Gloerich on New Media and Community Management

Creating Great Images With Quotes Is Like Creating Flags For Your Fans To Wave: 3 Free Tools To Create Your Own

Melle Gloerich — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 07:08:38 +0000

See on Scoop.it – Management of Communities and New Media

Melle Gloerich‘s insight:

Goed idee om meer met beeld te doen. Wel opletten dat het rechtenvrij is. Een van de voorbeelden dat dit goed ‘viral kan gaan’ is te zien in de vele Facebook updates met een simpel plaatje en wat tekst en de enorme hoeveelheid likes. De kale tekst is misschien net zo informatief maar voelt minder bijzonder aan en valt minder op.

Ook de meeste internetmemes zijn niet meer dan een grappige of bijzondere foto/tekening waarbij iedereen een andere tekst invult. Soort running gag.

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Do you really want to know what’s wrong? | Andy Sernovitz | Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That!

Melle Gloerich — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:43:56 +0000

See on Scoop.it – Management of Communities and New Media

From Andy Sernovitz’s Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That!: A reminder of how important it is to make it really easy for customers to contact you about problems.

Anonimiteit is bij veel communities niet mogelijk, en daar zijn nog goede redenen voor ook. Toch heb ik altijd nog een zwak voor de tijd toen anonimteit standaard en nicknames normaal waren. Het internet is in basis erg geschikt om anoniem te blijven, maar misschien is het daardoor juist dat grote partijen zoals Google, Facebook, Yahoo en Microsoft zich opwerpen als Identity Providers.

Op Facebook mag je geen nep-account hebben en ook bij Google+ moet je je echte naam gebruiken, anders loop je het risico dat je profiel op een dag offline wordt gehaald. Het is verleidelijk om als organisatie mee te gaan in de stroming van ‘anonimeit is voor mensen die iets te verbergen hebben en dus iets slechts van plan zjin’. Vooral omdat dit veel spam en onzin-reacties voorkomt. Maar als je echt de mening van iemand wilt hebben dan moet je soms juist anonimiteit garanderen.

Dus luister niet alleen naar wat je klanten of communityleden durven te vertellen als hun naam erbij staat, maar maak het ook mogelijk dat ze zeggen wat ze eigenlijk niet in je gezicht durven te zeggen. Als je dat mogelijk maakt en die eerlijke feedback ook aanmoedigt weet ik zeker dat je belangrijke pijnpunten te weten komt waarvan je geen idee had. Nu kun je er tenminste wat mee.

Een goed begin is om te monitoren wat mensen die je helemaal niet kent zeggen over je organisatie of community.

See on www.damniwish.comSimilar Posts:

Seth’s Blog: Non-profits have a charter to be innovators

Melle Gloerich — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:39:59 +0000

See on Scoop.it – Management of Communities and New Media
The biggest, best-funded non profits have an obligation to be leaders in innovation, but sometimes they hesitate. One reason: “We’re doing important work. The magic of their status is that no one is expecting a check back, or a quarterly dividend. They’re expecting a new, insightful method that will solve the problem once and for all.
Go fail. And then fail again. Non-profit failure is too rare, which means that non-profit innovation is too rare as well. Innovators understand that their job is to fail, repeatedly, until they don’t.

Melle Gloerich‘s insight:

Hoewel het artikel wat meer gericht is op goede doelen dan op verenigingen denk ik dat deze ook een bepaalde durf moeten uitstralen waar een donateur/lid enthousiast van wordt. Hetgeen men terugkrijgt is uiteraard de belofte dat het goede doel z’n best doet om het doel te behalen, een kleine product gerelateerd aan het goede doel zodat je direct iets vast kan houden maar daarnaast ook een goed gevoel dat men ergens aan bijdraagt. Dat doel kan het doel op zichzelf zijn maar is ook de manier hoe je dat doel probeert te bereiken. Het moet aanvoelen alsof je tot een bijzonder groep hoort als je hieraan bijdraagt en het moet aanvoelen alsof je status hoger wordt. Het moet aanvoelen dat je ondanks de kleine kans van succes toch gaat winnen of in ieder geval hebt kunnen genieten van de wedstrijd. Het moet een verhaal worden dat je jaren later nog kan vertellen.

Speel je niet (genoeg) in op het opwekken van dat gevoel dan blijft alleen het concrete product over. Tja, en wat heb je nou aan zo’n geel Livestrong armbandje nu het gevoel erbij totaal is weggeslagen?

