community – Understanding the Myths

Are You Blindly Following the “Wisdom of the Crowds” ?

Last year, we presented this topic at the Online Community Unconference in NYC to a standing room only crowd. It’s a fun topic, albeit one that elicits strong opinions and discussions. Whether you are an industry veteran or someone who is new to online communities and social media, this presentation can help you understand and avoid some of the classic mistakes being sold by the blogosphere and ‘gurus’ every day online. It’s available in our Social Media Resources area as a pdf that you can download.

For this month’s Online Community Unconference (June 10th in Mountain View, CA0, we are updating the presentation to cover even more myths that continue to gain a following despite impacting the results of communities and their teams. For example, are you using B2C thinking in your B2B community? Are you sure you need to be on third party platforms like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others? What about metrics, are you confusing traffic with value? What role should volunteers play in your community?

These and other topics will be discussed in our talk. We hope that you’ll join us.

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The New Reality – What It Takes To Get Hired In Social Media

The economy is tough, but social media keeps growing. Impact Interactions is growing this year and once again is adding staff. We’re also trying to help those impacted by the economy and those coming right out of school to understand what working in social media is really like.

From our experience, here is what it takes to get hired:

• A focus on business skills like written communications, presentations, and statistics
• Understanding of how businesses operate from a financial perspective
• A basic understanding of Marketing, eCommerce, Advertising, and Sales
• Experience as a team member who’s used the power of collaboration to help everyone succeed
• A positive attitude
• A “relaxed” professional appearance (you know what business casual means)

Did you expect that?

Notice what’s missing?

That’s right, you do not have to be a Facebook addict or have 2,000 followers on Twitter or 500 connections on LinkedIn. You don’t have to know how to build a widget to update a user for when the top 20 members are on the site. If you use Tweetdeck, great. If you have no idea what it is, no problem.

Yet, when we give career talks, advice to job seekers, and interview our own candidates they focus on their Facebook or MySpace skill, the number of followers they have on Twitter, or what online community they use. What are we focused on? Simple, can the candidate learn our business while building strong relationships with our clients? Can the candidate make the client look good while understanding that he or she will be in the background?

Afterall, Social Media for all its wonderful claims of revolutionizing the world is really just another set of tools to increase the efficiency of business in meeting their goals. Direct mail, robo-calls, telemarketing, advertorials, infomercials, email campaigns, listservs, click-to-chat, click-to-call, and other marketing tactics helped businesses gain efficiency in their marketing efforts. Social Media is doing the same thing. The underlying principle is to use the correct tool set to engage your customers in a way that benefits both sides of the relationship. (It really is that simple.)

But you have to understand and like business for business sake. Because Social Media is not all about playing with the latest cool technology, it’s about getting results. No results equals no budget.

The great push right now is to find employees who can help companies understand social media and measure the results of their efforts. Think about every online community, web 2.0, or social media conference you’ve attended or read about… what is the one area that is always a topic of interest? Measurement and monetization.

Success in Social Media requires a focus on results, thinking strategically and executing tactics that achieve tangible results like additional sales, reduced marketing costs, faster velocity of sales, reduced lead generation costs, reduced support costs, etc. There are so many people who want to work in Social Media today, but few are willing to demonstrate their business acumen to get the position. We saw this in the late 1990s in the online community world, again in around 2003 with the blogosphere, and yet again in 2005 with the early social network companies. And here we are almost ten years later with the same issues.

So do you want to work in Social Media? My advice to you is brush up on your business skills first. Worry about your number of followers on Twitter later.

What do you think? What skills do you think it takes to work in Social Media?

Mike

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Online Community Unconference East 2009: The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

At last week’s unconference, I noticed that many of the questions asked throughout the day repeated one another. Veterans in the online community world noted that the questions we are asking ourselves today seem to be the same ones that we have been asking for the last 10 years. One woman who had attended last year’s Online Community Unconference brought up an old expression to describe it, saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” I find this to be very true of the knowledge base in the online community industry. Even though communities and other social media are relatively new, their core elements are not so new at all. Online communities are just a new platform that allows people to build relationships and interact with each other, just like people have been doing since the dawn of time.

 

 

In order to really understand social media, you need to understand the social part of it. And while some people may tell you that the social part means just letting all of your members do whatever they want, I believe it is much deeper than that. It is about using our knowledge of human desires, feelings and behaviors in order to build a community in the truest sense. Successful “real world” communities don’t allow their members to do whatever they want, do they? To be successful, whether IRL (in real life) or online, communities need to have a specific purpose with regulations that help people to fulfill that purpose. Governments, school systems, the workplace, family, and friend groups all have specific functions and have guidelines (explicit or implied) that are built around fulfilling those functions. Prosperous online communities are no different. The people involved in online communities are the same people involved in outside communities. These people need structure, guidance, and freedom all balanced perfectly in order to make online communities as valuable as other communities and to make people want to be a part of them.

