Impact Interactions

We've relaunched our site which now includes our blog content as well as our presentations and other social media resources. We have moved all of our content over to the new site as well, so please take a minute to update your bookmark to http://impactinteractions.com/blog to follow our blog.

All future entries will be made on the new blog, not here.

See you on www.ImpactInteractions.com.

Mike Rowland
President

Labels: Impact Interactions Blog, online community best practices, Online Community blogs, online community presentations, Social media best practices, Social Media Blogs

Impact Interactions will be integrating our blog as part of our new web site in a couple of weeks. We'll bring over all of the content here, re-tag and categorize it, then offer it to everyone. Hopefully this will make it easier for you to find the information on social media, best practices, metrics & reporting, and online community mangement & moderation.

We've been using Blogger since 2004 and it's served us well. But now it's time to upgrade...We'll keep you posted on the switch over....

Labels: Impact Interactions Blog

THEY'RE HERE.......

That's right, the brand cheerleaders have infiltrated your community and are destroying the 'authenticity' of the dialogue. And guess what? IT'S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE AS MORE MARKETERS USE THIS TACTIC AS THEIR 'VIRAL' MARKETING CAMPAIGN.

In a recent "scandal" running through the online community world, Royal Caribbean has been using sponsored members to promote its cruises across many communities such as Cruisecritic, TripAdvisor, travel blogs, and other sites where potential cruise customers might be lurking. While Consumerist has a great write-up of the details, and Tripso.com's Anita Dunham-Potter has more details, the tactic is not new and will always be with us. And even though folks like Jeremiah Owyang are identifying the sponsored conversations in blogs, the trend towards using online communities and social networks is increasing each week.

As a professional moderation company, we see the campaigns hit across the multiple communities we manage for our clients. We see the trends quickly, whereas a moderator working for a single community may spot the campaign a little slower. Either way, you must act because these campaigns, like spam are not going away anytime soon.

The real issue is how to deal with this issue in your community when it happens.

Early on in the 2008 Primary Election season, we noticed a large number of posters in the AARP Issues & Elections community supporting Rudy Giuliani. No matter what the criticism by the Democrat/Liberal members of the community, these folks came back cheery about how wonderful Rudy was and what a great President he would make. While not as rampant as the “Royal Champions” of Royal Caribbean, they were persistent nonetheless.

We've also seen product supporters for Life Alert, The Scooter Store, and every multi-level marketing program on the market today in the community.

In each instance we've used several steps to push back on these folks and out them as the marketers that they are. Your moderation team should see the trend before your members start to complain and take action.

Steps to Take to Clean Up Your Community:

1. Start by checking out when the 'cheerleaders' registered. Most marketers who use this tactic do not have enough control over their posters/viral team. So, what ends up happening is they all start registering within a few days of each other. If you see a pattern of registrations, the marketers have hit your community and you must take action.
2. Get your own hyper-affiliated enthusiasts up to speed with what is going on. Give them the okay to confront these posters with questions about are they receiving anything for their posts, are they sponsored by the brand they promote, etc.
3. ENFORCE YOUR TERMS OF SERVICE! In the case of the Life Alert and Scooter Store cheerleaders, they continually posted links to the store where you could purchase the product. They violated the TOS for advertising in the community, so our moderators were able to remove the posts.
4. TRUST YOUR MEMBERS TO RECOGNIZE THE CHEERLEADERS FOR WHAT THEY ARE! Most folks recognize that someone who never is critical of a brand/product/service is biased. In most communities, those folks lose credibility among your longer term members. Some of these members will call out the cheerleaders in public, reducing the credibility of the cheerleaders.

Despite their best efforts, many of the brands who use this strategy are not that sophisticated in selecting who they use for the job. For example, in the "Royal Champions" case, the cruise line worked with Buzz Metrics to identify its promoters and then recruited them with trips and perks. But they recruited a 14 year old! (Cruiserccl, who at the ripe age of 14, professes that program hasn’t changed his posting habits.--- Yeah right, he's a good example of the quality that some brands go to for finding cheerleaders.) How many cruises has a 14 year old gone on which would qualify them as a cruise expert?

