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Telligenti

Serving up fresh ideas every day, Telligent style

Josh Ledgard

October 2007 - Posts

  • How do you encourage your community to welcome new users?

    I noticed a ?new? feature on facebook today when I added two facebook newbs as friends today. Although I've seen research presented that says it doesn't matter if someone is welcomed as to whether or not they will come back I'd like to think it doesn't hurt.  And who doesn't like to feel welcomed?

    From facebooks perspective, they went to make sure the new folks get hooked and see how active it is.

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  • The Red Sox Win! What it looked like in Seattle.

    This was my view from Seattle watching the Red Sox win the 2007 world series with a bunch of screaming sox fans we discovered on Meetup.com at the Spitfire.

     

    Good Times!

  • What Apps do you Rock on your Phone?

    Apparently the iPhone club ran out of cool people to "tag" in their little discussion about what pages they browse to most frequently on their expensive phones.  Well, since my phone has had an SDK for a lot longer than theirs I'm going to extend it to "connected applications" that aren't SMS or voice. 

    • Windows Live Mobile Search - This app does my traffic, directions, movie times, and directory assistance... and they just added support to do this by voice!
    • Google Reader - They recently added my favorite missing feature. Being able to share an item to your link blog through the phone. That was missing a few months back.
    • Webguide - Well, this is just the product link. but after installing this application on my media center I can now use it like a slingbox from my phone or a laptop.  Who needs to sync when you can stream content?
    • The Facebooks - Yes, I still use too much facebook SMS, but they force you to log in every day or so to their mobile web site. Don't think I haven't noticed.  Your on notice Facebook!
    • http://wap.mlb.com/ - Wow, Joe Torre is no longer a Yankee? 

    Now I have to tag people. That's the hard part of these posts.  I choose Gretchen, J. P.Dan, and YAG.

  • I should stop complaining. I love Google Reader

    But today I realized that taking it offline means that it will only sync recently updated feeds. I was hoping to use my flight from Dallas to Seattle to read some items that have been sitting in there for a while, but it only seems to like syncing recent items.  You'll notice the cut-off when you go offline and see your unread item count change.

    Despite this little flaw I can't imaging anyone living without their service these days. How's that for a compliment sandwich? :-)

  • What I'm Reading and Writing - Testing a WLW Plugin

     image I have a shared items feed from google reader, but I've been struggling with how to share that content more broadly through my main blog feed.  I didn't like mirroring my shared items since it felt like content stealing and I share more than I write, but at the other extreme I don't generally like blog posts that are links without commentary. 

    Today, while at the CSDC, I wrote a simple Live Writer Plugin that pulls feed items from RSS or Atom and can clip a summary. I'll release it later this week, but for now I'll leave it as a tease and just tell you that this post was created with it. :-) Let me know what you think of the formatting as I'll be adjusting things during the week.

    Via Engadget - Debunk: new Zunes will not have text messaging, but Microsoft's Zune Social community site will
    We've gotten a small flood of emails from readers today concerned with a certain page found in last night's leaked Zune support training manuals.

    I'm personally hoping to see them leapfrog Apple with the whole "Social" concept. They have a real powerful opportunity even if it's not yet enabled in the client.  I know one person who would agree with me.

    Via All Facebook - Tim O’Reilly at Graphing Social Patterns
    Dave McClure just posted the video of Tim O’Reilly’s keynote at the Graphing Social Patterns conference.

    Another step towards creating rich visualizations of data that's pretty much public.  I picked this post because the video was timely with what I'd been thinking earlier in the week.

    Via Penny Arcade - News: Dunder Mifflin Spokane
    Gabe: I'm pretty frustrated with the Dunder Mifflin Infinity ARG. The site functionality is just trash. The biggest offense is the piece of *** forum they've got. It's the one way for the whole branch to talk together and it's absolute crap.

    That just about summed up my experience. I'm still waiting to be hired.

    Via MSDN Blogs - Rising Above the Email Swarm
    In todays age of receiving dozens to 100s of e-mails a day, quickly processing these is critical. 

    This post both sums up what I've been attempting for e-mail triage and also ads a few great suggestions. I highly recommend it.

