Community Guy – Jake McKee

I’ve been everywhere, man…

A fun activity – here’s all the states I’ve visited. I’m bound and determined to visit the rest!

links for 2007-02-26

• Nikon 18-200mm AF-S DX VR Lens Review
  Wowza, if I had an extra $800 laying around, I’d be on this like white on rice. Gimme gimme gimme!!!
  (tags: photography Nikon lens)

The Social Community Ecology

(NOTE: I’m moderating a panel at SXSW called "Community Ecology: Finding Balance When Working with Fan Groups". As I prepare my notes and thoughts, I’m going to be blogging more on this subject)

I’ve discovered over the years that there’s nothing better for introducing people to community interaction concepts than a good analogy. I’ve used many over the years, some of which have been documented here, others soon to be.

One of the more significant analogies is that of the Social Community Ecology. Why ecology? Ecology is:

the study of the inter-relationships between organisms and their environment

Or  more specifically with our own version I call Social Community Ecology:

The study of the inter-relationships between community members and their social environment

Why is this important?

Because social communities are a type of ecosystem. They have many of the same markers as any other ecosystem, say a forest or a pond.

Of these markers, there in particular stand out when talking about the social community ecosystem:

Balance – there’s a certain ongoing ebb and flow to a healthy ecosystem. There is a constant equilibrium that the ecosystem seeks, and when radical change occurs, the system works to balance that change against the issues that might offset it.

Interconnection – With ever action is a reaction within the ecosystem because every entity is connected, directly or indirectly, with every other entity.

Life – Ecosystems are about living things, but they themselves are also living things. There’s a constant evolution and change process happening right before our eyes. It may sometimes be hard to see it without a trained eye, but life is there.  The life of an ecosystem can take on a life cycle of growth and death, or it can simply continue to grow and change over time. In theory, a well-balanced ecosystem will continue to evolve and grow as time moves on, evolving and changing, but never really dying completely. But insert radical change into the system and you can often overwhelm the balancing mechanisms of the ecosystem, throwing it into a death spiral.

Ecosystems are a powerful force, strong and robust. But they’re all incredible fragile at times. In upcoming posts, I’ll be talking about the "natural disasters" of a social community ecosystem, as well as methods for finding balance within an ecosystem where company and community work and play in the same space.  Stay tuned!

Blogging and the new Public Square

I stumbled upon this blog post from the Gift Hub blog, where I’ve been called to task for… well… I’m not exactly sure. Here’s the comment:

Over on that blog’s comments, I issued a challenge to Phil: school me. Give me the education. Consider this blog post the new Public Square. Please, oh please, explain to me how Web 2.0 and slavery even deserve to be in the same discussion.

(As you might imagine, I have comments about this. I’m going to refrain from sharing them until Phil has had a chance to start the educational process)

Community Next Speech Challenge

When I spoke at Community Next earlier this month, I focused on six best practices for companies who want to interact with existing, grassroots communities that have built up around their product/service. Here’s the quick recap of the six:

1. Redefine Success – What does success really look like? If you want to bring community input into product design, for instance, can 5 people be as effective as 5000? If so, why would you subject yourself to all that extra work?
2. Share. A lot. - Information is the currency of community/company interaction. What you may think is insignificant is what fuels the passion community members, so make sure you’re doing your best to get out as much info as makes sense to all involved.
3. Constantly Adjust -  Like any relationship, community/company interaction is always evolving. What was wonderful yesterday is overused and annoying today. Don’t forget that you’re never "done".
4. Skip the NDA – For far too long, the Non-Disclosure Agreement has been the handshake of community/company interaction. Everyone assume that to share anything first required a signed NDA. But the problem is that an NDA is a tool to STOP communication. Once signed, community members are no longer clear what they can and can’t share, and opt not to share anything at all. This is a huge problem when the people you’d want to sign NDAs are likely the best and brightest of the community!
5. Set and Maintain Expectations – When you start working with the community or giving out goods and info, be sure to set the expectations immediately and clearly or you risk creating perception problems when you can’t deliver again. There’s a significant risk of blowback when you don’t have clear conversation about what you’re contributing. Community members are very likely assume that what you do once you will do again – they see the impact, and naturally assume you do too.
6. Train Your Colleagues – Learning all this stuff yourself is only a minor part of the process. Getting everyone around you trained and clear about best practices for interacting with community members is your goal. After all, if you train your colleagues, the impact for both the company and the community is far better.

