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.

Best Practices for Strong, Stable Linkbuilding with Social Media

The old adage "It's not what you know, it's who you know," is more important than ever in today's business world. And, one of the major measurements Social Ranking sites use now is an objective measurement of the value of your network. This is a questionable measurement since, our networks are always valuable to us, but on the principle that links in from major industry players weigh more heavily than links from friends and family, there some value to the concept.

So, what can a small- or medium size business do to build a strong network? Let's start with Social Media Linkbuilding. Many, if not most, of the "Best Practices" guides online on linkbuilding advocate tactics that are questionable, if not outright ignored now by measuring tools. Just as poor website construction can damage your overall SEO, poor linkbuilding tactics can severely damage your Social Media credibility. Here are five simple tactics that will increase your credibility and your network value.


Converse, Don't Monologue
Like people, companies are self-absorbed. They enter Social Media spaces focused on what it can do for them. They pop up on Facebook, Twitter or whatever platform with the corporate equivalent of "Hey guys, I'm here!" and expect people to care. But, just as no one really likes the guy who comes into the room at the party and says that, no one really cares that your business is on GetGlue...until you become interesting.

Forget the press release that you now have a Twitter account. Take time every day to find people talking about your business and just talk with them. Have a chat about the sandwich, those tickets they bought - were the seats good?, news in that field...and after you're become someone to listen to, THEN tell them about the sale coming up.

Talking with people sends a clear signal that you are not just in this for you - you really get the Social part of Social Media.


Be Generous
Sharing ideas, praise, credit will make you the kind of person whose network people want to be part of. Who is retweeting you, sharing your Facebook posts? Thank them, make them feel special, make it a special thing to be recognized by you. You'll find that the more generous you are, the more generous your network will be to you. It takes so little time or effort to recognize and thank someone, there's really no good reason to not do it at least semi-regularly. Slow news week? That's a perfect time to highlight some great network contributors! Saw a great article? Tell the person - publicly. Yes a nice long email explaining what you liked about it is great, but a short "This was an excellent article" on your Social Media platform helps spread the word. This gives the author a chance to respond back and possibly a new connection for both of you.


Don't Hijack, Give Credit Where Credit is Due
When you quote someone, you're expected to source the quote. On Social Media, source your links and wisdom, too. No one likes the guy who never has his wallet...no one wants to be part of the network of the guy who never says where he saw the link first. Use via to let people know that they've been sourced. This link will come back to them...and there's a good chance that you'll get a link back from them.

People who hijack links without sourcing the original, or who run them through their own jump pages make for lousy network additions. Avoid people who hijack links and hope they avoid you.


Variety is the Spice of Linking
You're good at linking to people in your industry. You know your peers and vendors and maybe even some of your customers. But no company is an island. There are industries peripheral to yours...and many service industries that you can benefit from like research, design, finance...don't be afraid to link out of your vertical. In fact, be afraid to not link out of your vertical! The further out you link and connect, the further out your message will be heard and seen.


Be Bold
Once you've started conversations with people in other industries, there comes a moment when you can just talk with anyone. Don't worry that the person is a President of a powerful company - if they are speaking with you as an equal, just talk back to them as an equal. Social Media is a great equalizer. Be bold in who you address and confident in how you converse with them.  The bolder you are, the more confident you'll grow, and the stronger your network will become.

Use solid linkbuilding tactics to build a solid network to raise your credibility and value.

ROI Means What in Social Media?

One of the things that most confuses people about using Social Media is the concept of Return on Investment. Confusion about ROI in Social Media stems from several different areas of the overall process of trying to map traditional marketing tactics to a Social Media model. Today we'll look at exactly what "Investment" you're making in Social Media, so it will make more sense when you think about why (and how) one should measure them and any Return on them.

Money - In reality, there are two major things that can be invested in Social Media. Money is the first.  Whether you hire a Social Media Professional to develop a strategy or Twitter for you, have someone on your internal staff build a Foursquare presence, have a writer blog for you, or put ads on Facebook, you are investing money in Social Media. If you are reaching out to your internal staff, the cost appears to be less, because they are there doing work for you anyway and all that's left is an opportunity cost. But any way you slice it, you're still paying for that work.