    Via Techmeme - iTunes Plus DRM-free tracks expanding, dropping to 99 cents (Jacqui Cheng/Infinite Loop)
    iTunes Plus DRM-free tracks expanding, dropping to 99 cents

    I don't need an iPhone. I'm not jealous of people with those things. I don't pretend to swipe my finders across my blackjack screen. I can hold out... at least until the 16gb versions come out. :-)

    Via Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog -

    Announcing the Community Kit for SharePoint: Internet/Extranet Edition Forms-Based Authentication solution!
    As many of you know, one of the best new features in WSS 3.0 (and consequently MOSS 2007) is the way it leverage's ASP.NET 2.0 to support for forms-based authentication or FBA along with the ability to support multiple authentication providers.

     Announcing Community Kit for SharePoint: Virtual Earth Maps on SharePoint
    Microsoft's Virtual Earth technology powers the maps on Live Search and many other web-based applications, but many people have wondered how to get VE maps to work on SharePoint.

    Announcing Community Kit for SharePoint: Windows Live Authentication!
    Ever since the Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK was announced a couple of months ago, many people have asked when there would be a solution for WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 to authenticate Windows Live ID users.

    Some big releases for a cool codeplex project.

    Note: Below here I made the titles non-bold. Let me know what you like better.

    Via VentureBeat - YuMe, Blinkx latest video ad companies to make splash
    With all the video content online, the video advertising market is booming.

    How many ad networks can surve?

    Via Digging My Blog - Dan Hounshell - Professional Community Server Themes
    I had the pleasure of working on a great project earlier this year with two very talented co-workers: Wyatt Preul and Ben Tiedt.

    This book was anxiously awaited at the CSDC. I don't think the preview copies showed up in time, but I know there are going to be some people, for which, this becomes thier bible.

    Via Simpable - Ditch Confirmations
    James Avery wrote a post, "Modals or No more popups" inquiring about modal solutions.

    I'm going to try and keep this plugin both configurable, but fast and decision free for the users.  I'll see how it goes. 

    Via Seth's Blog - The truth about Radiohead
    1.2 million albums sold, $8 each, no middleman, one week: Radiohead Kicks the Middleman to the Curb.

    This answers a lingering question I had after hearing about this promotion. How much money did they make per album. I guess, since they don't have a label, that $8 goes much more directly to them as well.

     

    Via Read/WriteWeb - Microsoft's "Me Too" Strategy: Can the Tortoise Beat the Hare?
    Microsoft has lifted the lid this week on a number of products that compete to various degrees with popular Google services.

    There is a lot of truth to the theory held by one of my former co-workers that Microsoft as been very successful by never being first, learning from the mistakes of others, and being either a cheaper or better second.

    Via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Networking Site Platforms: How Developers Should Evaluate the MySpace platform (and others)
    I’ve been reading recently that a number of social networking sites are rushing to launch [or re-launch] a widgets platform given the success of the Facebook platform.

    I tend to agree.

    Via Seth's Blog - The wikipedia gap
    I wonder who the first teacher was who said to his class, "Okay, we have ball point pens now. No need to use class time to learn how to use a fountain pen."

    I always hated the teachers that wouldn't let us use the advanced functions of our TI-85's.  It saved time and made me smarter. Same with a resource like wikipedia. What people are going to have to learn is how to better quickly evaluate the degree of tint and accuracy to the information they are looking at.

    Ok, I think the first test post went well. I found at least 10 things I want to make better with this plugin before I share it with any other users. 

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  • Follow the Community Server Developer Conference Live

    Kevin Harder is live blogging Telligent's Community Server Developer Conference. Check it out.

  • Are You Ready for Smarter Spenders Bursting Your Bubble?

    Is your company, web site, or business model ready for the smarter customer spending habits being created by data transparency?  The world of data transparency is one where anyone can access, slice, dice, pivot, and extrapolate on their own about your products is almost here. The cost of doing so, like other commodity driven resources is quickly approaching zero. If your business doesn't embrace it then you are going to be one of the people complaining about the "bubble bursting" on Web 2.0. 

    What's happening right now is that businesses and customers are on the precipice of learning how to thin slice through what's been labeled "information overload".  Here are eight things you need to know in order to thrive in the age of information transparency and smarter customers.

