Online Community Report - Latest Comments

Re: Back to Basics: Want to Know What Community Members Need? Just Ask.

Kirby — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 14:41:04 -0000

Great stuff, Bill and team! Your series de-mystifies and crystallizes the field I've been working in for several years now.

Re: Back to Basics: Developing an Online Community Strategy

Cdeschamps — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:24:26 -0000

I believe your articles will provide many of us a roadmap to develop a quality social community.
I feel more comfortable communicating with a community that is specific to a topic or industry issue.
Thank you for your passion.

Re: Back to Basics: The Strategy Team & Goal Definition

Cdeschamps — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:11:21 -0000

Excelent; Very clear with step by step approach.

Re: Five Tips to Support Multiple Organization Collaboration Online

John Daniel — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 07:09:35 -0000

Awesome!Nice read..Thank you for the post.

Re: Social Media Strategy & Monitoring Research

40deuce — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:42:25 -0000

Thanks for sharing this! These are some really interesting stats.
I wonder about that size of organization section though. I wonder if smaller companies were more likely to respond to your survey, or if it's smaller companies that are using social media more than the larger ones.

Cheers,

Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos

Re: Social Media Strategy & Monitoring Research

Katie Morse — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:15:56 -0000

This looks like a thorough report, Heather. Thanks for including Radian6 in the summary! I find it really interesting that a majority of the companies you surveyed were using social media as a tool to drive traffic to their website. This is a bit of a different focus than I've personally seen some companies take, and I like the fact that they seem to be trying to tie their various marketing efforts together. It's interesting food for thought.

Katie
Community Manager | Radian6
@misskatiemo

Re: Ideas Sites: Interview with Rob Hoehn of IdeaScale

jnoble1 — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:50:54 -0000

A great example of a public ideas site is Adobe's Acrobat.com community. http://ideas.acrobat.com powered by Brightidea idea management solutions.

Re: Sustainable Community Building [for Humans]

Allen - Personalbrander — Wed, 12 May 2010 07:28:57 -0000

Certainly tools can make our way more comfortable but they may not always act as human! In addition to the above suggestions, I would add that there shouldn't be monotony in communities!

Re: Back to Basics: Developing an Online Community Strategy

tigeda — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:08:36 -0000

Great stuff. I'm just starting to develop an idea I first put to paper over a year ago, and this serieslooks like it will be a great help.

Re: Back to Basics: Developing an Online Community Strategy

sambrodie — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:17:41 -0000

Hey, where's the next post? :))

Re: Social Media for the Common Good: Interview with Ron Casalotti

Donovan Moore — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 17:59:49 -0000

I agree, it's the over 50 crowd that has the money. Kids these days have little money and it's spent on a few items- ipod, games, etc. weak market.

Re: Online Community Expert Interview: Dawn Lacallade, SolarWinds

Wiiliams — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 05:51:37 -0000

Nice article.Thanks for posting the interview of online community website expert Dawn Lacallade?

Re: SxSWi 2010: The Good Stuff (so far)

room dividers nyc — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 14:22:24 -0000

Thanks for providing links for more keynotes. Keep on posting!

Re: Back to Basics: Ecosystem Research – Find Your Community

steam showers — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:16:56 -0000

Very interesting!

You have published a few sites i was not aware of!

Re: 3 Sacred Cows About Online Communities That Need to Be Challenged

jkbennett — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:32:32 -0000

Great article. Fundamentals are often forgotten. Communities are going to be hard for many corporations. I think even the biggest operations have very little in the way of well thought out strategies that cascade through the organization well. But they do tend to control things from the top down that they don't understand as well as the those charged with doing it. Communities are an excellent example of this.

This weakness in social engagement is going to be a huge shift in the slate of players in a lot of very competitive and high value areas. I expect I will get a kick out of some of the giants making a mess of this arena.