Because traditional marketing was based on investment of money, with well-established formulas for marketing campaigns targeted to specific media, specific demographics, times of day, expected number of viewers/listeners, etc., it all seemed rather straightforward.  Any mathematical formula applied across variables will yield *some* kind of number. Online advertising doesn't yet have established formulas, and measurement has to change to account for changes in technology. Since technology is changing at a rapid pace, things like Pay-Per-Click become obsolete as soon as they become standardized. Ultimately what gets measured most are the easiest, least useful numbers.

Throwing money at Social Media will make it easy to measure the investment, but there is no tried-and-true formula to measure the return.


Time - In the currency of Social Media, Time is the Gold Standard. Every business wants to be able to send out a single status update to all their Social Media presences at a single click of the button and have business pour in. But Time is a counterintuitive spend. When it comes to relationships, the *more* time spent, the more you are indicating that this relationship is important to you. Consider the power of a lunchtime chat when catching up with a friend as compared to a holiday-season "update from the Smith family" letter. Which is more authentic? Which do you think shows that the other party values you? We know that we spend more time with people who are important to us than we do with people who are not. The truth is obvious to anyone who has ever received a letter from a company with the greeting "Dear Valued Customer."

Time is the one thing you *must* spend in order to create any sustainable relationship.

***

Time and Money are the biggest spends when executing any kind of Social Media plan. But they aren't the only things you're spending....

Reputation - When you've been in business for any length of time, you have built up a reputation. When you start to put yourself out there for people to communicate with, one of the first things you are doing is investing that reputation. If you've built an awesome reputation, people will want to be part of your network, to be part of your team. Conversely, if you've got a reputation for avoidance and obfuscation, when you venture into Social Media, you may be taking a gamble that your reputation will make you a target.

Investing in your reputation means you'll have reputation to invest when the time comes to enter the Social Media world.

Creativity - This seems obvious, but almost no one considers their investment of Creativity when they look to create a Social Media presence.  For instance, you may look at your creative team and ask for something cool, innovative, engaging, but easy to manage and measure. And you want it in a reasonable time frame. In order to get even most of what you want, you need to invest a lot of Creativity in the process. There are limitations to hardware, software - and people. Imagining something completely new sounds great, but do you and your team have what it takes to get there? Or are you going to fall short and get something that's easy for you and less functional for your customers?

Consider the amount of Creativity you and your team have to invest before you start to dream.

Stake - Big corporations talk a lot about stakeholders. Stockholders, employees, customers all have some stake in the well-being of a company. Even in your small business, there are more stakeholders than just you - your family, your customers, your vendors all have some stake in your business.

You can leverage this stake if you need to, to invest in your ability to develop, support and grow a healthy Social Media presence.

Before you question what the Return on Investment of Social Media is, know what you're Investing in Social Media in the first place.

How Social Media Sent Me To Japan

I often see requests for case studies on how businesses use Social Media effectively. I offer up a recent experience I personally had as an example. I want to be as honest as I can about this - there is a trick in this story. I'll tell you the trick at the bottom of the article.

I write another blog, Okazu. It's a blog attached to my avocation, the promotion, creation and publication of Japanese comics. To be very specific, I promote, create, publish and review Japanese comics and animation with lesbian themes. I state this only so you can understand how small the niche I'm positioned in is. My blog is the oldest in the world on the topic and I bring a fairly unique perspective to the issue.

There is a series of novels from Japan that are pretty popular there and mostly all but unheard of here in the West. Recently, a live-action movie was made of the first of these novels. Of course I wanted to go see it, but didn't expect to be able to.

I was on Twitter, discussing it with a friend from Japan. He originally emailed me because of my blog. We've stayed in touch by Twitter and email.

My friend let me know that he had purchased one of the commemorative tickets to the movie for me, so I could get the extras that came with them. Of course I thanked him and immediately started to look up prices for flights. My friend was in a particularly silly mood that night - everything I posted on Twitter, he relayed again, in Japanese. I commented that I would come for the movie, but that flights were more expensive than I was comfortable with. Actually, what I said involved the phrase "highway robbery." He cheerfully translated that I felt the airfares were too high. And then he started to tease me - if only one of your fans would fly you to Japan to see the movie! I posted back that I would certainly go, if someone flew me over...

...and a fan of mine tweeted that she would sponsor me.

Which is how, not two months later, I was able to stand on line in Osaka, Japan and see that movie.

