May 2008
60 posts
“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly...”
– Gardening tip #7: John Stuart Mill On Liberty (1859)
http://www.citmedialaw.org/ →
The mission of the Citizen Media Law Project is to provide education, legal training, and resources for individuals and organizations involved in citizen media. CMLP also provides research and advocacy on free speech, newsgathering, intellectual property, and other legal issues related to online speech.
http://www.eff.org/ →
The leading (US) civil liberties group defending our rights in the digital world
Legal do's and don'ts of running an online...
OK, so the law in the US is not the same as in Europe, but the principles are similar, with the caveat that you should assume it’s tougher in Europe! Kevin O’Keefe from Lexblog provided a few tips: 99% of legal stuff to do with communities is commonsense - precedents are few Never send a response (public or private) that could precipitate further response in the heat of the moment -...
Measuring naked conversations - are we engaged...
Katie Delahaye Paine is the doyenne of measurement. Her 6 step approach to getting it right is: 1. Define your mission and goals 2. Understand your audience and what motivates them 3. Define the metrics 4. Determine what you are benchmarking against 5. Pick a tool and undertake research 6. Analyse results, glean insight, take action and measure again Measurements can be characterised into three...
“A community is a walled garden, where the walls can be six-foot high or...”
– Gardening tip #6: From a conversation with Victoria Axelrod
We are smarter than me: How to unleash the power...
Barry Libert is the Billy Graham of the online social network space. No chance to doze, or even check emails. He started by asking us to stand and introduce ourselves to the person next to us as if we weren’t interested in him/her - and ended by asking us to stand and greet the same person as if they were a long lost, very close buddy. Being one of only two Brits at the conference it...
The evolution of community & the role of visuals
Nancy White, yet another luminary. This time chock full of audience participation and eschewing all visible means of technical support. So we (the 1% proactive bit of the audience) expanded on Nancy’s three perspectives on the interaction between technology and community - the historic, the near present and the near future. An easy one to write up - just look at the pics!
http://www.theappgap.com/ →
How new tools are addressing age-old challenges of organisation, collaboration, and creation.
“You can’t manage a network. You can manage its context. It’s about...”
– Gardening tip #5: Patti Anklam
From networking to network
If you like charts this one’s for you. Patti Anklam did a sterling job helping us over the semantics of what is a network and a community. In short, I now recognise a community to be a subset of a network. A network has four fundamental properties: 1. Purpose 2. Structure (the chart bit, which, depending on how it’s drawn gets us to think differently about how we relate to others) 3....
Conference day 2: Naked conversations - How blogs...
Shel Israel has traveled to five continents and 32 countries over the last year, talking with people who are passionate about social media as part of a global survey for SAP. The 96 interviews covered enterprise (including Michael Dell), entrepreneurs, academics, NGOs, social activists, youth and citizen journalists. His interviewees have included a blogger, Laurel Papworth, who watches how...
“All online social systems are challenged by human social foibles and...”
– Gardening tip #4: Howard Rheingold 1998
Community manager: Strategies for herding cats
Kellie Parker, community manager of PC World and Mac World, started her session with Howard Rheingold’s definition of virtual communities made in 1994 in his book The Virtual Community. This was part of that definition: “when people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships” - although I prefer the one in the...
In plain English: How simple explanations build...
I think the Common Craft husband and wife team are brilliant. It’s where I get all my techie know-how. Lee LeFever’s basic point is that there is a mismatch between what is heard and what matters. ‘The curse of knowledge’ and talking in the ‘echo chamber’ where phrases that recurred throughout the conference. He demonstrated the problem with his client...
Next generation community platforms
Not sure about this one. Vendors were discussing their wares, but it’s all proprietary, no mention of open source. Strange in a Community 2.0 conference that was otherwise about sharing. Ramius is well known to us when we were evaluating our own proprietary system. Their platform is 9 years old, so with those legacy challenges they’re migrating to a Web 2.0 platform. One new feature,...
How to measure success - the Microsoft way
Involvement - First point of contact (e.g. page views) Interaction - Contributes (e.g. quantity & frequency) Intimacy - Measures of affection (e.g. on 3rd party sites) Influence - Likelihood of encouraging others to buy The trick: To align metrics with business values and the goals by organisational function. In other words, everything you measure must have a business value and a home in one...
Finding, thanking & engaging community influencers...
We use the 90-9-1 rule - 90% of people are listening or reading, 10% are asking a question/contributing, of which 1% are highly active. Our breakout of the roles that people take (linked to functionality) is more granular than Microsoft’s, which looks like this: Elite 1% The Web 2.0 folk Regulars 9% ditto Joiners 20%...
Game mechancis + social media = the future of...
Amy demonstrated that the underlying structure of games maps to all social media applications: 1. Collecting (show me your stuff) 2. Points (e.g. leader boards, levels …) 3. Feedback (accelerates mastery and adds fun) 4. Exchanges (back & forth is close to conversation; implicit exchanges do not require response - e.g. comments, explicit exchanges do - e.g. add a friend) 5....
Putting the fun in functional: Applying game...
