Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy

I made this month’s Inc. Magazine, in the “Ask Inc.” section of the magazine.

It’s a small quote, but I got a nice plug for the Online Community Report blog. The question to Inc. was about how to increase activity in a company’s online community. The part of my answer that was quoted (more or less correctly) was to to strive to be your communities most active participant.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/ask-inc_pagen_2.html

Technological Terror

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I have predicted that when people start talking on their mobiles while peeing again, we would be in another bubble.

As of 3:30 pm yesterday, we are officially in another bubble.

ps: I was not the guilty party.

pss: what’s up with that people?

Lee and Sachi LeFever from CommomCraft put together this hilarious and educational video on RSS.

In my opinion, great format!

Enjoy:

Click To Play

Cross-posted from the OC Report:

Tim O’Reilly has called for and drafted a Bloggers code of conduct, mostly in response to the over-the-top harassment that Kathy Sierra received a few weeks ago.

From the O’Reilly Radar blog:

We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation. But frankness does not have to mean lack of civility. We present this Blogger Code of Conduct in hopes that it helps create a culture that encourages both personal expression and constructive conversation.

1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.

2. We won’t say anything online that we wouldn’t say in person.

3. We connect privately before we respond publicly.

4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.

5. We do not allow anonymous comments.

6. We ignore the trolls.

I think Tim’s request is well-intentioned. As someone who was on the receiving end of a very nasty round of harassment on a personal blog a few years ago, I can empathize with the emotions Kathy probably felt. I can also understand the motivation Tim has to address the “civility problem”, via the proposed code.

The reality is, the best written code in the world is not going to effect the behavior of mean-spirited people who wish to annoy and harass others online. This has been an issue, more or less, since humans started communicating with one another. We can put policy, laws, and technical barriers in place, but if someone wants to be a jerk, especially online, they will be a jerk.

I applaud Tim for starting the conversation, and I feel for Kathy, and folks like Kathy, who have the courage to speak their mind and honestly express their feelings regularly on their blogs. I’m just not sure a “code of conduct” is going to help anything when civility online is really a matter of basic common sense and human decency.

What do you think?

I’m struggling with the concept of “always on” personal video feeds, a la Justin TV.

I thought it was interesting when I first heard about Justin. Then I saw that Robert Scoble and Jerimiah Owyang will be streaming live from Web 2.0 Expo.

My feelings are mixed. My initial “oh, cool” reaction has faded a bit, and I’m now wondering “what’s the value”? I’m al about transparency and citizen media (insert your favorite term here), but I’m curious how any meaningful content is going to net out of this?

i have to give props to these guys for trying it.

Chris Pirillo calls “…all these new video streaming things like Ustream.tv and Stickcam and the microblogs like Jaiku, Twitter the “narcissystem.”

Jesse Thomas from Ogilvy breaks down his POV blogs in general, and blog design specifically.

My takeaway after viewing: Why do we have SO many ugly babies out there? I think the availability of reaymade tools and hosted solutions has led to many of us who should know better (me included) accepting the “common” in ux design as opposed to designing the extraordinary.

I also liked his allusion to blogging as “wunderkammers” or curiousity shops.

Check it: http://www.jess3.com/podcamp/Blog_Design_v2.ppt

Cross-posted from the OC Report:

Where does the community team belong in a commercial organization? This topic came up at our recent Online Community Roundtable and we ran out of time before we could properly discuss, so I thought I would queue up the discussion here.

The responsibility for Online Community in many organizations is distributed among several teams, including:

- Marketing, which typically owns blogging, blogging outreach and any sort of affinity community, and has some skin in the game on strategy.
- Product Support, which typically owns Discussion Groups
- Product Development, which may or may not own Discussion Groups, a Beta site, and potentially a “Labs” community, as well as potentially product development communities and user groups.
- Events, which owns “live” events like conference and any online component
- Web Team, (who’s reporting structure is usually a whole different ball of wax) which typically owns some technology and user experience
- IT, if you are REALLY lucky, your IT department is somehow involved with infrastructure.

The above is just a rough composite sketch based on my personal experience. The reality is that in most orgs, it usually more complicated, especially if you are a company involved in building customer community as part of your business, as opposed to customer community being your primary focus.

So, where does the responsibility for community ultimately reside in an org?

Marketing? At it’s best, marketing is about acting as the advocate for the customer back to the organization. At it’s worst, marketing is actively trying to convince customer and prospets to do something they didn’t know they wanted to do, or don’t want to do. A lot of online community activity is coming out of marketing teams today because of typically large marketing budgets, and marketing teams interested in experimenting with new technologies and trends like social networking and blogging. Still, until most marketing teams are REALLY ready to put their own agenda aside and listen to and act on feedback from their audiences, community engagement will be fairly superficial and short term.

Support? Support communities, and in particular those based in Discussion Groups have done the best job of fostering a real sense of community for most companies. Most companies have accepted the fact that the cost of funding Discussion Groups are offset by call avoidance and increased customer satisfaction. Becuase of this, there is generally a spirit of peer cooperation and a genuine interest in helping customers, as opposed to forwarding an agenda. Could the Support organizations role evolve in to an umbrella role of stewardship for all Online Community activity? Perhaps, but I don’t think this would happen in most companies for political reasons, and in particular, Marketing’s “Divine Right” ownership of customer touch-points.

Sales? Probably not. See the “agenda” issue with Marketing.

Product? Maybe, but I see most product teams as participants in a community, and in particular the community ecosystem around their product or service.

IT? Yeah, right.

It really surprises me that there isn’t a more formal approach emerging, and in particular a role on the excutive team like “Community Czar” or “Chief Community Officer”. Maybe this is what the role of CMO wants to evolve in to?

What do you think?

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OK, here’s the good stuff.

John Hagel’s POV on Community 2.0
In this eloquent and poignant post, John builds upon his keynote at c2.o to offer one of the most relevant perspectives on the current state of online communities, and the “Bottom Line Opportunity”.

OC Expert Interview: Lee LeFever, Common Craft
Great insight from Lee, especially around the topic of community management.

Community 2.0 Conference Coverage
The Community 2.0 conference, March 12-14 in Las Vegas, was a great success. The conference had over 200 attendees, and there were several interesting presentations and panel discussions. As usual, the conversations in the halls between sessions were often as interesting as the sessions themselves.
Community 2.0: A frantic update, John Hagel’s keynote & more - OC Report
Online Community Lessons from SXSW and Community 2.0 - Common Craft
JOHN HAGEL’s KEYNOTE at Community 2.0 Conference - Patty Seybold
Community 2.0: Links, and more thoughts - OC Report
c2.0 Blog Coverage - Community 2.0

Mozilla transforming into a social network
Project Coop: Building the Social Network into the browser

Compete Introduces Attention Statistics
Compete attempts to go beyond visits and page views by introducing the concepts of “Attention” and “Velocity”

News.com has a pretty decent update on the NIN Year Zero campaign. (Thanks for the Link John Kraft!)

I’m not a HUGE NIN fan (i do like them), but I find this campaign fascinating. Especially that the RIAA is actually trying to get the “leaked” mp3s from the album (approved by Reznor) pulled from fan sites that posted them.

I wish the lost experience had been this cool…