From HappyAbout.info

We were sent a review copy of ‘18 Rules of Community Engagement’ by Angela Connor, which contains very useful lessons for all businesses engaging with – or planning to engage with – their customers and potential customers online.

Angela Connor has boiled down a huge subject into an 18-step strategy. Think of it as an accessible masterclass by a pragmatist rather than a theoretical lecture or high-minded discussion.

Currently Managing Editor of User-Generated Content at WRAL.com, in 2007 Angela launched GOLO.com, the first online community for the top-rated television station in the state which has grown to more than 12,000 members.

Angela has a background in journalism that shines through in her written style, making it easy to follow, conversational and crisp.

Essentially, unlike some ‘gurus’ and ‘experts’ who perform a commentary, Angela has done the hard slog, learned the hard lessons and continues to grow her community day-to-day. Her thinking is fresh and grounded in reality.

Just like we do here at FreshNetworks, Connor returns again and again to the themes of interaction, engagement, conversation. Above all, the importance of getting in the mix, not performing a high-handed role from atop, but being a part of your community, regardless of what the community is formed around.

From the outset, Connor is clear:

“We are now living in the conversation age, where one-way communication is no longer acceptable or desired. People want to engage and discuss, react and interact.

“It is no longer effective to have an online presence without interaction.”

Key lessons:

•    “It takes a different kind of investment to grow community, and a major portion of that investment is TIME.”
•    Community managers need to have “a long-term strategy and a plethora of tools in your toolkit to turn lurkers into contributors and to encourage contributors to ramp it up a bit and move into the zone of those who post ‘very often.’
•    Engaging, asking questions, chatting to members and offering them something useful and interesting is all vital.
•    Look after your members and appreciate them: “stroke a few egos”.
•    Every community has its own culture and set of values.
•    Be open, honest, sharing – and accept and respond to criticism!

With this book, Angela Connor has put together a really handy overview with genuinely useful thinking points to steer community management efforts in the right direction.

Above all else, the breadth of activities she covers for community managers keeps us mindful of just how diverse a role it is, and how important it is to do it right.

ISBN: Paperback: 978-1-60005-142-5 (1-60005-142-1)
ISBN: eBook: 978-1-60005-143-2 (1-60005-143-X)
Published by Happy About®.

Read all our posts on Promoting Community Management.

At FreshNetworks we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in June.

1. Gordon Brown’s YouTube trauma

Our most popular post for two months in a row, Charlie Osmond examines Gordon Brown’s use of YouTube to make policy announcements and why it isn’t always the best medium. There can sometimes seem to be a temptation to use social media to convey a message, but whether it’s marketing, communications, PR or engaging your customers, there’s a place for social media and a time that another route is more appropriate.

2. Build your own community or go where people are? Do both

Another popular post over the last couple of months, examining the debate about whether brands should engage customers where they are online (and so in social networks) or build their own site to bring them to (a branded online community). Here we look at the Hub and Spoke Model of Social Media Engagement. Showing how the most effective thing for any brand to do is to do both.

3. Dell makes $3 million on Twitter. What can we learn?

Dell has reportedly made $2 million in sales directly from their @DellOutlet Twitter stream, and a further $1 million from sales that started on Twitter but were completed elsewhere. That’s $50 in revenue for every Twitter follower they have. In this post we look at three reasons why Dell has been so successful with Twitter and what others can learn.

4. How organisations can use Twitter – some examples

A presentation of three different ways that organisations are using Twitter and some ideas of how other organisations can do the same. Putting a public face on the brand, like Ford. Segmenting and targeting different groups, like Dell. Or using Twitter as a gateway to a broader social media engagement strategy.

5. People are fed up of joining brand pages on Facebook

Research from the Internet Advertising Bureau suggests that people are becoming increasingly tired of requests to join brand pages and install branded applications on their Facebook page or in other social networks. We look at what this means for brands and marketers trying to engage customers in social networks.

I’ve spent the last ten days with no Internet and very little access to English-language news sources. On my return I turned to my three favourite sources for getting up to speed quickly on what’s been happening: BBC News, Twitter and Google. The first of these for an overview of what had happened and the last two to really delve into some depth, to find out what people have been saying and to see what’s really been happening.

It turns out I missed a lot.

Only a few years ago, my main source of information on anything from the events in Iran, to the events in Los Angeles would have been a printed newspaper or magazine. I could have picked up one of the weeklies at Heathrow airport on Sunday and found out most of what there was for me to find out on the journey home. Today things are very different. There’s a vast array of information out there from news outlets to people like you and me. People who might (at least claim that they) know more than the new outlets, or at least are more willing to tell us.

Both the aftermath of the Iran election and the death of Michael Jackson have highlighted the role that users can play in generating  news content. Keeping us up-to-date on what they are seeing, hearing and thinking. And often doing this more quickly than traditional news sources. The way we find out about what is happening is now quicker than ever  before.

Speed of reporting is important for news and has been the focus of many important developments. The Crimean war in the 1850s saw the arrival of reporting that must have felt to readers of the day like ‘real-time’ updates. For the first time, electric telegraph enabled news to travel across Europe in hours and not weeks. People could find out what was happening at the Front. This was a real revolution. The increased speed at which we could get news and reporting changed what people wrote about and how they wrote about it – the birth of the ‘embedded’ journalist with the troops. This was the first time people could hear about battles and what was happening in the war whilst they were still pertinent. People felt they knew more and knew more quickly. They felt like they could change things.

