Wibbly-wobbly, Returny-wurny | Lessons on Social Media from Doctor Who

In 1963 a children's show was created in the UK. It was meant to be an educational show, a show that would transport its audience through time to the past to witness the Aztecs or Ancient Rome. It was marginally successful until someone decided that while the characters were traveling through Time, they could also be travelling through Space. The show, Doctor Who, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and is more popular than ever. But it wasn't a smooth ride at all.

For the first years of its life, the show was popular with children (and their adults) as a sci-fi show, with evil baddies, ambiguous morality lessons and a charismatic, mercurial lead, The Doctor. In the 1980s the BBC leadership was absolutely dedicated to killing the show, but fan pressure - now global through Public Television support for the show in America and Australia - brought it back from the grave, for a while, until the show was once again cancelled after the 7th Doctor played his last spoon....

...Only Doctor Who didn't die. Bizarrely, it was picked up by an American television network, which of course focused on all the wrong things, and annoyed the British fans no end ("The American Movie" is how the 8th Doctor's tenure is known among fans.) But it did something unheard of. 40 years old and the show hadn't died. Like a Monty Python character, it kept reassuring us "It wasn't dead yet." And fandom hadn't moved on. With a body of episodes in the hundreds, still showing on Public TV, then reluctantly released by the BBC on VHS, the DVD, fandom wasn't dead.

And neither was the show. In 2005 the famous blue box known as the TARDIS landed once again in the UK and it was alive, again. The "new" Doctor Who, which picked up with the 9th Doctor and has now made it to the 11th is more popular, more global  - and more financially lucrative than ever before.

So, what are the lessons we can learn from this story?

Return on Time - Perseverance isn't overrated

In the days before Venture Capital and Y Combinator, sometimes all you had to rely on was Time. Having a good idea five years too early can gut a company. But Apple proves the point - when a good idea takes time, perseverance, passion and a soupcon of delusional belief that you're right, playing the long game can lead to success.

Return on Investment - Throwing money at the problem works too

When the BBC demanded better ratings for the 7th Doctor, and they were competing with Star Trek: Next Generation for share of the TV Sci-fi watching audience, the creators of Doctor Who were in a bind. They scraped up more money and put on the most sophisticated show their budget would allow. In comparison with earlier seasons it was fantastic (despite that, the BBC was grumpy again, and they killed it anyway.) In 2005, the showrunners pulled out the stops and the re-launch of this iconic show was as good as anything else on TV. No plywood hallways, no two-set shows. Doctor Who was a big kid now. When you've strained to the edge of what you can do with Time, Investment pushes you to the next  level.

Return on Social is Wibbly-wobbly, Returny-wurny

The 10th Doctor famously stated, "Time is wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey." If there is a single lesson we can grok from The Doctor and his travels through our airspace and time, it's that Return on Social isn't a matter of simple eyeball formulas or likes or shares. In the days before the Internet, Doctor Who fandom created fanzines, wrote fiction, gathered together with friends on Saturday night to watch the show on Public Television, went to conventions to meet the actors. It has always been a social product. DW fandom were early adapters of online technology, expanding their contacts in fandom globally. When the new show launched, fandom was all ready for it. The network was built, ready and waiting. Virality wasn't an accident, it was 40 years in the making. And that is why the new show is popular. BBC and BBC America have made it more accessible, but the Internet does the rest.

Return on Social means a little push here, a nudge there, circle back and start again. When the formula doesn't work exactly as planned, passion and engagement can carry the project along. Superb execution pushes the boundaries and then back to the beginning yet again. Social is wibbly-wobbly, but if Doctor Who teaches us anything, it's that it can absolutely be returny-wurny.

The 4 Pillars of A Healthy Online Community

Whether we're reaching out to a specialized subject community or to a broad social network, we're looking to our contacts online for information, suggestion and recommendation all the time.

More of our lives is spent online in the communities we join and build, and more of our time is spent handling the issues that arise in these spaces. Communities exist on investing sites, shopping sites, health sites and entertainment sites. There is hardly anywhere online one can go where a community is not at least part of the equation.

The question then is - how do we build healthy online communities?


Defining Community vs Network

For the purposes of this article, I want to define how I am using the word "community" vs. "network." 

A "network" in this context is the web of contacts, acquaintances, friends and colleagues we acquire over time. These may be circumstantial - professional colleagues, coworkers, etc.;  or social - friends, relatives, acquaintances. Networks may be organic and/or intentional.

Communities are, for the purposes of this article, always intentional. A professional community may be an association, a personal community may be a group focused on a hobby or interest. Networks can grow without our specific intent to do so (a friend introducing us to another friend for example) but we seek out community with intention.

