{"id":240,"date":"2009-03-17T10:17:49","date_gmt":"2009-03-17T16:17:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/?p=240"},"modified":"2009-03-17T10:17:49","modified_gmt":"2009-03-17T16:17:49","slug":"building-strong-online-communities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/?p=240","title":{"rendered":"Building Strong Online Communities"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tuesday, March 17th at 11:30 AM
Presenters:
Ken Fisher<\/a> – Ars Technica
Alexis Ohanian<\/a> – reddit.com
Drew Curtis<\/a> – Fark.com
Erin Kotecki<\/a> Vest – BlogHer Inc<\/p>\n

BlogHer.com<\/strong><\/p>\n

Largest women’s blogging network. It started by a question at a conference of where are the women bloggers? From that, a flame war started, and BlogHer was created. The Blog Her conference happened in San Francisco. They continue to meet and blog at the site<\/p>\n

Fark.com<\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments were added 2000 (Drew needed to learn SQL). Not a huge fan in online communities but it has grown organically after a small nudge<\/p>\n

Reddit.com<\/strong><\/p>\n

Started in 2005 in college – too many comments in Slashdot. They just wanted a site that listed cool links. An article was written about it, and it took off from there.<\/p>\n

Ars Technica<\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments went up shortly after 1998 as a way to comment email (other people would answer questions instead of Ars staff. Tried to create a place for people to find answers to these tech-y questions. Fostering discussions helped to kill the trolls that were found at many places around the net.<\/p>\n

How do you balance your own vision for your community with the actual community? How do you enable communication with your users?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You have a number of voices and you need to take it with a grain of salt if it is actually what the users want, or just a crazy user. You have to balance small sections of complaints with the rest of the folks who actually read and enjoy something. "Well organized minority"<\/p>\n

Reddit created sub-sites for different topics (programming). They let the community set up these sub-sites. How do people get in touch with Reddit? Just one guy answering emails doesn’t scale very well (moving to Twitter?).<\/p>\n

Blogher – you need to listen and implement as much as you can to engage the community. You need to listen.<\/p>\n

Ars – twitter gives you an insight on what is actually happening in your community. Only a certain percentage of the folks are regular participants in the discussions. Created a forum for complaints and feedback. Other members can respond to the feedback, allowing you to take the communities pulse. Providing a place for feedback is usually good for the community.<\/p>\n

Comment on how the community really influences itself – does it police itself? Moderation teams? How did you get there?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blogher – very strict community guidelines so that the bloggers feel safe. Nobody will get attacked and there is no hate speech. You don’t always get that at other sites. The community is pretty strongly self-policed<\/p>\n

Fark.com – don’t be an ass! Give your moderation team the tools to police. Nark function to call out inappropriate comments. Narking throws the comment into a queue to be handled by moderators.<\/p>\n

Reddit – "reddicate" Once sub-reddits were created, the moderators are given the power to handle issues in those sub-sites, and generally police themselves. It’s pretty hands off<\/p>\n

When you run into problem bits of content, what do you do with them? Do you leave them? shame them? Delete them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blogher – removed them fully. It is so rare there is no backlash. Things got heated during the presidential campaign, and relied very heavily on the guidelines.<\/p>\n

Fark.com & Reddit – leave them, but sometimes revisit and change if necessary. Stuff is removed on fark all the time (5000 people permanently banned from fark now).<\/p>\n

Ars – don’t delete or modify unless spam. Sometimes it can be perceived as censorship, and abuse the trust of your community if you silence someone. There is a "law" of cardinal and compulsory rules where they can call people out on certain things. Strike 1 – one week ban, and it gets more severe from there. Why don’t people just come back under a different name? People are very invested in their community and name.<\/p>\n

What mistakes have you seen other community participants or managers make?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blogher – they tell rather than ask – don’t let the community know when change is coming. The community isn’t involved on many of the decisions being made.<\/p>\n

Fark.com – a moderator would troll the users. Don’t listen to your readers too much. Most readers are too anal. When you redesign, you get a crazy reaction. When you redesign, most will get over it after a bit of time. When people threatened to leave, a user would record it and throw it in their faces when the DID come back.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Reddit – the majority of users are silent – never log in. Most never tell you how they feel. You need to trust your gut, and listen to the core users, but think of the people that don’t really have a voice.<\/p>\n

Ars – Surveys are fantastic! The results are shared with the community. It proves you were totally wrong or you’re right in your choices and the minority is the most vocal. Started with only 3 forums. Forums are added as needed, not 100 forums at first that look like a ghost town. People think that nobody is there.<\/p>\n

Questions:<\/strong><\/p>\n

What are you looking for in a community manager?
-biggest skills you need is patience, level headed. neutral. someone who can multitask.<\/p>\n

What has blogher learned about the conferences?
-very community driven on what they want to speak about and hear.<\/p>\n

Reddit & Ars part of Conde Nast – any problems with upper-management, pressure?
-They know better than to ask about that – very open discussion.
-People assume that Conde would create issues, with ownership issues. Ars asked the audience what they wanted, and went from there.<\/p>\n

How do you attract people in this landscape?
-People can easily go to both, and not worry so much competitive.
-Having a niche and passion will show, and attract people who are like-minded.<\/p>\n

What do you think about anonymous comments?
-If you can’t say something with your name on it – we’re not interested (fark)
-Do you just want a big comment number on your post? 2 quality comments are better than 14 anonymous comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tuesday, March 17th at 11:30 AMPresenters:Ken Fisher – Ars TechnicaAlexis Ohanian – reddit.comDrew Curtis – Fark.comErin Kotecki Vest – BlogHer Inc BlogHer.com Largest women’s blogging network. It started by a question at a conference of where are the women bloggers? From that, a flame war started, and BlogHer was created. The Blog Her conference happened […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}