And the use of user-generated news is bringing similar changes thanks to the speed at which it is letting people tell us what they are seeing and hearing. This is changing the kind of news we are exposed to. Whereas previously we would see reports that a journalist had crafted and would assess how much credit we gave to that particular journalist, source or publication. We are now getting snippets of information from multiple sources and each time  have to assess what we think about that source and that piece of information. The many thousands of comments an news-snippets on Twitter about Iran or Michael Jackson need to be evaluated  – which do we trust (and why); which are we interested in find out more about (and why); which snippets when put together give us a fuller picture of events (and why).

There is a danger with this kind of news. A danger that people will question less and that things that are not true or have less critical appraisal will start to influence what we think and what we do. I’m more optimistic. I think that the  massive growth in real-time news will make us be more critical and help teach us to process this new kind of information – taking in more from a wider range of sources and filtering out what we don’t trust and query things by looking for other sources. This has to be a good thing.

And of course it means that we will get this information quicker than ever before. What this means for traditional news outlets is probably another story…

Some more reading

• Michael Jackson: Information Overload (geeksaresexy.net)
• Web slows after Jackson’s death (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Twitter and the news cycle, perfect together (ethanzuckerman.com)

The real power of all the user-generated content and ideas that result from an increasing use of social media depends on our being able to find it. It’s no use to have millions upon millions of comments added each day if we can’t find them, or if we can’t sort for the ones most relevant to us at a particular moment.

This is, of course, not a new problem. Information from the earliest Medieval libraries to today’s online communities and social networks has needed sorting, categorising and cataloguing so that we  can find it successfully. Twitter users have a simple way of helping to sort data – the hashtag.

The concept is simple. A short code is added to the end of a Tweet to associate it with others – this then lets people search for everything on this  subject. So, for example, if you were tweeting at this weekend’s Glastonbury music festival in the UK then you could add the code #glastonbury to your tweet. If you wanted to search for what’s happening then you just need to search for everything with this code.

Hashtags are great for events and are a really effective way of associating related tweets with each other. But they are quite limited. As a means of sorting and cataloguing data they are very simple, perhaps too simple.

This became quite clear over the last couple of weeks with the use of the hashtag #iranelection. The tag was originally used by people in Iran who were tweeting updates about what was happening. Others in Iran were able to find out about  events, protests and developments by tracking these updates. The hashtag wasn’t the most used on Twitter but it was serving it’s purpose. Then it suddenly became popular, very popular. And that’s when you start to see the weaknesses of this way of organising information.

The #iranelection hashtag started being used by people not in Iran searching for information or merely expressing concern for or interest in what was happening in the country. The tweets from people on the ground were much less easy to find with hundreds of tweets from well wishers mixed in there. Information was much more difficult to find as the hashtag became more popular.

Whilst simple, the hashtag has limitations associated with this. One of the real challenges for Twitter (and indeed for many other social media sites) is finding ways to sort, file and catalogue information in a way that makes it easy for others to find. This is not easy – in part it depends on the fundamental structure of the site itself, and in part on the ways in which users use the site.

The ideal might be a way to filter content by type, by user information and by a series of categories. But this requires that you gather more profiling information than many of these sites do (or indeed than many users would want to give) and providing a way to categorise both at a parent and child level, which is complicated from an information architecture perspective. Resolving this is the real challenge of social media – finding a way to search for and discover information we want. It is this that will really show the benefits that social media can bring.

Some more reading

• Social Media and #IranElection | bigMETHOD (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• How to Search Twitter (olago.wordpress.com)
• Twitter numbers up thanks to Iran (thisisherd.com)
• Iran Twitter: Why The Movement Adopted This Medium (huffingtonpost.com)
• Iran, Twitter and the value of new media (sluggerotoole.com)
• ‘It’s Hot in Iran’ Is Latest Tech PR Gimmick (gawker.com)

Wikipedia informs me the first flash mob was created in 2003. I am sure there are many earlier examples – the U2 video Where The Streets Have No Name, seems a possible contender. Whatever the case, they’ve really only hit the popular psyche in the last two or three years (in Britain at least).

Is it a need to feel part of something that draws people in? A sense of community? of belonging? I’m not sure, but I suspect it’s a trend that’s going to stay. And I’d love to hear your pet theories.

Three recent flash mobs:

Last month I saw a great example. The Sasquatch Dance Guy. It’s an extraordinary video of how one man can build a crowd and start a craze in no time at all. It’s not an organised flash mob, but it’s a fascinating insight into instant community building.

Here’s this evening’s Michael Jackson flash mob in London:

And this appears to be a gather by bicycle flash mob for Michael Jackson in San Fran:

A few of the best flash mobs
While I am on the subject I thought it only fair to share a few of the best flash mobs ever:

The big freeze flash mob in Grand Central Station:

The T-mobile dance flash mob at Liverpool street

The Ninja flash mob

The MC Hammer flash mob