Groups on Facebook, subReddits, hashtags on Twitter and other smaller pockets of interest on larger platforms can function as communities, as well as focused lists, forums, sites and even whole social networks.

Online Communities are, therefore, groups of people we intentionally seek out in order to...what? 

People seek out community to gain/share/impart information.

The guy who tells you about this lunch on Twitter - he's imparting information. Not very relevant or targeted information, admittedly, but hey, there may be someone out there who cares that Taco Tuesday at the Taco Stand is outstanding. It might be noise to you, but it's signal to the guy who shared it.

So when we seek out community, we have the intention of finding folks who will share info that is more signal than noise - i.e., stuff we care about. This may be information of relevance to us professionally or personally, but the point is, we look for a "community" where this kind of information will be shared.  

When we join a community, we are all initially consumers of information. We might read FAQs, ask a few folks for their thoughts, read what is being said. We join to gain information.  We join as "consumers" of information. Over time, some people find themselves with the right experience or temperament to share or impart information. These people contribute information. (Contribution is sometimes rewarded with badges of achievement or rank.) Generally speaking, even new people can see that there is an upper class of users. These may be called senior members, power users (or the star-chamber cabal, depending on the level of resentment harbored by non-power users) and they will have both cognitive authority and be the object of resentment on even a healthy community.

Building a Healthy Community

Every community want to be a healthy community. Like our own bodies, there's a certain amount of health one can establish as a solid base on which to build. For a community, these include good moderation, inclusive policies, scalable architecture and a soupcon of humor when dealing with other humans. I.e., the hardware, the software and the humanware should be as flexible and scalable as possible.

On this base are Four Pillars that support the Community.

       Contributor                                             Contributor

Top-Down Communication	Peer Communication
Peer Communication	Bottom-Up Communication

        Consumer                                              Consumer

Consumers come into a community with a desire to know, learn or share.

Let's create a fictitious community called Labville, where high school students can discuss scientific experiments with other students and get prompts from older students and teachers.

Adam joins Labville first as a Consumer. He reads posts by Barb and Charlie, both students who have done the same experiment he's working on now. Adam asks a few questions, but mostly reads. He is a consumer involved in Bottom-up Communication. Once he's learned that Daniella is doing the same experiments and has similar ideas as he does, he starts to talk to her as a peer. Adam and Daniella are joined in their "Experiment Y" discussion by Eugene and Frieda. A peer group is forming between them and they generally don't reach outside of it unless they need help from Barb and Charlie. The groups now engages regularly in Peer-to-Peer Communication.

George arrives and he's...a problem. For whatever reason, he's taken a disliking to Adam and snipes constantly at his work. Whether Adam asks a question, replies to someone else  - and even though he generally avoids conversations where George is active - George goes out of his way to be rude to and about Adam.

Barb and Charlie, as Contributors, will try to hold the conversations on topic and maybe Harriet, a Labville Moderator, will step in.

These Contributors will shape the conversation through Top-Down Communication.  Because Labville is not a hobbyist community, but is focused around asymmetric relationships (people who know and people who want to know) Contributors contribute by answering questions, positing thought-provoking questions of their own and guiding and focusing conversation. Top-Down Communication serves to keep conversation moving forward, or restarts it after it stalls. One of the goals of Top-Down is to inspire Peer-to-Peer Conversation among Consumers by helping them over humps in their learning

George has been behaving, but after a few months, he's started up again. Barb and Charlie have both moved on as Contributors (as a natural part of the Community Lifecycle,) but Ike and Justine are now very active Contributors. As Moderator, Harriet needs a private place to warn them about George and ask them to let her know if there are issues. The Contributors need a space for Peer-to-Peer Communication of their own, to foster best community practices, share critical operating information, training materials and provide a space for them to discuss the Consumers who might serve the community well as Contributors or even Moderators.

Peer-to-Peer Communication at both Consumer and Contributor levels fosters teamwork (and cliques.) Top-Down Communication provides a steady hand at the rudder and Bottom-Up Communication means there's opportunities for Consumers to learn and grow in the community.

These four pillars, standing on a foundation of good community practices, will be stable enough and strong enough to support a healthy, sustainable community for a long lifecycle.

The Truth About Internet Trolls

There is a very real misunderstanding of the nature of Internet Trolls and, as a result, there is a incorrect belief about the way to "deal" with them.

Here is the fundamental flaw.

People think this is what Trolls look like:

Angry person online, fundamentally outraged by your words - possibly your very existence. 

Trolls give you that impression because they make very personal insults, they comment on your appearance or something you may or may not have said. As a a result you think trolls are about you.

