Community Guy – Jake McKee

AEV @ SXSW

The Ant’s Eye View team has four sessions in the SXSW 2010 Panel Picker this year. We need your help! Can you vote us up?

It’s Never What They Say, It’s What They Mean
When someone yells online, it’s easy to get caught up in the negativity, seeing visions of doom and gloom. But more often than not, negativity is a form of passion. This session will introduce you to the fine art of translating community discussions into actionable decisions.

Ensuring Everybody Goes Home Happy
This session will convince you that any company/community relationship that is not built on the belief that success doesn’t exist unless “everybody goes home happy”, company and community members alike. You’ll learn how to find the right balance between serving your community while also delivering business results.

Social Business Vitamins
Discover the overlooked, but essential mental vitamins necessary to prepare the social body to function inside the Enterprise. Case studies that showcase what needs to in place to operate and benefit with the myriad of social tools and content.

Watch Out For The Ugly Babies
Everyone has seen an ugly baby, but no one has given birth to one. Online Communities are similiar, a lot of online communities are ugly and need help, but the parents who gave birth to the online community site are last to realize. Learn some ways to prevent ugly babies and if you believe you have one, get ideas to help your community become more attractive for your audience.

The United Breaks Guitars Effect

Last week I wrote about the United Breaks Guitars story and the reaction that because it wasn’t directly responsible for a drop in United stock price, it was still significantly problematic.

So you can imagine my reaction when I saw the photo below last week while standing inline at the American Airlines check-in desk.

I asked the woman who owned this bag if the “I <3 baggage handlers” tag was about the United Breaks Guitars story, and she said that it was and that she is really scared now about traveling with United because of that video.

Like I said last week: literally everything helps and everything hurts a business. If this isn’t proof, I don’t know what is.

USS Green Bay, here I come!

A few months back, some bloggers were invited to fly onto the USS Nimitz, a working aircraft carrier. Reading the stories of the trip (here, here, here), I was jealous beyond belief. You see, one of my life goals is to visit (hopefully via an arrested carrier landing) such a ship. I saw Top Gun in the 7th grade and was convinced for years I was going to go into the Navy. Growing up in Southern California, it was common practice to head to San Diego to see ships come and go, tour ships, tour NSA Coronado, and watch F-14 touch-and-gos at Mirmar.

So you can imagine my delight when Jenn recommended me for the next Navy embark to the new ship, the USS Green Bay. That’s right! In September, I’ll be boarding a Navy helicopter and heading out to tour the Green Bay for the day. (Thanks, Jenn, I owe you one! Sorry about all those nasty things I said about you getting to go to the Nimitz when I didn’t… )

I am really excited to take this trip and will be posting photos, videos, and stories before, during, and after. I apologize in advance for my probable gushing. Hopefully it won’t turn the Navy team off of inviting me to the next USS Nimitz trip! (Life dream, folks. Help a blogger out!)

Here’s the skinny on what the mission the USS Green Bay will focus on now that it’s going into service:

The USS GREEN BAY will be used to transport and land Marines, their equipment and supplies, by embarked air cushion or conventional landing craft or Expeditionary Fighting Vehicles, augmented by helicopters or vertical take off and landing aircraft. USS GREEN BAY will support amphibious assault, special operations, or expeditionary warfare missions throughout the first half of the 21st Century.

Healthcare Reform Explained by Dan Roam

Thanks to Lee, I stumbled on this incredible presentation by Dan Roam, author of “Back of the Napkin“, a great book about visual thinking and explanation. Dan explains the current healthcare debate in great detail, yet utter simplicity. This is a must watch (must click?) for all of us.

Great Presentation: Social Media Strategy Instead of Tools

Very nicely done presentation on how to best approach social media.

Absolutely amazing video: U2 Spyplane Ride

A humbling story

I have been “out there” on the Web for years now. Search my name and you can piece together a pretty solid picture of who I am, where I’ve been, and what I’ve done going back years. There’s a lot of downside to this, but without question the biggest upside is that when you have an impact on someone, it’s easy for them to find you and share that impact.

As some of you know, I wrote a book a few years back called Getting Started with LEGO Trains. I’ve always hated it (I’m a perfectionist, and as my first book, I learned a metric ton of lessons for next time), but when I read emails like the one below, I feel really proud of my work.

Allow me to share…

My name is Deann and am writing on behalf of my 5 year old son, Caden. He loves 3 things…LEGO, trains, and directions! My sister gave him your book as a gift and he pretty much gave up his “blankie” and now sleeps with your book. He carries it around the house like it is a part of him.

