Wednesday, December 13, 2006

ten bullets on online communities

Yesterday Danyel Fisher came to OCLC's Seattle office to talk to WebJunction staff about his work at Microsoft Research and the Community Technologies Group (we'll see his colleague Marc in Seattle next month). I made some comments about the first portion of his talk (all about community data analysis) here.

But the second part of Danyel's discussion was a list of ten things that he and his team had noticed, observed, or could suggest for online community management, based on their research in social networking. I admit freely that I am not into the whole top ten list thing, but I thought I would take this opportunity to share Danyel's list, with my short-hand commentary. Because social networking is the now thing, I wonder how these comments/observations will chance over the coming year?

Enjoy!

1. know what your space is for - have a purpose
2. know what your space is doing - it's there, just pay attention
3. most people won't do much of anything - remember that 100:9:1 rule
4. let users know what they're doing - show them
5. top 10 lists are a game - people like to play with the data, such as, I can be the top poster if I just post 243 more replies in the next 3 hours!
6. critical mass is critical - you have to have some there there
7. bring in new people - show them around, help them out, welcome them
8. you don't own the community - it's a party in your living room
9. negative reputation doesn't work - it just pushes good people away, the bad guys like the negative attention and will go after it
10. it's all under the same brand - community is community is community; the action doesn't all have to happen in a single spot

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