We see most of these efforts fail because they follow the same patterns as spammers. As a community moderator/manager, you must watch the trends in your qualitative content and be ready to act. The text may not always be similar, but the tone and message in these campaigns will be. Use the tools that you have and the top members in your community! If you let these campaigns in, your members will begin to think that you are getting paid something for the campaign. This can only have a negative impact on your community.

Just as with spam email, some marketers think that paid cheerleaders as a viral campaign is a great tactic. But in the end, most of these campaigns are run poorly and have the potential to actually damage the brand that they were set up to promote. Along the way, they can also damage your community if left unchecked. To learn more about dealing with cheer leading campaigns run in your community, please contact us.

Labels: online community, online community best practices, online community management, Terms of Service, Viral Campaigns

Last night I watched President Obama’s unofficial State of the Union address to Congress on television. My favorite parts of watching these types of speeches are always when the camera captures the audiences’ reaction. A republican frowns when tax increases are mentioned, democrats jump out of their chair for healthcare reform, one or two of the senior members of congress seem to be sleeping… But last nights’ address was markedly different than those that I have watched in the passed (aside from this one being delivered by our nations’ first African American President). Move over camera man, congress has gotten a hold of Twitter.

After seeing the success of the Obama campaigns’ use of Twitter and other social media applications, many other political influencers are finally beginning to realize the power of social media. To date 69 members of the US Congress, Senate (19) and the House of Representatives (50), have Twitter accounts. Granted, many of these congressmen rely on their staff to manage their social networking ventures and use is limited to announcements of public speaking events and party sponsored news but a few brave souls are jumping in head first to share their political insights with their constituents. But did the twittering on the floor contribute anything of real value or insights last night? Not really. Many of the comments were simply snarky and partisan like that made on behalf of Texas Republican, Joe Barton: "Aggie basketball game is about to start on espn2 for those of you that aren't going to bother watching pelosi smirk for the next hour." This comment was later retracted but demonstrated that while our political leaders are beginning to use social media, they aren’t quite using well, yet. These new joiners to the social media realm have many asking ‘should the highest leaders in our political system be twittering?’

Some have security concerns about congressmen exposing themselves to this level of transparency in certain sensitive situations. A sensitive situation being when Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra twittered while travelling through Iraq and Afghanistan earlier this month. Revealing real time classified information, and making political gibes at members of the opposing political party may not be the best use of this tool but in the hands of our country’s leaders, Twitter does have the potential to bring real value to the community.

Political views aside, a common theme to Obama’s campaign and overall message has been increased transparency, willingness to sit down and listen to new ideas, and accepting constructive feedback. Giving the voters a higher level of access to the people that shape the laws that affect our daily lives can only be a good thing, providing deeper insight to what our political leaders are actually thinking, doing, and how they are responding to events. It’s great to see that social media tools and applications are slowly making their way into the hands of our political leaders. The value will come when our leaders use social media not only as a marketing tool for themselves, or to pass snarky notes, but as a means of listening to the needs of the nation and allowing social networks to contribute to the shaping of the nations future.

Are your congressmen on Twitter? You can find out whether or not your congressmen are on twitter and if they aren’t you can sign a petition for them to be.

You can also follow us on Twitter @ ImpactInteract

Photo credit: icklebird, Flickr

Jen Graziani

Labels: government use of social media, social media, social media tools, Twitter

At last week’s unconference, I noticed that many of the questions asked throughout the day repeated one another. Veterans in the online community world noted that the questions we are asking ourselves today seem to be the same ones that we have been asking for the last 10 years. One woman who had attended last year’s Online Community Unconference brought up an old expression to describe it, saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” I find this to be very true of the knowledge base in the online community industry. Even though communities and other social media are relatively new, their core elements are not so new at all. Online communities are just a new platform that allows people to build relationships and interact with each other, just like people have been doing since the dawn of time.