    1. Your customers are only going to get more access to data every day and never less.
    2. Data is going to become increasingly consumable to people that don't know anything about how to create pivot tables in excel.
    3. Every new bit of data will encourage humans, who naturally seek connections and meaning, to to ask ten times the questions they may have previously.
    4. The data is going to be used poorly while people learn to correctly thin slice.  You might not like the stories customers tell on their own to answer the aforementioned questions.
    5. You will be as unable to control access to the data, metrics, and subsequent analysis as you are able to control your singular corporate messages an PR today.
    6. Because information is so cheap to distribute through the series of tubes it will only take one person to discover and aggregate this kind of information. Really only one customer needs to be smarter and the rest will just listen to the "smart ones", but you knew this already.
    7. The flow of information goes can go two ways.  This presents an opportunity to learn as much or more about your customers than they know about you. 
    8. Thin slicing the data will open more doors to micro-message and micro-target your features, services, or brand to customers.

    Here are some examples and trends that demonstrate the approaching freefall in the cost of public data mining.

    • Search engines will make collecting hard data simpler.  Most of them already returns hard numbers instead of guesses in the form of links.  Today you can search for APPL and get a stock price back instead of a link to a page that references the stock.  You can search for ichiro and see his career statistics. How long before "Baconader calories" returns the nutritional information directly or "Xbox Failure Rate" returns the total unique number of "red ring" incidents and the failure rate?
    • Technologies like wiki's make collaborative document editing simple.  Google Spreadsheets has taken the first strides toward collaborating numerical analysis.  What happens when someone opens wikipedia for data  mining?
    • Currently sites are now popping up that encourage this sort of data collaboration. Check out http://www.voterwatch.org/ & http://www.revenuewatch.org/ for collaborative pollitical dirt digging, http://www.plebble.com/analysis.php for public data analysis, or http://www.kidsdata.org/ for examples of public health records data aggregation.  The next logical step is for these aggregation technologies to improve over time and enable the users themselves to submit and refine the data.
    • Communities are already starting to do their own data mining to enable self policing. Wikiscanner is a good example of this. How long before they are policing your products, communities, and marketing efforts.

    The first question to start asking yourself is what will happen to your business when your clients and customers can go beyond user reviews and can become immediately familiar with your failure rates, cost of goods, how popular your site is, percentage of other customers who repurchase, and how many people actually click through the average ad on your web site?  It's common sense to be looking at these numbers anyway, but the twist is now realizing that this sort of information either is or soon will be public knowledge. 

    The next set of questions you should be asking is how can you take advantage of the data transparency. Here are some untested suggestions to think about. :-)

    • Your own data mining needs to be taken to the next level.  You need to go beyond answering the basic questions and start performing trend analyses and attain the ability to predict what bits of information (good and bad) your customers will discover next. If you don't already have, for example, a tool/process that lets you find out what people are doing and saying in your customer communities then you need one.  It may not seem that way, but there is still a delay between the first person that says "I have a red ring", the next fifty, and it becoming front page news.  The data can just about predict what's going to go from 1 to fifty to millions.
    • A risk/reward analysis could be performed on the data that will be uncovered.  What will happen if the exact failure rate is known or if people know how willing your site visitors are to convert into paying customers? On the other hand; Is this data something that you should be sharing more broadly because you know it's better than the competition?
    • What data and models can you be transparent about? It's may no longer be acceptable to throw out a great customer satisfaction number without showing the numbers used behind the figure.
    • You should consider enabling your own public data aggregation initiatives. Look at how Ideastorm took loud, but separated voices, and gave them lightening rods focus their energy.  Because they are hosting these conversations the cost of data aggregation about customers suggestions went from wildly expensive public surveys and "buzz metric" analysis to near zero in comparison.

    What do you think?  Are your customers and clients getting smarter with cheaper data?  Do you see an "adjustment" in spending in the "Web 2.0" space coming?

  • Is it Safest to Walk, Drive, or Bike to Work?

    I found this post more relevant than most would.  But amazingly you are safer biking than walking to work.

    "Per kilometer, cyclists are 12 times more likely than car drivers to suffer a fatal accident, according to Rutgers University urban planner John Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra of the European Commission (the same study found traveling by foot to be 23 times more dangerous than driving, per kilometer)."

    But you always have to weigh that against...

    "On the other hand, a Danish study found that people who do not bike to work suffer a 39 percent higher mortality rate than those who do. So, assuming you can avoid a fatal accident on the road, biking to work may actually help you live longer."

  • Offline Google Reader

    Here is a little glitch I ran into with Google Reader. I'm hopeful someone on that team picks this up, but maybe I'm giving their bug/idea search too much credit.