And then you think, surely, this guy can be reasoned with. Yes, he's angry, but he is an adult, he can see the value in other perspectives. So you engage, thinking consensus is possible.

In reality, trolls are this:

Trolls have no idea what "skullfuck" means, it doesn't have to mean anything - it sounds nasty. They don't have any interest in reasoned dialogue - they haven't read your post/article/answer. It's for the lulz and the win - if they can silence you, they win the Internet. It's something to pass the time..

I'm not being ageist here - trolls are often actual teenagers, trying to be adults in a very childish way, they are also adults being childish, but they have one thing in common - trolls all treat harassment as a game. A game they can't lose, because there is no one to catch them, there's no punishment if they are caught. It's for fun. If you get angry, they win. If you react at all, they win. If you have to set up new rules for comments, they win. Block their IP, they'll change it - and they win.

So how can you win? Remember "sticks and stones"? Yeah, that.

Since the goal of the game is to silence you, all you need to do is ignore them and go about your business. Leave their comments hanging out there, ignorant and hateful as they are, unanswered. They will expose themselves trying to get you to react. All you need to do is...nothing. If they escalate - you win. If they take it to multiple spaces online - you win. The more they scream and rant and waste time thinking about you, and the less time you think about them - the more you win. Your toolkit is Report, Ignore, Block, Delete, Mute, depending on the site/platform you're on. Use all of the tools, but use Ignore the most.

Have pity for the trolls who spend hours of their day obsessing over you while you read books, go out with friends and have a life. Because the more you win, the more they lose.

Opinion is not Information - Why Social is Not the Answer You're Looking For

Lee Odden in his excellent presentation War of Words: Myth-Busting Social Media, SEO & Content Marketing has a slide that shows Pete Cashmore stating "Social is on the verge of solving all search problems". 

As a Information Professional with a quarter of a century of experience, I think my reaction to those words looked something like this:

And it came to me in one fell swoop WHY social is not the answer to search at all.


Opinion is not information - Social is not search. Information is nor knowledge - Search is not research.

Let's look at a common scenario to explore the difference.

You want to take a short vacation. You ask your friends for ideas. One suggests Las Vegas. Now, if you like spectacle, elaborate shows, gambling, theme hotels, this is a terrific idea. What if you hate those things? Not so good an idea. 

You asked for an opinion - you received an opinion. It may be relevant to you. It may be as irrelevant as possible, if your friends ideas are about their desires, as indeed, I have found with the above question. People tend to suggest the kinds of vacations that would appeal to them, whether or not they know your tastes.

Now you need to book that room, one friend went to one site, got a one price, another friend got a different price, one bought a package and has no idea about the cost of the hotel. You asked for information - you received data.

Social search can answer some, but not all the questions you have. When you need information, opinion and data points will only confuse the issue. 

Your friends are great when you need an opinion. Social Search will be great when you need an opinion. But when you're running a business, you don't need opinion, you need information. Information professionals take information and turn it into knowledge you need to make critical business decisions. 

Defining "Quality" for Content Marketing

Quality is not, by it's nature quantitative, so it will always be both subjective and a moving target. So what does "quality" mean in the context of content marketing?

As much as I would like to say "Quality is more important" it honestly doesn't matter how good your storytelling is if you're talking to yourself. Compelling, unique content brings in an engaged audience, and nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. To achieve your goals you'll need quantity in audience and quality in content.  

When you and I read a newspaper article, novel or blog post, we bring our own bias, opinions and experience to bear on what is ostensibly someone else's bias, opinions and experience. One should not presume there is a valid way to measure that - if one does, one had clearly lost site of their own bias, opinion and experience. 

For instance, I loved Lord of the Rings the book and thought to movies and incoherent mess. My relatives loved the movies and though the book boring. Which narrative has the best "quality"? The books which have sold millions of copies over decades, or the movies which made millions of dollars? Both are high quality when judged by certain criteria, and perhaps not so high when judged by others.

Quality is judged over time: I've been writing a blog for over a decade now and I'm still gaining new readers. But some people vociferously disagree with my opinion, so they say my blog is poor quality. In this case, "quality" is the word we use to describe things that agree with us. ^_^ 

When you're selling the story of your business, "quality" means "good enough to bring someone back." 

Quality content will sell consumers on your brand, your products, your commitment and on you. 

In content marketing, "quality" is the impression you leave on potential consumers that brings them back as customers.