See on sethgodin.typepad.comSimilar Posts:

Fast Moving Targets – Platform over innovatie, tech, media en communicatie

Melle Gloerich — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:39:50 +0000

See on Scoop.it – Management of Communities and New Media

Ik was van meet af aan enthousiast over Google+. Waarom? Omdat ik een toekomst voor me zag van een sociaal netwerk dat persoonlijk en bedrijfsmatig combineert. Dat ruimte voor zowel gesloten als open communicatie heeft. Dat een einde maakt aan rigide scheidslijnen tussen intern en extern. Immers, je kon door het aanmaken van circles zowel kiezen voor communicatie binnen een bedrijf als voor circles waar in projecten met externe partijen wordt gewerkt. En daarnaast was het mogelijk om open te publiceren en dus voor iedereen aanspreekbaar te zijn.

Melle Gloerich‘s insight:

Ik herken zelf ook de kracht die vanuit Communities gaat, eerst keek ik zelden naar Google+ maar nu ‘something is happening’.

See on fastmovingtargets.nlSimilar Posts:

Hide or Show Contact Groups on Android 4.x

Melle Gloerich — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 19:54:13 +0000

Recently I got a new phone, a Samsung Galaxy S3. Very nice upgrade from my Google Nexus One. Ofcourse the S3 it’s a much better phone, it’s been nearly 2.5 years newer! Apart from the hardware, the software is also new for me since I was stuck on Android 2.3.6. Android 4 brings a lot of improvements and with everything new it sometimes takes some time to make it your own.

One of the first things I did was signing in with my Google Account, so I would be up and running in no time. Works fine except that it also synchronizes Picasa with the photo gallery even when you’re not on Wifi, I found out later when I checked my data usage. So that’s 500MB over 3g (or actually HSPA+). Not cool, but no problem with my data plan.

Another problem I quickly ran into and couldn’t solve was that my Contacts list was enormous. True, I saved a lot of contacts in several groups in Google Contacts, but on my Nexus One I could simply select which groups to display. Try as I might, I couldn’t find the option anywhere.

Surely, somebody on the internet has figured this out, I thought. But none of the questions about this on a forum or a blog were answered. I couldn’t believe there was no solution so after playing around in the Contacts screen, I found out this option was hiding in plain sight!

Go to Contacts and follow the following steps:

Tap on ‘Contacts in *****@gmail.com. You’ll see the next screen:

You’ll see all connected accounts, probably everything is set to show in your Contact List. Tap on ‘Customized list’, so you’ll see the next screen.

First, tap on the down arrow right next to your Google Account (probably but not necessarily a @gmail.com email-address). If you’ve created groups in your Google Account, it’ll show these groups. Toggle the groups you want to show or hide. You can also decide for the other accounts you’ll see in this view wether you want to show or hide these, for example your Facebook account.

If you’ve selected the groups and accounts you’d like to show in your Contacts List, tap on ‘Done’.

You’ll return to you Contacts List, but now it’s customized to your liking!

That’s it! If something works differently, let me know, maybe I can help you out. If you’ve got a lot of Google Contacts but no groups yet, I recommend to use this special view of your contacts. It’s an official Google webpage and a lot cleaner than when you access your contacts via Gmail.

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Dale Carnegie en Community Management in de praktijk

Melle Gloerich — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 19:13:42 +0000

Al een paar maanden slingert het boek ‘How to win friends and influence people’ van Dale Carnegie in huis rond, ik nam het zelfs geregeld mee naar fitness om te lezen tijdens het gebruik van de hometrainer. Het laat me niet los. Eerst las ik het van voor tot achter uit en nu lees ik willekeurige passages ter inspiratie. Briljant in al zijn simpelheid. Al bijna even lang als dat ik het lees zegt een stemmetje in mijn achterhoofd, daar kan een mooie link gelegd worden met Community Management, daar moet je een blogpost over schrijven. Blijkt dat stemmetje mede Community Manager Martin Kloos te zijn, die genoeg van mijn uitstellen had en zelf een mooie blogpost schreef.

Ik raad je aan om het artikel van Martin te lezen, maar hieronder kort de hoofdpunten uit het boek. Carnegie legt uit dat met een paar makkelijk te onthouden richtlijnen de relatie met andere mensen enorm kan verbeteren. Basisregel is dat je oprecht moet zijn. Vergeet dus een groot gedeelte van de hele Gamification hype, oprechtheid kan je niet automatiseren (“leverage our community management skills” noemde ik het). De 3 fundamenten en de 6 principes die daarop zijn gebouwd zoals Martin die stelt zijn:

Fundamentele technieken in de omgang met mensen:

Lever geen kritiek, veroordeel mensen niet en klaag niet.
Geef eerlijke en oprechte waardering.
Wek bij de ander een verlangen op om iets te doen.

