Community Guy – Jake McKee

Twitter Followers vs. Influence

File this under: “Concepts we know, but are glad to have data and research to back it up”….

A group of researchers have proven something we already expected to be the case: your Twitter follower count is somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence. To reach this conclusion, the researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be “popular” Twitterers, but that’s not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don’t always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways.

Intuit on Amazon

Many companies struggle with the best way to engage users where they are. On-domain properties are easy since they’re under the company’s control, but what about when users are talking about you and your products off-domain? Intuit noticed that users were having dynamic discussions about their products in the reviews and review comments on Amazon. Rather than ignore, they rolled up their sleeves and jumped into the fold.

From Intuit’s Small Business United blog:

Since QuickBooks 2010 launched, our team has responded to every single review on our QuickBooks Pro 2010 Amazon site by posting a comment. Although this has worked well for us to resolve issues and thank happy customers, there were certain instances where our comments provided important information and clarifications about the product and it was hard for customers to get to that information.

For example, when the QuickBooks team worked over a weekend to make a major change to the product based on feedback from the Amazon reviews, it was hard for people visiting the Amazon site to know that there had been a change. The original reviews complaining about the issue were front and center on the Amazon page, whereas our comments stating that we had fixed the issue were almost hidden from view. We knew we had to do something, as our QuickBooks customers were getting outdated information on the Amazon site.

They were so proactive, Amazon even asked them to work together on the redesign for manufacturer comments.

The lesson here: Roll up your sleeves, wade in, and start working. It can yield fantastic results!

How to Develop Robust Moderation Methodology

Moderation, at its core is about ensuring that published content on a particular site, typically submitted by the site’s users themselves, meets the terms of the site’s Terms of Service (ToS). This function is, all too often, seen as an analog task: groups of moderators site at terminals clearing content submission queues asking simple yes/no questions like “Is this porn? Is this hate speech? Does this content have personally identifiable data?”

The problem with approaching the moderation task as an analog, queue-clearing activity is that it simply doesn’t scale. What if you have hundreds of thousands of content pieces being submitted every minute? (YouTube, for example, has 24 hours of video uploaded every minute!) Your company simply won’t be able to afford the sheer number of bodies needed to clear those queues.

Therefore, it’s important to stop thinking about “moderation” as that analog activity of reacting to full queues and instead look at the primary objective moderation is trying to fulfill: an overall reduction in inappropriate content being published. This means reacting to bad content that’s been submitted, but it’s also about reducing the amount of negative content developed in the first place. It’s about getting your moderators smarter, as well as getting your community more active. The goal is not to reduce moderation clear rates any more than the goal of customer service is to reduce call times.

No, the goal is to improve the community health overall by providing positive, safe environments using every method you can. To that end, here are nine methods that you should be applying as you develop any community. The question isn’t which one of these methods to apply, the question is in what ratio do you apply each.

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Governance
The starting point, and all too often the stopping point with preparing moderation processes is the governance piece: Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, and other formal documents meant to define the concept of “appropriate behavior”.

Alison Michalk has a great overview of how to approach the creation of such documents. By far, my favorite governance example is Flickr’s Community Guidelines. Fun, clear, and shareable.

Engagement
General community management practices, development of culture, encouraging positive and discouraging negative activities, and participation from the company.

Engagement is a common discussion with message boards/forums, but is also highly effective, though implemented differently in all three levels of your Presence Framework.

As I’ve written about before, the moderation activity can, and should be used to help build your community’s culture.

Processes
Community moderation activities – generic approval processes, from one individual to multiple levels of approval.

This is where traditional in-sourced or out-sourced vendor moderation processes play. Straightforward concept of human approval before/after content is posted.

Positioning
Moderation is as much about providing a sense of security and safety as it is about simply deleting inappropriate content. Social experience have a culture and when the culture is one of positivity, the experience overall tends to have vastly more positivity. It’s not enough to simply have great moderation processes, you need to prove it out as well.

Algorithmic Tech
Using technology to discover and utilize patterns of tone, structure, users, response times, and other such data points to automatically identify potential problems and/or filter those problems out before moderators even see them.

• Crisp Thinking

UX Tech

Improved methods of user-facing technology like like buttons, report abuse, on-topic buttons, and other tools that give users a chance to actively participate in the identification and reporting of problems.