Community Lifecycle: How to Prevent Evaporative Cooling from Eroding an Online Community

Evaporative Cooling, a termed coined by Eliezer Yudowsky, is the natural loss of user base on a community, tare if you will. Time, crises and change will contribute to Evaporative Cooling. It can't be prevented, but it can be slowed and managed. In response to a question on Quora, I detailed a few steps to identifying, managing and modulating Evaporative Cooling on an online community.

How to Prevent Evaporative Cooling from Eroding an Online Community

1. Acknowledge Community Lifecycle

2. Passion At The Top to Ignite Passion at the Bottom

3. Reward Users With Rewards, Not Rank

4. Architectural Flexibility = Good, Managerial Flexibility  = Better 

****

1. Acknowledge Community Lifecycle

There is no way to "prevent" Evaporative Cooling (EC) in an online community completely. 

Your active user base will ebb and flow over time. Incremental growth may or may never lead to an explosion of popularity, but tare will exist with every new generation that joins the community, because people's priorities change and technology changes over time. What is a passionate interest now could become a vague interest later. Technology will change and no matter how innovative a community architecture is right now, at some point it will be old-school or obsolete. Not updating the technology means you'll lose people - updating the technology means you'll lose people. Keeping the group small and intimate means you'll lose people. Opening the community up means you'll lose people.

The key to keeping a community alive has a lot to do with keeping the currently engaged users engaged. In part, this can be achieved by...


2. Passion At The Top to Ignite Passion at the Bottom

I'm speaking here as owner and moderator of 4 concurrent communities, all based around an interest - not a hobby even, merely an interest. Of course people come and go in this interest space and in the more than ten years I've been running these communities, the thing that sustains me - and the communities - is that we all still enjoy the topic. My passion for it communicates to some degree in everything I do on these communities. My communities give warm welcomes to other fans, who find their enthusiasm rewarded.

In communities I haven't run, but have had the pleasure of moderating for, when the passion at the top cools, the community congeals almost instantly. Community builders that choose moderators so they can play with the architecture, cede control to people who don't have their vision or their passion. Moderation becomes a "thing to be done" not a "thing that keeps our community thriving." (1) (See point 3 for more on this.)

To slow one's own EC, one must acknowledge the limits of one's own passion - and energy. Like any community leader, I go through phases of burnout, or if there is simply less to talk about, I let the conversation ebb. Ebb tide is not an irreversible trend on a community, a blog or even in a conversation. When I've been blogging with frequency and intensity, I often take a few days off to let the audience - and myself - have a break. When I come back to it, my readership jumps. The same is true with a community. Short breaks in news/updates allow for a more relaxed approach when one returns - time for chat, personal opinion and other less quantifiable discussions that make up a community. Or a pattern of small news/chit-chat can be excited by big news or broader topics. 

The more passion a leader brings to the community, the more passion the community will generate.


3. Reward Users With Reward, not Rank (2)

I cannot stress enough how critical this point is.

It's time for a story. Two, in fact. In both cases, I was a Admin-level member after rising through the ranks by just being a good contributor and relatively unflappable.

The story is very similar in both cases. In the first case, there was a member of the group who offered to take charge of one of the committees. She was a horrible leader; selfish, mean and lazy. Everything she touched withered and died. She was so bad, that even the people above her left because she was loud and intractable and it just wasn't worth the energy. When the person above her left, invariably she would be given that position. No one at the executive level would be the bad guy and tell her to get lost (in part because this was a volunteer community, in part because of who was chosen to lead.) She rose through the ranks, more quickly as time went on, because the higher she got, the more people had to work with her and more would leave.

Ultimately, in the first case, the person took over the community and - no surprise at all - within a year the community was dead.

In the second case, a top user was rewarded with rank, because she was online so often. The community owners relied on this person for feedback but there were no checks and balances to her intel or actions. Her misinformation was the only information the owners received and like idiots, they relied on that. The problem was that the reason she was online so often was that she was conducting a cyber-affair with another user (who was a major contributor of money, which translated to rank on the community.) The two of them formed a block that abused, harassed and destroyed other users they felt were a threat.

In the first case, rather than dealing with the problem, that person was given power. In the second, the community owners used hours logged as a metric for valuable contributor. In both cases, the community owners set the community up for massive EC as the community members were disengaged and occasionally, active persecuted, by people who unsuited to hold any power at all.

In both cases, I pointed out the fallacies behind the appointment, but The Powers That Be chose to pretend nothing was wrong. I did not stick around long.

How can this problem be rectified? Understand that the #1 value good contributors are making is not their presence, not the hours they log, not their experience. Good contributors contribute good content. Rewarding them by giving them management tasks which will suck away their energy and desire to contribute is the perfect recipe for EC. It's the Peter Principle, online community style.

