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 (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

Google Reader

Google Analytics

Google keyword tool

Twitter Search

Google Alert

Datumprikker (‘pick a date’)

Google Groups

Tweetdeck

SnagIt

Google docs (and forms)

dlvr.it

bit.ly

Yammer

What else?

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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:

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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?

1. Ranking
2. Score on profile page
3. Status upgrades
4. Form an elite group
5. Make restricted content available
6. Build up a profile on what content somebody likes
7. Make statistics available
8. Show their profile everywhere you can
9. Real life present
10. 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:

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So where to start? Points of course, what else?

What are points?

Points are potential. Points are transferable in different currencies but are nothing by themselves. Think of it as money: Nobody wants to die with a fat savings account, but with a life full of incredible experiences. Money in itself means nothing, but almost anything has a monetary value. Yes, it almost sounds like economics and philosophy. Try to define to what points are converted to by your community members because if you know what they want, you can help them get it. Is it status? Is it a free e-book? Is it access to an elite group? Is it a way of measuring achievement? Aren’t points converted to anything? Not that easy now, is it?

The different kinds of getting points

Even if your score increases with 1 point, it matters a great deal on what kind of point it is.  In my opinion there are 3 axis to define what kind a point is:

1. Social vs system
2. Monotonous vs creative
3. Surprising vs expected

1) Social vs System

A social point is when someone else is responsible for giving you this point. Somebody made an effort to signal that you’ve done something they can appreciate. When somebody likes your status on Facebook it is an example of a social point. A system point is the exact opposite of a social point: a system (a set of rules) is defined to give you a point. After killing a dragon you get 10 points. Most of the time a social point is a lot more valuable than a system point.

2) Monotonous vs creative

The task you complete to get a point makes you value a point in different ways. When somebody gets a gold medal for doing the dishes he won’t start crying, but if he gets it for finishing first in a marathon which he has trained years for, he probably will start crying. I think you have got monotonous task on the one hand that don’t need much attention just a bit of your time and you’ve got creative tasks on the other where you need to think and act creatively. Creative tasks might seem easy or even dull in retrospect but they need your attention when you do them at first. If you do the same creative task over and over again in the exact same way, it is monotonous.

Getting points for something creative gives a player a lot more joy for a longer time than receiving it for a task he doesn’t really like in the first place. Monotonous task points are just for the points, creative tasks points are celebrated while accomplishing something.

3) Surprising vs expected

The amount of points and the timing of them can surprise us. A surprise in itself is something most people enjoy so points that are unexpected and surprising are more than just a point, they are signs you’re on the right track and you feel joy that you’ve done what you just did. Getting a ‘nice job!’ from your boss every time you finish something don’t mean anything after a while. Getting a card all of the sudden with ‘nice job!’ means a lot more. When you can surprise somebody in a positive way, why wouldn’t you?

So now we start implementing points in our community?

Well, no. More and more evidence shows that getting people to do things by themselves for a longer time is not by giving them a reward for it. I’m not completely convinced though, because in the examples and research they did they saw points as points as points while there are different kinds, in my opinion. Nobody ever gets tired of getting an honest compliment from somebody who cares.

So I think we need to think out a great ‘reward recipe’ for our communities. You want to motivate community members to become active, so the first few times they sign in or like a post you want to automatically congratulate him. Also, when someone writes a well constructed forumpost you want to stimulate that kind of behaviour. Points still might be a first step towards getting them closer to something they like or want. So if you communicate very clearly what points might get someone they start dreaming of it, and if it sounds doable, they start collecting points for it.

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Spotify HQ Logo by Jon Åslund

If  you love music, there’s no way around Spotify. But like the 2006 version of Youtube isn’t comparable with the current Youtube, Spotify won’t be the same in a year or two. Let me show you how I think Spotify will position itself on the social/music spectrum in the coming months or years.

As most of the websites and webservices that are created the last few years, Spotify is social site. That just means that it gets better if you have some friends who also use it. But this simply observation is fundamental to improve on Spotify since we have to look at ways to improve on the social aspect of the service, since they got the core functionality (streaming music) alread nailed.

Social Objects

Every popular social site has one or more social object. These are objects which are central to the experience of that site and which you can share somehow, often via a URL. On Facebook the social objects are profilepages and fanpages. Youtube uses video’s and profilepages as social objects. Twitter uses profilepages and tweets. More on Social objects on Andy Roberts blog, Hugh McLeods blog)

What are the social objects of Spotify? Hint: It’s not music.

It’s lists of music (playlists) and people who make, collect and share cool playlists. And boy, is it difficult to act on those objects! It is very hard to find other people on Spotify (other than importing your friends from Facebook) and only via these people can you discover new playlists. You can’t even search for playlists or users!

At least they made it possible to link to both user and playlist on their website so (lots of!) other people can figure out a way to improve on discovering interesting playlists and people who who make, collect and share these playlists. Sure, Spotify still collects the monthly fee ($5 – $10) so it seams like it’s all good but what if a site similar to Spotify comes along? Exporting your playlists isn’t that hard, so if this site offers something better (all the music Spotify has plus Bob Dylan/Beatles) people are leaving without too much exit costs. Everybody knows that discussions, comments, likes, etc. are a different thing to export.

Where should Spotify now focus on?

With competitors starting their engines, the first mover advantage isn’t really securing Spotify’s future since people don’t have much exit costs. There’s hardly any lock-in. That’s a good thing for consumers obviously, but making Spotify better and thus harder to leave should still be top-priority and hard to argue against. Because Spotify lacks so much basic ways to act on a social object, they should start there.

