More and more, quality content is becoming less scarce and the ownership of that content is becoming less valuable.
With media 2.0, web 2.0, community 2.0, open source development, and the rest, content creation has become easier and the barriers to distribute that content are eroding away. Content is moving toward commoditization. Moreover, sites that still stranglehold the content creation process have higher costs than their competitors that tap into the overwhelming network effects of a user community. In a community, users take on community responsibilities, creating, moderating, networking and refining the system as a whole. Users create the culture and preserve the history of the community.
It’s not only about costs – the value itself is in trust. In an open community, trust is the cohesive factor between members and moderators; trust fosters growth, trust converts users into an audience, and trust broadens the distribution of the message. Community sites (along with multimedia) represented the top growth categories during 2006.
Community success stories: (from futureofcommunities.com)
- Ducati was able to fire their marketing department and replace it with a central customer community group responsible for all aspects of marketing - from product design and marketing communications, to creating the overall brand experience.
- In Germany, eBay was able to increase its revenue by 56% by getting existing eBay users to join customer communities.
- And through their “Connect and Develop” strategy - which involves employees, customers, prospects and even competitors, P&G is now able to derive 35% of their innovations and billions of dollars in revenue from the community it’s developed.
Communities rally around a strong purpose – this can range from social issues, education, commerce and project development. A clear purpose provides a common goal for all stakeholders to pursue. Communities, when done correctly, are self-propelling and over time require less and less strict oversight and external administration. Online communities are much more likely to succeed when the users have real-world connections, such as membership in an organization and careers in similar fields.
Me-first! Successful communities build around the individual rather than the work group, allowing single users to create profiles, customize components of the environment, and express their individuality. Moreover, individuals must gain some benefit by becoming a member of the community and contributing. In the new web, the individual creator is at the center and everything flows outward. In a work-group focused community, individuals are not as easily able to make connections with each other; therefore the strength of the network itself is weakened.
Communities need an administrator and a set of ethical principles to adhere to. Communities must have rules of interaction and a system in place to effectively enforce those rules in order to maintain the quality of the communication within the community. Off-topic conversations, advertising, or abuse can lower the value and rate of active participation. However, brand and product based communities should balance the need for civilized interaction with the requirement to have an open and unbiased forum.Community management can be broken into the four following principles:
Purpose of the Community
It’s the goal of the administrator to clearly define and communicate the purpose of the community and to moderate the interaction of individual members around the purpose.
Participants of the Community
Within the community, the administrator must continue to provide opportunities for members to express identity and to segment themselves. The administrator must also work to always increase the trust between the provider and community.
Platform to Create Community
Administrators must oversee the health and fitness of the platform for the community – including providing vehicles for interaction (blogs, forums, etc).
Policing of the Community
As the community evolves, users will take a greater role in moderating the various vehicles of community – however, clearly defined oversight by the administrator is needed at all times.
How can a website foster Community?On the page elements of a site are critical in establishing or hindering community development. The top features include:
Interface Ease of Use
How easy is it for users to access the features of your site, including all community vehicles (blogs, forums, etc). Do you allow anonymous posting or must users register first? How easily does the system adapt over time or accept new features? Is the system error-prone? Maybe the most important question is how easy is it for one user to find another? Keep the interface as simple and as consistent as possible.
Profiles
Within every successful community must exist, at its core, the ability for individual users to differentiate themselves and form distinct identities. This can include uploading photos, adding bios, professional experiences, creating a screen name and more.
Membership Features & Benefits
What is gained by signing up or paying a fee to your site? How is membership defined in regard to the overall features of the site? Who benefits more – your site, or your users?
Member Growth
Are members encouraged to continue participating? Many sites create points and participation levels to continually activate their users.
Mischief
How is bad behavior handled throughout the site? How easy is it to find your general policies and codes of conduct? What level of authority do users possess to moderate other user’s actions?
Discussion about the Site
Successful community sites allow a section of the site to solely hold discussion of the site where users can give feedback in an open dialogue with site administrators – new features can be recommended, existing features can be improved and overall the administrators can share a sense of ownership of the site with the users.
