Inside Out

I just stumbled upon this great study by Forum One Networks. One of their projects is the Online Community Research Network. Why didn’t I find that earlier? The study was made in October 2007… Better late than never. They also provide other interesting stuff and you can participate in their studies, which at the end of the day will be great for everybody.

Some findings they point out on page one:
- Respondents generally valued non-fiduciary dimensions of value, like loyalty over direct revenue.
- The most effective revenue generating techniques were advertising and charging for community subscription.
- A member-first attitude is needed when considering the addition of fee-based or revenue-generating services. The best way to find out what your members do or don’t want ? Ask them.

Interesting facts to me while I was reading the study were:
- More then 50% don’t get directly attributable revenue from their communities.
- Community activities like content sharing and social networks got more popular. Blogs, general discussion groups, content sharing and product support forums are the most popular.
- Highly valuable dimensions for the organizations are: member engagement, member loyalty, member satisfaction and influencer activity. This is much more customer centered than call avoidance which was rated not valuable.
- communities charge for a lot of different and specific stuff. For example: Contact members, assess to experts, Storage ad-free browsing, custom domain, enhanced game play, enhanced support, member visibility, networking, private groups, custom platforms, enhanced profiles, premium articles, custom templates, private messages, there’s no freed content on the site, premium documentation, developer version software. I’m wondering for what else you could charge: more detailed information, earlier access to information, unique Profile extensions or effects, …
- best targeted Advertising and Subscriptions but the most common ways to generate revenue from an online community. Thought leadership, lead generation, customer retention, brand loyalty are top indirect revenue sources. The study provides a list with websites that have interesting revenue approaches, which show that Advertising and Subscription generally work for every community but you need to find a specific solution that depends on your community.

Overall the best advice is to understand your community, what value do they find in interacting. Ask them what they want/ need. Which means that you add features that are valuable for the members and compliment the core features. Don’t abuse it, try advertisement or sponsorship that is that well targeted that it actually adds some value. If you want to charge for features, add something where your members think its actually worth paying for. Try to mix the parts of the different revenue models so you always use the one that suites you community the best.

I just found Rachel Happe’s Blog www.thesocialorganization.com - how social media is changing communication and organizations. This is not only a very interesting topic, she also provides us with brilliant thoughts, lists, question an further information.

Social Media is one of the most popular buzzwords these days. So how do you put metrics on a blurry phrase?

Rachel formulated a couple of question to understand what social media provides and what the value we want to meassure would be:

- What is the value of having a better conversation?
- What is the value of meeting someone?
- What is the value of getting more accurate information faster?
- What is the value of being able to drive consensus around an idea faster?
- What is the value of building trust?
- What is the opportunity cost of not innovating?

And how can we measure that? Just try to answer these question for yourself, your social media life…

Can you measure the value of a conversation and if you do, don’t you forget a lot of aspects that these numbers won’t show and therefore you miss more information then you gain? Not measuring at all can’t be a solution but always be aware of the fact that a lot of information especially regarding social media can’t be measured but is at least as important.

Still companies need some numbers as a basis to decide if things work, if they improve, if they are worth the investment. So if you are looking for numbers to put some sort of handle on these question try Rachel’s list. They might not make sense for everybody in every case, but it’s a great starting point to decide where to start and what you need in your special case. So go to the list, answer the questions and get some inspiration.

Barcamp Shanghai will take place this Saturday. On Sunday it will be time for Drupalcamp Shanghai. Here’s the Facebook discription for the event:

BarCamp and Drupalcamps are events for the Shanghai local community!

The term camp derives from unconferences like Barcamp. Like any camp, this BarCamp / Drupalcamp Shanghai is defined by the people and is for the people, in particular for the learning and sharing knowledge and ideas with each other among the local Drupal community.

We are now open for topics from you before the Camp, but those topics and exactly who will present them are not decided until the day of the camp usually occurring during the initial introduction.

If you’re interested in community, don’t hesitate to register to join us from Register page.

On Saturday and Sunday, May 17th and 18th:

Day 1 May 17th Barcamp Shanghai begins from 12:00PM to 18:00PM, followed by a Community Party at Abbey Road at 19:30.

