All Things Cahill

Week 1 - Community Building Field Test

(If you didn’t read the first post in this series, you really ought to start here…)

We’re moving right along on Cycling.com - and it’s beginning to look like the site now has a pulse!

Things improved dramatically after we got our login issue fixed.  Here are the basics for the week:

• 40+ users registered
• Several new photos added
• Comments starting to come in
• 2 new regional cycling groups were created by users
• The first weeks poll had 65 votes - and I only seeded it with 10 votes…
• We had our first ‘real’ forum post, i.e. one that I didn’t write

No doubt a lot of you are saying “gee, that’s not many users” and you’d be right.  The thing is, as low as that use level is, it’s much higher than the previous couple months, in which all we had was spam being posted.  The secret of community building is that when you start from ground zero, it take a while.  If things are going well, I expect to see a geometric progression of traffic for the initial period.  The problem is, that is very hard to do when you aren’t actively marketing the site and you’re left with only guerrilla techniques.

That comes with only a modicum of effort.

• Olympics articles updated every day or so, as time permits
• New videos are upload as soon as I find something worthwhile on YouTube
• Forum posts are created pretty much daily

Next steps

Since we started registering users in March, I’ve decided we’re going to send out a newsletter.  I wanted to do it today, but unfortunately time has gotten away from me, so we’ll be sending tomorrow.  The basic play will be “We’ve got Olympics coverage” but deep down, the message is more simple, “we’re alive, come visit us.”

I’m looking to have stickers made, but I’ll admit that CafePress is an utter let down.  I don’t think a simple oval sticker is worth $2 per in a 50 unit increment.   So now I need to actually figure out what the design will be and go to bid with the traditional vendors.  Anyone have any luck recently?

Findings

It’s too early to make any prognositcations.  I have been surprised by how much I’m learning about the platform we’ve built, and most of it’s good.  I really like the ease I can post stories, the ability to easily post videos, the way user generated content is handled, and way that users can easily interact.  On the negative side, i really don’t believe that BBPress is a competetive solution for forum software.  Even though we enhanced the heck out of it, I don’t feel it is close to Simple Machines, or the gold standard in my mind, vBulletin.

Surprisingly, I have found that which Sal commented on in the first post in this season - the user interaction is spread all over the site, and that makes it that much harder to see what’s happening.  I’m wondering if we missed something by restricting you to seeing only what your friends are doing on the site, but deep down, I know we were right on the privacy issue.  Perhaps a homepage widget that boils up all public activity, such as wall posts, blog posts, forum posts, comments, etc. to show “What’s happening right now.”

Tags: community development, online community building

The Gray Lady Gets Trolled

In quite possibly the single most shoddy piece of journalism I’ve ever read, The New York Times has been taken on a ride by a few Internet dirt balls.

In a piece that ran in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Mattathias Schwartz examined the phenomena of Internet Trolls, in a story entitled “The Trolls Among Us“.   Unfortunately, neither Mr. Schwartz or the copyeditors seem to really know what the definition of an Internet Troll is.  Too bad, as its been more than adequately defined and an accepted part of the online lexicon since the days of the bulletin board. From Wikipedia, who dates the term to the early 1990s:

An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response^[1] or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.

Unfortunately, that which the article attributes to trolling is really no more than online stalking.  Even worse, they give play credence to the type of activity that needs to be prosecuted, not published:

Sherrod DeGrippo, a 28-year-old Atlanta native who goes by the name Girlvinyl, runs Encyclopedia Dramatica, the online troll archive. In 2006, DeGrippo received an e-mail message from a well-known band of trolls, demanding that she edit the entry about them on the Encyclopedia Dramatica site. She refused. Within hours, the aggrieved trolls hit the phones, bombarding her apartment with taxis, pizzas, escorts and threats of rape and violent death. DeGrippo, alone and terrified, sought counsel from a powerful friend. She called Weev.

Weev, the troll who thought hacking the epilepsy site was immoral, is legendary among trolls. He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.’s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemies’ credit ratings. Better documented are his repeated assaults on LiveJournal, an online diary site where he himself maintains a personal blog. Working with a group of fellow hackers and trolls, he once obtained access to thousands of user accounts.

