Thanks for sharing, Scott. It’s funny, this piece of full of the kinds of advice I’ve been giving for years — don’t be overcontrolling, expand your target audience as widely as possible, consider fan sites allies rather than competitors — but it still left me a bit uneasy.
To cite just a few things I’d contest either in fact or implication:
“These communities are so drab, so uninviting, that many visitors never return after a brief first visit.”
Do most visitors of most…
Timely question — I wrote a blog post just a couple weeks ago about how to cultivate superusers on your community, and I think many of the principles apply to advocates out on the social web as well: Superusers: Step by Step.
I think the main thing to understand is that advocates aren’t generally looking for rewards of monetary value — and often such rewards are unwelcome or counterproductive. The most important thing you can do is recognize them, open the channels of…
Good question! Policy of course is always company-specific — you policies should reflect your company values and culture, and should be in agreement with your any other guidelines you provide to employees (e.g., confidentiality agreements).
Having said that, I think it’s good to look at policies created by other companies to get an idea of the kinds of things you may want to include. Some of the best policies come from companies who have been at this a long time, since a smart company…
Thanks for the question. It’s important to note that most of our customers use a web analytics package in combination with our community platform. They want the same visibility over our pages that they have over the rest of their website, and that can easily be accomplished by placing a beacon on our pages.
However, our platform isn’t just a series of webpages — it’s an application. Therefore, placing beacons gives you only a partial view of what users are actually doing on the…
To add to Kevin’s reponse, I think Barnes & Noble has done a terrific job of integrating the community with their website so that any visitor to bn.com is aware of them. My experience is that lack of promotion is the number one reason that communities fail — customers just aren’t aware of the social features you are offering them. Therefore it’s rarely a problem of convincing people to join — if you have enough users and if you do a good job of creating awareness, they will figure it out!
Ah Kevin, you beat me to it!
Just to add a little more color to that — most of our customers focus less on how much time users spend on the community, and more on how much participation (posts, kudos, blog comments, etc.) and usage (logins, page views, message views, etc.) there is in general. There are exceptions — ad-supported sites might be one of them — but time-on-site is generally not the first priority.
One thing people often miss about 90-9-1 is that it’s only a point-in-time measure — where only 10% participate within, say, a 30-day period, you are typically engaging a larger percentage of your target audience time. That is to say, the 10% participating at any time is never exactly the *same* 10%.
If you want to get a sense of what percentage of your audience might engage over time, take a look at Forrester’s Technographic Profile tool. Just plug in age, country and gender,…
Companies do indeed participate in the conversations in their communities, and my experience says that your customers expect it. You do, however, have to think about how you want to participate.
I get this question so often that I wrote a blog post about it last year. I called it “Three Ways to Show Up.” I think you’ll find it helpful!
Ei-lunT wrote:
A question asked during the live event was:
“To what extent do most companies contribute to the conversations taking…
What Jake said.
Ok, maybe I do have a few additional tips of my own.:) I like the 5 of 5 structure also — it’s a common way to avoid the problem you encounter when you try to create 20 or more ranks, but still want to make then “legible” to users in terms of “what’s higher than what.”
I also wrote a blog post yesterday that had a few tips for ranks structures and also linked to a couple of examples you might want to look at:
Most people look at our default rank structure…
Gail Williams of Salon and The WELL invited people this week to share their thoughts on the subject of “influencers,” and recaps the contributions here. Following are some simple tips I share with companies launching online communities about how to cultivate “superusers” — that group of active users from which influencers and advocates can emerge.
PRE-LAUNCH
Identify superuser candidates among known advocates, online or off.
Even before beginning their own online…
