Do Users Really Generate Content? Tips and Tools for Building Engaged Online Communities

Editor's Notes

• #3: We have a lot to talk about. We really want to get a sense of who you are, so we can tailor our information to your needs, and we want you to feel free to ask questions at any time, no need to wait until the end of our presentations.
• #4: NSRT helps grantees of the Corporation for National and Community Service, such as AmeriCorps, build capacity with information, online training, and online communities. In addition to being an avid user of online communities in my own personal and professional life, I have been interacting with the community of CNCS grantees for over ten years via listservs, email, and phone, and now we are embarking on an exciting project of building more full featured online communities for the grantees.
• #5: Let’s hear from someone who works at a fairly large organization. And someone who works at a very small organization. We are online junkies and nerds, so please, please stop us if you don’t understand what we’re saying. We are all here to learn and you may be advocating for several of your audience-mates if you ask us to explain our jargon.
• #6: Ask audience for some examples. Ladder of engagement
• #7: On the high end of the UGC spectrum. Lesson is – took a long time and these trickle in, but what they submit is really quality and useful to others. A well-defined community that has been developing over years, knows each other from our listserv. So, this is one possible end point from a ladder of engagement, and Kate is going to go over some of the basics that need to be in place as you build that ladder.
• #9: There’s a scene in Through the Looking Glass where Alice runs lightning fast alongside the Queen. When she stops to rest after a long while, Alice can hardly believe her eyes, for she is in the same place she started. The Queen asked why Alice thinks this is remarkable. Alice says, “Well, in our country, you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” The Queen responds Alice must be from a very slow country. She says: “Now, here, you see it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”  
• #12: This data is interesting, but not necessarily actionable.
• #18: There’s a scene in Through the Looking Glass where Alice runs lightning fast alongside the Queen. When she stops to rest after a long while, Alice can hardly believe her eyes, for she is in the same place she started. The Queen asked why Alice thinks this is remarkable. Alice says, “Well, in our country, you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” The Queen responds Alice must be from a very slow country. She says: “Now, here, you see it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”  
• #20: There’s a scene in Through the Looking Glass where Alice runs lightning fast alongside the Queen. When she stops to rest after a long while, Alice can hardly believe her eyes, for she is in the same place she started. The Queen asked why Alice thinks this is remarkable. Alice says, “Well, in our country, you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” The Queen responds Alice must be from a very slow country. She says: “Now, here, you see it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”  
• #25: Personal networking at work (Basic social and communication skills) Social media Start with listening Build trust Amplify your message THIS IS THE ENTRY POINT TO SOCIAL NETWORKING; IF YOU DO ONE THING, MAKE IT BE A GOOGLE ALERT
• #31: This example shows blog monitoring, it can also be used for monitoring tweets, tags, apps, other feeds. The premium version does curation and analytics as well.
• #32: Even if you’ve reached the Holy Grail and are getting lots of UGC without doing anything proactive to get it, you’ll still want to highlight and curate it.
• #35: Parameters: A time-bound ask (one month). Win-win – contributors get professional recognition, links to their blog or their org’s blog Inclusive/Frictionless – contribute from anywhere, just use a hashtag, send a quick email, can re-use past content (explain frictionless – no complicated logins, formatting instructions, etc.)
• #36: Add Robin Good example
• #37: This shows the way I’m currently using scoop.it for our org on a particular topic. It could also be used to curate, for example, a Twitter list you build of your best supporters or members.
• #40: This example shows news, but it could easily be blog posts or tweets that a known community member has written. They will feel special by being highlighted.
• #43: NetSquared roundups Zoetica/Beth questions on Facebook TechSoup discussion boards #nptech tag on delicious and Twitter So, tools include Blogs, Online dashboards, Twitter, Email discussion groups (NTEN has), Wikis (WeAreMedia), Flickr, SNS (Facebook). Slideshare, YouTube (add a few slides to show quickly w/Amy’s dashboard, a blog, WeAreMedia? )
• #44: Within the VISTA Campus there is a separate area for VISTA Leaders. Notice bullet point three – the challenge was to create useful, evergreen materials to help other VISTA Leaders do their job well. Six teams worked on creating content for six different products. There were 3 facilitators/coaches. The materials were drafted in wikis and the end products were nicely designed PDFs.
• #46: “ What is KaBOOM!” Read KaBOOM! Vision and Mission Basically, we can’t do it alone. Bringing corporate and foundations together to fund needy communities to plan and organize one day community builds that bring together hundreds of volunteers and transforms communities. That takes a lot of time. A lot of staff. A lot of money. We’ve been using the internet to rapidly scale our impact for about 6 years. We’ve developed a number of online tools and programs that help community-minded citizens (and regular joes) helps us build, improve, open, and map playgrounds across North America.
• #47: So you might be asking…
• #48: Building, improving, and opening playgrounds is a high barrier. The Map of Play is a consumer-friendly advocacy tool we created to meet people who are fans of our work half way. If you don’t have a year to fundraise and put together a playground build, you can map the state of play in your community by using the Map of Play to add, find, rate, and upload photos of your community’s playgrounds. It’s the Yelp or Youtube for playgrounds. Play deserts.
