Social Flare

Starting a community - things to keep in mind

A small list of things to be aware of, steps to follow, when starting your community. More on each of these will follow.

Plan – know your purpose of your community, know your intended reader. This might change, but have it in mind, before you set the community up. this also informs your choice of community type ( blog, threaded discussion, etc ).

Provide value – I say this over and over again, and I don't mean just putting your stuff up there. Make it funny, novel, or -really- worth my time to look at it. Otherwise, you're doing it wrong.

Seed it from other communities you have access to. Being the first in a new community is -not- like being first to a hot new restaurant. People will notice no one where, and they will leave.

Keep it current – update every day for a month, then every other day for a month, then every third day… and never go below that. More if you want. Call this Pete’s Law of Effort.

Plan to spread the word – physical channels, other like-minded communities, press releases, corporate blogs, and so on should be considered. More to follow.  Have these action items in mind -before- you open your doors.

Know how you'll handle problems - they will come up, and having a list to go by ( even if the situation isn't exactly covered ) is many times better than dreaming up a course of action on the fly. this is true for any disaster.

 

Myth - retaining community members

"If you build it, they will come."

This is the hallmark line from the movie "Field of Dreams" resounds on the web today. Everywhere you can find a website or a community or social network effort that seems to embrace the above ethos as its primary marketing strategy. With websites it's bad enough, but communities are entirely another level of effort, a different kind of beast. And it bums me out when I see folks who have the fire to start a community make mistakes that will insure its demise.

Back in the late 90s or so, The Line might have been true; having a website was novel and just putting one up meant that you could be assured of people finding you and visiting. This is not the case anymore... your site needs to provide -something- to retain anyone at all. And retention is what you need. "Visitors" or even "registered users" is no way to measure success, regardless of what the marketing folks might tell you. Sift a list of registered users through a list of purchasers, and you have the beginnings of a glimpse at how effective your web presence might be.

For Communities, the issue is even more intense. The deeper we move into Web 2.0, people expect more from the web, and the things they find there. They are more savvy, and just putting up your community ( a blog, a threaded discussion, or a full-on social network ) is not a guarantee that people will be there, flocking to your brand.

You love your brand. You're excited about it. You see communities forming online, and you go to the effort to build your own community. How in the world could anyone -not- come to your community, post on your forums, follow your blog just as devoutly as you do?

The answer of course is the simple reason most communities fail. People aren't invested. They show up to the door of the blind date with your community, but when you answer, they see what you have to offer, and beg off that blind date. Wonderful advertising, killer SEO and brand recognition might be enough to get people to the front door...  but absent compelling content, the above is all wasted effort.

So, maybe we should tweak that above statement a bit, to really fit the fallacy:

"If you build it, they will stay."

This is no truer than the first version, of course.

People need a reason to stay. They do not feel the same way you do about your brand; they are not drawing a paycheck from it, and they did not build it up.

...

To follow, I'll be posting about some of the basics to keep in mind when you're getting your community off the ground.

Web 2.0 in the nutshell

Paul Graham said:

Web 2.0 means using the web as it was meant to be used, and Google does.  That's their secret.    They're sailing with the wind, instead of sitting  becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or    trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels.

Google doesn't try to force things to happen their way.  They try    to figure out what's going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does.

Found this quote in the book The Long Tail. It speaks to using the web the way it's meant to be used... that is, the way thousands and millions of people use it; not the way you'd like it to be used, maybe.

Knowing who your friends are

At Social Flare, the kind of work we do involves developing an understanding of who you are as a business, and how you are perceived by the people who see you on the web. This is usually a bit different than how you -think- you are perceived, and definitely different than how you would like to be seen.

A large chunk of our skillset comes from past work in experience design and architecture. When doing this kind of work, you design total experiences for clients. This is more than just whipping up web pages; it has to do with an almost intimate understanding of how different groups of people approach your content and how they use it, and how to help them do this. It's as much art as it is science, and involves some leaps.

"Of course people will use our page commenting feature- it's so easy."
"Why wouldn't they call us if they had a problem? We get no calls, so everything must be fine."
"We've been doing things this way for years; it works just fine. We just want a total new look."

And so on.

You may recognize the above statements as ones you've made as a client, or what you've heard as an experience designer. Whether you're developing communities or single page sites or blogs, you need to be very careful about the assumptions you make about how people use your content and apps.

