Christopher Carfi

SXSW Liveblogging: Community Ecology: Finding Balance When Working with Fan Groups

“How to best nurture your online community ecosystem in order to avoid fan burnout, maintain balance between community and company goals, and drive business success.”

• Jake McKee Lead Samurai, Big in Japan
• Virginia Miracle Dir Word of Mouth Mktg, Brains on Fire
• Rebecca Newton Global Safety & Moderation Mgr, Sulake.com
• Terrence Ryan Moderator, suicidegirls.com
• Betsy Whalen Dir Mktg, Discovery Education

Audience: One of our customers is a large car company with a cult following, as well as new brands. They’re scared of getting in to social media. How can you create a consistent experience across different grassroots sites?

Rebecca: It’s the buyer, or the supporter, the community member who really controls the product now. In my opinion, they need to be paying attention to that feedback.

Terrence: We have a lot of fans on LJ, mySpace, etc. We created templates for mySpace, and we try to connect with those groups as well.

Jake: When there are multiple groups, you’re building relationships. If you think about how you would approach a “normal” relationship, things become more clear. If you’re on a first date and you start telling the other person how to think, you’re not going to have a second date.

Audience: How many people do you need to make a “micro-community?”

Betsy: We had a group of five teachers with a site we started. We said “Welcome! You’re the first five members of the community.” Try to not start with the technology. Start with what the customer’s interest are. We have one group, that started with two people, they now connect millions of people in classrooms around the world.

Virginia: Size doesn’t matter. We created a community to fill the need. We have a small community, around 1200 registered users, and it’s a thriving part of Fiskars business.

Jake: You need to clearly define success. It might be five people. It might be a music festival that exists only for two months out of the year. “Let’s get as many people as possible” might be the wrong way to approach it.

Audience: The education component of community…how do you set expectations for the growth of the community?

Betsy: Be very clear, and have a clear vision at the outset. Then, once you launch, your community will decide what the community is for — you can’t predict where it’ll be in a year. Give some clear vision, some basic rules, then let the community discuss it.

Virginia: Developing some leaders within the community is a key part. For us, you can’t just “join” the community … you have to reach out to one of the four community leaders, who will then send a “secret” link to them. So, at the outset, the new person is connected to someone.

Betsy: Don’t feel that you can’t ask. People are willing to be invested in things they care about.

Audience: How do you engage community members engaged in a product design process?

Betsy: Again, just ask. We say “we want your feedback,” people show up.

Terrence: Then again, we have waaaaay too much feedback. (laughter)

Jake: You may have some leaders just under the surface…encouraging them to get involved might push them over the edge to become true leaders in the community.

Rebecca: It also helps people get more connected to the product.

Terrence: Be aware, though, people will always focus on what they don’t like, vs. what they like. When we do a redesign, we get 25 pages of “hate it!” feedback, and two comments that say “hey, that’s cool.”

Virginia: We have live chats every two weeks, and they are well-attended.

Audience: With ‘flagging,’ how do you get feedback without overpowering the community?

Terrence: We have a couple of steps. If someone in the community flags something, we will warn the member that was flagged. In other cases, we’ll just prevent the member from posting if the infraction of the terms of services was something like hate speech.

Betsy: It needs to be clear as to what it means. Some companies don’t want to see any bad things about the company. We had a “reduction in force” and some of the Discovery community members freaked out. We left the comments up, and let people vent, and in the end the community was stronger than before.

Audience: Sometimes there are conflicts between community members. How do you handle feuds?

Terrence: We have an ‘ignore’ feature. And sometimes you have to separate people into their corners, and remind them that they don’t need to talk to each other.

Final thought from Jake: “I’ve never seen an internal community that started ‘large’…they start small and grow.”

Christine Herron does a great writeup of Kathy’s talk.

SXSW 2007: World Domination Via Collaboration

“Many companies are so focused on the goal of building a community in order to exploit it that they skip a crucial step that ultimately hurts their business plan: Collaborating with users/customers to build a product or experience that can dominate the market because it’s great. It is possible to strike that balance: Building community, maintaining credibility, meeting organizational objectives.Meet company leaders whose models are steeped in user collaboration — and who have been working on the ground level themselves.”

Panelists are;

• Jory Des Jardins Co-Founder, BlogHer LLC
• Betsy Aoki Program Mgr, Microsoft
• Jessica Hardwick Founder & CEO, SwapThing
• Lisa Stone Co-Founder & Pres of Operations & Evangelism, BlogHer LLC
• Jenna Woodul Co-founder, LiveWorld

Jory: “Community was “nice to have” in web 1.0, is required today.”

Question: “What kills community?”

Jessica: “lack of participation. need to ensure users own the community.”

Jenna: “Community is a social thing. you need to think of it in terms of culture. who are going to be the leaders…us? the people in the community? how do we set up the conditions so that happens? Withough that, you just have a message board.”

Betsy: “Community needs to have a defense mechanism against trolls. Fortunately there aren’t many of them, and if you don’t have moderation tools, it can take the tone of your community down.”

Lisa: “Ask, don’t tell. If you want an authentic community, lecturing people is a challenge. You need to ask the community what they want, and they’ll tell you.”

Question: “How do you establish community in a corporation

Jenna: “It’s not the technology … AJAX, etc. It’s the people, stupid. The Dove (Campaign for Real Beauty) campaign asked ‘What is real beauty?’ They built a place, asked the question, and women came. The linkage shows respect for the customer. They don’t talk about Dove there, though…but they are there. You’ve got to think about these communities and how you get the golden fleece, which is ‘engagement.'”