In order to really understand social media, you need to understand the social part of it. And while some people may tell you that the social part means just letting all of your members do whatever they want, I believe it is much deeper than that. It is about using our knowledge of human desires, feelings and behaviors in order to build a community in the truest sense. Successful “real world” communities don’t allow their members to do whatever they want, do they? To be successful, whether IRL (in real life) or online, communities need to have a specific purpose with regulations that help people to fulfill that purpose. Governments, school systems, the workplace, family, and friend groups all have specific functions and have guidelines (explicit or implied) that are built around fulfilling those functions. Prosperous online communities are no different. The people involved in online communities are the same people involved in outside communities. These people need structure, guidance, and freedom all balanced perfectly in order to make online communities as valuable as other communities and to make people want to be a part of them.

I found it very interesting when Scott Moore hosted a session called Psychology For The Community Manager. He took psychology principals on human behavior and analyzed them, explaining how these principles relate to behaviors in online communities as well. One example he gave was the Bystander Effect. This principle states that people are less willing to offer help to someone when others are present. This is because people tend to feel like someone else should be the one to do it, or because they fear that they will be judged on their actions and instead do nothing. Applied to online communities, Scott gave an example of how the degree of community moderator involvement can greatly affect the extent to which members help each other. If members feel like the moderators are ever-present and that they will do everything, then members are not as willing to solve their own or other people’s problems. The lesson here was that while your moderators are essential to communities, managers need to be aware of their impact on the member engagement and shape the community norms so that members will help each other to a reasonable extent and turn to moderators in advanced cases.

I am surprised that more people don’t connect the world’s knowledge of psychology and sociology to online community development. Oftentimes people who build online communities take the stance that social media is brand spanking new and that everybody is experimenting and learning everything from scratch. While there are aspects of social media which are a definite departure from many traditional corporate viewpoints, there is no need to start with a blank slate. That’s one of the reasons why people are always asking the same questions year after year. Instead, follow Newton’s lead and innovate by standing on the shoulders of giants. Utilize existing resources and tap into the knowledge of those who have been there before you. Then you’ll be years ahead of everyone else.

Jeremy Latimer

Labels: #OCUE2009, online community, online community best practices, online community management, psychology of communities

This entry is a summary of a presentation we made at last week's Online Community Unconference East meeting in NY. The session was attended by roughly 20-25 members and lead by our president, Mike Rowland.

The idea of the session was to drive discussions regarding many of the common ideas around community that have been published/promoted/blogged about as if they were absolutes rather than the experiences of a few. The topics covered the following:

1. 90-9-1 Rule- Comes from concept of Participation by Jakob Nielson. Worked pretty well in early 1990s when published. Major impacts on this idea have been adoption of online communities since 1990, broadband adoption, social networks, etc. We find that the numbers don't hold and should not be relied upon in selling a project to management or in goal setting due to the wide variances we've measured with over 40 communities over the past eight years.
   - At Participate.com, we modified the rule to use as an outreach rule of thumb.
   - At Impact Interactions, our clients have ratios all over the map
   - It's more important to measure the quality of interactions as it relates to your objectives instead of trying to work towards a specific ratio
   
2. Self-Policing Communities - Using volunteers to moderate and report violations is a hot trend for organizations to buy into right now. But it's been that way since at least 2000 when we spoke of hyper-affiliates and enthusiasts. Our experience has shown that most community members cannot be relied upon to keep the community moving forward.
   - Volunteers will catch some violations, but mostly report content that they don't agree with. This forces community team to review content twice or more which is inefficient
   - Volunteers are good at defensive work (spam, porn, etc.) but do not align with your organization's objectives in most cases and won't faciliate most B2C communities (B2B support communities, they usually will keep the conversations moving forward towards a resolution.)
   - Data in our presentation that we've been tracking each year for clients shows that members generally report about 20-30% of all violations in any given month. You still need moderation...
   - Our surveys of multiple community members (both B2B and B2C) over time shows that members don't want to be classified as a tattle tail, nor do they believe it is their responsibility to keep the community free of junk, nor do they want to handle being attacked for removing or editing members' content for violations.
   
3. Personas - There are strong feelings around this topic. The term authenticity comes up quite a bit when discussing personas when what is really meant is transparency.
   Great conversations on this one, with no conclusion reached about using personas or not.
   - Most personas get blown by members because the host creating the persona doesn't think through the process and character, misuse the persona to cheerlead the organization and its products, is so unbelievable (master of health issues, political issues, computer technology, astrology, etc.), or is used to sell in the community. All of these are wrong and should be avoided.
   - Where personas work well is very, very limited. In new communities, personas can help seed conversational content and help demonstrate norms. In a flame war, they can help diffuse the situation (especially in the case of unjust attacks). Over time, as the community grows, the role of the persona should diminish.
   
