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Month: August 2020

Community Management, Scale. Freshening, Get Together, Love, Small Things, Without Management, True Community, Party Started, Terrible Netizen, Snakes, Circle Game, Look, Netizen, Corralling, Wandering off Topic, Facebook versus Forums, Superstar Users, Analytics, Community Roundtable, Community Management Haikus, Life of a Community Manager, Social Media Job Descriptions, Superstar Users, Community Roundtable 2010

Community Management — Get Together

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on August 27, 2020

Conquer Your Fears and Get Together

Yes, you can—and should — get together! Life online is all well and good. Many of us spend large chunks of our time connected, whether that is via a desktop PC, a smartphone, a laptop, or a tablet. Newer technologies will, undoubtedly, make it even easier to get and stay connected.

But sometimes you’ve just got to say: Stop the Internet, I want to get off!

Of course you go offline every night for bed (er, you do, don’t you?), at the absolute minimum. But there’s more to it than that.

When your community has been around for a significant period of time (say, a year), your users are going to, naturally, be curious about meeting one another. In person. With no screens dividing them.

And this is excellent. It is a sign of the community jelling. You should encourage this. Or, if you like, you can even suggest a meeting yourself.

I mean, why the hell not?

Informal Gatherings

For informal gatherings, there is little, if anything, that you need to do. If you can attend, great! And if you can’t, ask people to take pictures. However, remind your users they should get permission before they take any photographs and post them online.

Furthermore, if there will be minors present, emphasize that photographs of them really should not appear online. Be prepared, if the child’s parents ask, to remove such photographs if they end up on your site. But that’s about it.

Formal Gatherings

Formal gatherings allow for a lot more dazzle. A get together can be as expensive or cheap as you like. Your attendees might wish to reserve a block of hotel rooms, or even a hall. Or you might just need to make reservations at a restaurant.

Or you could think outside the restaurant, and consider a visit to a museum, historical attraction or nature preserve. Your group might enjoy attending, say, a minor league baseball game (it’s often a nominal fee to get your site or company mentioned on the scoreboard or over the public address system. Usually this takes the form of a charitable donation).

Or your users might even enjoy a potluck, or a cruise, or a bowling tournament for fun. They might like to run a 5K race (or just watch) or even attend lectures or form a book group. And they might even enjoy helping to build a house for charity or volunteer at a soup kitchen for the day. The only limits are your imagination and the focus of your community.

Because a forum devoted to young mothers, for example, might enjoy a gathering where they can bring their children. Whereas a board focusing on a hip hop artist might prefer attending a concert.

Get Together Swag

For a gathering (in particular, for one specifically planned and sanctioned by you), it’s nice to bring swag. That is, forum- or company-specific merchandise. Make it free for the taking! Hats, tee shirts, frisbees, key chains, whatever you like. The young mothers’ forum might like diaper bags or onesies. That hip hop forum might like licensed mix CDs, or special music that they can download.

Just give them the URL and a key or password, so they can get it exclusively, at least to start. And, it’s not a problem if people begin to share the URL and the password. Because you want them to do this.

Gatherings are fun. It’s enjoyable to finally see and get together with people you only know from online. Once you’ve heard their voices and seen their mannerisms in the flesh, you’ll never read their posts the same way again.

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Community Management — Freshening Up

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on August 25, 2020

Let’s Look at Freshening Up a Stale, Tired Community

Freshening up is something you may have to do. But why?

Communities go through any number of cycles, so it is inevitable – the forum becomes stale.

There are a few things you can do. First off, try to see it coming before it happens.

Say what?

Yes, it’s possible, although it’s not necessarily reliable. How? Check your site metrics. Now, there are natural variations all the time. A bad day or two is not necessarily an indicator of trouble, even if those days come in the same week, or even one right after the other.

Time the Avenger

The real issue is a decline over time. The two main metrics you care about are time on site and the percentage of new users versus returning ones. There is nothing wrong with having a lot of returning users. It’s a forum, and people get comfortable and will to want to keep coming back if the comradery is good. However, you do need to get a relatively constant stream of new users. As for time on site, check the average, and see if it has been declining over time. This is over a significant period of time as in: over the course of about a quarter of a year.

Follow the Bouncing User

Hand in hand with both of these metrics is a third: bounce rate. Bounce rate is defined as a visitor coming to only one page prior to exiting the site. You’re a lot more likely to see a higher bounce rate if you attract a lot of new users (e. g. they see what they want immediately – or don’t – and then depart). A lower bounce rate is generally a more positive metric. Hence, as you can see, in this instance, the converse may be true.