• #49: Many of you in the room are, I’m sure, aware of the challenges of trying to crowd-source any type of knowledge base, and all of those same challenges of trying to engage users exist for the Map of Play too. Two years ago, we launched the Park-a-Day Summer Challenge. It was a call to action we put out through mommy blogger channels, facebook, twitter, and kaboom.org. We challenged parents to take our challenge to visit a new playground every week (or more if they wanted too). Instead of jumping right in to the ins and outs of the program, I thought I’d share some of the good data that came out of it. If you are like me, you are thinking– wow! That’s awesome. All in all, we calculated roughly 1,300 “engagements” across the KaBOOM! related to the challenge. And since so much of it is on the Map of Play, this great content will have long term benefits to new people visiting the site and looking to engage.
• #52: Using social media, our newsletter, etc, we put out the call for 2011 challengers. Users responded by signing up for more information on a Salsa form (we also used salsa to send our regular updates) 2. He hosted two orientation conference calls so we had an opportunity to introduce ourselves, explain the challenge and how it worked, and get people talking to each other. 3. After that, we let people go on their way. If they signed up on the KaBOOM! website and joined the discussion group, they officially became part of the challenge. And used our tools, Map, iPhone, and forum, to participate in the challenge.
• #54: Here is some proof of how one challengers perspective changed from the experience. Playgrounds are all well and good, unless they are locked behind fences. Alex has gone made countless revisions to entries in our Map of Play. He sends us long, loooooong emails detailing misinformation and suggests on how to change the website. He finished his challenge with a 1,500 word essay on the forum that served as a beginner’s guide to the Map of Play and a ‘best practices” guide for the site. In short superstar.
• #55: In one of our weekly emails, I listed a count of everyone’s activity on the website so far in the challenge. A leaderboard of sorts. 15-minutes after the email went out, Michelle emailed me a spreadsheet laying out, in great detail, how I had counted her activity in correctly and how I missed dozens of playgrounds she added in earlier, buggier versions of the Map of Play website. As a side note, injecting a little competition into our challenge with the leaderboard split our challengers into three groups: The “I feel so guilty I should do more” The “I’m so close to the top of the list! I’m adding XXX more this weekend!” The “I don’t cares.”
• #56: Dana is a “Mommy blogger” that knew nothing about KaBOOM! before the challenge. After hitting her goal of 50 playgrounds in the summer challenge, she’s started a entirely new blog at http://www.calgaryplaygroundreview.com/ where she continues to find and rate the places to play in Calgary.
• #60: Dear photograph
• #63: Moral of the story, we are lowering the bar to enter a little more to invite more people in, and we are offering prizes! With actual monetary value, not just swag. Gamification is the use of game design techniques[1], game thinking and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts. Typically gamification applies to non-game applications and processes, in order to encourage people to adopt them, or to influence how they are used. We are going to spur more engagement on the Tag app and the Map of Play by using game elements, like a Badge as a reward. Points will determine prize winners and get people highlight on the Map of Play homepage. If we do this again next year, I’ll let you know how it works.
• #64: The Cause and the user meet : We figured where our cause, creating new places for kids to play, can meet people with ordinary lives and ordinary goals. It takes some really special to take on a playground build on their own. We tailored the challenge to appeal to everyone else. High Touch: We got to know the challengers better, and they got to know us. We traded “social capital” to create a mutually beneficial relationship– they received press and social media, we received stellar content. Radar : This program was cheap. Not on time, but in dollars. It was heavy on sweat, low on tears. The investment paid off. We had great content for the entire summer to promote in social media. We had great stories for our board and donors. And the Map of Play now has a great content that will attract new visitors and spur further engagement Customer Service: I can’t stress this enough as a Quality Assurance person. It’s tech, and if you are building your own like KaBOOM! does, it’s going to be buggy. Our iPhone app, Playgrounds, was a mess. Should not have been released and we couldn’t keep up with bugs. People will get mad. Be patient. Be patient. Thank them for their patience, even when they don’t have any. You can transform someone who hates your product into someone who, at least, likes you enough to stick around for version 2.0. Listen to your users. You want to be quick on the draw with a retweet when they drop your hashtag 6PM pacific time and you are in washington dc. You have to read what they write. Comment, but try not to be the first one. This is their community– you just host it. Don’t overly restrict your campaign: We told people (and documented it as such in instructions) to go once a week, but in reality, we didn’t care. We understood people have real lives and real responsibilities and we never used a lack of steadfast, daily commitment to our challenge as a reason to not feature someone. We never passive aggressively welcomed someone back if they took a week or two off. Let the user have some leeway with their commitment. Phone: This goes back to customer service, but re-learn to love that phone. Put your phone number on the webpage. Make sure everyone can see it. It just works when someone can hear your voice, whether it’s a technical issue they are having or they just want to share something they found truly inspiring. I can think of at least 3 times where someone just called to tell me how much fun they were having, and they were all people I had talked to first for a tech support issue. Solutions : More customer service. Know your product or tool you are using. Figure out the work around’s. Know the browsers. Know how they effect the look or feel of your page’s. If it’s unfixable, try to fi it anyway, even if it’s just hitting up Facebook for a support request. If you need a day or two to fix something, let them know the timeline and give the a message when it’s ready.
• #65: Move some questions down here
• #67: I really like Amy’s blog because she goes into depth about the meaning of community. Community is not just you having a conversation with your audience. It’s when they start talking to each other, co-creating things together. It takes more than being a defined demographic or having a shared interest for a group of people to be a community. If brands were nervous about turning over control of their message to users, they are even more nervous about turning over control to communities. However, many social causes can benefit from cultivating true community.