Community Summit
Data-Driven Community Management
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Data-driven CM bores people
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So let's talk about fire
- Post-fire, they try to figure out why it happened
- Can they improve anything?
- Was it a crime?
- If something can be improved, is that actually done?
- Codified by Law Enforcement Assistance Administration
- How to spot arson
- Started seeing arson everywhere
- Experimented: actually arson?
- "Where does the fire begin?"
- If fire begins where it normally doesn't, it's probably arson
- But < 6% of the investigator could locate where the fire began
- So much of what happens in fire investigation was unscientific
- Started a forensic approach, very scientific, # of arsons reported dropped
- Post-fire, they try to figure out why it happened
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How much of CM are things that work & how much is cargo culting?
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We have not even begin to figure out the potential of our data
- If you collect the data, does it affect what you do in your community?
- Find CMs are great at measuring things but not at determining insights & taking action based on it
- We could be doing so much more here
- We collect as much data as possible, but don't use it to change what we're doing
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Measurement isn't as important as how we're going to take the insights we have & improve the outcomes for our companies & communities
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Good at
- Seeing what's popular & doing more of that for their community
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Most community engagement is more about the people using the game than the game itself
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De-lurking the lurkers
- How do get them participating
- Study from IBM: "lurker to leader"
- Used to believe this wasn't possible
- Now finding there are systematic ways to do this
- Avoid novelty ideas
- "Lurker week"
- Small bump in participation & no long-term effects
- Interviewed lurkers
- Have nothing to offer
- Have no experience
- Have no time
- Don't want friends/boss/family to see it
- Started making asking questions the most valuable thing people can do in a community
- Started looking for questions rather than answers
- Lurkers started participating a lot more, and for the long term
- STRESS THE VALUE OF QUESTIONS & make it safe for people to ask them
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How to get newcomers to participate actively
- Lots of visitors & bouncers (1 in 1000 will become active)
- How to fix this
- Don't just drop people in: Laser-focused in the action
- Don't just leave it up to them or to chance
- Provide direction/funnel
- Cohort/analysis tool in Google Analytics
- Don't just optimise for the first week of participation
- Easy to get them to participate once; hard to make them participate in the long term
- Long-term engagement involves psychology
- Social-identity theory
- The more we feel a group is successful, the more we participate
- Provide history, top members of the community, what it takes to participate
- Context helps people feel engaged & stick around
- Add some friction to the entry process
- ask people what they're interested in & provide them interesting content at the very start
- Automation rules
- After you join, you get a message from the community
- After 1 day, 1 week, 1 participation, etc
- Use this to help bolster social identity
- In technical communities, encourage newcomers to make their requests as possible
- Increases newcomer participation due to increased responses to requests
- Even one response increases chance of participation again to 45% from 16%
- They find that top 20 discussions in a community consistently end up with 50% of the page views
- SEO to make discussions easier to find
- Merge the good discussions into one discussion (if relevant to each other)
- Can promote them elsewhere (Quora, etc)
- Spend as much time improving your best discussions as creating new ones
- Very good way to get people engaged & actively participating
- Don't just drop people in: Laser-focused in the action
- Big announcements…often fall flat
- Hard to get people to engage with them
- Sticky posts are where announcements go to die & emails don't get read
- How do you get people to open & read any type of message?
- People don't progress through communities like we think they do
- For instance, they often don't start on the home page
- Figure out where people enter, then how to make the most of those entry points to promote announcements
- Side-bars on blogs, etc.
- Go to where the audience actually is, don't assume where they'll be
- Sense of community
- Building this
- People who believe & identify as a member of the community
- We assume that this just happens & is emergent
- Yes, it's important that it happens, but we can help it along
- It can happen, but it often leads to participation inequality
- Core group & others don't feel they can break in
- Virtual Sense of Community survey (can find this on the net)
- Will tell you what you need to do to improve the sense of community
- Composition of sense of community
- Membership: people can identify each other
- Rituals w/in the group
- Anything which makes people feel a connection with each other
- Unique shared experiences
- Stronger sense of community from sharing these
- Common symbol systems
- Forum system should reflect how the community speaks & engages
- Don't force a structure on them which doesn't reflect how they think of things
- Use the same language as your audience
- Increase the sense of influence
- Those who participate are those who feel they can influence it
- How can we increase this for everyone?
- Give people an opportunity to show off (let them feel smart, clever, good)
- Write about what people in the community are doing
- Create a sense of success
- How do you make the group feel successful?
- Most communities don't have a clear common goal
- Adding one bonds people more in the group
- Having a shared emotional connection
- Strong communities react the same ways to the same things
- How can we encourage this?
- Create opportunities for people to feel a specific way at a specific time
- No practical use for sharing information, but bonds people into the group
- So off-topic can be very good
- Improve member satisfaction
- Video gamers can get angrier than anyone he's ever seen
- How do you make people feel more satisfied instead?
- Looked at how to measure this
- Responses from other community members are rated better than those from community managers
- Turned out to be not that it was the community manager but that the community members were answer the questions quickly
- Quick answers got a higher satisfaction rating
- LIFO/FIFO in response methods
- Generally found that LIFO got higher satisfaction rating
- Response structure?
- Direct answers get a higher rather than FAQ links
- Even if the answer isn't as good as a FAQ or link to better answer
- Wording?
- Answers using validation, empathy, guidance get much higher satisfaction rating
- Increase long term participation & happier community members
- Membership: people can identify each other
- Are there questions which do better in the long term?
- Yes. Questions beginning with "How" do much better in the long term
- Take the time to develop these questions
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What's the problem with increasing engagement?
- It doesn't always equal more value
- If you generate more engagement but it's not clear what the value is…then you'll get cut
- Must connect engagement with value
- FeverBee has a page "Classifying the Benefits of Community"
- Very, very few communities are able to do this
- Studying it is very difficult
- Can figure out what metrics you need but must do it in a systematic way
- Coursera course on introduction to probability & data
- Outsource it to a data scientist
- Explain the question, hand them a bunch of data, they can get you answers you wouldn't find
- Hire someone else to do it
- PhD grad students are great for this
- Create a custom dashboard for the metrics & outcomes you specifically need for your community
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Q&A
@richmillington