 

 

I found it very interesting when Scott Moore hosted a session called Psychology For The Community Manager. He took psychology principals on human behavior and analyzed them, explaining how these principles relate to behaviors in online communities as well. One example he gave was the Bystander Effect. This principle states that people are less willing to offer help to someone when others are present. This is because people tend to feel like someone else should be the one to do it, or because they fear that they will be judged on their actions and instead do nothing. Applied to online communities, Scott gave an example of how the degree of community moderator involvement can greatly affect the extent to which members help each other. If members feel like the moderators are ever-present and that they will do everything, then members are not as willing to solve their own or other people’s problems. The lesson here was that while your moderators are essential to communities, managers need to be aware of their impact on the member engagement and shape the community norms so that members will help each other to a reasonable extent and turn to moderators in advanced cases.

 

 

I am surprised that more people don’t connect the world’s knowledge of psychology and sociology to online community development. Oftentimes people who build online communities take the stance that social media is brand spanking new and that everybody is experimenting and learning everything from scratch. While there are aspects of social media which are a definite departure from many traditional corporate viewpoints, there is no need to start with a blank slate. That’s one of the reasons why people are always asking the same questions year after year. Instead, follow Newton’s lead and innovate by standing on the shoulders of giants. Utilize existing resources and tap into the knowledge of those who have been there before you. Then you’ll be years ahead of everyone else.

 

 

Jeremy Latimer

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Community Myth Busting – OCUE2009 Presentation Notes

This entry is a summary of a presentation we made at last week’s Online Community Unconference East meeting in NY. The session was attended by roughly 20-25 members and lead by our president, Mike Rowland.

The idea of the session was to drive discussions regarding many of the common ideas around community that have been published/promoted/blogged about as if they were absolutes rather than the experiences of a few. The topics covered the following:

1. 90-9-1 Rule- Comes from concept of Participation by Jakob Nielson. Worked pretty well in early 1990s when published. Major impacts on this idea have been adoption of online communities since 1990, broadband adoption, social networks, etc. We find that the numbers don’t hold and should not be relied upon in selling a project to management or in goal setting due to the wide variances we’ve measured with over 40 communities over the past eight years.
   - At Participate.com, we modified the rule to use as an outreach rule of thumb.
   - At Impact Interactions, our clients have ratios all over the map
   - It’s more important to measure the quality of interactions as it relates to your objectives instead of trying to work towards a specific ratio
2. Self-Policing Communities – Using volunteers to moderate and report violations is a hot trend for organizations to buy into right now. But it’s been that way since at least 2000 when we spoke of hyper-affiliates and enthusiasts. Our experience has shown that most community members cannot be relied upon to keep the community moving forward.
   - Volunteers will catch some violations, but mostly report content that they don’t agree with. This forces community team to review content twice or more which is inefficient
   - Volunteers are good at defensive work (spam, porn, etc.) but do not align with your organization’s objectives in most cases and won’t faciliate most B2C communities (B2B support communities, they usually will keep the conversations moving forward towards a resolution.)
   - Data in our presentation that we’ve been tracking each year for clients shows that members generally report about 20-30% of all violations in any given month. You still need moderation…
   - Our surveys of multiple community members (both B2B and B2C) over time shows that members don’t want to be classified as a tattle tail, nor do they believe it is their responsibility to keep the community free of junk, nor do they want to handle being attacked for removing or editing members’ content for violations.
3. Personas – There are strong feelings around this topic. The term authenticity comes up quite a bit when discussing personas when what is really meant is transparency.
   Great conversations on this one, with no conclusion reached about using personas or not.
   - Most personas get blown by members because the host creating the persona doesn’t think through the process and character, misuse the persona to cheerlead the organization and its products, is so unbelievable (master of health issues, political issues, computer technology, astrology, etc.), or is used to sell in the community. All of these are wrong and should be avoided.
   - Where personas work well is very, very limited. In new communities, personas can help seed conversational content and help demonstrate norms. In a flame war, they can help diffuse the situation (especially in the case of unjust attacks). Over time, as the community grows, the role of the persona should diminish.
4. Volunteers/Hyper-Affiliates as Good Guys – Beware the myth that your top people will always love and support your community.
   - The more volunteers/hyper-affiliates you have is not always a good metric
   - They don’t always follow the rules and have no objectivity
   - When a volunteer or hyper-affiliate turns against you, the result is a much larger confrontation than you might think.
   - Once enabled, it is very difficult to make changes to your site/community without a large time commitment to deal with the criticism of your volunteer network.
   - Letting volunteers and hyper-affiliates run the community demonstrates favoritism on the part of the host organization in the eyes of many non-recognized members. It is a double edged sword which if not carefully managed can have very negative consequences on your community’s conversion and engagement ratios.
5. Community ROI cannot be measured – Everyone is familiar with the cost avoidance argument to measure ROI. But after that, the conversation usually stops because the thought is that it is too hard to show the economic value of the community.
   - Don’t confuse value with ROI… they are not the same!
   - You can measure the economic value generated by your community using multiple data sources and methods. We’ve measured the online community ROI for sales (influence on purchase & intent), Marketing (awareness and loyalty), lead generation (development and qualify leads faster), and e-learning (higher achievement and registrations). They all require certain data that doesn’t come just from the community’s metrics.

We’ve uploaded the presentation as a pdf on our web site in our Social Media Resource Center.

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