I am not joking about any of this, or making any part of it up. But I did say there was a trick.

The trick is...the story starts almost nine years ago.

Nine years ago I started Okazu. I have been posting reviews, news, opinion pieces, discussions guest columns there for nine years. For nine years, I've been building a readership, a following, a fan base and, for good or bad, a reputation.

The trick here is that Social Media is about building relationships and developing them over time. I met both my Japanese friend and my benefactor a few years ago and we have communicated through email, Facebook, Twitter, sometimes phone, ever since.

This is not an overnight success story - it's not a story about ROI. This is a story about how Social Media really works.

P.S. - The movie was excellent. (^_^)b

Creating an Amazing Social Network on Twitter Without Spamming the Universe

I recently volunteered to help out an organization I work with from time to time with their Social Media initiatives. When I logged in for the first time, their Twitter account had three followers - one of them was me. After a day, that had increased ten-fold - still small potatoes in the numbers game, but hey, you gotta start somewhere. And more importantly, we had a lead for a headliner guest, a sponsor and a few great panelists. In one day.

As the follower gauge crept slowly up, I was thinking about how easy it is to create a truly *amazing* network on Twitter. And I thought I'd write it up and share it with you today.

1) Start by Following Someone/Something You Know

I've mentioned this before. A new classroom or new job doesn't seem as scary when you know someone there before you start. It gives you a person to sanity check with, a guide and a mentor.

Talk to the people you know who are on Twitter. Learn from them, emulate them. Use them as references for behaviors, acronyms, abbreviations and actions.

Read what they say and notice how they say it. Take note of their balance between work and life, personal and professional.

Use all of this as a guideline for your own interactions. When you get a little freaked out, shoot a Tweet over to that colleague or friend and just have a nice irrelevant chat. It's great for the soul and you'll be blown away by how many people follow you once you relax and just have a conversation.


2) Follow The People The People You Follow Follow

You follow people you respect, information sources you trust, peers and colleagues and people against whom you benchmark your business. Take a look at who these people follow. Who do they get their news from? Who do they consider valuable members of their network? You don't have to follow all - or any - of these people, but the people you follow are a great resource to find more people to follow.


3) Don't Follow Everyone Just Because They Use A Keyword Or Phrase

There's nothing stranger than noticing you've got a dozen new followers and they all seem to have the word "soap" in their names. Suddenly, you realize that you mentioned the lovely new soap you bought last weekend. These people have created a search for a single keyword and automatically follow anyone who mentions that word. It seems like a good idea, but you already *bought* soap. You don't need or want more.

Having a keyword search set up is a great idea. It might net you a few new folks to talk with, a conversation about your business to track, some new contacts - but it's not a catchall basin. Pick and choose your connections so that there's some meaning in it for both you and the person you're following.


4) Follow People You Want in Your Stream

Everyone you follow will pop up on your home page. This and your own posts are your "Twitter stream." It could seem like a great idea to follow your cousin, because she knows a lot about Twitter, but when she starts late-night or drunk Tweeting, is that what you want showing up in your *public* stream?

Follow people who provide your stream with the level of quality and professionalism you want your business to express to the world at large.


5) Talk to People!

It may seem weird at first, just jumping in and asking a question, or introducing yourself to someone online without context, but, really, it's okay. That's normal on Twitter, where the conversations are public, so anyone can join in.

There's even specialized chats that use hashtags so you can follow the conversation with a simple search. Feel free to join in on a chat and learn what people have to say about topics of interest to you. Chats are another great way to find new people to follow.

These are all pretty basic things, but if you keep them in your mind as you get to know Twitter, you'll be well on your way to building an Amazing Network!

Social Media Without Delusion at ArtsCAP on 1/26

I'll be presenting the keynote speech at ArtsCAP's Electronic Media Bootcamp on January 26th in AsburyPark. I'll be talking about the Three Dimensions of Social Media.

In the meantime, here's my presentation from AsburyPop on "Social Media Without Delusion"



Thanks to Laura Gesin for putting this up on the VoxPop site and to John Kaplow for asking me to be part of this exciting ArtsCAP event!

Where You Are Doesn't Matter Until You Know Why You're There

One of the questions about Social Media I have heard most is "Which Social Network should I focus on?"