The interesting bit is that they’ve apparently accepted a term “lulz” which is a bastardization/pluralization of “LOL” for laughing out loud, which the article says these fine folks collect as a rating on their adventures.

The only problem is, that it really isn’t true.  If you search Google you’ll find two or three vague references, which come from exactly the same folks they’ve interviewed for the article.  I’m sorry, but a handful of clowns doth not a circus make…and they certainly won’t suffice as sources for an article in the Gray Lady.

The article is utter rubbish - an attempt to create a trend where one does not really exist, and frankly, we should expect better from The New York Times.

Tags: internet slang, new york times, online stalking, shoddy journalism, trolls, wikipedia

Top Ten List of Apple IPhone Apps used by Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton while they were Eaten By Sharks

Traffic stats - the red headed step child of statistics, damned lies cloaked inside a slathering of untruth and then wrapped in that un-Godliest of file formats, xls and used to bludgeon all that is sane and rational out of your web strategy.  This is the stuff that reduces grown webmasters, those mastadonian throwbacks of an earlier tech era, to tears, and enables the airline magazine reading, conference attending execs to think they actually have a handle on what’s happening.

The truth is that the only true measure is cash.  The cold, hard green stuff, the only thing that slays the monthly mortgage beast, or allows us to consume fossil fuels with reckless abandon.

Now the stats for this blog have got me completely befuddled.  Yes, I can see what is happening, and I see that all too clearly.  The problem is that I have little notion of how I should react.

From the top:

• I notice from from MyBlogLog Stats that I’m getting 300 or so readers a week, up from 50 or so a couple months ago.  Google confirms this.
• The primary referer for those users is Google Images, specifically if you search for “sharks” which will show an image from one of my posts from June in the #2 spot.
• My “One and Done” rate is (the site bounce rate) is threw the roof.  I have lots of traffic that simply isn’t engaged.  They’re coming to the wrong site and leaving.
• That image is in danger of being hot linked all over the web.  Google images is the place people generally go to find image for use on their blog, and frankly, it’s where I found the image in the first place.  I am worried someone will live link, and I’ll end up getting a huge bill for bandwidth (this site is setup to withstand a visit to the Digg homepage or slashdotting).

Eugene and Tom, tell me I should be flattered.  I’m not so sure.  Perhaps it’s experience, perhaps its just my inbred belief that things tend to go from bad to worse, not good to better.  So what are my options:

• Do nothing - my wife’s beliefs aside, this is not my strong point.  I hate inaction…
• Throw in an htaccess rule protecting the images, then sending an adverisement for my site to anyone who links live.  Nice idea, but frankly it’s hypocritical.  I live link…a lot.  I know it’s bad, but darn it, I like having images.
• Go with Tom’s suggestion: start doing more shark content.  Darn it, if they’re coming for sharks, then sharks they’ll get.  I guess this is a good one, except for the fact that I have little access to shark content.  Even though I once was almost shark food…and wear a mako shark tooth around my neck, and have a set of mako jaws on my wall above this very computer, that was caught on my boat while I was captaining, by my father.
• Delete the image and wait for it to drop from Google.

Sadly, here is what I see:

• Writing about sharks = actually making something out of this blog.
• Writing about Social Media = sending lots of smoke up the chimney, and getting readers who’d never, in a million years, click on an advertisement
• Writing about the Death of Print Media = talking to myself - its a dead issue, and no one is reading my posts about it anymore.

I guess if I really thought I wanted to monetize this blog, I’d start writing posts like “Top Ten List of Apple IPhone Apps used by Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton while they were Eaten By Sharks.”  Then wait for the diggs to roll in…

That, I think I might be able to do…and for the record, I miss the days when I used to get paid to write stuff like this (and paid well, I might add…)

Tags: airline magazine, digg, google, google images, red headed step child, sharks, traffic stats, web strategy

Why Most Online Communities Fail…

David Churbuck linked to the Ben Worthen story in the WSJ yesterday entitled “Why Most Online Communities Fail“.  David points out that a simple typo from a Deloitte powerpoint managed the ruin the story and deflect the discussion from the matter at hand to a moot discussion on percentages.