After the conference one of the attendees, who knows more than a thing or two about community interaction, sent me an email challenging one of the examples I used to back up #5 – Set and Maintain Expectations.

The Example
A few years back, I received an urgent call from the organizer of one of the bigger LEGO fan events. After several years of getting the venue for their event free, their attendance had grown to a point where the venue was going to charge them. They hadn’t budgeted or considered the $1700 they were now required to come up with.

I happily pulled the $1700 from my team’s budget and passed it along. (As a side note, this was about 2% of my yearly budget, a relatively huge amount of money) But I failed to fully set the expectation and the next year it was assumed that $1700 would be there again. The problem was the next year was the same year that the company lost $213 million dollars – more than most companies gross in a year. Needless to say, the event organizer was disappointed and a bit upset when I couldn’t come up with the money.

The Challenge
The attendee that emailed me challenged my decision to no "find the money" within the company. After all, her argument went, $1700 was a minor amount of money when compared to the millions spent on traditional advertising. Why not just go bug my colleagues until they coughed up the money?

Long story short, there were several reasons I didn’t find the money:

• The event in question was successful and interesting because it was grassroots. I’d been working for some time to try to help them figure out a way to develop ways to be self-sufficient.
• At that point, I was still working to get colleagues to understand why community was cool. Those who would give up money had already given it. I was begging, pleading, and guilting colleagues into kicking in on a range of issues. This additional money presented a picture that the community couldn’t sustain itself, and I didn’t want to send that message at that point.
• There literally was zero money available, or at least that anyone would give up. In a marketing organization money is power. When people were being laid off, and every budget that existed in teh company was being slashed in an effort to balance the books, nobody was willing to give up a penny that they didn’t have "direct ROI" on.

It might seem like I didn’t "go to bat" for the community, but that’s simply not the case. Working as a community member is a game of balance. You’re constantly trying to balance the needs of the community against the needs of the company. The needs of one company team versus the needs of another team.

LEGO: Seven Years Later

This time seven years ago, the LEGO Company was only just beginning to work on introducing themselves to their adult community, and were finally getting serious about the kids community.

In my five years at LEGO the situation on the ground went from having colleagues regularly decline to even meet with me, to having a Wired cover story about our work and seeing the company restructured to include three silos, one of which was community/education/direct. I left the company with a feeling of success, but still wondering if I’d actually had any affect. Had anything actually changed? I had put way too many hours, traveled thousands of miles, met hundreds of people, and had countless arguments with colleagues who simply didn’t "get it". Great interview, well worth the time.

Nearly a year later I had my answer. The current LEGO CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, did an interview with new publication, Monocle where he talks about moving the company back to its roots and truly putting users at the front of the decision making process. Clearly this guy "gets it", and hopefully he can help change a culture that is not necessarily inclined to change quickly.

It might have taken seven years to get the company moving in the right direction, but it’s clearly headed there. I’m proud to have been a part of that success.

links for 2007-02-24

• What Does OpenID Mean for Communities?
  Lee outlines some interesting implications of the further growth of OpenID, a very cool standard for “single login” sign on across multiple sites. (OpenID is way cool and worth your time to check out)
  (tags: openID community identity2.0)

The Dawn of My Music

Had Kurt Cobain lived, he’d have turned 40 this week.

He died when he was 27.

Ouch. I suddenly feel really old.

Cobain’s death still make me sad, sadder than it should for a guy I never met. In the late 80s I really liked music, or perhaps really wanted to like music. I was in high school at the time, and was at that age where I was trying to figure out who I was. My uncle moved out of his house and onto his boat in preparation for a long-term sailing adventure and give me nearly 400 vinyl albums. There was everything from The Clash to Herbie Hancock to Ray Charles to Mozart to Waylon Jennings. I devoured this collection and found a great many artists that I liked.