Principes die er voor zorgen dat mensen je ‘liken’:

Toon een oprechte, natuurlijke interesse in anderen.
Lach.
Onthoud iemand’s naam.
Wees een goede luisteraar. Moedig anderen aan over zichzelf te praten.
Praat in termen van andermans interesse.
Maak dat de andere zich belangrijk voelt en doe dat oprecht.

Ok, en nu de praktijk.

In het artikel van Martin gaat hij al af en toe in op een aantal praktijkcases, zoals hoe KLM met een tegeltjesactie mensen zichzelf belangrijk laat voelen, maar ik ben benieuwd hoe wij als community managers deze principes bewust of onbewust in de praktijk hebben gebracht. Het lijkt me gaaf om een een samen met andere Nederlandse community managers een lijst van praktijkcases te genereren die net zoveel inspiratie levert als het boek van Carnegie.

Autoritten, verhalen en de principes van Carnegie

Samen met experts binnen de NGN community (vereniging van netwerk- en systeembeheerders) organiseer ik regelmatig een soort van workshops, waarbij 10 man een paar uur lang lekker ongestoord gaan prutsen met technologie onder leiding van een expert. We noemen ze mobiele werkplaatsen om het knutselaspect wat te onderstrepen. Dit doen we van 16 uur tot een uur of 9, met tussendoor pizza en eigenlijk altijd sterke verhalen over nieuwe of oude technologie.

Aangezien ik met het OV naar mijn werk ga (net zo snel als auto op mijn traject, en ik heb tijd om boeken te lezen) is de terugweg vaak wel een klus. Rond 21 uur rijden er maar weinig bussen over het industrieterrein waar ik werk. Gelukkig biedt vaak iemand me een lift aan, en de lifterscode is volgens mij altijd al geweest dat er goed gepraat wordt in de auto. Zo ook de keer van dit verhaal.

In de rit (buiten de files om) van ongeveer een half uur hebben we het eigenlijk alleen gehad over de IT in de organisatie bij deze persoon en naar wat voor een ontwikkelingen hij geïnteresseerd is. Ook nodig ik hem uit om deel te nemen aan de Yammergroep van de NGN en waarom dat interessant is voor hem.

Een maand of wat later komt hij op een evenement dat ik samen met andere community leden of experts uit het veld heb georganiseerd (over IT-beheer aspecten van de iPad in een organisatie). Daar was hij samen met 274 andere vakgenoten. Natuurlijk spreek ik hem even na hem begroet te hebben (met zijn naam, principe 3, check!).

In een discussie op Yammer over een onderwerp dat gerelateerd is aan het iPadevenement post hij een 7 pagina’s tellend verslag met de hoofdlijnen, allerlei oppaspunten en feitjes die genoemd zijn in de presentie. Fantastisch hoe secuur hij dit heeft gedaan, gelukkig krijgt hij ook veel complimenten van andere groepsleden.

Misschien had hij dit ook allemaal wel gedaan in de community als ik er niet was geweest, maar misschien ook niet. Toch lijkt het me een mooi voorbeeld bij het boek van Dale Carnegie.

Nu jij

(Glimlach) Ik ben oprecht geïnteresseerd in naar verhalen uit andere communities! Als je ook maar een beetje succes hebt met community management moeten dit soort verhalen niet moeilijk te herinneren zijn. Hopelijk heeft mijn verhaal je geïnspireerd en wil je jouw succesverhaal ook delen met andere Nederlandse Community Managers.

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst op www.communitymanagers.nlSimilar Posts:

Your Community is Under Attack

Melle Gloerich — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:10:53 +0000

We know communities are valuable, we preach it every day. We are successful in showing how important a community is and now others are seeing the value of communities as well. It sounds like good news and it is, but they also start to look for ways to use it. And where you are responsible for the health of a community, they get valued for what they get out of a community. This difference means that your community is under attack from all directions: From outside your company and even more dangerously, from the inside.

Who is attacking my community?