    The problem is that Google reader isn't always ready to go offline.  Before my most recent flight to Dallas I installed Gears and tested switching between "go online" and "go offline" modes. At home it seemed to work great, but the system allowed for some human error that would be easy to fix.

    The error is that I forgot to "go offline" before I left.  Then, when I opened my browser it failed to load the Google reader page. Maybe there is some trick I'm missing, but I thought the point of gears was the blur the line between a thin and think clients on the web.  Ideally, Google reader would be constantly downloading my items in the background so that it's ready whenever my Internet connection fails. It shouldn't require any planning or foresight on my part. Today it was a plane ride that I knew about, but tomorrow it could just be a "Comcastic" outage.

  • MySpace.com Forums are now powered by Community Server

    Forums.myspace.com - I thought this was a cool use of the Community Server Forums. It's great to see such large, vibrant, communities making use of your companies software. 

    We're told that since these launched there have been over 300,000 new post by nearly 20,000 unique users.  (This is a different ratio than you see in support focused communities.)  These users also make use of the "favorites" feature and almost 9k threads have been added as a favorite so far by users. 

  • OCS 2007 - Now What?

    Description: What are the most significant trends and opportunities looking forward?

    Introductory comments: David Forrest / Motley Fool

    Talk about "what, so what, and now what?"

    Encourage you to focus on the behaviors you are trying to change. 
    Super-Nova of Social media

    • Build the platform
    • Allow for reputation to be built
    • Provide sustainable incentive
    • Solve a problem.

    Ebay and Linked in are the biggest examples of this.  Motely fool uses linked in as their #1 recruiting tool.

    Motley Fool Caps: Crowdsourcing - Go in and rate 7 stocks that will outperform the market.

    • They ask up or down.
    • If you succeed the algorithm will weight the smarter stock pickers more over time.
    • Ratings based on players and stocks.
    • 6k stocks rated now
    • So far so good... one year down. In the first year the four and 5 star stocks outperformed the market. 

    Spent a lot of time on this business goal because other community stuff is just noise.

    Observations

    • Will the novelty of contribution wear off?  In 6 years what happens if someone stops updating wikipedia.  Worry about mass contribution.
    • Your networks will have to be geared towards goal oriented things.
    • Implicit collaboration is set to explode (Editor note: I think it will find a happy merger with explicate... the best systems balance the both.)
      • iLike, Amazon, etc

    Calls to Action

    Use what we are learning

    • Experiment with what you learned here about goal setting and changing mails.
    • Investigate how to use mechanical turk.

    Always answer both questions:

    • Is this good for the customer
    • Is this good for the community.

    Book Recommendation: Elements of User Experience building.

     

    Introductory comments: Bill Johnston / Forum One Communications

    What we are hearing: Dimensions of value

    • User engagement
    • Page views
    • time spent on site
    • Influencer activity
    • Call avoidance was "Somewhat valuable" - Near bottom of the stack

    What are you charging For?

    • Contact members
    • expert access
    • Augmentation to the experience ala storage

    What we are hearing with corporate communities?

    • ROI expected soon... not just waving hands.
      • In 2008 most of you will be expected to produce some complex models.
    • The community team is in flux
      • Roles, who funds is, where it lives changes year to year.
    • Companies struggling with strategy is.
      • Need to really understand your corporate goals and mission
    • The corporate web site is no longer the static brochure-wear site is less valuable year to year.
    • Attention is very saturated so you get a thin sliver of attention from online constituents. 

    Discussion... What are you taking away?

    Comment: The nature of participation and incentive will evolve.

    Comment: People are getting utility out of the services they are using. youtube for bandwidth and storage. But you still have to have people there to find what you are producing.

    Comment: Is participation just a novelty.

    Comment: Since the cost is zero isn't it worth the distribution?

    Comment: Like to say that 2008 will be the year of the mobile community, but the breakout sort of showed there are still some device and bandwidth limitations that won't made it happen.

    Comment: It's also free to leverage in other places like facebook so why not enable the multiple touch points for your community?

    Comment: If there is one trend over the next two years is the arrival of marketers into this arena. Many of us who started in this space have a chance to impact their arrival.

    Question: Do you see a role for using qualitative methods to understand the relationship people have with brands?

    Aggressively pursuing a net-promoter score. Organizations starting to tie compensation to the net promoter scores.