When I created a reward program for one of my communities, I focused on rewards that reinforced the "team" aspect of user support. Rather than adding on burdensome responsibility, they are rewarded for what they already do, the way they already do it. Time is not an issue. Amount of money spent is not really a major factor. Power is taken out of the equation entirely. The point of a reward is to make someone feel rewarded. (3)

By using Rank as a Reward, you disincentivize your top users to use. Their time on the site becomes unpaid work, their voice becomes the Voice of Authority, so it's harder for them to kick back and have fun. Many sites give rank without power or tools to maintaiin order- a veritable death spiral for online community moderation. Additionally, training for Moderators is poor or non-existent on many communities. The end result is that your best users are too frustrated and tired to contribute. 

There is no faster was to kill a community than by using Rank as a Reward for contribution. It is the major EC generator.



4. Architectural Flexibility = Good, Managerial Flexibility  = Better

In the article quoted, the focus is more on the technology than the people. It is absolutely a benefit to be able to adapt to the times. Adding social sharing and alternate means of communication, providing spaces for digression and dissension (warrens) and open fora for conversation are a fantastic way to slow down EC.

Even better is management that acknowledges mission/scope drift and is as transparent as possible (4) when changes are made or have to happen. "We're adding a new feature because we want to try it out" is something that community builders can (and should) say. Users may or may not try the new feature out - this, and what they have to say about it when they do use it, is valuable feedback. When a new control has to be rolled out, the best way to explain that is to say just that. "We had to do this because...." Engaged users will understand. Don't be coy, "Hey we made new changes that will take away something you liked because we did." Are there so many cases of something that a new rule was warranted? Say that and say it plainly.

Users believe they ought to have some say in a community by virtue of their time and engagement. Management has to make decisions based on the greater good and the bottom line. But surely there's a way to bring these two things together? Harness the insight of new users, casual users and heavy users in regards to community change  - and publish these findings so people can feel as if they were represented, heard and understood. In the volatile start-up world more=better, so it's understandable that changes will be rapid and constant. Can you think of any community anywhere, online or off, that likes change? People get used to what they get used to and they adapt very quickly, but they do not realize this. Every change, no matter how ultimately important, will increase EC...unless you include the community in that change.

It's easy for engineers to tinker with architecture, it's far more important for community managers to tinker with community engagement.


5. Conclusion.

While Evaporative Cooling is a fact of online community life and cannot be prevented or avoided, it can be slowed and managed. Understanding which aspects of community life are the most vulnerable to EC, establishing a rhythm to harness the ebb and flow of community life, maintaining engagement, rewarding contribution, providing tools for moderation and flexibility in management can decrease EC over the long-term. 

More reading:

1. Perils and Pitfalls of Online Community Management by Erica Friedman on 'Splaining: The Bloarg

2.Moderation: Policing, Curation and Shoveling Behind Elephants by Erica Friedman on 'Splaining: The Bloarg

3. When a Reward Program Feels Like a Slap

4The Myth of Transparency in a Community by Erica Friedman on 'Splaining: The Bloarg

Erica Friedman has been managing online communities since the olden days of BBS. She was a moderator on Usenet, and has owned, adminned or moderated about 2 dozen communities online. She currently own and runs 4 communities.

The Heart of Social Media - and the Key to Unlocking It

Hey you. Yes, you. Your Social Media strategy isn't working is it? Takes too much time, you end up dealing with customer complaints mostly, you don't really see the point, right? Forget ROI, you're not seeing ROAnything.

Well, I have something important to tell you.This isn't just another "why companies suck at Social Media post", although yes, we'll be starting there.

The heart of Social Media is the ability to express mutual admiration.

Okay, so what? There's plenty of things that express appreciation. Greeting cards, 15% off discount coupons, televised award shows...

Only those aren't really mutual at all. Think of Sally Field's iconic Academy Award speech, "You like me, you really like me!" The Academy did indeed like her that year and she liked that they liked her (after years of pretty much ignoring her existence.) A discount coupon is a carrot to get the horse into your barn. These may have mutual benefit, but they are not expressions of mutual admiration.

Customer A: "I love this store. You guys are always friendly and you always have just what I need."

Store Owner: "Thanks! We try our best."

There's nothing wrong with this answer, but it could be better.

Store Owner: "Thanks! We try our best, and we couldn't do it without great customers like you."

By expressing *mutual* admiration, the store owner acknowledges the important place the customer has in the process.

Online, way too many companies forget the mutual aspect of Social Media. A company might thank customers for complimenting them. They may offer to help customers with problems...but how many companies on Social Media think to thank their customers?

Take your Social Media up a notch and make it mutual. That's the key to unlocking the "social" part of Social Media.