Basically everybody who doesn’t share your desire to make your community a succes is a potential attacker. But with this attitude, you can’t really trust anyone, so let’s forget this and look for signs of someone who is trying to use your community at the cost of the community.
First let´s look for outside attackers: Someone asks you to do something with your community and doesn´t really know what your community is about. Secondly, if someone proposes a deal but there isn´t a easy way to explain what your community gains from it. Third, someone who says something about ´just this once´. Fourth, someone who mostly talks about how good, big, succesful, his or her company is. Fifth, someone who, when asked to participate in your community first, never signs up.

But outside attackers are easy, just say no to them and you´re probably saved from this particular attacker. Inside jobs are the ones to watch out for.

If you see a mostly inactive user suddenly become active with product pitches or several links to the same (company) website. Calling such a member is almost always the solution, most of the time, they don’t really see what they’re doing wrong and can become active users who contribute greatly to a community if you tell them how they can participate in a healthy way.

The real inside jobs are the ones from departments from your company who don’t directly benefit from a healthy community but can reach their target by undermining your community. You know what I mean: The marketing department that wants to send an email to all the community members. The sales department that swarms around members on events to sell them stuff. Upper management that wants to double the number of members with strange deals and disturb the community with the fall out.

What can I do to defend my community?

The good news is that you’re experienced in improving your community in all kinds of ways. You are probably trained for years to look for opportunities. Make use of the energy someone uses to make use of your community and deflect this to the community’s best interest. If an outside marketeer wants to advertise a product, get a unique discount for members only. If an event-organizer wants your community members to register, negotiate a special area for members of your community and organize a meet-up for your members. If your boss just asks how many members the community has gained, ask him/her how many members he knows and has interacted with. Explain how a community gets more members as his number grows.

But most importantly, never do anything unless you believe it is right for your community and can honestly and enthusiastically talk about the deals you’ve negotiated. Your community is doomed if you can’t, but you’re adding insult to injury.

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Tools for Community Management

Melle Gloerich — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:22:22 +0000

Tools (by S. Svadilfari)

There seem to be lots and lots of tools for social media professionals, but as community managers what kind of tools are essential? We need different kinds of tools, or maybe we do need tools in different way. What tools do you use every day? Do you make use of some special features not many people know?

By no means is this list complete, but it works for me! I greatly appreciate new suggestions.

Telephone

There’s just no way you can do your job without one.

Google Reader

You need to stay in touch what’s happing on many sites about the subject of your community. Google Reader is perfect to read hundreds of sites, get recommendations about articles of friends or community members and just one click away from sharing nice articles via twitter and your website (you need to add a clip to your site (via shared items, sharing settings). You can see my shared items here.

Google Analytics

You do need to know what your members and readers (potential new members) are looking at on your website or forum. It is very cool to see how people formulate what they are looking for at Google and thus via what kinds of keywords people find you. Google Analytics is, to my knowledge, one of the most easy and advanced tools for webanalytics.

Google keyword tool

Especially when your new to the subject of your community, the Google Keyworld Tool is easy way to learn about words that are used by people like the people in your community.

Twitter Search

Who’s talking about the topics your community is about? Use the Advanced Twitter Search feature if your community is local or in a language other than english. Search only for tweets in an area, for example if you’re looking for people in The Netherlands: search within 130 miles of Utrecht. You can adjust the distance to your exact wishes in the url after your first search with a distance.

Google Alert

Google Alerts you when the name of your community is mentioned anywhere on the internet, so you can act upon it. You might use this for competing communities as well, just to know where people are who you might want in your community.

Datumprikker (‘pick a date’)

‘Pick a date’ or Datumprikker, you can use this dutch tool with english settings. It does exactly what you think it does, it makes it easy to find a pick a date if you’re going to meet up with several people. Something which no community can do without.

Google Groups

You might want to create small groups of experts of a different topics. It’s very important for teambuilding that a group can easily reach one another without sending a message to someone specific. I’m slowly starting to get annoyed by too much strange behaviour, chaotic UI and requirements of Google Groups. What do you use for mailinglists?

Tweetdeck

Sure, everybody uses Twitter, but keeping a good view on what’s happening in your community and in the rest of the world on the subject of you community is something else. Tweetdeck is constantly improving and has a lot of advanced features (ie. filter Foursquare out of your timeline) and You can use Tweetdeck with multiple Twitter-accounts, which is nice if you have a personal and a community-account. Also, having specific twitter searches in a column allows you to monitor discussions and topics.

SnagIt

Easy screencapture application that just does what you expect it does.

