He emphasized that you need to put your community’s needs first. Open communication should be encouraged without the concern of pointing outside your site and to your competitors when relevant.
Community is mostly not a technology problem. Here at KickApps we seamlessly take care of the technology side of things for you so you have more time and energy to concentrate on appointing what Hinchcliffe deems almost crucial, a community manager. In larger, communities hiring someone to engage in the community can be extremely effective especially when you choose a community manager who is already highly engaged and involved.
Measuring success with community requires new yardsticks. The pageview model of measurement for communities just doesn’t cut it and that we need to think of new methods. You can look at the size of your community, the number of new ideas generated and through KickApps widgets you can see how often your widgets are viewed and posted elsewhere giving a more 3D view of how successful your community is. Knowing your goals and objectives from the outset will all lead into how you design and run the community and your ability to measure how successful it is.
Realizing that there are various types of communities out there (Consumer social networks, grassroots customer communities, and business-initiated customer communities) and you really need to understand where your community fits in in order to serve the needs of your community properly.
It’s essential that there is a general feeling of mutual ownership and control in a community. The balance between the two can be a delicate art form involving three parts.
Making a set of rules of behaviors publicly available.
Enable community policing where possible (flagging).
You as the publisher have the moderation abilities to block IP addresses, delete posts, etc.
Check out the rest here, and download our white paper and webinar on building a Successful Social Media Website.
With Olympic fever in full swing this week, the blogosphere and Twittersphere has been buzzing with activity. People are sharing photos and videos from news media outlets and also people who are lucky enough to be in Beijing right now, like Rohit Bhargava.
This is a great example of social media at its finest. People are ‘programming’ the way they experience the Olympics by creating, choosing, consuming and sharing content that appeals to them. While NBC has the exclusive broadcast rights (and it’s still pretty damn cool to watch the competition live in HD), getting Twitter updates from people like Rohit and others about what they’re seeing gives us a nice perspective that didn’t exist before.
How can media companies take part in this? Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester blogged about how media companies and corporations should make their content embeddable. The blog post stems from a slideshow of photos of the Olympics which he posted on his blog. Jeremiah had found the slideshow on Sean Percival’s blog but later learned that the photos are originally from the Boston Globe. Missed opportunity? Jeremiah writes:
“The Boston Globe should have created the images in an embeddable media player or slide player that allows the images to quickly be shared from blogs, facebook profiles, and anywhere else those may talk about the Olympics. They should have links back to their site, give due credits, and even make a dynamic “learn more” at the end of the slideshow that they can change at will to recommend other content as it comes around. There are many widget developers that offer these services, that can also help content spread within Facebook and other social networks.”
In the world of the distributed web and the anti-portal, everyone can be considered a new distribution channel. A simple “Click Here For More” link turns a photo or video in the wild to a gateway back to your website. For your advertising types, think of it as an ad unit which takes the form of ‘earned’ media. You’ve created interesting content which people feel is worthy of sharing with their world of friends and followers.
The KickApps team was out in full force at Mashable’s SummerMashNYC at TOUCH on August 7th. We had a booth where the team gave demonstrations of our superior widgets and our stickers and balls were some of the most sought-after schwag. Check out this recap video starring Allen Stern of Centernetworks and Mashable’s own Pete Cashmore.
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