Community sites can offer a multitude of vehicles to drive greater user interaction and contribution; these vehicles can come in the following forms:
- Blogs
- Wikis, user contributed encyclopedias
- User Ratings, of products, feature content, other members, etc
- User Reviews
- P2P File Sharing
- Content Sharing, allowing users to send and display favorite content
- User Comments
- Trackbacks, ie: when one blog references someone else’s blog
- Blogrolls, a list of a users personal favorite blogs
- User Profiles
- Most Popular Lists
- Tagging, greatly increases search and browse capabilities
- Open Source Development, of software or knowledge material
- Podcasting / Video Blogging, allowing users multiple formats to contribute
- Chatting/IM
- Forums
- https://www.futureofcommunities.com/ -- The Blog of The Community Management and Marketing Council
- https://www.futureofcommunities.com/wp-content/uploads/Community%20Design.pdf
- Community Design: The Four Principles of Community Management By Patrick Duparcq, Kellogg School of Management – Northwestern University
- https://infotangle.blogsome.com/2006/04/07/community-20/ - Community 2.0 Overview
- https://elearning.typepad.com/thelearnedman/social_networking/ - The Learned Man!https://www.uxmag.com/strategy/93/this-is-media-20 - Media 2.0 Overview
- https://www.digital-web.com/articles/building_an_online_community/ - Tips for Building an Online Community
- https://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/charting_wiki_p.html - Charting Citizen Participation
There's a flip side to this, where the community is actually after different goals to the ones that are outlined here. To illustrate, I'm going to post up a quick comment I put on Aaron's blog...
On the subject of who uses MySpace and why, based on the observations that:
"Generally, to use MySpace much, you have to do one or more of the following:
...my comment was as follows:
"I think the problem is you've missed what the target market is and isn't: It's meant for 10-18 year old people. They don't care about spam. They don't care about other people sending them messages.
For them, the whole point is to get as many friends as possible, and to be findable. The point is to have what is, in essence, a mini website about them, that they can refer people that they meet to, and be found by others by.
Bands use it a lot as well, for the same reasons: connect with as many fans as possible, and be findable. Speaking as someone who came from music, I'd say that having a myspace page is now at least as important, if not moreso than having a normal website.
The basic difference is the level of interaction. On a myspace, you feel like someone from the band has added you to their friends. Like you're somehow now actually their friend. Like they know you. On a normal website, you're just another fan.
Going back to the community/friends side, you feel like you're now a minor celebrity - you have a thousand friends! You're popular! You're cool!
In a society where popularity and sex are prized above all other things, myspace gives people a way to become awesomely "popular", whilst being flirted with by as many men/women as you can want.
And therein lies the appeal to the 11-18 demographic: sure, it may be a lie. The other people/bands may actually not give two hoots. But it's the illusion of friendship, of being wanted by these other people that myspace users are after. Whether it's real or not is by the by. They're happy with what they create in their minds, based on it.
Rant over."
Sometimes it's not about the quality of communication, it's just about the act of doing it. It's not about the community's focus or goals, it's about letting people define those things themselves, so they get what they want by their own definition.
From our point of view, MySpace breaks a lot of the rules. It's cluttered and messy, the search functions are lousy, it's the biggest spam farm on the web, and yet its members just don't care. Why? Because when you're 15, those things don't matter to you. What matters is that, for what YOU want (the perception of popularity et al), it delivers in spades.
Although Myspace is damn ugly from the perspective of a webmaster, to my teen friends they never noticed it. It does the job.
The part that surprised me was all of the layout hacks that people have going. It is rare to come across the default profile layout, yet it is a hack to get anything custom running.
Despite being ugly and hard to use in our eyes, it is a pretty simple system. Go to a friends page, click 'add to friends', leave a comment, view their friends, find someone cool, view their profile, view their images, 'add to friends' and on it goes.. :)
The main features that I have seen used have to be adding friends, leaving comments, and viewing uploaded images.
It is pretty simple to do all of these things even if you do nothing else on the site, thats why it wins.
Like I said, it does what it needs to do. Only in this case, it's the users deciding what it needs to do, rather than a CEO with a spec sheet.