Google docs (and forms)

If you want to create a quick poll or form and have it online in one click, this is the easiest way to do it. Open Google Docs and click on ‘create new’ -> form. Easy as that. When you copy the layout and questions from a previous poll, remember to not only clear the answers in the spreadsheet but also to delete the rows entirely. Otherwise Google doesn’t see the spreadsheet as empty and will use previous answers to the summery of a new form.

dlvr.it

You probably know twitterfeed.com as a service for automatically sharing new blogposts or articles posted in your community via twitter. dlvr.it is much more reliable and shares new posts much faster.

bit.ly

You want to know how many people share your links on twitter and how many people click in those links. This is the tool for it. The best part of it, it is highly automated: To automatically shorten links and link them to your bit.ly account to get a nice overview of the click statistics copy the bit.ly API Key from the settings to Tweetdeck (settings -> services). To shorten everything you share via dlvr.it copy the same bit.ly API Key to dlvr.it (settings -> short links -> add shortener -> bit.ly -> make default)

Yammer

The jury is not out on whether Yammer is the next big thing for communities or just another platform you need to monitor and manage. It basically is Facebook for communities or companies

What else?

I’m sure I forgot a whole bunch of tools that I use on a less regular basis. What kind of tools do you use?

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Getting a ‘Now Live!’ Community

Melle Gloerich — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 21:26:09 +0000

When I was a kid in the 80′s, there were only 2 dutch tv-channels. When something cool was on, you were sure to talk about it the next day because most of the people would’ve seen it. You knew your friends watched it too! Maybe you are one of those girls that chatted on the phone with a friend about the show you watched together!
I can’t recall exactly if adding a 3th channel changed the way we talked about television the next day but I’m sure it has changed somewhere along the line up to the point where we are now.
And that is a sad thing. Remember the conversations with friends? “When they guy said xxxyyyzz…” “yeah, but I thought he said zzzyyyqqq and I had to laugh so hard!”. What’s the last time you’ve had one of those conversations?

You’ve seen this happening in your community.

The same thing happened in your community and maybe you didn’t even noticed it. When your community had only 12 members, they knew one another’s names. They read the same blogposts and read every single forum-post. They knew what someones stance was on certain topics. If someone wrote a opinionated forum-post, people were waiting for a certain person to respond. Now your community has several thousand members, very good, but do they know one another? Do they think “ooh, I can’t wait to read what Bob has to say about this”?

Television is getting better.

Maybe you’ve noticed that watching television right now can be a lot more interesting than watching your recorded copy. How come? Twitter! It is really easy to join the conversation about a show that is one right now. It’s a good reminder how big television still is if you see how fast it updates.
The thing that makes it more interesting is the feeling that someone sees the exact same thing and is yelling at the television just like you do. And that you can read this.

How to get this intimacy back?

Don’t worry, you can get some of this magic back in the community. It takes a while, but what doesn’t in community management? Their are lots of tools out there to enable live conversations. Richard Millington rightly notes chat enables you to easily deepen your communication. That might be why chat-rooms were one of the first things available on the Internet (even before website with pictures). Check out Chatzy, it is very clean, simple and don’t need you to sign-up or download anything.
You might want to pick a time and day to increase to number of people who are there at the same time.
If you’re not scared of camera’s, I recommend Livestream to interview people and broadcast live. People can comment by chat and can ask questions for example. I’m doing that every wednesday at 4 o’clock with a different guest every week.

There’s still lot to improve

Our ‘TV’ show is not where I want it to be, still the amount of people who watch it and ask questions increases. It’s hard to find a ‘perfect’ time to go live. Getting people to ask questions when you’re in the middle of an interview isn’t easy either. I’m also thinking about the way we can improve the live experience in comparison with watching it afterwards, because I as well as the guests really like a big live audience.
If you’ve got some advice, I really appreciate it!Similar Posts:

10 Things to do with Points in your Community

Melle Gloerich — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:40:05 +0000

In order to grow and keep a healthy community we need to leverage our community management skills as much as we can. In my last post I talked about game mechanics in general and the good and bad kinds of points in a community. Points are interesting for a reason: they are an explicit, automated response to behavior and are just a potential. We have to do something with them to unlock that potential. And that’s where game mechanics kick in. I’d like to define the goal of game mechanics in communities as ’to automate responses to activities of members of your community in order to increase participation.’ So how do we unlock that potential? What do we do with the points?

Why do people do things? Basically it is to get these 3 things: Fun, Money and Authority. If you don’t want to pay for points, we need to help members get closer to or get a feeling of these 3 things. It depends on the person and the task what kind of mix he wants. Some just want money, others get a kick out of being seen as a authority. So how do we help them reach their goals? There are lots of examples, but find these the most useful in a random order. Remember though: If you start with points, you start a game no matter how you look at it. Games need constant tweaks and adjustments, are you ready for it?