Re: Back to Basics: The Strategy Team & Goal Definition

jkbennett — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 12:41:05 -0000

Very solid outline. This article set is just what I was interested in finding. I am looking forward to reading the rest. I wonder how many communities evolve from a different action percentage-wise in relation to more purposed efforts like the one described here.

Re: 3 Sacred Cows About Online Communities That Need to Be Challenged

awareobserver — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:34:52 -0000

Couple more cows. Social Media are so important and we all have be there and rush into it. Please don't take this for granted and do the same profiling, analysis and strategy work you would otherwise. 10% or even less of registered users of almost any web community is responsible for 100% of the given online activity (posts, comments, moderation, alerts, rumors, threads).

My investment is leveraged
There are almost no serious demographics studies and data available as owners prefer to control access to personal data (and so they should) and often would not want "true" activity figures be divulged. There is almost no serious financial analysis of the financial efforts required to sustain, maintain, refresh, edit, moderate a social presence vs sales, branding, top of mind, shares it generates. Just as for Google advertising, this is a closed loop environment controlled by the owners who tell you traffic figures almost always in contradiction with what ComScore, Neilsen and others observe. And they control ad pricing...

Re: 3 Sacred Cows About Online Communities That Need to Be Challenged

heatherstrout — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:12:00 -0000

Bill, I agree with all three of your "sacred cow" challenge statements. What's interesting is that these are all part of a larger list of items we hear over and over about how online communities *should* be created and managed. The truth is, every community implementation and management effort is different and all of them take a LOT of strategic focus and the successful ones integrate community into the fabric of the organization.

Great catching up with you at sxswi.

Heather | @heatherjstrout

Re: 3 Sacred Cows About Online Communities That Need to Be Challenged

Robyn Tippins — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:55:36 -0000

I think Sacred Cow #3 more refers to not building a forum for CompanyX Widgets, when there is already a huge community of Widget users, brand agnostic, at sitex. (ie in the offline world, it's better to take your discussions to the existing Town Hall rather than start up a new one for only your discussions).

Re: SxSWi 2010: The Good Stuff (so far)

shacker — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:04:28 -0000

Nice write up! Like you, I found Lanier's presentation to be the most inspirational talk I heard all week. And like you, I couldn't bear not to take as many notes as I could scribble. Here's my writeup:

http://birdhouse.org/blog/2010...

Notes from other SXSW sessions are here:
http://birdhouse.org/blog/tag/...

Re: Current Research: Social Marketing Compensation Study

JeskaD — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:48:57 -0000

Are the results posted somewhere? I saw on twitter that there was convo about it yesterday...

Re: Back to Basics: Developing an Online Community Strategy

sambrodie — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:43:03 -0000

Insightful. Practical. Fantastic posts!

Re: Back to Basics: Developing an Online Community Strategy

ocreport — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:37:58 -0000

Hi Jackie - great question. We roll out communities in phases. For instance:
An alpha phase would be for staff and a select group of customers / members to test the community platform, and give feedback on user experience, etc.
A beta phase would be for a wider audience, possibly based on invitations from alpha members, from a newsletter mailing list, etc.
The next phase would be a launch, where the community is open to the "public" (depending on your audience).

Point being: launching cold generally doesn't work, and with planning, you shouldn't be in the position to have to launch with 0 members.

Re: Back to Basics: Developing an Online Community Strategy

Jackie Nevill — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:14:16 -0000

Hi Bill,

I'm reading your blog with interest.

I just wanted to ask you, when first starting up a community website, would you suggest starting the interaction with "fake members". Otherwise, surely the first people to go to use the site would be driven away once they realise they are the first? Someone has to be the first? How do you deal with this?

Thanks,
Jackie

Re: Holistic Community Strategy

Jackie Nevill — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:43:10 -0000

Hi Bill,

I'm really interested in what you are talking about here. I dont suppose there is a video of your presentation? I'm very interested but it's not easy to really understand the points you are making simply from the slides.

Thanks muchly,
Jackie, Sydney - Australia