    Comment: Didn't see as much facebook talk as expected. Are we going back with incentive in our orgs to start staffing up people that pay attention to sites that aren't ours. 

    • 1st party sites come first.
    • Other groups actively go 3rd party first.

    Observation: See more people wearing more hats as people with the money start to invest quickly in the social media space. 

    Comment: There is no discussion going on in the groups in facebook.  It's too early to go too far down the facebook private path. 

    Reply: this is true about facebook... it's not a discussion platform. It is a great event medium. Organize events on facebook and people go.

    Comment: Maybe organizations should just think about how they get facebook people to wave their flag and that's good enough.

  • OCS 2007 - Presidential Campaigns and Online Communities

    Description: Every four years the presidential campaigns get way out ahead of everyone else in the use of interactive technologies. What is their experience to date?

    Introductory comments: Michael Slaby / Obama for America

    Link: Obama social network http://my.barackobama.com 

    It helps that the candidate has a lot of youth appeal.  Hundreds of thousands of friends on myspace and facebook. They've been rolling out profiles on just about every social network they could think of.

    The point isn't just an effort to pander, it's to reach people where they are. Not everyone will find barackobama.com.  The goal is to give people tools to communicate and share. 

    The open question is how they translate online interest into real world activity including, but not limited to voting?

    The level of engagement to create a my. profile on barack's site is different than the level of engagement to add him as a friend on myspace.  People that went to the my. site would canvas a neighborhood for the candidate. So the ask in return has to be commensurate with the customer who started the engagement.

    You need to speak to people in a context they understand and engage on their level in their homes.

    80 thousand active profiles on my.

    Big challenge is continuing to make sure the active people have new things to do so that you keep them engaged beyond the initial conversation.

    In November of 2008 the site could fall apart so they can experiment.

    Question: What is the ratio of staff resources that you put towards external stuff compared to internal?

    It's currently a balanced spend.  The people at My. are more active offline so even though the other networks might be bigger the ones at my. are more engaged.

    "Just talking to people isn't enough, they want everyone talking to everyone else about the content they push"

    Question: How do you bridge the online to the offline specifically?

    It's hard to guess the value of 80k myspace friends. Metrics for offline events rely on self identification.  Online advertising is more complete than on-> offline motivation metrics.

    Question: How much of this has proven?

    Not much. There is no proof that all the myspace friends will vote. The thinking is that they "hope".

    Question: What experiment are you most interested in?

    Text messaging.


    Introductory comments: Stuart Trevelyan / NGP Software

    Online has changed money, message, and mechanics.

    25% of contributions come from online.

    Candidates carry more empowering and participatory messages. In the 90's the goal was message control and you only said ten words. Now you have to change how you communicate depending on the mechanism and audience.

    The mechanics have changed looking at things like the "youtube debate"

    Some candidates are allowing users to create their on commercial via jumpcut.

    There is a huge increase in low dollar contributors.  The long tail is donating money and that changes things.

    You can more easily have a scaled engagement hierarchy of engagement with the online tools that are available today.

    How do we use participatory models in a way that can be branded and "message managed"?

    "Micro-targeting" research is also very popular by running slices against the profiles to send targeted messages, content, and activities at those targets. 

    More Discussion

    • Have also done a lot of e-mail campaigns as well.  So what they do is choose a sub-section of the full campaign database. by 10am see the response rate then blast out that reply to the rest of the addresses.
    • Metrics are huge. Organizers want to find and mine all sorts of data. They give local campaign organizers access to data like "who in dayton has donated over 500 dollars and attended one event over the last year" so that the local organizers can mobilize the constituents.

    Question: Why do all the campaign web sites look the same? The features are also the same.

    There actually aren't a lot of unique companies that do the sites. There is a race to differentiate in features between the web sites. 

    There are also a lot of masters to serve so something that's edgy and great might not have the broadest appeal. 

    Comment: In the Dean campaign things would break often enough it didn't feel real. Today it feels like the candidates have their online acts together.

    Campaigns are doing better at the qualifications of online users and getting a feedback loop from the users about the tools. This way they can figure out the "quality people"  to micro-target activities to.

    Question: Pitfalls?

    A NYT reporter will write stories about how one campaign bashes another when it might just be a community member on one of the fan or support sites. Comments on the blog have had their ups and downs.  But being willing to put these things out there has been a good risk.

    Question: Every campaign has a splash page where they want to gather the e-mail address. Never seen another site or company take that approach.