Google found this out, the other day. In an excellent article on one of the NYT blogs, Miguel Helft illustrated this very issue. In an effort to better position itself as a major force in social networking, Google is innovating it's own applications and putting the social spin on them. Google Reader is an app that allows you to read various blogs, and before a few days ago it let you specify other people ( Google Account holders, of course ) who you could share this content with. A few days ago it became known that Google changed this slightly; now everyone that you had IMed with using Google Talk had access to what you had read using Reader, as if you had shared the content.

The assumption of use was this: if you had IMed with someone, then certainly they were your friend.

It would therefore be fine for Google to assume that it was cool to open up sharing of all the things you'd read to your "friends" that you've IMed with.

This probably isn't true for some.

A fundamental precept of  user experience is that, as much as possible, you should let the user define the experience. in the framework of what you offer, certainly, but the user should have as much control as possible. An important point here is that Google didn't offer Reader to start with, in it's initial form, as something that shared with everyone you IMed with. This was a change, and thus not something "factored in" to the user's experience. When people found out that things were different now...  many had a problem.

One can make several reasonable guesses as to why Google did this; it wanted to make its apps more "social", because it believes that in doing so it positions itself as more of a leader in this type of very popular computing. It also sets the exprience trend for future Googel applications.

The problem comes in assuming how users experience your app; Google assumed it'd be just fine to give all the people you IM with access to what you read in Reader. Apparently this is not the case.

It's hard to beleive that Google did not research this point first; it's always interesting when something you assume would have showed up with a bit of user research seems to come as a total surprise to an institution like Google.

Even the biggies can make this mistake.

Live or Memorex?

I am finding myself increasingly interested in alternate reality games ( ARGs ). This is a game that uses the real world as the gameboard, with clues and actions being all present in real time, in real life. You might have to go to a certain website or a certain address and do something, talk to someone, or whatever. I played a kind of lame-but-still-interesting version of this kind of game at GenCon last year... and now I'm interested in making one go.

It would bring into one tight little package several areas of interest I have: viral flow of information across social networks, social media, game design, and writing in particular.

I have an idea for a sort of starter-game. We'll see what I can come up with.

Here's a story from Wired that discusses one such ARG.

communities for conferences

A year ago, we spoke about using communities for conferences and symposiums; just as it's possible to have a blog that has a finite lifespan, it's definitely possible ( and practical ) to have a conference who's days are numbered, so to speak.

Imagine that weeks before attending a conference, you were able to "meet" and speak with other attendees, vendors, and speakers. How much time is wasted now on setting up meetings or demos on the fly, while at the event?

The way it woudl work is simple: you'd set up a temporary community for your conference, in much the same way you'd set up space for it at the convention center you're renting out. Attendees and vendors and speakers and other interested parties could friend up, form interest groups and demo products, create buzz or give previews of material to be presented. Contacts could be established before feet hit the ground and ID badges got affixed to lapels.

Your community could last for a month after the conference, to solidify ties made before and during, to post materials, and to end things on a good note. Then you could laythe groundwork for next year's conference.

As it happens, the folks at MacWorld is doing just this...   using Ning, of course. Check it out here. Sadly, we didn't have anything to do with this, but it's nice to see that kind of validation of a good idea, eh?

Ning is our tool of choice when it comes to rapidly creating a community; there are most costly out-of-the-box solutions if your needs are more proprietary, but Ning does rather nicely for many different  needs.

Speak to them directly

Nothing beats having nothing but a bit of space between you and your people. Ask Trent Reznor.

Blogs, communities and social network sites let you speak to your clients or customers directly, en masse, without even having to print a brochure or answer the phones. And it's better than relying on someone else to tell you what they're saying, or asking for.

Social Network Profiles - How much is too much?

Yesterday the Washington Post Online featured an article about Barak Obama's footprint on the social network sites. Sen. Obama has the big two ( Facebook and MySpace ) more than covered, but has also established more than a toe-hold presence on various racial/culturally-themed networks. Jose Antonio Vargas writes:

And as of Friday, he's the first candidate to have profiles on BlackPlanet.com and MiGente.com, popular soc-nets in the black and Latino communities, and also on newer soc-nets such as AsianAve.com (for Asian Americans) and GLEE.com ("GLEE" stands for "Gay, Lesbian and Everyone Else").

How much is too much?

At what point is an individual's online presence just advertisement, and how much is genuine expression, leveraging the power of the community in question? Is "just advertisement" okay for individual's profiles? Businesses savvy and not-so-much alike have leveraged the potential ROI these networks afford, should individuals?