Therefore you should have some notice when things stagnate. Even if you don’t track your metrics too closely, you should follow your users. Are they not making too many new topics of any sort? Or are they complaining? Are they leaving?

But once you know, and it doesn’t matter how you determine that the community is stagnating, what do you do?

Don’t Panic

Don’t panic. This is relatively normal. One thing you should do, though, is determine whether it is a seasonal issue. As the weather improves in the time zone(s) where most of your users live and work, they will go outside and – gasp! – go offline. In that instance, don’t worry, the users will come around again. But there’s no reason why you can’t practice a few of these techniques anyway, in order to be proactive.

Fortunately, if that’s what’s going on, it’s far less dire.

So let’s assume that the weather and the season are not factors. Your percentage of new users is down and has been declining. Your users’ time on the site is tanking. They’re leaving. And the ones who are staying are bored, angry and restless. Worse still, they’ve taken to causing trouble in order to entertain themselves.

Some Freshening Techniques

Here are a few techniques for freshening:

Improve your SEO – attracting more users will help to replace the departing ones.

While you’re at it, target your SEO better. E. g. let’s say you have a forum about relationships, but not a lot of gay and lesbian users? Try adding keywords about, getting link-backs from sites that feature, and get listed on directories that cater to: gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender individuals.

Purchasing Another Forum

Consider purchasing a smaller forum that caters to the new users you hope to add. There are plenty of small forums out there for sale. Look for not only a targeted forum at a good price, but also an active one. Prepare the forums by telling your original forum that new people are coming. You can even tell them which kind of community they come from. Ask your extant members to be welcoming.

As for the board you are absorbing, diplomatically tell them about the transfer. Do this in as many places as possible so that as many people as possible see it. If that forum has a blog or a newsletter, use it to communicate this. Expect consternation, and expect some people to leave without giving the other forum even a chance.

Avoid Duplicate Accounts

Check your database, to be sure that you do not bring in what the database will think of as duplicate records. Whether your primary key is username or email address, or something else, compare the extant member list to the member list of the community you’ve purchased.

For any duplicates, give the members of the board you’re absorbing the chance to rectify the situation by asking them to select a new username or email account (or whatever else you may be using as your database’s primary key) in advance by sending them a private message.

Do not tell them where they are going as you can end up with even more duplicate records if the absorbed users create new accounts at your currently existing forum.

So keep it on the QT. And, to make it easier on yourself,

have a contingency plan for any records that are still duplicate (e. g. you tell the absorbed user and they fail to timely help you to fix the problem, and,
keep the lead time short, as in less than a month.

Freshening Up With New Features

Add new features for more freshening. What kinds of features? Blogs, skins and groups are all great features to add if you don’t already have them. Spread them around and only offer one at any given time so that you have reserve magic rabbits you can pull out of your hat, or

Ask your users! Really? Yes. Send out a survey or conduct a poll, or just open up a topic or a blog post, asking: what would you like to see on the site? Some users will be flippant, but many more will take you seriously.

And, most importantly, listen to your users! If you can implement any of the changes they request, see if you can do so over time. And if you can implement more than one, do so in stages (with the more important or more requested one being done first) so that the new features can keep coming. If you cannot, explain why. Your users will (mostly) understand.

Some of them may even be able to assist you with implementation.

Freshening Up: The Upshot

Communities, like anything else, can become a little flat and need freshening. It’s like any other party. If a party gets dull, and it’s not yet time for everyone to go home, you bring out different foods, change up the music or even break out the board games or call other friends to come over. You start freshening up the snack bowl. It’s not much different with an online party. You’ve got to keep it lively.

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Community Management Tidbits – Drawn to Scale

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on August 20, 2020

What Does it Mean When a Community is Drawn to Scale?

A community that is drawn to scale has the tools and the wherewithal to be able to grow.

There are little forums, and there are big ones. And there are forums with a very personal touch, and those without. It should come as no great shock to most people that smaller communities tend to have a more personal slant than much larger ones.

Getting Started

When you first start your community, like it or not, you will be building traditions. Perhaps your organization welcomes everyone personally, either in a topic or by sending a private message. Maybe you even mail out some swag the old-fashioned way, using the postal system. Or you write it up in a newsletter.