But nobody really spoke to me. None of the albums reached up and yanked my stomach and made me want to jump up and dance. I had found great muic, but I was struggling to find my music.

Then came the fall of 1991.

In the span of three months, I had discovered Fugazi’s 13 Songs (my first Compact Disc purchase), Pearl Jam’s Ten, and Nirvana’s Nevermind. I remember the day I first listened to all three of these like it happened last week. I had actually come across the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" single and immediately tried to buy the CD but the store didn’t have them in stock yet! My buddy Aaron and I must have listened to that damn single 75 times in the two weeks I had to wait until Nevermind arrived in stock.

September 1991 – the month I found my music. By the end of that year I had this mudslide of great music coming at me. Faith No More, SoundGarden, L7, MudHoney,  Red Hot Chili Peppers.. the list goes on. Hell, I even renewed my life long love for U2 with their Achtung, Baby release.

But to this day I can still work myself into an excited state simply by pulling up Nevermind on my iPod. Thanks, Kurt. I wish you were hear to keep the excitement coming.

Six Techniques for Safer User Generated Content Campaigns

I’ve worked with my vendor partner, friend, and all around great folks at eModeration to develop a fun whitepaper: Six Techniques for Safer User Generated Content (UGC) Campaigns.

The paper details techniques that creators of UGC sites (brands and marketing agencies alike) to help protect both their brand reputations and their users; while creating a site that is fun and engaging for users. While there are a great many methods to find this balance, the paper focuses on six key, and often under appreciated techniques:

1. Craft your guidelines – create “community guidelines” rather than “terms and conditions”. Use accessible language so that users will understand the rules of the site. After all, the clearer the guidelines, the more likely users will abide by them.

2. Build automated filters – the first line of defense against offensive, litigious, illegal or hijack-marketing content should be smart filters. Filters should not replace human intervention – they will never understand slang trends or cultural sensitivities, for example – but they will get rid of the more obviously “bad” content and help to offset some of the load on the human moderators.

3. Embrace your technology – use some basic mathematics and logic-informed algorithms to build tools that human moderators can use to review content. For example, keep an eye out for a single user that is making numerous submissions within a given time frame. Look at a user’s site history – how many times have they been in agreement or dispute with the moderator? Is there a particular piece of content that is driving significant volumes of traffic – and is it for the right reason? Is it because of undesirable content?

4. Enlist your users – most site users want a positive experience. Given the opportunity, many of them will help to protect the safety and quality of a project. Enlisting users can not only help moderators, but can engage users in the site itself. Make sure to develop tools and processes that make it easy and rewarding for “good” behaviors to help protect against the “bad” behaviors.

5. Make moderation actions visible – contrary to traditional thinking, human moderation does not work best when hidden from view. In fact, hiding moderation techniques can give an implicit invitation to a user to try to abuse or get round the system. If these controls are visible and clearly laid out, it can discourage people to post bad content. Moderators have a job not just to remove content, but also to work with the community to educate users as to what is and isn’t acceptable. Some users make honest mistakes, so should be allowed to make amends and resubmit content.

6. Moderation tools need love too – test the usability of the moderation tools, alongside site testing. You don’t want to find that you’ve created a site that’s difficult to moderate once the site has gone live. Smart interface design can significantly reduce moderation time (and cost). You moderators will love you if you show them the same love you’d show your users!

All of that, and it even features some cool British English! What more could you want?

Download Now!

UPDATE: The discussion begins!

• Allied
• Techscrape
• Netimperative
• Calico-Media
• Best Engaging Communities
• Internet Retailing
• Snow Patrol
• The Retail Bulletin
• Julian on Software
• marktd
• Green Blog
• IT Week (UK)
• Phil Muncaster
• mad.co.uk (requires registration)
• Centopia
• Two Point Touch

links for 2007-02-21

• When PR Meets Social Media – The Viral Garden
  JetBlue’s CEO heads to YouTube to almost, but not quite apologize for their crappy service recently. All in all, JetBlue is doing a great job responding to the debacle, but this video comes just shy of fantastic by failing to utter those two great words:
  (tags: jetblue customer2.0 PR)