Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

At SXSW09, I attended a very informative panel entitled “Building Strong Online Communities."  Jam packed with useful information for running your own successful communities, I’ve distilled some of the most relevant “don'ts" for us to remember as we create and continue to foster existing communities here at Capstrat.

• Don't troll your users too much, it sets the wrong tone.
  
• Don't "over listen" to your community when something on the site changes. If users freak out with change, give it two weeks. Any lash back was likely stemming from a lack of warning about change, not about your community in general.
  
• In terms of moderating for quality, resist the urge to remove posts that you think don't "forward the discussion". If they are of poor quality, they will find their way down to the bottom organically.
  
• Don't ridicule and/or flame people, no matter what their actions are; don't cross over into that vindictive place. This can often be a challenge when you're overwhelmed with negative feedback and in the heat of the moment. Don't let yourself get sucked into the negativity. Take a break and come back before taking further action, if you need to.

Try looking at it from this perspective.

• Running your community is sort of like throwing a party at your home. It's your house. You hope all your friends start coming over, have a lot of fun at the party, and invite all their friends.
  
• Now, having said that, it's still a party. Someone is probably going to spill a beer or two on your carpet before the night's over; you have to know that going in.  No use in crying over spilt beer.  At the end of the day, it's you're house and you're responsible for fostering an environment where your friends and family want to continue to gather in the future.  

 

Aw SXSW09, I attended a very informative panel entitled "Building Strong Online Communities."  Jam packed with useful information for running your own successful communities, I've distilled some of the most relevant "do's" for us to remember as we create and continue to foster existing communities here at Capstrat.

On Feedback

• Give users the ability and space to criticize you separate from the community.  Give them an outlet for feedback.  Listen to them on the basic level, that's what they really want.
  
• Email users back when they give you feedback.  There’s power in getting a personal email from a community team member.  Yes it’s time consuming but it will pay dividends.  People generally have low expectations of online personal responses, surprise them and build dedicated users at the same time.
• Digitally compile all user comments (with post dates and times) in case you need the log later. 
• Communities are a constant revolution, think carefully about the consequences before you implement a new tool.
• Patience, level headedness, calmness, and neutrality are the best collective qualities for your community manager. You also need someone who can multitask.
• Be able to accept harsh criticism without taking it personally.  This is harder than you might imagine but is very important for neutral moderation.

On censorship.

• In a community, where voice is the most important thing, you run the risk of abusing users trust in you if you silence them.
• Before nixing comments, make sure you view the comment in context first.
• Save the banning of users for real jerks; banning should be fairly infrequent and saved for severe cases
• Let the discourse happen.  Taking it off is giving users more ammunition to criticize you.
  

On change

• Let the community know when change is coming and ask for input.  Not involving the community in change can backfire.
• Use a two week barometer.  Are people still upset about the change two weeks later?  If so, do something about it. It's unlikely that they will still be upset.
  
• As a general community rule, ask rather than tell. 

           Big take home points

• The biggest way to attract people and keep their engagement is to demonstrate earnest interest in your topic.  Others will be attracted to your vested interest.
• Finally, listen to your gut.  Remember that at the end of the day, this is your site and you need to make the calls.

I'm usually not a big fan of pseudo-science when it tries to masquerade as the real thing. So, when I heard about the following formula, I was incredulous.

Behavior = f(Person, Environment)

Essentially, what this is saying is that behavior is a function of both people and the environment they work within. Despite the formulaic approach, I appreciate the intent and "succinctness" it brings.

People.
People have instrinsic and extrinsic motivations. These may be supported by your product. The challenge is to marry their goals with your own. Human nature is hard to change; in many ways, you have little or no control over this factor.

Environment.
Environment is your site and the actions it provides. Think of it as the rails on which your users ride. You have control over this through the features you expose and what you allow people to do. These need to match up with the peoples' motivations.

Behavior.
Behavior is the net result of your work. It's what you want people to do on the site. You can only indirectly address this, through the environment.

To use an example, Flickr's environment is one of photo publishing and sharing. The behavior they want to elicit is photo sharing. They guide the behavior by building out an array of things you can do with your images. You can group them by tag, by collection, by set. You can send them to a group, search by location, explore by "interestingness." Flickr demotes the importance of messaging friends, fiddling with your profile and other actions not focused on photo sharing. By directly focusing on a limited set behaviors and supporting only those with robust features, they keep the purpose of the site from becoming dilute.

Takeaway
The takeaway is that encouraging users to behave in a certain way requires acknowledging motivations and selectively building out features to suport. This is common sense to most of us, but sometimes we lose sight of this. Think about this the next time you feel like your site needs to be social, needs a blog, should use Twitter, or whatever the latest techno-fad is.

Figuring out who your users are can be challenging. Many times stakeholders can have varying and conflicting opinions about what users deserve focus. Personas help manage this, but they're products of user research. Prior to research, it's important to provide some direction on who will be studied and in what capacity.

As I was preparing for a brainstorming session, I started thinking about how to start discussion about a business' users without explicitly asking "who do you think your users are?" That approach seemed rife with canned answers; I was looking for something different.

"Hire Your Users" is technique that would be applied in early discovery to start defining these boundaries. Using the metaphor of a hiring process, it helps design strategists and stakeholders collaborate on who the users are, in what order they should be considered, what they need to accomplish, and how they might do so.

In use, a facilitator would guide discussion around the following points:

What's the need?
This first question is used to start translating the business strategy and mission into tactical needs. Like hiring for a position, it uses the business objectives as input and defines how these can be accomplished. Often, this information is known and socialized; hopefully, the facilitator will not need to dwell too long here.

Who do we hire?
This question is starts to map those business needs to user segments and define their characteristics. To do this, we would use a job description to organize and divide the users. Doing so places rigor around each segment to reduce misinterpretation. Within each description are the following:

• Job title - a succinct phrase that defines the user type
• Position summary - this focuses on the core mission and goals of the user
• Responsibilities - the tasks they must perform to support the goals
• Experience - their background, knowledge, traits and capabilities

How will they accomplish this?
This question starts to elicit the features and content that may be needed to support the user's responsibilities. Demonstrating this relationship is important since it helps ensure technology is driven by business need and not the other way around. It should also help ensure that features are justifiable and not simply faddish.

What can we offer?
This question is about trade-offs. For this task, the participants are given a personnel budget of $100,000. Using a divide-the-dollar approach, they apportion that sum among all of the job descriptions. The result is a rough indication of the order and degree of priority of the segments.

 

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I've just hacked together this idea, so I'm hoping to hear your thoughts. Take this further? Abandon it immediately?