Blogs | Social Signal

I've just started a facebook group for Oberlin Alumni in Social Technology" -- either nonprofit technology specifically, or social media more generally. I have this theory that the nptech scene must include a fair number of Obies, and I'd love to connect with them. So I'm starting the hunt, and hoping I might even surface some fellow alums who will be at the upcoming NTEN conference in DC. If you're an Obie and you're reading this, please join the Facebook group or post a comment here.

There's a superb post by Kathy Sierra at the Creating Passionate Users blog about user-submitted questions and answers, which are at the heart of many online communities – especially the ones built around forums.

Here's how questions and answers typically work on those sites:

There's a great article by Kevin Hogan in the latest issue of Credit Union Management, all about how credit unions are using online communities like blogs to engage members and the public. It's required reading for folks in that industry, but it's also a great general-purpose organizational blogging primer.

Web marketing 1.0 taught companies one simple principle: brand big. Make your brand visible and consistent by spreading your logo and brand message across your site (ideally with a few demonstrations of your web team’s Flash prowess) and throughout the Internet (through the awesome power of banner ads).

That approach worked great – or at least ok – in the era of content push. But while a great Web 1.0 site was as good as the marketing and web team behind it, a good Web 2.0 site is only as good as the people who contribute to it. And that makes all the difference.

You can have the best web developers in the city and the smartest marketers in the country, but if your customers don’t want to play – if they don’t want to put their words, profiles, voices, photos or videos on your site – you’re going to have a hard time creating a Web 2.0 community.

The trick is creating a site where people want to play. For a few lucky brands – like media companies, Nike or Apple – customers care enough about the product or brand that they’re happy to come and talk about your products. For everybody else, the best way to tap the power of Web 2.0 is to create an online community that has intrinsic value, and let the activities of that community reflect positively on the parent company's brand.

If your organization is listed in Wikipedia, the community-edited online encyclopedia, congratulations. Quite apart from the virtues of collaborative editing, Wikipedia entries often rank at or near the top of Google search results.

Now break open your RSS aggregator. You're going to want to add a new subscription immediately... because nearly anybody could be editing your entry.

Here's what you do: navigate to your Wikipedia page. (Here's a shot from the entry about Wikipedia itself.)

If you're like Alex, you're already in Las Vegas at the Community 2.0 conference, and good on you. The rest of us aren't bitter about your hot, sunny days and your swimming pools and your rubbing elbows with fellow leaders in the social web. Not in the least.

Why? Because if we can't go to Community 2.0, Community 2.0 will go to us. Here's how they're expanding participation beyond the conference rooms, hallways and luxurious spa treatments rigorous breakout sessions:

• The Future of Communities, a companion blog to the conference.
• A discussion forum.
• A Gabbly chat page, for live chats.
• A dedicated IRC chat channel.
• The tag community2.0, for aggregating content on Technorati, photos on Flickr and (thanks, Lou!) bookmarks on del.icio.us.

Updates are in italics.

I'm writing this from the Community 2.0 conference, which promises to be two great days of inspiration on online community building and management. It got off to a great start with a presentation by John Hagel on "What's Possible? Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities".

Here are some of the highlights of John's talk:

How do we create effective online community?

1. What do we mean by community?
2. What skill sets are needed?
3. What mind shifts are needed?
4. What organizational structure is needed?

1. What is community?

There's a tendency to regard anything that's interaction as community.
The emphasis of real community establish connections among people so they can participate in shared discussions over time, leading to a complex web of relationships, and to an increased identification with the overall community.

Twitter seems to be the new addictive social networking app on the block. (For those new to the phenom, it's a site that lets you tell your friends what you are doing RIGHT NOW, and to see what they're doing, too.) But I haven't been able to get into the addiction cycle, because I don't have any friends. :(

Why? Because unlike other social networks -- Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster spring to mind -- Twitter doesn't provide a way to mine your address book for fellow Twitter-ers. As far as I can tell, if I upload my address book to Twitter, EVERYONE gets an invitation to be my Twitter buddy, whether they're Twittering or not. I can see how this helps to spread Twitter, but since I don't want to annoy my entire contact list with invitations to all the social networks I check out, it makes it very hard to get up and running on Twitter.

So consider this a triple request:

1. If you're using Twitter, ping me or add me to your friends list.
2. If there IS a way to make Twitter scan my contact list for fellow Twitterers, please let me know.
3. Twitter, if there ISN'T a way to scan my contact list for fellow Twitterers, could you add it? Or could you at least allow me to scan my buddies on other social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook -- not just LiveJournal, which is the only one you currently connect to?

Last month, writing about our Web 2.0 valentine, I mentioned one of the surprises to come out of our little meme:

We've been involved in memes that went viral, but never one of our very own. And interestingly, the number one name in meme propagation, Digg, had very little to do with it; a vastly more significant chunk of traffic came via StumbleUpon. Which suggests to me that, just as you can't reliably predict whether something will catch fire, you never know where it will happen, either.

We aren't the only ones to notice this underappreciated web tool. Darren Barefoot at Capulet has a terrific, well-documented report on how StumbleUpon compared to Digg with two memes of his, iCryptex and First Life.

And he has charts and graphs to back him up, the most dramatic of which shows traffic to iCryptex.com after six months:

StumbleUpon tends to start small – which was our experience as well – but it is, as Darren says, "the gift that keeps on giving." It's still going strong on our site, too.

He sounds a cautionary note about reading too much into those numbers, though:

Earlier I called StumbleUpon visitors 'infovores'. That's true--they're definitely greater consumers of online information than the average person.

In shopping terms, the StumbleUpon user is browsing while the Digg user is buying. The very name and nature of StumbleUpon suggests a more casual, serendipitous relationship with the Web than the average voracious (and sometimes downright snippy) Digg user. There's no way to compare the broader (and no doubt greater) echo effect of Digg with that of StumbleUpon.

That's happened at our end, too. StumbleUpon users have tended to hit the one page and then move on to another site – suggesting an approach of browsing StumbleUpon rather than the sites it links to. Digg users (who are, in fairness, more technologically focused) linger and poke around.

If you're interested in the tools that drive web traffic, Darren's post is a must-read. One last excerpt, and then you really ought to check it out for yourself:

At Gnomedex last summer, people kept referring to 800-pound gorillas like Delicious and Digg. At the time I pointed out that instead of one big gorilla, maybe we needed 100 eight-pound orangutans. I failed zoology, because orangutans can weigh up to 175 lb. Based on the anecdotal evidence, though, it looks like StumbleUpon has been eating its fill of bananas. While Digg gets most of the attention these days, it's easy to forget that there are other primates in the jungle.