• Amazon’s “was this helpful” buttons
• Get Satisfaction’s smiley faces

Reputation Systems
In any online social experience, reputation is crucial. Whether that’s simply a culture reputation amongst community members, or specific points/badges collection, reputation can help with a range of activities in community building. Moderation efforts can be significantly helped by applying UX Tech and Algorithmic Tech together with reputation status. Yahoo Answers is extremely strong in this area.

For more on reputation systems, be sure to pick up the new book, Web Reputation Systems .

Tool Consistency
Undedicated moderator resources (moderators who don’t work on just one property day in, day out) spend a surprisingly large percentage of their time simply wrestling with poorly design moderation tools that lack consistency across properties. Moderators can clear multiple pieces of content per minute, so every minute lost to a struggle with the bad content is time spent in entirely the wrong way.

I would love to see a company like Yahoo or Google or any other organization who has a vast array or moderation-necessary properties lead the industry by creating a set of moderation tool standards, a UI/UX library of sorts, that any and all properties that use moderation tools are required to use. Yahoo already has experience with this type of concept through the YUI Library, for example. Let’s see that same thinking applied to moderation tools.

Programs
Specifically designed programs such as the Facebook Community Council that grant additional powers to select groups of partners, customers, or users.

• Facebook Community Council
• Disney Mom’s Panel
• Wikipedia is adding moderator approval
• Online MMO games – users given more power both inside and outside the games

After the AOL Community Leaders and About.com court cases a few years back, companies have been very hesitant to engage users to do anything that can be perceived as a “real job”. Even the Facebook Community Council is small and invite-only only because they are beta testing before rolling out to anyone who wants to participate. Programs can be successfully and legally implemented, they just need to take proper precautions and do proper planning. It’s actually quite simple: If you’re going to develop a program that treats volunteers like paid staff (only without actually paying them), stop it.

The fine folks at TextsFromLastNight.com recently added a “Moderate” feature to their iPhone app. You can pay 99 cents for the privilege of moderating content submitted by users. Hey, I bought it…. what can I say? I love my TFLN nuttiness!

Gaming/Application
Moderation functions wrapped in a shell of activity that users can enjoy as a game or useful secondary application

• Google Image
• recaptcha

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Remember: The question isn’t which one of these methods to apply, the question is in what ratio do you apply each.

Keep SXSWi Weird

Paraphrasing Bono: There’s been a lot of talk, maybe too much talk about this year’s SXSWi. This next song is Douchey South by Douchey.

This year’s SXSW Interactive had 12,000 people attend. It was bigger than SXSW Music for the first time. It had 4,000 people more than the year before. Largely I heard two things from people:

• “This is a great event, I’m getting a lot out of it!”
• “Man oh man, I can’t seem to throw an iPhone without hitting a douchebag!”

Personally, SXSWi for me just isn’t compelling anymore, at least not as a conference. While the content may be perfectly suited for some, I found the sessions weak and beginner level. But that might be OK, since there was clearly an audience for that content. And yes, there were an insane amount of douchebaggery going on. This came in two forms:

• Social Media Expert Douchebaggery – There’s only one thing worst than a room full of “social media experts”… a room full of social media experts who’ve been making a living off that “expert” status for a couple of years. They’ve fashioned a career out of telling clients what to do and now they seem to think that they’ve been knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
• Starf**king Douchebaggery – I’m amazed at the sheer number of Foursquare shouts and twitter messages I saw from talented, experienced, mature social media people that sounded something like “OMG! I might get to meet Pete Cashmore at the Mashable party!”

Maybe my disillusionment comes from the fact that my SXSWi experience this year started off with one of the most insulting conversational exchanges I’ve had in my entire life, with a “social media expert”, who later (and totally separately) blogged on the topic of the problems with interpersonal exchanges at the conference. (No I’m not going to say who or what, other than to say that year ago we drank together as friends. Apparently I’m no longer worthy of respectful conversation…)

But that was my experience. I’ve been going to SXSWi since 1997, taking a few years off around the dot com bust. I remember when the conference was less than a thousand people. We were learning and struggling together through the Web 1.0 days. Then we were learning and struggling together through the Web 2.0 days. But as Gina Vakili said: “Aging Techies are the new Aging Hippies.”