    Part of it is the compressed timeline. There is a lot less time to get users active and build up relationships than there might be with other sites.

    Question: What is the strategy among 50+ online participants?

    A lot of candidates have embraced ??? which isn't a huge network.  There isn't as much of a match between the demographic and the willingness to collaborate online. 

    They try and think about what someone's native form of participation is.  Someone who is 50 and is on a social network might be thinking more like a 20 year old and need that sort of engagement.

    Question: What has worked best for online fundraising?

    E-mail is still the biggest driver of actual fundraising. There is also a lot of offline fundraising that pushes people online to donate.  But e-mail is still the primary driver.

    Final Comments

    One of the hardest thing is asking for the right amount. Need to set the right goals... it's micro-targeting again.

  • OCS 2007 Breakout - Mobile Communities

    Question: What does a mobile community look like? What is the toolset and what are the enablers?

    • Small bursts of activity and information seem to be working best.  Lots of information doesn't translate well.
    • 60% of people with a handset have access to the mobile Internet. 30% of those people use it.
    • Text messaging, games, and cameras are key. "There is a phone 2.0 happening."
    • "Its about me and my presence information that can be updated and read on a mobile device. "
    • There is lots of money going into the location based services.
    • "Not many community opportunities in the mobile space."
    • Multi-user gaming is happening via mobile spaces.  In the next year you'll start seeing some more interesting stuff happening with geopresense.

    Question: Where do they intersect with or extend existing communities?

    Question: What is the ROI of mobile communities?

    • Tremendous ecommerce opportunities.
    • Twitter and facebook can't monitize it.
    • Status updates make facebook sticky. You can monitize the "passive intimacy".
    • The idea is that it's "I am the news".
    • Commerce and fundraising are extremely restrictive so it would be hard to leverage mobile devices.
    • Text messages from grandchildren and photo-sharing from children.

    Question: What if it never had a connection to the web? What is the difference?

    • The mobility is the difference. You don't take your laptop with you. But your phone goes everywhere.
    • The input constraints screen size, keyboard, etc.
    • Some people have mobile phones that don't have a connection elsewhere.
    • Nokia is supposed to call them "Multimedia Computers"
    • Who is to say that screens will be a constraint in 10 years?
    • Designing for each and every browser is a nightmare problem.
    • 128x128 up to 640x480 devices. If you offer a service you have to deal with that.
    • Could a wifi network displace the carriers?
    • If you are in a space where more than 50% of the people are updating presence and twittering.
    • There is a huge potential for apps to leverage the strong ties contained in the address book. What about the weak ties?
    • What are "mobile only" communities? Mobile home users that never connect for real? Dodgeball?
    • There is nothing that is better than the PC experience. It's obvious that there are possibilities, but there is no glue or service that exists soley in the mobile space.
    • "The thing that's coming next from mobile isn't really here. "
    • Location based services could be huge, but it's hard to get the data. Until you get location there is less available than a PC.
    • e911 doesn't know where you really are. But your phone is always broadcasting your location. Any phone that doesn't have geo-location won't be turned on from verizon. The FBI, however, knows where the phone is.

    Question: Mobile community and real world geographic communities?

    Question: How do you work with or around device constraints? What is a minimal acceptable experience and what would be ideal. What do the curves for technology?

    • Operators are a constraint. They don't open up the devices. Apple is the most recent to lock down. 
    • When will a phone know where I am? The carriers want to charge 25 cents to let your location out to you or other applications. 

    Question: Do political campaigns leverage the mobile space?

    Some space in "action alert" mobiles to get people to call up their congressmen. They are also used for event organizations like "get out and vote" or campaign rallies. 

    Question: What apps or services or sites to people in this room use?

    • Facebook status
    • google maps
    • Google reader
    • Twitter people
    • Flicker to upload flicker
    • Frucall - Sign up to use cell phone to get pricing about objects. Just enter the product number. Local comparison shopping and reviews.
    • Witsets is an RSS aggregator.
    • Use yahoo IM via a blackberry/java application
    • Yahoo go

    Question: Is there a service that you can use to manage massive group texting?

    There is a free service where people can sign up to make a group where they all share messages. There are some web sites.

    Example: http://www.zemble.com/ and www.textmob.com are free services.

    Group text message admins.

    Question: What would be a geolocation community that you could imagine?