My son is a very interesting child with an old soul. He is very bright but doesn’t relate well with children his own age. I got him his first big box of LEGOs right after he turned 3 and that has been a life saver. His lego table is our pool table and he will spend a significant amount of time on that or He locks himself in the “train room” and will build and create for hours. He comes up with the most amazing things for his age. He also likes following complex lego directions…I recently purchase the “Emerald Night” and he completed it by himself in a matter of days. He is now in search of a black steam train similar to the Polar Express to build but I do not have a clue where we can find instructions or pieces for that. I am sure he will find away to create one on his own. Anyway, I just want to thank you for writing “Getting Started with LEGO Trains.” Its like you wrote it especially for him.

Sincerely,
Deann
Springfield, MO

Thanks Deann. And keep on building, Caden! Maybe one day you too can work for LEGO. I proved that living the dream is possible!

ASK: 8 tips for successfully working with your legal team

For anyone who has developed community programs as part of a medium to large corporation, there are two words that can send shivers down their spine: Legal Department. In today’s business culture, the internal legal department has taken on a powerful role, and many marketing and community building employees find themselves at odds with legal. Today’s society doesn’t help much either, with so many people being scared to death of getting sued or causing their company to get sued.

Too often we see projects that bend and give into the demands of the legal department, watering down what could have otherwise been a great project between company and community. Certainly there are times when such bending is warranted and smart, but far more often project leaders simply don’t push hard enough for what they need from their project.

Think about the purpose of an internal legal department – their job is to reduce risk to zero. Their work experience, their degree, and their industry’s culture is one that is primarily focused on removing risk. This desire to remove risk leads to complex Terms of Service, disclaimers, and Non-Disclosure Agreements.

On the flip side, the business and marketing team has a different purpose: to reduce risk to the lowest possible level, while increasing reward to the highest possible level, finding a balance between the two that is comfortable for the corporation.

The conflict between the legal department and the business teams primarily stems from this subtle, yet extremely key difference. In recent memory, the legal department has morphed from an internal service provider, supporting the decisions of the business team, into a group that tends to make more decisions than they influence. When we’re making decisions about the future of the business based on the desire to reduce risk to zero, it’s no wonder we find ourselves with diminishing profits, upset customers, and uninteresting products!

With risky, fear-inducing concepts such as engaging communities and community members, how do avoid being shot down by the legal department? Here are 8 tips for partnering with, rather than working around your company’s legal department.

Respect realities
Perhaps the most important starting point when working with a legal department is to understand that they are actually trying to help you and protect the business. Sure, the current decision making power legal teams find themselves with is a bit out a balance, but there are real issues you need to be aware of. They get paid to think of and worry about things that may never cross your mind. The legal team exists to help you, so don’t get to caught up in trying to avoid working with them or working around them.

Create partnerships rather than friction
Like any other group in your company, the best way to get past the legal difficulties your yet-to-be-launched community project might face is to connect to the legal team and ask them to participate. Ask them to step out of their role as purveyors of yes/no answers (mostly “no”) and have them participate as a team member. This helps them to fully understand the business goals, which helps them find solutions rather than simply telling you to stop.

The core question is not “Should we involved them?” Rather, the question is “When is the right time to involve them?” Each group of lawyers will vary in the best time and way to include them. Some help significantly by being included from the first day, others when there’s a solid gameplan. Either way, don’t wait too long.

Listen to the issue, not the answer
Legal may tell say, for example, “We can’t use Twitter because we’re required to track any and all communications by employees due to regulatory statutes”. This doesn’t mean the Twitter project must stop; it just means you have to look for a way to document the communication. While the legal department may speak in absolutes, it’s your job to see through those absolutes and find a solution that works for all parties. One helpful tip is to ask specific questions in a way that leads to further discussion.

Face the fears head on
Risk is based on a combination of logic and fear. Healthy risk assessment balances both. Unfortunately, in today’s business environment too much risk assessment takes place with a minimum amount of logic and a maximum amount of fear. New communication channels open every day, countless stories of product leaks come across the news wires, and feel overwhelmed by the lack of controls on their corporate communication. In this environment, the legal department is struggling to manage their own fears as well as the fears of the rest of the organization. Understand this, and help them manage them. Acknowledge that concerns of negative user posting on a blog or forum, for instance, are legitimate. Be ready to politely work through these concerns and share a gameplan for how to deal with these issues.

Know your subject matter
If you plan on having a debate with the legal team, make sure you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. As Mike Rowland once pointed out, you should know some of your key legal cases related to social media, such as:

• Anthony DeMeo vs. Tucker Max (Which stated that community owners aren’t liable for their user’s postings)
• Viacom vs. Google/YouTube (Which requires YouTube to turn over user data to Viacom in order to help Viacom prosecute a copyright infringement case)
• Current status of case law around whether pre-moderating user submissions constitutes an increase in liability concerns

Simply understanding some relevant legal issues will not only gain you some respect from the legal team, it will help you have more interesting, helpful, productive discussions.