I knew Amy Jo Kim from when I was working in Germany. At the time, around 2000, she brought out what is probably still the seminal work on online communities Community building on the web. And here she is talking about games at a community conference. Always have thought that game thinking should underpin all good interaction on the web. My first venture in an online start-up involved creating...
“If you don’t seed nothing happens”
– Gardening tip #3 A conference participant
4 things you need to build a brand that matters
So here’s Hsieh’s way: 1. Vision - whatever you’re thinking think bigger; does the vision have a real meaning; chase the vision not the money. Money follows passion. Customers sense passion. 2. Focus on repeat customers 3. Transparency - be real and you’ve nothing to fear. Employees can ask anything. 4. Culture - define commitable core values that are the basis for hiring...
A cultural revolution instigated by a Chinese...
This was amazing - Tony Hseih talked about his company Zappos and his one and only focus on company culture. In the context of Web 2.0 being transformational, here is a guy who’s company from day one was designed to be transformational and not replicate business norms. He started the business to sell shoes online in 1999. In 2007 it grossed over $800 million and is projecting over $1...
Data, information and conversation (aka knowledge)
The essence of Weinberger’s thinking (perhaps) is unscrambling these three types of content. He thinks we’ve muddled them up to the point that we’ve reinterpreted ourselves as information. Worse, we think that data is information. In other words, all I have to do (and some guy reckons he’s going to achieve it by 2029) is migrate my brain into a computer and I can live...
Day 1: How the dimensions of information are...
This was one worth being here for … David Weinberger is definitely a ‘luminary’ as co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto - a ‘must’ read to get an insight (it’s now 8 years old) into what is happening and will happen to our lives - you can read it for free on line. His 2007 take is Everything is miscellaneous - the power of the new digital disorder (needless to...
How to handle complaints
Dear reader, I understand that you were not impressed by the paucity of contribution yesterday. (Folk are emailing me. Note this blog is especially designed to discourage comment!) Well, to be clear the conference is very demanding especially for a bear of clouded brain (re. 16 hours travel and body clock issues). Combine that with the need to go 10-pin bowling in the exclusive 10-pin bowling...
Conference day 1: How to create our community...
Presenter: Charlene Li, Forrester Research, author of Groundswell. Social revolution requires framework and process. The framework is P O S T: P eople - asses your customers’ social activities O bjectives - decide what you want to accomplish S trategy - plan for how relationships with customers will change T echnology - decide what social technology to use The Forester ‘social...
“Good ideas need time to germinate”
– Gardening tip #2 A conference participant
“Nature is the best GUI designer. Look how flowers attract the bees. Colourful,...”
– Gardening tip #1 A conference participant
#6 Plum: Best and worst practices
BEST 1. Clear goals & purpose 2. Right talent 3. Commitment & time 4. Topic engenders passion 5. Social & communal WORST 1. Start with technology 2. Marketing “campaign” 3. Mixing business/consumer motives 4. No facilitation 5. Metrics vs. business measures
#5 Plum: Community inhibitors
1. Incentives (reputation - yes; reward - no) 2. Corporate culture 3. Lack of physical component (meeting up on a cyclical basis - create a ‘cadence’ is critical) 4. Community moderator profiles 5. Community social infrastructure In other words, this is all stuff to get right before you start (or at least know there are somethings yet to be fixed).
#4 Plum: The virtuous feedback loop
1. The more CONTENT you have the more MEMBERS you will get 2. The more MEMBERS you have the more CONTENT you will get. 3. The better you match CONTENT and MEMBERS to MEMBER PROFILES the more MEMBERS and CONTENT you will get. 4. The easier it is to do TRANSACTIONS the more MEMBERS you will attract All this is supported by the technology infrastructure and the social infrastructure (e.g. rules, use...
#3 Plum: Measuring
Measurement and analysis must be based on business measures (e.g. increased sales, greater awareness, number of new ideas) not some typical web analytics (e.g. page views and time on site). It’s got to be qualitative, not quantitative, which means getting the metrics has to involve humans not just machines (which costs). 1. Measure impact on business processes the same way as those business...
#2 Plum: Who's in charge?
Who’s in charge of the community? In most organisations the answer is the marketing department - although that’s not likely to be where the community originated - IT, Customer Service or PR might have had some initiatives. The important bit is - how is the budget structured? If the answer is marketing has it all, then this could be a really bad situation if marketing is run by a PR/ad...
#1 Plum: Motivations
The motivations for people to engage in ‘community’: 1. People want to connect with people 2. People want to help and be helped 3. People operate in a SOCIAL framework (I do it for ‘love’) or a MARKET framework (I do it for money) #3 is an epiphany moment. There appear to be just these two states of co-operation - all based on relationships. If you move someone from a...
http://www.emergencemarketing.com →
http://www.communityeffectiveness.com →
Workshop #2: How to measure progress & success in...
You know when you read a ‘good book’, it’s good because it contains ideas that you’ve adopted elsewhere and the ‘good’ is reinforcement? Well that’s what this workshop was for me - brill! The main part was a synthesis of the findings of a study of over 140 companies who actively use communities, sponsored by Deloitte represented by Ed Moran, Beeline Labs...