Excellent point. I wish there would be a way to promote great comments to an article status. Meanwhile, here's "up yours"! :)
sorry, pete but i must disagree with your myspace rant:
i think the latest research shows that the majority myspace users are in their 20's and 30's now.
i use it, but not to appear popular to strangers. it's a great way to keep in touch with and find people you thought you'd never hear from or see again. most of my myspace friends are people i know in real life, a lot of them from back in high scool and college in indiana (i live in texas now and chances of me "running into" anyone from high school or college days is very slim.)
and a lot of those that are on myspace are not big internet users like us seos so it's not like they have a personal blog set up to communicate with friends. for them, myspace is their only voice on the web. it is their blog.
would you consider blogging on your own personal blog a waste of time?
Very good post.
This is exactly what SEOmoz has done. Every time you post a comment your face is there (how nice right?) Now you get points that results in ranks AND possibly "premium membership". (Hint, Hint, Rand?)
Ooooo..this got promoted to the blog. Excellent job BudC!
Awesome post, I learned a lot.
Along the same thread, when I used to intern at scout.com (now rivals.com) back when I was at school, it was fun to get the CEO all wound up and talk to him why he liked the business so much. Basically, Scout created a pseudo-CMS that hand picked publishers could use to create fan/reporting sites for their sports teams. He LOVED the idea of some freak living in Indiana writing and living Notre Dame football...all the while contributing passionate content to the site.
I'm glad to see he had some vision.
During the late 90's boom I was an overpaid high school student at a few different startups. It's interesting to see how every one of my old bosses had some piece of the vision that the technology and the community have finally caught up to. Of course, they were missing that all important, “how does this make us any money?” answer….
Most definitely an excellent post and well deserving the promotion to the main blog. It's great insight how admins who were probably the ones previously in charge of all content creation will now be focused on directing and focusing the content of the membership.
I still think there will be room for a single person or team creating content, but that content is going to need to stand above and beyond.
SEOmoz is actually a good example of both sides. The site had already built a community prior to its latest version, but that community has been strengthened in many ways since the change, by adopting much of what you talk about in this post.
On the other side most if not all of the community here grew around Rand who is an above and beyond content creator.
Once again great post. If I could give you more than one thumb's up I would.
Thanks so much for the thumbs up, everybody!
In terms of content creation, I work at a custom publishing house, so saying things like "good content is becoming a commodity" won't win me any medals, but I'm trying to get everyone to see down the road. We have clients just like the group at SEOmoz, people who have extreme knowledge in their core business areas, the content I see them creating themselves (with our help) is thought leadership content. Thought leadership content is still valuable, and attractive. So why not attract members (alot of our clients are associations) and users around a core of break-out thought leadership content, but let them still have voices to discuss and explore subjects further. I always try to stress that the thought leader in the industry isn't afraid to share ideas, express opinions, and open up two way communications with anyone.
So fostering community on their site is only step one. I’m working to motivate more and more businesses to follow this model, I’ll keep everyone appraised.
I'm finding a touch of irony in the post now that I know where you work. Probably not the idea the boss wants to see spread around.
I think your ideas are good. Much the way things work right here with Rand being the central voice of thought leadership around which grows a community. I think that central voice still takes on a large role in directing and focusing the community like you mentioned in the post.
Wow. This is actually an inspiring post. Although I've realized for a while that I needed to do something to leverage UGC (and made a few weak stabs at it) this article quantifies the how and why enough to make me picture it working with my projects. Thanks.
BTW, are you a musician? I swear you've got the look.
Another By The Way – this article is 5 months old, ancient by blog standards, and a great example of why content should not be devalued as it ages.
thanks for the sage tips. It's on my new required reading list for budding networks seeking experienced advice.
A lot of your lessons echo the dialog that occurred at the CommunityNext conference earlier this month at Stanford.
I wish I could attend more conferences :(
Very good post. In reading some of your thoughts I can now plainly see why some web communities have tens of thousands of participants, and some only hundreds. You can always tell the small ones need work, but it's always tough to put your finger on precisely what is missing. Kudos to ya.
fantastic post BudC, well done on making it to the main SEOmoz blog =)
Excellent and thorough article. I appreciate the further reading. I really appreciate posts on YOUmoz which show some extra effort and research.
When I first read this article I commented above (first comment) that I really appreciate YOUmoz articles like this which have extra resources and show a good amount of research. As such I am not surprised that it would be promoted to the SEOmoz blog, and I'm very happy to see that. Congratulations!