Different points of view, here. Traditional marketing and advertising thought is to saturate the market to a point of providing maximum exposure, while not diluting the brand; use the power of very-minimal-cost exposure opportunities to grow the brand. Is this a violation of any network's stated purpose? Is it a breach of what the network's community "expects" as far as authenticity goes? Also, all of the networks mentioned above are businesses, run for a profit. It's probably not a stretch to say that even if use this way stretches the intent of the use agreement ( I don't know that it does ) or sidesteps the feeling of a particular community of members ( again, maybe, maybe not )... these networks are still benefiting traffic wise ( and thus dollar-wise ) from Obama's presence.

At what point is it a wiser decision to utilize the power of one community, rather than attempting to develop a coherent presence on many of them? Do the "rules" of traditional marketing apply here, where so many of them don't in other aspects of social marketing?

Always On, and going vertical

So, the most recent Stanford Summit came and went. Innovators and technologists ( a Who's Who, of course ) gathered for two and a half days to discuss, among other things, future trends. Of interest to me was a discussion about the evolution of the space occupied by social network sites. Predictably, the voices from the Summit speaking on this topic thought it "very unlikely" that another biggie such as MySpace or Facebook would come to dominate across the whole of the web.

That is to say, the future is probably with more niche-oriented social networks; people looking for other rabid pulp SciFi fans or canning enthusiasts or renfaire participants ( not to mention personal finance aficionados,  usability professionals, and other such non-hobbyist communities ) will likely gravitate towards their own corner of the social network webspace.

Duh.

For a time now, various entities ( WalMart, Microsoft, etc ) have attempted to develop the "next MySpace", dreaming dreams of going head to head with that phenomena and competing in its own space. After the first few got there and expanded beyond all  prediction, the space is proving exceedingly difficult to penetrate, just like any market dominated by  major players.  Not impossible to be the Next Big Thing, but desire and millions of dollars are not a guarantee you'll succeed at getting a place to the table.

The point of my post, and yes I have one, is that technology that supports portability between networks is going to be coming into its own, and someone smart will become quite rich helping to facilitate this.

We, members of the social networking masses, have one or two presences on the biggies like MySpace or Facebook. Maybe one on something more specialized or in a different area like Virb or Digg. I'm not giving up my membership in the communities I've been a part of for some time now, and there's a definite bandwidth limit, here: I can't track my info ( let alone other people's info ) on more sites.

So, what to do?

As vertically-oriented social networks emerge and grow, some way of making "me" ( that is, my online presence ) portable would sure be helpful. FoaF is a tiny step in this direction. This is a first step in a Rosetta Stone for all the different social networks I might want to participate in.

Don't make me learn 5 or 10 languages; help me learn one, and get me a good translator.

The social media implementation; how it’s like an elephant

Let me borrow an ancient parable about religion to explain how social media and the enabled experiences address several paradigms at once.

During lunch with a colleague on a contract gig, I was speaking about social media… my own personal interest, Social Flare’s take on it, and the playing field in general. He had been of the opinion that MySpace, Facebook, etc were the provinces of the young, unemployed, and extremely wired, and thus had no place with serious adult consumers.

I had a different point of view, certainly, but I understood his own perspective; most of what you hear on the news or even in some of the places you’d think would be a venue for better understanding… these places are described as playground for the college-set at best. Hunting grounds for predators or identity thieves at worst.

Social media and its associated expressions such as networking sites, blogs, community bookmarking apps, video shares, eLearning applications, and so on represent the elephant.

In the aforementioned parable, several wise men came to the master and asked “What is the nature of religion? Wise men see very different things, yet all claim to know the true face of God.”

This is discouraging, of course. Since way back when, we’ve wanted an easy answer. About the true nature of God, or the practical applications of social media.

The master spoke:

“Imagine 5 wise men with blindfolds on, to represent their limited human points of view. They each approach an elephant; one that represents the true nature of God. Each grabs ahold, and describes what they sense… their direct experience. They are not incorrect about their experience at all, though they all describe something a bit different. Tusks and trunk, tail and hide."

All have a bit of the whole, but it’s not so easy to discern the working whole based on your own little piece of it, sometimes. The same is true with social media.

MySpace can be used for real business marketing. YouTube can be a potent political venue. Teachers can use blogs to enhance their classroom community. The tools are there, and functional-fixedness is not helpful… though in truth, we are for the most part still learning our way.

Of course, you can also use MySpace and YouTube to distribute those pics you took at the Christmas Party, when you pulled down your khakis, sat on the copier, and pressed “start” a few times.

But there are many other uses for social media. ; )