Ask specific questions
Stay away from questions like “Can I post content online?” which don’t provide enough context to even allow for a “yes” answer. Remember, a lawyer’s job is to reduce risk to zero, so if there is any risk at all, there’s a good chance they’ll say no out of habit. Instead, focus on the specific area you believe there is concern around. Ask questions like “When we post content on our blog, should we be concerned about documenting responses?”

Build processes, don’t ask for answers
Even better than asking specific questions, ask the legal team to help you identify larger issues and concepts on your own. Rather than having to come to them with every iteration of a problem, address the bigger issue together, learning what the core concerns are and how to avoid them generally. This will save both teams countless hours of back and forth.

Trust yourself and your own knowledge
Countless marketing professionals have asked the legal team questions like: “Is this safe for me to do?” When the answer is “no,” they simply accept the answer and move on to finding another solution. Perhaps this is from lack of interest, but more likely it’s from lack of confidence. Most people consider “the law” in the same league as Tax Code: confusing, scary, and understood only by professionals. Trust yourself enough to believe that while you may not understand the full context of why certain legal issues work a certain way, you can ask a lawyer for details. Push back on the legal team, ask questions, and issue challenges. You’ll be surprised how often your “outsider approach” will cause a reframing of the problem at hand. There is a reason why the term “think outside of the box” exists, and it doesn’t apply only to the marketing team.

Remember that the legal team, no matter the industry, is a service provider who is supposed to enable and protect the business. Ask your legal team colleagues for help making your business and projects better, but don’t allow them to make your business decisions for you.

(This content was originally posted at the Online Community Research Network and reposted here with permission)

I want to work at Netflix

As a business owner, I need to set a recurring calendar reminder to absorb the presentation embedded below once a quarter. Seriously, this is absolutely the best story on how to improve and set corporate culture.

Warning: This is a 128 slide deck, but well worth your time.

Case Study: Comics in Community Communication

In 2003, I was working on the community team at The LEGO Company, the maker of those fantastic and wonderfully ubiquitous plastic interlocking bricks. During this period I had a unique challenge of trying to convince my colleagues, smart folks who were solely focused on kid oriented programs and projects that there was value in working with the Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOL).

I had a hard time getting on their calendars, much less convincing them that they needed to stop working on the 95% audience and turn at least some of their attention to the 5%.

The Idea
One day over lunch, I noticed four colleagues reading the comic strip in the back of the instruction book included with one of the LEGO sets we were producing that year. Overhearing their conversation about whether the explorer was going to get out the clutches of the tiger in time made me start thinking about the power of visual story telling. Here were four grown adults having an in-depth debate about content meant for kids 7-12 years old!
Using this inspiration to guide me, I worked with one Greg Hyland, an artist and AFOL to create a series of comic strips that told the story, for those uninitiated in the hobby, of it was like to be an adult fan of a”child’s toy”. Together we developed a series of hilarious, relevant four-panel strips that were then printed, color copied and stapled.

(As a sidenote, Greg worked in exchange for a huge box of new LEGO sets that I sent him. He delivered dozens custom designed illustrations for a box of LEGO sets that cost my budget center about $300)

The Internal Roadshow
After assembling the comics into physical form, I put together a presentation, a short video (created by fan clubs, of course), and some other materials that I used for a multi-city, multi-office internal roadshow to “formally introduce colleagues to the AFOLs”.
When I walked into each stop on the roadshow, I threw down a handful of the comics on the conference table and started talking through my presentation. I’d start off the meeting pretty casually, because inevitably the attendees would get so wrapped up in reading and discussing the comic, they’d largely ignore my presentation until they had a question about one of the scenarios highlighted in the comic.

Fairly quickly, I modified the presentation to focus primarily on talking through the sixty scenarios we’d outlined in the comic. Within a few weeks after this roadshow, there was a clear shift in the way colleagues were talking and thinking about the adult fans. To this day, I still hear from former colleagues who reference those scenarios in conversation!

Why comics work
Comic pioneer, Will Eisner, uses the term “Sequential Art” to describe comics. In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud tried to expand this definition but ended up right back at these simple, albeit sterile two words. While this may be a good definition, it misses the point of why comics do such a great job explaining complex concepts. Here are five reasons that might explain that phenomenon:

Approachable – If you had the choice between reading a 60 page TPS report or reading a 60 page comic, which would you be more inclined to do? Exactly. Comics speak to us on an emotional level; they use storytelling rather than fact sharing as a foundation. And who doesn’t want to hear a good story? Evangeline Haughney from Adobe Systems asked that same question and turned to comics to help share research findings in a compelling way with her colleagues.

Universal – Due to their visual format, comics have an ability to transcend language . After all, seeing a businessman trapped under a huge pile of paperwork is clear regardless of the language used. You could probably take out the words from the comic adaptation of Moby Dick and still pick up much of the meaning.