4. Volunteers/Hyper-Affiliates as Good Guys - Beware the myth that your top people will always love and support your community.
   - The more volunteers/hyper-affiliates you have is not always a good metric
   - They don't always follow the rules and have no objectivity
   - When a volunteer or hyper-affiliate turns against you, the result is a much larger confrontation than you might think.
   - Once enabled, it is very difficult to make changes to your site/community without a large time commitment to deal with the criticism of your volunteer network.
   - Letting volunteers and hyper-affiliates run the community demonstrates favoritism on the part of the host organization in the eyes of many non-recognized members. It is a double edged sword which if not carefully managed can have very negative consequences on your community's conversion and engagement ratios.
   
5. Community ROI cannot be measured - Everyone is familiar with the cost avoidance argument to measure ROI. But after that, the conversation usually stops because the thought is that it is too hard to show the economic value of the community.
   - Don't confuse value with ROI... they are not the same!
   - You can measure the economic value generated by your community using multiple data sources and methods. We've measured the online community ROI for sales (influence on purchase & intent), Marketing (awareness and loyalty), lead generation (development and qualify leads faster), and e-learning (higher achievement and registrations). They all require certain data that doesn't come just from the community's metrics.
   

We've uploaded the presentation as a pdf on our web site in our Social Media Resource Center.

Labels: #OCUE2009, online community benchmarks, online community best practices, online community management, online community ROI

At the Online Community Unconference East, there was a broad range of conversations from ROI and community benchmarks to the psychology behind using online communities. Throughout these sessions I noticed a common theme brought up several times was super user engagement and incentive programs. That in itself is a topic that I was not surprised to hear about. Engaging and encouraging your hyper-affiliated members to contribute regularly drives better content, activity, and engagement throughout the community. Asking these members for feedback, to help out other users when they can, and highlighting them as role models for community behavior is a standard best practice. Where this conversation ventured off path was when I heard the question (I’m paraphrasing here) “My team does not have the time to deal with all of the violations in our community and in this economic climate we just can’t bring more staff on board. Can I get my super users to take on this responsibility?” Simple answer to this one. No.

Giving members of the community the ability to flag content and users that violate the community rules is a valuable tool that allows moderators to identify problems and act more quickly. This is a function that is built in to the majority of community platforms today. But giving members the administrative power to make actionable decisions on the behalf of your organization begins to border on the edges of shirking your own responsibilities and will inevitably leave you asking yourself “Hey, who's driving this thing?”

No matter how much your members love your product, your brand, your cause; they are not there for your company. They have their own reason for participating in your online community and that reason is often not to uphold all rules and requirements set out by the sponsoring organization. You will find some volunteers that have a great helper mentality and want to do all that they can for the community but can you risk your brand reputation on hoping that one of these members won’t steer the company into oncoming traffic? Remember that these highly active users already have a tremendous sway over the conversation in your community because they are very visible and have built up a reputation to where other members will follow their lead. Handing over administrative tools will only amplify this power.

The level of freedom that you give your members will obviously depend on the type of community and the audience but the ultimate responsibility for running the community needs to lie in the hands of the organization. Volunteer super users cannot take the place of a dedicated and objective moderation team. In our experience of moderating an online community with over 50,000 users and many members that have been deeply involved with the organization online for over 10 years, we find many members that are active in reporting objectionable activities. Despite this, we still see that on average 75% of the terms of service violations are being reported by our moderation team where only 25% of violations are noted by members.

When the internal resources in an organization are stretched too thin to bear the brunt of moderating their communities, contracted moderation services become a viable and cost effective alternative to the expense of hiring additional staff.

If your organization needs help handling the moderation load or are looking for proven moderation best practices, leave us a comment here or Contact Us.

Jen Graziani

Labels: #OCUE2009, community volunteers, enthusiasts, online community, online community best practices, online community management, online community strategy, online moderation