As one of those aging techies, I remember a time when SXSWi was better than it was this year, and it wasn’t a smaller amount of douchebaggery. Here are the main three reasons I think SXSWi has gone off the rails:

Size
The organizers of the event have largely kept the formula of the event the same as it was 13 years ago when I attended my first event. Directly scaling a 500 person event to 12,000 simply doesn’t work. To put the 12k number in context, CES this year had 6,000 attendees, while GDC had 18,000. This is the big leagues as far as industry events go. At this point, SXSWi will never again be a 500 person event, and that’s OK. But it’s time to rethink what SXSWi is and what people are hoping to get out of it. The SXSWi team has to decide what they want the event to be and then redesign it according to those desires. If it’s going to be a size restricted event, so be it. If it’s going to be as large as they can sell tickets to event, that’s fine too. But those are both very different events, and that decision needs to be made.

Mass Audience Crowdsourced Panel Picker
The first year the Panel Picker was out, I thought it was a great idea. The content that came out of it was pretty solid. But as awareness of the tool grew, people figured out that the best way to get a panel selected was to come up with a sexy and often pointless session title. It’s time for the organizers to enlist a group of people to help find genius speakers we don’t know, to find topics we don’t know we need to know. The best session I’ve seen in years at any conference was Henry Jenkins at last year’s SXSWi. Henry is an absolute genius and an amazing speaker. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of him, and if you have, you probably haven’t read his blog or his books. Which is exactly why he was so much fun to hear from. Just because a metric ton of potential conference attendees vote up all the panels with “sex” in the titles, doesn’t mean you’re going to have a compelling content experience.

Do you know why TED has absolutely astounding content? Because they make it the very core of the program and they find people you’ve never heard of. Then they work with them to ensure insanely good presentation.

Grand Expectations
Good things do, in fact, come to an end. SXSWi isn’t the same because the world isn’t the same. For every SXSWi vet that I talked to who said the event sucked, I talked to two first timers who loved the event. Yes, SXSWi is “just another event”, but that’s actually a good sign. It means we’re onto the second (third? fourth?) generation of Web geeks. Those of us who were doing this stuff 10+ years ago dreamed of the day when the Web would be given the serious attention and credibility it deserves. We’re there. And that’s a great, great thing.

Despite the problems, I have to call out some awesomeness.

• Foursquare (the app): A truly useful service for the event. While I used Foursquare before SXSWi, I was never really that excited about it. Having a purpose and a network for people using it for the same purpose helped me get quickly excited. Now I want all my friends and local businesses on it. I’ve already talked to two neighborhood small businesses about how they should get on it. (Oh, and the updated app was a great improvement just in time for the conference)
• Foursquare (the company): From the fact that the service was rock solid stable, to the custom SXSWi content, these guys did great in running a Web app business.
• Chevy: The power bricks the Chevy team put out for people to plug their laptops into was an insanely good promotion for their Volt electric vehicle. I literally thanked the Volt girl standing next to the car for those power bricks. They could have just printed a bunch of pointless paper collateral to shove in the registration bag. Instead they solved a real need.
• AT&T (the network): It worked. Well. As TechCrunch asked, why can’t they do that every day?
• AT&T (the lockers): Like Chevy, AT&T solved an honest to god need with an unique and talkable solution. They created lockers where you could plug in your phone to get a recharge, then lock it up so you could hit a session while you rejuice. Genius.
• Inspiration: I didn’t realize quite how inspired I was from all the great work my incredible friends are doing until the first day back in the office. I literally filed a 4′x8′ whiteboard with ideas, tasks, and sketches.

So what did you think about the SXSWi 2010?

UPDATE: Here’s a few additional bits of content from around the Web re: SXSWi 2010

• Swag Bag Assessment (with lessons for marketers)
• Check-in & Location Apps
• How AT&T dealt with the insanely high network traffic
• SXSWi 2010 recap on Baazarvoice blog
• David Armano’s recap

SXSW Survival Guide 2010

It’s that time of year again! This is a rehash of last year’s version, but that’s OK. It’s the same advice I’d give this year too!