Expression – Comics combine imagery and content to deliver impressive clarity for their message. Look at the two versions of the 9/11 Commission’s findings: One was delivered in traditional text form while the other was delivered as a graphic novel. I’m not sure how the numbers play out, but it’s a safe bet that those who read the comic adaptation had a vastly more emotional experience seeing a dry report brought to life.

Imagination – Through abstraction people engage with the content much more deeply because they can more easily put themselves into the scenarios depicted. The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is a book about magic chopsticks and a pixie spouting career advice, yet as you read the pages, you find yourself wondering where magic chopsticks can be found!

Desire – Because of the reasons outlined above, content delivered in comic form is simply more enjoyable to consume. Comics can turn a dull product manual, for instance, into an entertainment experience. The Nintendo Wii game “No More Heroes” actually delivers their gameplay instructions in the form of a comic, which makes learning the button combinations part of the experience, rather than something to get through before the game actually begins.

Using comics for community workCommunity professionals have a range of activities they’re responsible for but one of the most foundational is the task of communication. Whether bringing information from the company to the community, connecting colleagues to community members, or delivering community feedback into the company, communication is a keystone of any community professional’s daily to-do list.
That said, what better way for a community professional to increase their success than to improve their communication? And what better way to improve their communication than to utilize comics, which pack more punch than plain text alone? Outlined below are four scenarios where using comics may help to improve community interaction. What else can you think of?


Social Outreach
Whether you’re pitching bloggers or introducing yourself to an existing community, comics can be a fantastic and fun way to introduce yourself and your company. The brilliant folks at Capulet Communications did exactly that when they used comics as part of a blogger outreach program for Brothers Printers. They grabbed photos from the Flickr streams of various bloggers and worked them into a comic strip that they then emailed to each blogger.
Tell me you wouldn’t respond, and respond positively, to someone sending you something like this!

Introducing the Team
While we’re thinking about introductions, why not put together a short comic that introduces you and your colleagues to a larger community?

When you, as a company/brand employee begin to engage with communities, it’s important to let a bit of yourself come through, to share some of your personality. This helps build a certain “reality” around you that helps community members believe that you’re honestly interested in engaging and helping them, not just performing marketing activities on the sly. Build a comic strip (or strips) that use humor to share a bit about you, and also about your team members. While you can’t necessarily say “I’m a nice guy who loves to play paintball with friends” to any positive effect, you can show through a comic story a funny paintball incident that others can identify with. Comics make you more approachable because they are more approachable.

Explain Complex ConceptsUsed effectively, comics can distill large amounts of knowledge into a small footprint. Imagine, for instance, the amount of text that would be needed to explain how to create a mini-hovercraft rather than the few comic panels shown below.

Perhaps one of the most difficult tasks of working with community is taking the business realities that you face and distilling them into explanations that both make sense to community members and that also generate support for those realities. Rather than simply typing up a long blog or forum post, how about turning that discussion into comic form? It will probably make your point more effectively and it will definitely be a much more enjoyable exchange.
Help create offline Word of MouthThe AFOLs comic generated an amazing reaction among internal colleagues and clearly helped increase their understanding of the adult LEGO enthusiasts. The AFOLs were constantly asking the community team for help and tools for explaining to the outside world that they weren’t “weirdos” simply because they had a unique hobby. What better way, we thought, than printing and distributing a comic that fans could hand out to friends, family, co-workers, and attendees at their events?
With some minor alterations of the comic, we made it print ready and distributed 10,000 copies to various fan groups and clubs around the United States. They handed these out to other adults who voiced interest in learning more about joining the ranks of adult LEGO fandom as a way to encourage them to join the community.
We also released a PDF version that was quickly translated into multiple languages by the fan community themselves.

Of course, one factor to consider when printing copies is the number you print and the way you distribute them. Fans love collectibles, after all, and they want to keep a copy of the “artifact” for themselves. One lesson learned is that we should have sent around a small number of copies to fans first, given them a chance to let the excitement of receiving the artifact wear off, then distribute the bulk of the comics to be used for giveaways. As it was, the AFOLs often had a hard time tearing themselves away from their copy to give it out as intended!
Comic Creation ResourcesIf you’re interested in getting started making your own community communication comics, here are a few places you might want to start.
Author Scott McCloud has produced three amazing books about comic creation, all of them told solely through comic form. Start with Understanding Comics and work your way to the other two. Scott also has his own Web site at: http://www.scottmccloud.com
When you’re ready to start building your own, these are two tools that you can use. Both are cheap and easy to use.

• Comic Book Creator (PC)
• Comic Life (Mac) (If you have Mac OS 10.4+, you have Comic Life already installed. You can also pull it off your 10.4 installer disc)

(This content was originally posted at the Online Community Research Network and reposted here with permission)