    • There is real interest in disaster response to find people.
    • Broadcasting your dating preferences and matching you to people near you.
    • Geo-games ala pac-manhatten.
  • OCS 2007 Breakout - Social Media

    Question: Should you break out into other communities like myspace and facebook to get the word out on your community? Is it worth the time?

    Question: Should you have to maintain separate views and keep your relationships, reputation, and identities straight?

    Question: Is there a central verifiable key for children?

    Question: What is the definition and difference between social media and community? 

    Online community is a gathering point. Social media is extended loose tie networks?

    Facebook has become a key distribution mechanism.  How can thought leaders make a case for a facebook strategy?

    How have technical communities used social media tools to do their work together? 

    Comment: 5k per year per member is too high for a community.

    Comment: It's too hard to train companies and consumers to use tools.

    Community Overlap: We create lots of video content. We want to allow it to spread, but also manage the brand where people reuse the content.

    Question: Best practices in the corporate world for migrating community tools to the enterprise?

    Question: How do you measure the effectiveness of leveraging facebook and myspace?

    "Not sure how you would do anything without a facebook strategy right now."

    "Don't think OMG I'm not on facebook these days"

    If your audience isn't on facebook would you want to go there?

    Shouldn't you have a digital distribution strategy across all platforms. I would argue you don't need a facebook strategy, but you need a digital distribution strategy.

    Social media implies "social" meaning that your consumers make the media. Another perspective is that social media is a way for me to distribute the information.

    Long running community people on The Well that have to pay money and use real identity.  A few years ago people started a flickr area. Then people go back to the well to talk about that they don't want the public "Comment here" on flickr.  There are different relationships from flickr to the well. Smaller feels more connected in the communities.  Public versus private changes people's behavior.

    Maybe people view public for shallow relationships and the well for their real friendships. 

    Tracking Influencer Relationships

    Attach metrics around influencers that participate outside of the 1st party sites.  You need to go where your community influencers are and engage with them there.  It takes manual labor and there are also paid tools that would do this sort of influencer audit. 

    Lexis-nexis compares to google alerts for tacking this stuff.

    The excel knowledge sharing
    Here is a great video MSFT found from a user that teaches people how to create a ghant chart in excel.

    What do you do for the guy who made this excel video?

    The best thing you can do is say thank you. The worst thing you can do is say "do more" then they will stop doing it.   The currency is the appreciation of attitude.  Pay it forward is the right metaphor for this conference. 

    "I answer questions because someone answered me one day"

    Once you do visualization of data on community threads you can figure out who the good, bad, and neutral people are.

    Anyone could use Netscan to see example visualizations of the data.

    Point Systems are Useful because they create some form of competition, but not good if you can convert it to rewards.

    Maybe the best point systems can be used to create goals for people that they can achieve instead of the Top 100 type of lists.  Match people with the ones around you.

    Respect is the strongest currency you have. They way you demonstrate it is to link to that content. The way to attack the problem is to win emotionally.

    "I would have been stunned to find an official Microsoft page that linked to a video on excel"

    On facebook groups & Letting your brand extend into other sites.

    "haven't gotten the staff time or presence to maintain a real facebook identity for your effort. "

    There is no way to merge groups and there is no reason to combine groups.

    Facebook groups are like a fan sites that are easy to create.

    You don't get to hear about it since it happens without you anyway. You can't shoot them down, but you may not be that excited.

    What about copyright violations?

    If someone does a less than appropriate mash-up of your videos/cartoons/brand.  Then you have to make a judgement call.

    You could spend all your time on lawsuits trying to trace the brand. You have to be nimble by looking at how large the talent pools are in these communities and shift that energy to good things.  You have to "skate where the puck is going".  You need to extend your brand into these other sites.

    ACLU has an official facebook cause.  Also hosted a second life event.  In second life there has been an informal ACLU group that's been lobbying the ACLU to be recognized as a member group.  There is a lack of readiness in the non-profit space to think about the implications of having this sort of virtual presence.

    The facebook app gives you a notification anytime someone attributes a cause to your name and you have a chance to de-list them.  This was great to help protect your cause and how it's being promoted.

    There are lots of people out there saying things to raise money for the ACLU.  Some have said "impeach bush" which the ACLU hasn't said.  How do you coral/harness this energy online?

    Comcast has had to do a takedown on sites that deface the brand. They haven't seen many neutral sites. It's either strong energy in one direction or another.