Day 2 May 18th Drupalcamp Shanghai begins from 10:00AM to 18:00PM.

How Much: 50 RMB per person (Includes cost share on venue, a t-shirt)
Venue: 3F, River South Creative Park
Address: 1247 Nan Suzhou Road (Suzhou Road South)

Near Nan Suzhou Lu Xin Chang Lu, Xin Qiao Building
surrounding traffic: Metro1(Xin Zha Lu Station)
Bus 136,19,64,801,933,253,869
Parking Lots: Shanghai Jing’an Accident Control Center(Nan Suzhou Lu Chengdu Bei Lu) Xin Qiao Building(Xin Qiao Lu)

For further information please check: http://drupalcampshanghai.org/ or http://barcampshanghai.org/

It’s pretty quiet in our blog these days but I still have a lot of panels to sum up. This might probably take me till I attend SXSW 2009..

“Description: ‘A/B Testing’ is the practice of directing web traffic to multiple alternative designs to determine which is optimal. This method raises significant questions regarding the role of a designer and the need for a traditional design approach when deciding which design is ‘best.’ Are we being cut out of the equation?”

You will always need a designer, intuition and experience, because you simply can’t answer every single choice you have to make till you have a website by A/B testing. There are books, blogs, articles that offer general guidelines and help you avoid basic mistakes. A/B testing will help you afterwards in the optimization process and to validate your previous decisions. Lets put it this way: If you are developing a car you won’t ask your customers how to build the engine or how many wheels they prefer, but when it comes to colors or usability questions their opinion is important thus not always what you expect.

For effective A/B testing you need to focus on the goal of the site. You have to have one clear and measurable action/ site goal that you want to improve. Your sign ups etc might diminish during the testing but the lessons you learn from the test are worth it. Analysts and designers should work together in interpreting the result of the test. The analyst can provide the better data and interpret it more rationally because he wasn’t involved in the design process. The designer can point out connections between the design elements the analyst might not be aware of.

On the one hand the designer might feel less creative, because your audience might not appreciate your ideas, but it can also be the other way around. You might be able to test a really crazy idea which under “normal” circumstances would have never made it to the monitors of users and it might turn out to be the best solution.

For a more detailed Summary of the session check Matt Heerema’s Web Design Blog

The topic of breaking up in the social communities era turns out to be very popular in the last month. I attended a core conversation on that subject @ SXSW. In general I think the web just adds a new dimension which has to be considered but if you are breaking up and you were sharing an apartment before a joint flickr account or a shared blog is just another thing that has to be divided and sorted.

It can be difficult if you change your facebook status a couple of month after the breakup, when you have just dealt with all the “real life” stuff and now you have to go through it again because people on facebook start asking you about what happened or your ex changed his/ her status befor you, or posted pic of the new love.

All theses things are similar to the real life but online communities might be able to offer possibilities to make a breakup which will never be easy, easier at least in the virtual dimension. This could turn out to be a important issue for the success of communities. At the moment facebook for example is struggling with privacy issues. If you want to open a fotosharing community account and you are connected in many communities, wouldn’t you prefer one that provides some privacy and breakup backup solutions? It wouldn’t be the main reason to choose where you sign up, but a pretty good argument among others that convince you to sign up or to love your community even more.

I try to sum up some of the main questions they tried to answer:

- What are community “killers”? They mentioned that the main mistake is assuming that people will participate without being prompted or inspired. Which brings us to the second question:

- What some things you do to drive participation? Stephanie wrote a great summary on the panel and also made a great list about what would help with community involvement:

• Create Q & A columns – this will bring in new content and address user concerns
• Send updates to the community – this will help them get used to recognizing new content and they will start to anticipate updates
• Recruit good moderators who are not afraid to go in and welcome community members and give them a sense of safety and comfort
• Create content that may not always be agreeable – this will help people discuss issues and voice their own views and opinions
• Use people and resources experienced in your particular site’s mission – this way you can change information per your culture/needs and you won’t have to go in and reinvent the wheel

- Moderated vs “free” communities

This question can’t be answered in general. It depends on your culture as a community. Your Filters might work good enough and your main goal is to provide freedom within the communit. But privacy and respect are the other side which has to be taken care of. So good moderators who truly understand the culture and your basic mission are very important to keep the balance between privacy and freedom so your users feel protected but not restricted.