What do I mean?

First: Spotify should make searching for playlists and users waaaay easier. Don’t do anything else before you’ve fixed that!

Next, think about what users want to do with playlists and other users.

• What about discussing a playlist with other subscribers?
• What about voting on songs that should be in or taken out of that playlists?
• What about annotating playlists so people can see what you want to share and make notes about what songs are still missing from Spotifys library but should be included?
• What about making folders of playlists?
• What about chatting with somebody

That’s just from the top of my mind, what else should Spotify improve in interacting with playlists and users?Similar Posts:

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But if you can’t force other people and you can’t start discussions yourself, what other options are left?

News items

They don’t have as big a footprint as discussions do and that’s exactly what you want. The barrier to post a news-item is really low, literally just copy/paste. People can adjust some fields, but that isn’t even necessary.  There’s no need to follow a news-item or responding to comments. They can, but they don’t have to. But the best part is that even if you post several news-items a day, it doesn’t feel like interrupting to someone when they post something as well. So you can go right ahead and start posting interesting articles. At least something is happening and there’s value being created in this group. Also important to know

But there’s more – RSS

Posting news-items is a feature that is greatly undervalued. Why? Because you don’t need to be logged in to LinkedIn to share news-items.

As a group manager you can access a special tab in your group called ‘Manage’. One of the options that shows up in that tab is ‘selecting news-feeds’. If you want to automatically post items that you or other people write on a (group-)weblog enter the RSS-feed of that weblog inhere. When a blogpost is posted a an hour ago or so it shows up at ‘news’ in your LinkedIn-group. Especially with the new look of Linkedin with Discussions and News mixed in with eachother is really valuable.

Still a little bit more – Shared items

If you read your daily news mainly via Google Reader, and I suggest you do, you can share interesting articles by just clicking ‘share’ when you read it. The webpage where these items are posted to are something along the lines of www.google.com/reader/user/name . Check your sharing settings to be sure of that page. That page has an RSS-feed. And you know what to do with RSS feeds and LinkedIn by now. So even when you are checking Google Reader on your mobile while waiting for the menu in a restaurant it is really easy to share items which get syndicated to LinkedIn.Similar Posts:

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I have no iTunes songs or mp3′s from Amazon. Why? Because it doesn’t feel like I own the music, so that’s no upgrade from my illegal MP3′s . And what happens when Apple or Amazon shuts down its store? What do I actually own when I download an MP3? According to Amazon, they grant me the non-transferable right for personal use. I can’t sell it, so I don’t own it. Do they license it? No because if I my hard drive crashes with my freshly downloaded mp3′s on it, tough luck, I need to buy them again. Same thing for Apple iTunes.

So why the hell would I wanna buy the rights to download a song only once?

Does downloading music legally make me feel better than downloading it illegaly? Ironically, it’s just the other way around. Some prive bittorrent fora are just really nice to communicate with other fans (Dutch) who share the music they love so they can talk with people who might love that music as well.

The Big Question

What kind of rights is music gonna have in the near future? Is every band gonna release its songs for free and finds a way to make money on hard to copy experiences, like concerts and personalized items? Is every euro (sure doesn’t sounds as cool as dollar) I spend now, a waste of my money because the music I’m buying will be free in a few years time? Some of my cd’s are already skipping parts of the songs.

I don’t want to buy the same CD over and over again. Bob Dylans Blonde on Blonde is a masterpiece, obviously well worth the €9,99. But don’t think twice about it, I am not gonna buy that cd over and over again. So were do I turn to when this cd starts to skip tracks? Not to iTunes, not to Amazon, not even to the record shop around the corner. You guessed it right: I fire up my browser and point it to The Pirate Bay or one of the private fora. Which is illegal.

I don’t want to be a thief

But they make it so hard not to be one. I spend a fair amount of money on music and concert tickets and I am still a thief. And you know what, I know I still don’t know amazing bands touring in my region because record labels fail to inform me about them because they don’t know what I like.Similar Posts:

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On your website you create useful content and whenever somebody finishes consuming it, you want to be as helpful as you can be to get him/her to read more of your content. Actually, when somebody clicks to the next article or to any other feature on your site, you want to whisper in his ear: “Yes, very good choice. Keep going”. Of course this might annoying every mouse-click but is essentially what you’re doing with good (interaction) design. Every time the user clicks he gets either satisfied, surprised or disappointed.

The moment you’ve been waiting for

I’m working a lot with LinkedIn lately and I even after a few weeks of heavy usage I still find out ways to really take LinkedIn to the next level. One of the most striking examples are automatic responses to activity in a group you are manager of. This is exactly the “Yes, very good choice. Keep going”-moment you’ve been waiting for. The person who joins actually expects a response and you can easily satisfy him by the default “Congratulations! You have been approved to join the group xxxx” or you can write something yourself. Something way better. Something that might trigger a newborn member to participate.

How do you do this?

You need to go to the group you are manager of and select the Manage-tab

After clicking on that tab you see a menu on the right-hand side, click on ‘Manage Templates’.

There are 4 templates, from which the ‘Welcome Message’ is the most important by far.

Click on and get creative with the message you want you newly joined group-member to read.

Now what?

You can figure out the message I created by becoming member of the ‘NGN’ group on LinkedIn.

What hidden features have you found on LinkedIn?Similar Posts:

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