Ranking
Score on profile page
Status upgrades
Form an elite group
Make restricted content available
Build up a profile on what content somebody likes
Make statistics available
Show their profile everywhere you can
Real life present
Badges

1) Ranking

Find the metric you like the best to rank people. Total collection of points? Total logins? Best answer on a forumpost? Watch out for ranking people because it alienates people who aren’t competitive. More importantly, it will define what a lot of people will strive for, and are likely to find ways to game the system. Do you really value logins that much? Is answering or starting a topic in the forum really worth points if it’s nonsense or in the ‘chatter’-subforum?

2) Score on the profile page

People draw some status from a high number. Do you know from the top of your mind how many followers you have on twitter by a margin of 5%? Do you think somebody else will know your number of followers? Hardly anyone, right? But you still want to increase that number!

3) Status upgrades

People don’t really strive for more points but for the status the points come with. It sounds a lot better when you say that you’re a ‘rising star’ than to say that you’ve got 182 points. Also it is an easy way to feel close to somebody else when you’ve got the same status, especially if it takes a while to reach it. When you’ve playing games you know that the first level is really easy to finish, so should a beginners status be. Nobody likes to be a beginner, so if someone has posted 2 or 3 forum messages you might want to promote him to ‘explorer’. Besides that, most people in your community don’t know what it takes to reach that level because they’ve never posted 2 of 3 messages, they are the lurkers (I prefer ‘audience’).

4) Form an elite group

Just like different status slice and dice your community into different groups, explicitly inviting somebody into a ‘invite only’ group really makes people feel they’re are appreciated. Never underestimate the power of a small group of like-minded people having pizza together. Let them formulate how the community thinks about that topic. Do something special with it. Videotape it, let them make a whitepaper, make a press-release They’ll trust each other way faster when they’ve had a informal but useful get together. Create an email-list, facilitate intensive communication. Hopefully they inspire each other and good things come out of it.

5) Make restricted content available

A litte bit like an elite group, something that is only available to special members will make it feel way more valuable. When your community is one around a brand or a product, make previews or beta products available. Let them know earlier in the process what you are developing for the community, new features on the website or an event for example.

6) Build up a profile on what content somebody likes

It takes some advance features of your content management, but if you’ve got people voting content up and down, you know what kind of articles they like. If someones blogs about something, and uses tags and categories, you might as well use those hints of what they like. Maybe you want to show more of the stuff they like. If somebody constantly votes 9/10 on articles by the same author, maybe they want to know when that person writes a new article and get an email.

7) Make statistics available

Once again you can link this to number of points or to a certain status. Making statistics available of any kind triggers people to find out stuff. Whenever somebody blogs, I grant them access to the Google Analytics for the blog they’ve written an article for. Some of them just like to see how many views they’ve got, other people look for keywords and refering sites, and all of them like the gesture and are getting more engaged.

8 ) Show their profile everywhere you can

Sure, every forumpost has the authors profile next to it. Also a blogpost isn’t complete without a sentence or picture of the author. But why stop there? For every kind of point someone gets, you might want to decide to have the member featured somewhere on your site. Someones first contribution should be celebrated! Make their profile featured on the frontpage. Tell them it’s featured, make a really easy to twitter this event! If somebody already has some friends or connections before writing their first comment, make it really easy to let them notify their friends about him being on the frontpage (or do it automatically).

9) Real life present

Sure, bells and whistles on a website are cool, but remind someone of their status every day for years probably takes something tangible. Send the top 10/20/50 of your members a coffee-mug with their name and status on it, and of course a small logo of your community. They will use it, and if they take it to work, people will ask about that status.

10) Badges

The boyscouts do it. Foursquare does it. Big Door does it. Bunchball does it. But should you? If you start giving away badges for special activities, there’s no stopping it. I started using Fousquare a few months ago, got 12 badges but can’t be bothered to check in again because there’s hardly any badges I can get. When you use badges, make sure that the activities people need to do are still way more important than the badge. If people start to do things for badges, they stop when they’ve got enough and will game the system whenever they can to get their badges.

What activities to monitor?

Everybody knows what things a perfect member of your community does, but how do you translate that to the language your website understands? Next post I’m going into the different kinds of user activity you might want to log and find a interesting use for via points.Similar Posts: