Social Media–Week 5 readings

The Digital Handshake, pages 97-114  (Niche Online Communities)

Online communities are not like social networks, they are niche-specific.  A major difference is the way that profiles are displayed.  In a niche community, profiles are peripheral to what goes on, in social networks, they are the important thing. 

Why do online communities?

• improve customer relations
• search engines can index them
• useful for feedback
• users can give positive feed back through it
• gives stakeholders a sense of ownership

Sites can break down into 3 categories:

1. Customer support - customers come to it to get support for a manufacturer's product
2. Customer engagement - customers come here for education and interaction with manufacturer.
   When created there are things to think about:
   Research and understand the targets interest
   Form a coalition with related/non-competing products
   Create non-branded content and tools 
   Use experts to give credibility to site
   Use social engineering tools to encourage sharing 
   Passively put coalition product information up, also banner ads for more direct.
   Syndicate out the content for use on other sites
3. Employee communities and/or Vendor/partner communities - encourage people who have a stake in the company to share insights among themselves.

Common community mistakes:

1. Lack of adequate planning and research - follow the '5 Ws and H'. While it takes minutes to make a site it takes a while to plan.  
2. Putting an undue focus on technology - the people make up the community, not the technology
3. Not putting resources where they are best utilized - put someone in charge who knows how to run a community, not just some part time staff. 
4. Making the company fit the company not the other way around - the user defines the community not the company
5. Measuring the wrong things - you can not use traditional metrics to measure ROI

Online communities need a personal (pastoral) touch

There needs to be some glue to hold the membership together - a vision maybe.  Remind people every month or so what that vision is. A 'shepherd' is needed to guide the community, this requires a person who can apply a lot of TLC.  There must be a regular flow of content so that people will come to the sire.  Active participation by users should be encourages.  They will need to be paid with time, attention and rewards.

Society of Word of Mouth

Case study -

• Ensure that there is already a community that is undeserved and itching to meet
• Have an annual meeting
• Keeping the online community juices flowing requires large amounts of content
• Think education -- webinars draw people
• Kick out the polluters quickly  - you do not need a place for criminal actions to take place (spammers, etc.)

Twittermoms

Case study

• Starting a social network you set the tone
• Find people who have common interest and connect with them
• Have guidelines in place for spammers
• Make sure you offer high quality content

Tools for creating your own community

Ning:

This a website for people to create communities for any subject they choose. Tools are available (blogs, podcasts, calendars, etc. ) to customize the community to your liking. It is free with Google ads running through it. 

KickApps:

Like Ning it is hosted but you can put widgets from it into your own pages. 

CollectiveX Groupsites:

Hosted site that lends itself to professional network groups.

Open Source Options:

Drupal and Joomla are two platforms for building community.  These do take some time and effort.

WordFrame:

For larger firms it is more suited for B2B and is Blog-centric.

Mzinga:

Also for larger businesses, it is focused on learning, marketing and customer support.

Awareness Network:

Large industry branded communities are the focus here. 

Jive:

For enterprise business, focus is collaboration.

Lithium:

Larger company hosted support site.