Jessica: “Forgiveness is almost infinite if you get the users involved in the dialgoue, and get them involved in solving the problem.

Audience: “Can you give some examples of when the community helped to solve a problem?”

Jessica: “We had a huge debate on our site about users wanting to know if they could swap animals, both in farm situation and in purebred situtation.

Lisa: “For Blogher, the biggest challenge we had was in how to improve our community hub. For literally one year, we’ve been playing with Drupal, asking the audience what they think, and have been as transparent as we could be. We narrowed the key community issue to ‘search and findability,’ and are now working on that. Also, being able to blog on the site has been something that the community wants to do, and so we’re going to do it.”

Audience: “How did you find the users, the experts, to participate?”

Jessica: “We keep an open dialog through our blog and our newsletters. For example, with the animal issue noted above, we took it to phone and email as well.”

Jenna: “‘Whoever shows up’ is going to be you’re community. At the very beginning, you need to REALLY know your people. You need to establish rapport with people. If you do that early, when you do hit problems later, those same people with step forward.”

Audience: “Is it worth setting up an ‘advisory board’ with select voices for the community?

Jenna: “A lot of people have had success with that. For example, eBay has a ‘Voices’ group that does that. Sometimes it’s good to rotate that — if you’re always getting just the voice of the old-timer, you don’t hear the newcomers. As the community grows, you need to manage it at different levels. It’s just like a party — you need to have somebody who is working the door.”

Betsy: “Microsoft is doing that with it’s MVP program. We have a member of the community who is that advocate, who (interestingly) is actually an ex-cop. Yet, the community connects with him, because he’s less ‘the man’ than I am, since he’s not part of Microsoft.”

Lisa: “We ask. We put up a little description of what we need, for example, for editors. People come forward, and they were brilliant. We never would have found them. These women have shown things that women are doing in corners of the web that I don’t think anyone else online is covering. We consistently post our community guidelines, ‘we support civic disagreement — attack the issue, not the person.’

Audience: “I work for another MegaCorp bent on world domination, so the title of this panel attracted me. (laughter) Three part question: 1) Many employees are not terribly incented to write. Getting first text into the system is a challenge, 2) A side effect – the social risk inside your company, exposing things that you know that you shouldn’t know, and 3) how does this get handled when employees outside are representing the brand?”

Betsy: “We started out with policies, but now, Microsoft’s policy is that we don’t have a policy. We have the employee handbook, and that’s it. The way get things going is with a ‘hello, world’ post — start small, and be true to yourself. This really is a wisdom of the crowds, some people will make mistakes…but blogging has shaped how Microsoft thinks about itself, and how it interacts with its customers. It’s been such a valuable thing for us to have that connection with its customers. People didn’t need to be dragged into the blogosphere, they saw the people next to them doing it.”

Lisa: “Pre-Blogher, I spent a lot of time in traditional newsrooms bringing them online. Whether or not you have a blog, your customers do. They are blogging. Best way to start is to see what people are saying, and mix it up with them. “

Betsy: “We actually had external blogs before we had internal ones. We actually have an internal blog system now, too.”

Audience: The primary thing I see is a fear — a fear to let go of control. In the UK, the National Trust was one of our clients. They set up a forum. That forum died for one very specific reason — that forum died because they insisted on moderating every.single.post before it went live.”

Jenna: “Times are changing. BMW Mini Owners Lounge invites owners to share their problems online. If you require everything to be previewed, you’ve cut down your volume drastically, and so no-one participates at all. People are talking about your brand ANYWAY, you should listen, respond, and be in conversation with our customers, not just broadcast. We do know that participants in community who return purchase 57% more than other people do. (ed – cite is from Jenna, re: eBay) “

Betsy: “Check the laws. There might be different levels of responsibilty, whether you say you are moderating beforehand or not.”

Question: What do you do when there’s a misperception, or an insurrection in the community?

Lisa: “Never lie. The WalMart Jim & Laura travel blog is a great example of what happens when this goes wrong — it’s a fundamental missed opportunity for the company.”

Betsy tells a great story about “Norbert, the Cod of Conduct.”

Audience question: There are more people who read than post. How do you engage the lurkers?

Jenna: “I think lurkers are just as important as posters. How are newcomers treated? That’s a great example for the lurkers. If a newcomer comes in and the old-timers jump on them, I as a lurker think ‘Oh…it’s dangerous to go here.’ On the other hand, if the newcomers are greeted, it totally changes the dynamic.”

Jenna: “Another thing you can do is feature pull quotes from the site, and feature them on the site. It helps people find ‘people like me,’ and reduces the feeling of walking into a room where everyone knows each other, and I don’t know anyone so I’m on the outs.”

Jessica: “We do all sorts of things to pull in, especially involving without writing. Mini-polls and the like.”

Jenna: “Don’t make people feel like they’re going into a room of strangers, instead, ask people their opinion.”

Audience question: What is the role of anonymity? Is anonymity Kryptonite for community?

Lisa: “No, I don’t think anonymity is Kryptonite.”

Betsy: “I allow anonymous commenting on my blog. I thought the Slashdot ability of having the ‘anonymous coward’ login is an interesting one. We like to have some kind of fixed identity, to build up reputation over time.”