Online community

Tara Hunt (Miss Rogue)
Betsy Aoki (Microsoft)
Elisa Camahort (BlogHer)

Tara Hunt
Stop pushing messages to customers. Listen to the messages coming from customers.
Reward your customers.

Betsy Aoki
Microsoft's "blog queen". Self-titled, but that was the only way I had to describe what I did.
Blogs on MSDN has been a company-changing experience.
Making community happen at your company.
Ridiculous success story: smart people blogging about things they love. No blogging policy then or now. Authentic.
We never advertised - it's the "no marketing" school of community.
600% increase in RSS feeds in the first year.
At other companies, people get fired for blogging. People think of Microsoft as the essence of corporate America, but we've been very progressive in this area.
It works in environments where you think it might not.

GotDotNet
People get together with other people and work on code. Even when it was neglected by Microsoft, the site was successful. Even when the features were broken, the servers deteriorating, the users angry. I was given the task of bringing it back and refurbishing it.
I was the person who always answered the customer e-mail. I'm not a kindly customer support person, I'm a program manager! But because they got answers from me, I helped to turn perception around while we got the product up and working again.

QnA
Leaked in May before we were ready to talk about it. We'd put together a plan - for several months, all you could do was read theblog. There was a form to sign up for the private beta. Hundreds signed up on the basis of the blog. It kept people thinking about it.
The purity of the question and answer format - how would it work out in a community?
Actually a lot of personality, people track certain people's questions.
As they saw new people come in, some folks evangelized the code of conduct. You don't often see that!
Launched with a group of people who felt like a tribe. What kind of tribe? We'll find out.


Elisa Camahort
BlogHer
When Tara talks about introspection, commitment, and honesty, I agree those are critical factors.
Bloggers on BlogHer, independently of the site, began interviewing one another online to got comfortable with the idea of meeting each other.BlogHer found out, contacted them, offered a logo and support.
The community will tell you where to go, and will go there with you.


Q and A

B to B examples? Competitive aspect, detecting a poser from the competition.

Betsy:
Questions come up over and over at QnA. One is, "Isn't this just like Yahoo Answers?" Guy kept on and on about Yahoo Answers, had Yahooza user name. We let the community handle it. We took the high road and looked better.

Elisa:
Strong communities will self-police.

Tara:
One good way to deal with troublemakers is to promote them. They want attention. You give it to them.

Elisa:
Interesting way is to take the gadflies...let the community know you're open to debate, don't shut the gadflies down. But give them the opportunity to put their money where their mouth is.

Tara:
B2B, there's all sorts of ways to create communities.
If you work with your competitors, it strengthens your category. "If Google's doing it too, we must be doing something right."

Betsy:
Microsoft is very developer-oriented...

(Tara begins playing the Steve Ballmer "Developers, developers, developers" video in the background as Betsy speaks.)

By emitting so much RSS, we allow you to do all sorts of things with our content. It's really your content, so with RSS you give us your content and then take it back out with you. It's the future of community communications. You get to take what you like of your content with you and show it off at your site.


Concept of a slowly developing community seems related to personal side. Other cases, communities have to develop rapidly or no one will use it. Like Wikipedia. There often is a QA mechanism - a small number of people influence the content heavily. Does that have an impact on your types of communities?

Elisa:
As we've grown, we've gotten community managers. We're different because we have editors who work for us, troll blogs listed in the blogrolls, and write about what they're saying. We control the quality of that insofar as we have good editors.
"We want a certain number of posts, a certain number of links to women bloggers."
It's not about quality, not about telling people what they should be interested in in the forums. Sometimes people just talk about whatever in whatever category. Maybe we need better forum areas to make it more relevant.
It's a fine line between hands on and hands off, and also how much your community expects.
B2B maybe more hands on. Users don't expect to be able to do anything they want.

Betsy:
Switching from developers to consumer (Qna), shift in thinking. The broader your audience is, the wackier stuff you could get in there.

I made a "cod of conduct" - a cartoon cod with a top hat who would say various things in response to violations of the code of conduct.

Tara:
Yeah, you should always have fun with community interactions. The more fun you make it, the less chance there is of conflict. "It's not us, it's the cod."

Elisa:
I bring people's attention to really hot but civilized debates, posts with lots of comments.
Enforcing guidelines makes some people mad and they leave, but it makes most people feel that there's a safe space for debate. Civil disagreement.

Tara:
Having public disagreement and criticism of the company or the community can be beneficial, telling you where you need to improve.

Elisa:
But not every company is ready to have that conversation in public. Microsoft clearly is, but not everyone else's culture supports that.

If you're a blogger, don't you already belong to a community, do you need to create one?

Betsy:
If I like bath bombs but don't read other people or comment on their stuff, I'm talking to myself.

Elisa:
There's not a community for knitting bloggers, but knitting bloggers do amazing cross-blog interactions. Knitting Olympics, etc.

90% of people in a community lurk. But they feel like they're a part of the community.

Elisa:
Some membership is really onerous, requires people to change their behavior. John Bell at Ogilvie posted about this.

Can community be engineered, or must it be organically grown?

Tara:
Both.

Betsy:
It's like throwing a party. If you don't have the drinks set up, you don't have the food, you don't have the music or enough space, people won't come.

Elisa:
Someone at Flickr greeted every new member, checked out what they were doing, directed them to relevant groups. She considered herself a hostess.

Tara:
People are giving you their time. Make them feel that their presence is really important.

Elisa:
Go to your existing customer base. Ask them, your existing community, what they would come online to visit you every day for.

Tara:
Don't blast an e-mail to them. Pick community members for a one on one. Make yourself available. "Tell us how we're doing" surveys don't cut it.


What's the difference between traditional market research - focus groups, surveys, mass e-mail questions - and what we're talking about here?

Betsy:
If you don't get a viral reaction - self-policing, customers referring customers, you don't have it.

Tara:
You're not going to get real answers through those methods. They aren't real conversations. Have real conversations with community members, record them. You get better qualitative data, rather than the quantitative data.

Elisa:
When you're with your partner and they say, "What are you thinking?" your answer is very different than it would be if they weren't there. There's pressure, ramifications. You respond with artifice or distance. When you listen to what the community is saying, you're catching them unguarded.

When I blog, I tend to forget that the people I write about are real people and might e-mail me. So I'm not as careful about what I say. I'm more honest. As a result, I sometimes get e-mail from people I write about!


Re: hoops, and registration, is it better to use an existing community platform like LiveJournal where people are already registered?

Betsy:
Is it appropriate for your business? LiveJournal probably isn't.

Elisa:
I recommend the existing hosting platforms. It's find for a professional to use TypePad. It depends on your audience too. How professional does it need to look? Who's your customer base? Are they on LiveJournal or MySpace? If so, you could use them.