    Should groups like Motley Fool actively encourage things like Flickr groups?  Maybe groups should set it up and monitor the pull into your sites from these resources.

    22 Techniques for Getting a deal on dell. Became a news story since they asked for it to be taken down. Dell owned up and did "22 ways we messed up replying to this" blog post.

    You may need to set up a google alert on your brand to find new content across the Internet and have it delivered to you.

    Doing an Ecosystem Audit

    One consulting project now and the first couple of weeks was an ecosystem audit for other information around the topic.  So they looked for signs of life first. Suggested that the company augment the user content by throwing in links to official information from those to pull the conversation back on message.

     

    Question: Can you shape user activity? Do you try?  What sort of success do you have?

    Question: Are there any tools people have employed in achieving persistent identity?

    Flock browser is interesting in this area because you do have a lot of your networks there... what's going on in all these places.

    Question: Is this a problem?

    Yes, users are asking for it, but it depends on the pivot in the community. Some customers might not want to be identified as the same person across sites.

    Question: What is the thought on OpenID?

    Suggesting we need digital identity a long time ago. 

    The general public is starting to accept social networks and we may be reaching the boiling point where users want it.

    The problem is that there are millions of ID systems that would have to say they agree.

    The users managing the log-in and pages that get them all of their information. Is there a tool for managing your personalities between sites.

    Users might not want is because they use all different networks for different purposes.

    1. Linked in for blasting resumes.

    2. Myspace for dating.

    3. Facebook for their strong tie friends.

    Seems to me that the identity is the most prized part of the community. It's what you use to share ads, interface with your users, etc.

    It's about people needing to say "I own my data, give it back to me, and let me share with who and where I want if I carry my information across sites"

    There are no standards on a global level for privacy that companies could go for.

  • OCS 2007 - A Report from Researchers

    10:00 – 11:00 Session 4 / What Works? A Report from the Front Edge of Community Research
    Description: What does current research tell us about effective strategies in the design and management of online Communities?

    Introductory comments: Paul Resnick / University of Michigan

    "How do you get participants in online communities to participate more and better?"

    www.communitylab.org - Handbook of Social Design

    If people can change their names then what is the effect on the community?

    • You can't trust new people
    • People can get away with more

    People on Digg game the system partially because of the design choices they made in the system. 

    One thing you need to keep a system clean is to have a barier to entry.

    Obvious Idea: Have activities anyone can do, but only let the best people at those activities do more important activities.

    Getting People to Participate More

    Tested Theory: If you assign members of a community a goal then it works. The basic principals of goal setting work except that the more challenging the goal the better it tends to work online... as long as it's doable. The goal also needs to be specific. The optimal goal was at the 90th percentile.. that becomes the most motivating. 

    One version of the experiment was done with groups. The theory was that people would participate less if they were in a group.  But the reality is that they participated more knowing they were members of an anonymous group.

    More contributions from people that were told they had rated rare movies.

    If you tell the low performers how they performed to the mediate they will move up. 

    Think about how you can create groups that people can identify with within your community.

    Welcoming Newcomers

    Natural intuition is that users like to be welcomed.  Users who's first post got a reply were 12% more likely to return.  The tone of the reply didn't matter. Just being noticed made a difference.

    Change in a community also improves productivity.

    Introductory comments: Neel Sundaresan / eBay Research Labs

    Ebay has three communities and the shape of each is very different.

    Ebay, Skype, and Paypal

    Realized that people, ala stumbleupon, is that if they came in for one reason, but saw something else then they would stick around and buy the something else. 

    The surprise factor of random product links actually results in more sales. It has the potential to beat the recommendation engines.

    There is a huge difference between what people ask for and what they really want. Like people that search for Jessica Simpson on ebay, but they are looking for shoes.

    The community is better at pointing out things that their tools can't.

    Community Computing Effort is their big research area now. 

    Thinking about there community problems.

    Acquisition - Easiest - Marketing to get them there.

    Activation - Medium- To get them on the site and perform thier first action.

    Activity - Hardest - How do you keep people on the site and being active.

    Observation: Stickyness in a lot of categories is based on reselling. People buy from folks with medium reputation and sell to rookies for profit on e-bay.

    Discussion

    • Does a real name mean anything to people's participation?
      • Real names put people complete online reputation at stake, but profiles only effect how you are viewed on that site.
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