Growing

This is all perfectly fine when you’ve got a community of fewer than 100 users. But what happens when you hit 1,000 users? Or 10,000? Or, like Able2know, the site I’ve been managing since its inception in 2002, where you go from 2 users to over 1,200,000??? And of course there will be more to come.

Suddenly those nice personal touches become nice for everyone but you and your staff. Suddenly, they are nothing more than a burden, like a nest full of baby birds, constantly demanding a feeding. Yesterday.

When they don’t scale, they start to really stink after a while.

Setting Expectations

Hence you must start setting expectations early. If you want to welcome everyone, recognize that, if you can automate at least some of that (or delegate it), then it will be far more sustainable for far longer. Many forms of forum software allow the administrative team to send out a private message upon an event. One such event can be confirmation of an email address and/or a completed registration. Hence you can set up your software to send out a welcoming message.

Welcoming Messages

What should your welcoming message say? Only you truly know your users. What you say to the members of a gun owners’ forum will probably differ from what you say to a board dedicated to people looking for international pen pals. But either way, there are a few messages you might want to get across, no matter what your audience:

Welcome to the site!
Here is a link to the site rules
Come and introduce yourself (if you’ve got a specific topic or forum where people are supposed to introduce themselves, put the link here)
You can find forum announcements/the site blog/major news here
And here’s where you go for help or if you have an issue (this is where a link to your Help Desk, or the address for support, should go) and
Here is how to get your account removed, if you allow that.

Scale and Respect Your Users’ Time and Interest Levels

Including all of that information will help to head off some newbie questions at the pass. But don’t make the message too long as no one will read all of it. All you can hope for is for a good minority (say, 30% of your users) to read or skim most of the message, so make it short and bulleted. Hence it should comprise more of a reference than a one-stop shopping place where your users can find answers to their questions. And that will help to assure it can fulfill at least some of its purpose. User-centered, information-centric design is key here.

The personal touch is lovely, and you may still wish to use it every now and again. Certainly if you bring in a larger staff, it will allow for some of that, or at least allow for it longer. But if it gets away from you, don’t be afraid to scale and go to an automated solution. After all, no one expects Facebook to send a personally tailored note whenever they join the site or make a change in their status or friends list.

May your site become that large, too.

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Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky, A Book Review

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Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky, A Book Review

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on August 4, 2020

Let’s Look at Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky really has something here. Because I have to say, I just plain love this book. I am a fan! In addition, this book ended up tying with Groundswell for being my favorite of the six books that we were assigned to read in my first Quinnipiac University social media class, Social Media Platforms (ICM 522).

At the time, I started classes thinking I would only get a certification and nothing more. However, I ended up staying long enough to get my Master’s of Science in Communications in Interactive Media (social media). And a part of that decision can be traced directly back to reading this particular work.

Philosophy To Go

Furthermore, I really liked the philosophical and sociological aspects of his work. Essentially, what he ended up saying was – society is changing. It’s not just the Internet; it is happening to humans ourselves. We are in the process of becoming new, and different. Hence there is a seismic shift going on, in our society.

Of course, that is likely to just be the wealthiest slice of society. Because heartbreakingly poor people in Third World countries simply aren’t going to be adding to online or offline content any time soon. Or, if they are, it is far more likely to consist of content that is survival-based.

Hence this would be items for sale, rather than the products of truly creative pursuits. But the internet is also one, big, giant marketplace. And those contributions are just as valuable.

Clay Shirky on Amateurs vs. Professionals

In addition, I really love what he had to say about amateur participation. Because in Chapter 5, on page 154, Shirky persuasively writes:

“As more people come to expect that amateur participation is always an option, those expectations can change the culture.”

So, here’s to amateur participation. Because it is here to stay and I suspect it will never, truly go away.

Ten Years Later, What Do I Think?

I think what Shirky has to say is still useful. However, one piece of social media has a use case which he did not think of when he wrote the book. I am talking about people who do not own a tablet or a personal computer or a laptop. They don’t even own an e-reader. But they do own a smartphone.

There are great swathes of people, particularly in Asia and Africa, who consume social media only one way—via mobile.

Amateur participation is happening on ever smaller screens. And mobile users move quickly! If you don’t grab them in the first few seconds, guess what? They’ll swipe left.

I think my rating right now would be 4 1/2 stars. But that’s not really the fault of Clay Shirky. And, if he updates this seminal work to include more mobile-only users, then my rating would go right back up to 5 stars.

Rating

Review: 5/5 stars.