Part of the inconvenience of Next Big Thing-itis is that whatever the current "Next Big Thing" is gets most of the media coverage. Whether it's Facebook hitting X number of users (a totally meaningless number, since many accounts on Facebook are dead or nearly so,) or the current flock of celebrities who Twitter (another meaningless set of numbers since nearly all celebrities post communications meant to be read, but rarely respond to comments they receive), this kind of coverage means that the noise is way louder than the signal until the Next Big Thing is something else.

The side effect of Next Big Thing-itis is that for most people, putting the cart before the horse is their main issue. They ask where they should be, before they even know what they want to do there.

Effective Social Media is not a popular dance club. Being seen is not enough

So let's back up and take a look at the difference between Strategy and Tactics.

Strategy is the theoretical plan you start with. Taking into account your own Strengths and Weaknesses and those of your closest competitor(s), you take a high-level look at your market and formulate a plan based on as many variables as you can find data for.

For instance, this blog. My Strategy in creating this blog was to provide a single place to gather my thoughts on Social Media. Rather than build a website listing all my great skills and clients other stuff you may or may not care about, I decided to cut to the chase - here's my thoughts on Social Media. Having one place to collect them allows me to disseminate them easily.

I was well aware that there are many Social Media and Social Marketing blogs already in existence. I'm not competing with them, because my Strategy was to create a single place to gather *my* thoughts. Not to sell services or books (although that is not outside the pale, eventually.)

Tactics are the specific techniques and tools you use to execute a Strategy.

I chose a blog rather than a Facebook page, because a blog allows me more free rein with my ideas. If I want to try out a thought, a tactic, a marketing campaign, a design element, a blog offers me the most freedom to do so. It provides more space for exposition than, say, Twitter, and more personalization than LinkedIn. It's not a corporate presence like a company website or a presence on Foursquare. This blog is the conversation I have with - ideally - you, my readers.

If you can't articulate your strategy beyond "to have a Social Media presence" then it doesn't much matter where you are, because you don't know why you are there anyway.

Let's say that you are working on a new project - book, website, product, whatever. If you ask me what tactics should you use to promote that project, I'm going to tell you that it doesn't matter. There is no *thing* to promote, outside of your head. I mean this sincerely and with all due respect - very few people truly care about a project that you "are working on."

This is true for any widget, event or concept that is not about to be in existence. Any gleam in your eye might be of interest to those people who are close to you; your friends, your fanbase, etc, but for the large majority of people out there you'd like to reach, the fact that you are "working on" something means nothing.

So, what tactics *can* you focus on while you're writing that book or designing that site? You can pick one or two main Social Networks and Build Your Audience. It honestly doesn't matter what Network you choose - unless you focus your energy and time on one or two, you'll just have a small, diffuse audience all over the place. Pick a space and work it. Make it a base of operations - call all the shots from there. Refer back to it on your secondary and tertiary networks, mention it in casual online conversation - put it on your business card. Pull people into that space over and over and over. Build Your Audience using that space. Then, when you finally *have* something to promote, you'll have that audience to reach out to and hopefully, be able to convert them into your market.

Next post, I'll be talking about some broad categories of Tactics, so you can better target your efforts to the spaces you inhabit and the actual phases of Social Media Marketing.

In the meantime, your homework is to finish your End-of-Year review of your Social Media efforts and pare them down into the top few spaces where you'll spend most of your time and effort in the coming year. (I.e., for me, working on this blog.) Next Time we'll talk about what you'll be doing there to start the new year off with a strong Social Media Plan for you and your business.

The Importance of Being Social

You know what I've been doing recently? When I am in desperate need of a genuine smile, I smile at someone else first. I ask about their day, or wish them a wonderful weekend. Like magic, I almost always get a smile back in return. :-)

This holds true on Social Media spaces too. It's not enough to "have" a Twitter account, or be a member of a mailing list. On the web no one knows you exist - until you speak up.

"Build it and they will come" only applies online if what you've built is a network and a reputation for being interesting, relevant and fun.

Today's post comes with some homework. Sometime this week, pick a Social Media space you have a presence on but have neglected for lack of time. This could be your own company mailing list, or your Plurk account, or whatever. Take 15 minutes and go find a conversation to join, or a person to connect with. Use the site features, answer a question, join a group and a conversation - be social.

Go smile at someone.

You'll have increased your network, your presence and your reputation. And, dollars to doughnuts, you'll get a smile back.