So with that, here’s some SXSW tips I’ve found over the years…

1. It’s casual, baby. Austin is one of the most laid back cities on Earth, and with it being a college town there’s not much need for the suit jacket. The event is pretty low key – upscale weekend wear. Don’t show up in your car wash shorts, but you’ll be fine in jeans and a t-shirt. Been dying to show off that new Threadless shirt? This is your opportunity. (And despite what you might have heard, not all of us Texans wear boots and cowboy hats, FYI.)

Oh, and wear comfortable shoes. Everything’s bigger in Texas, including the size of the convention center, and the distance to lunch. (See below about lunch)

Bonus tip: Watch the weather for Austin. This time of year in Texas has a wide range of climates, and you’ll want to pack right. This may well include bringing an umbrella. Or a snow shovel. Or a bikini. Or all of the above.

2. “Plan” your sessions. The sheer number of sessions is insane. Seriously crazy. And they’re all going to be great. Take a look at the schedule before you get on the plane, and then once you’re there and have seen the building layout, make up a game plan for what you want to see. The really cool sessions can often fill up to standing room only capacity, so the quicker you get from session to session the better. That said, don’t over plan either.

Be prepared, but go with the flow. I’ve passed up seemingly cool panels to hang in the hall and talk to people who’ve ended up being long term friends.

3. Learn the building/room layout. Along those lines, there are so many session rooms, the event is naturally spread across the Convention Center. Last year, there was a whole wing that nobody knew how to find. When you get there, take a walk around, learn where all the SXSWi rooms are. You’ll more quickly and easily move from session to session. And hell, your superior knowledge may impress those around you who are struggling for direction…. a great wa to meet new people!

4. Introduce yourself! SXSWi, like the city that hosts it, is an incredibly welcoming event. Don’t think twice about sticking your hand out and saying “Hi, my name is ______”. I’ve always been amazed at how easy it is to meet people at this event. The great thing about the event is the guy sitting on the floor in the hall charging his laptop may be the founder of your favorite web app!

Don’t forget to bring tons of business cards and a pen. (I always write details on the back of the cards I collect so I can remember who the heck the person was, including descriptive physical traits)

I actually make a list of the people I know who will be attending that I want to meet. This helps me ensure that I don’t forget anyone I’m dying to connect with. It’s nerdy, but hey, I take my networking seriously! Besides, when are this many people I’m dying to meet in person going to be in the same location again?

Bonus tip: Don’t spend all your time between sessions checking email. Do something more productive with your time… you can check your mail at home, and you’re going to be behind when you get home anyway.

2010 Bonus tip: Stop twittering and start talking. No, I’m not suffering from “Get Off My Lawn Syndrome”, I just think that with so many great people and great sessions, it’s time to look up from the screen and rejoin the world, at least for a few minutes. There’s a good chance that many of your twitter followers will be at SXSWi, so no need to tease the rest of them who aren’t with info they’re likely not going to understand without context.

5. Get out from behind the camera. Keep in mind that hundreds of people will be uploading thousands of photos to flickr and other photo sharing sites in the days of and after SXSWi. Don’t spend all your time behind your camera lens when you are just going to be taking photos of the same thing 432 other people will be posting online too. Save your “behind the camera” time for shots that are truly unique, or that are must-haves for you.

Bonus tip: Be sure to tag your photos when you post them to flickr! Something descriptive will work: sxsw2009 should work fine.

2010 Bonus tip: Ask someone to take YOUR picture with YOUR camera. You’ll enjoying having pictures of yourself for later.

6. Food is off-site. Plan on heading off-site for lunch, since the Convention Center doesn’t have much in this department. (One of my biggest beefs with the event for years now) There’s a number of places close by.

7. “Plan” your parties. A lot of great companies host a lot of great parties. So many, in fact, that if you don’t think about which ones you’re going to, you’ll miss something great.

And of course, same thing goes as planning your panels – go with the flow. Have fun, don’t stress your plan too much. You plan so that you have the knowledge to be flexible.

8. Dump your bag. Part of planning your parties is figuring out how to get back to your hotel room to drop of your bag before heading to the parties. Nothing worse than having to drag your laptop around all night, hoping nobody spills beer on it.