Another great article I found during my recherches is written by Daniel Benner who was also one of the panelists. His article finds answers to the questions:

9 Accelerators for Vocation Network Startups and 5 Ways to Monetize Your Community where he quotes Lindsay Blanton, owner of Radioreference.com.

For those who want to listen to the whole panel it can be found on myfeedia.

A very entertaining yet interesting session was about the worst social media campaigns 2007. By looking at the worst practice you learn a lot about the best practice. Even if the Spot for example is a big success on youtube it a bad ad when everybody remembers the spot but not the brand.

You can find all the links in the SXSW Notes. Listening to the session on the SXSW Podcast is even more fun.

Listening to Zuckerberg could have been an interesting session but it turned out to be more a comedy. The interviewer asked questions that in my opinion would have been suitable to a cosy interview on TV for the audience who wants to know about the person behind facebook. Unfortunately it was the wrong audience. It might have been an attempt to make Zuckerberg feel more comfortable and open up but there was only one Zuckerberg to feel better and a hall full of people who wanted to learn more about facebook..

They wanted to know about where facebook is going, what they are going to change about usability, privacy aso. I guess nobody was really interested in her promoting her book either. Anyway, here are some headlines summing up the desaster: “Zuckerberg Keynote Descends Into Chaos as Audience Takes Over“, “When geeks attack - twitterati lashes out at interviewer after zuckerberg keynote“.

Those who want to get an own idea of what happened and are also interested in the information that was nevertheless hiding in the interview can watch the whole Zuckerberg Interview on viddler.

(for the german audience: Das Interview wird auch beim Handelsblattblog Indiskretion Ehrensache behandelt)

We’re hosting the next Shanghai PHP Usergroup Meetup in our The NetCircle HQ.

Date & Time: Saturday, March 29. First session starts at 1.30pm.

Presentations will include symfony, our PHP framework of choice, and an introduction to PHP extension programming (geeky!).

The full event description can be found on the website of PHP China: http://www.phpchina.com/bbs/thread-53325-1-1.html (Chinese)

Everybody is invited! We’re looking forward to seeing you!

Here are some photos from our last event (thanks Robert).

“Northern Voice is a two-day, non-profit personal blogging and social media conference that’s being held at the Forestry Sciences Centre, 2424 Main Mall, UBC main campus, Vancouver, Canada on February 22-23, 2008.”

Blogging about a blogging conference seems logical but what if there are already many blog posts on the same subjects? Right, quote them. Here is the schedule for the 2 days. If you find something interesting just “searchengine” it, I’m sure you’ll find a lot of information.

Here’s Matt Mullenweg’s keynote (WordPress): Blogging & Social Media: Where do we go from here? You can listen to the whole presentation at the atlargemedia.com Podcast. Here’s a short summary of his basic ideas:

- Bloggers want: 1. to represent themselves, 2. to be public and interact 3. validation with stats 4. a simple form of the tool that fits their writing (form dictates writing)

- what Bloggers need for that: 1. invisible software 2. be prepared for a large amount of posts 3. social filters to sort out the personal relevant information (e.g. only comments from our friends) 4. Spam is the Achilles Heel of Social Media, everything that distracts is Spam (also advertisement). People’s time needs to be respected. Keep advertisement at a reasonable amount. 5. The megabrands can have a negative image transfer. Subbrands and diversion without referring to the family brand. 6. Transparency of open source as the taste of freedom, applied on many aspects of our daily life.

For a more detailed summary and many other summaries of nv08 check Robin Yap’s Blog

For those who are interested in telling a story Alan Levine made a list with all the Web 2.0 tools for that with description and examples. Maybe not the most complex but pretty funny tool he showed was Blabberize which creates an old school Monty Python Effect on the pic.

Personally I recommend Dave Olson’s F**k Stats, Make Art This is also available as mp3. [Addition] I just found some great notes on this insiring, funny and motivating session by miss604.