9. SMS is your friend. In the few days I spend at SXSWi, I send more SMS messages than I probably spend the entire rest of the year. It’s how I check with friends to see how our current sessions compare. It’s how I tell my friends where I’m at and how to hook up for lunch. It’s how I coordinate party going. If you’re not a big SMS person, figure out how it works on your particular phone before you get to Austin.

2010 Bonus tip: Here’s where using Twitter might be fantastic. Especially since the parties last year were ALL packed like mad. Prepare to setup your own parties, and start building your twitter following now so you can quickly switch gears when the line for the party you’re trying to get into is 500 people and the building fits 135.

10. Bring cab money. This is something I always forget, then find myself looking for an ATM at 2a or walking many blocks back to my hotel. Austin isn’t a real “cab city”, but downtown there’s usually plenty. As part of the point above, I try to go to the furthest party from my hotel first, then party/bar hop towards the hotel, which often eliminates the need for a cab all together.

SXSWi is a great event, so have fun! (It’s hard not to) Hope to see you there. Feel free to text me (214-566-5957) or drop me an email (jake AT communityguy DOT com). I’d love to meet you in person!

Need more tips? Check out the unofficial SXSW blog, or check out this collection of links from DailyIdea.tv. They’ve also put together a fun video that covers many of the same things I’ve outlined here.

We The Practitioners

When Sean and I started Ant’s Eye View almost exactly a year ago, we had a pretty clear dream. We wanted to build a company that was based on senior talent, doing in-depth work with clients who were rolling up their sleeves and diving into social media and customer engagement with force.

A year in, we’ve achieved exactly that. Our team is an amazing group of geniuses. Our clients list is amazing and we’re helping them develop and implement some impressive programs and internal changes. And we’ve grown to 11 people and 2 offices.
11 people and 2 offices.

Never in our wildest dreams did we think we’d reach such heights in a mere 12 months. But here we are about to celebrate again.

That’s right, we’re growing again. As you may have read on the AEV blog today, we are very excited to announce that we’re opening a Silicon Valley office. 3 offices!

Building out that office will be the newest Ant, Kira Wampler. Kira has been the Group Marketing Manager of Online Engagement with Intuit and will join as Managing Director. Here’s some background:

When it comes to being in the trenches with customer engagement , nobody has been deeper, or done more amazing work than Kira Wampler. Having had a chance to work with Kira when she was at Intuit, I was blown away by her depth of knowledge, amazing leadership, and of course her stunning use of BSG references. Kira has been named a Small Business Marketer of the Year not once, but twice (2008 and 2009), and her project Small Business United won the WOMMA 2009 Grand Prix Award. In short, she’s a rockstar.

As Kira joins the team, it’s a good, and proud reminder that our team is unique. We have built something that attracts amazingly talented practitioners that otherwise wouldn’t join an agency or consulting firm.

It was an amazing 2009, but 2010 is shaping up to be flat out stunning. With a team like this, how could it not be?!?

Apps vs. Widgets

Are apps just the updated version of widgets? Today Peter Kim asks that very question:

Remember widgets? In the early days of corporate social media (i.e. 2005 – 2006), widgets were all the rage. They were light and viral; the minimal effort to support them post-lauch made them more attractive to brands than blogs or podcasts.

What also made them attractive to brands was an ability to fairly easily reformat existing content. This meant they could “be social” without much additional work. Thing is, widgets were a pain in the ass. If you weren’t a fairly skilled nerd, and let’s face it, most people aren’t, you wouldn’t know what to do with widget installation code if you life depended on it.

The other issue with widgets is the platform. The iPhone or Facebook as the platform inherently allow vastly more people to use apps than widgets ever did. The difference between app success as a concept and widget success is almost entirely based on the platform(s) by which they are delivered.

Generally, Peter is absolutely correct when he says:

If you’ve been trying to figure out how to think about the new world of applications, look back at your resources on widgets and run a find-and-replace…it might get you up to speed sooner than you imagined.

But it’s important to be clear that while the underlying thinking of apps and widgets is extremely similar, don’t be convinced that we’re going through the same thing we did when widgets were the rage a few years back. Widgets, and the ensuing conversation, helped to get us to a point where small, inexpensive applications could be easily delivered. But today’s apps and yesterday’s widgets are absolutely not the same thing, anymore than the Model T and a Prius are the same thing.