1. Going out with the claim that 60% of businesses invest over $1 million in online communities thanks to a Deloitte typo that should have stated 6% is not a great way to get off on the right credibility foot. Worthen does the correction, but …

The point I’d like to make goes more to the point in Churbuck’s piece that will be overlooked - “This is bad research on a tired topic.”

You see, the thing that all of the social media gurus, wannabes, and willneverbes would have us believe is that community is easy. You build it and they will come.  The truth is so very far from there that if it was commonly known no marketer in his/her right mind would ever utter the words “let’s build a community, gang!” again.

Sounds harsh?  Well, it ought to.  There are way to many businesses committing to creating community development without the slightest thought of what the real ramifications of failure are.  And even worse, they judge the cost of creating their communities solely on the basis of what the servers, dev costs, etc. will be and routinely devote little or no resources to actually managing and developing that community.

I say it again, more clearly: a community will fail surely if you do not devote experienced people to building and moderating it.

Note that word, people.  I don’t say person.  And there’s a lot more that goes along with this.  There are ton of real, hard costs that you’re going to face in order to make a community successful.  Building in these terms isn’t development, it’s people attracting other people to your service, getting them committed, and giving them reasons to stay there.  This big myth is that communities build themselves.  When done right, it will look like they build themselves,  but there’s always someone helping the community get going.

This is where I see companies fall flat on their face time and time again (sorry, not gonna name names here, but I could).  They think that assigning a marketing intern to run the site they just poured a million in development and up front costs into, is going to be sufficient.  People come in once, if your lucky, look around, realize they’re essentially hanging out in an empty room and leave.  Eventually the company folds up shop, does a post mortem, fires the intern and promptly forgets every lesson they should have learned.  Then someone chimes in “hey gang, let’s build a user forum and share our brand.” Then the cycle starts all over again.

Most businesses have no business running communities.  They want to make “the brand more transparent” and in the end, they hurt the brand by creating a bad user experience that has nothing to do with their actual brand, but through association, it’s now taking the hit.

If you don’t have experts who can show you working communities they’ve built, and if you’re relying on consultants who aren’t cautioning you, you need to be very wary. Personally, I feel the best place to expose the brand to a community is through active sponsorship of existing communities.  You don’t need to own it, you get a ton of mileage for your buck, and the positive effects start right away, not a year from now when  your development cycle is done.

Think about it…why own a community when you can rent one…

More reading:

Helen Whitehead on Why Do Online Communities Fail? - a well thought out piece with some good advice.

R. Todd Stephens, Phd - making the point that communities struggle when there’s no good business reason to get involved.

C. David Gammel at High Context Consulting on the Three Reasons Branded Online Communities Fail

Update: Tom O’Brien at A Human Voice commented on the Churbuck post with probably the most important note of all “the community vendors were scrambling hard to pull the curtain back up..”  Darned straight, they have been scurrying to get the genie back in the bottle.  Tom’s own post - “Social Media Madness: Build it & they will come . . .” also puts the lie to to the maxim that brands need to develop communities.  As he puts it, the community often already exists, and “increasing brand value” isn’t their goal.

Tags: Ben Worthen, deloitte, media gurus, online communities, online community development, online community failure, wsj

Social Network Wars

Yeah, I need some humor today…

Tags: facebook, friendster, myspace, Social Networking

Social Media - Participation Rates Much Lower Than We Thought…

Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester has a great post up entitled ” Why Some Don’t Need to Join the Conversation“. The basic premise is that even though social media has been so very hot in the past year or two, actual participation by users remains at a relatively low percentage of overall visitors.

To prove my point, let’s start with data: In most markets, (even youth) there are no bars that span 100% for creators. In fact, 18-24 year olds in United States only are creators 39% of the time. 45-54 year olds in UK only create online content a paltry 6%, although they are critics 11% of the time.

So what does this tell us? Not everyone is part of the online dialog exchange. Not everyone will ever be part of the online conversation.

This point has really been driven home lately to me as I’ve become more directly involved in the Reel-Time Community again. In discourse with a few readers, I’ve mentioned “well, you’ve only been a member for the past two years,” only to be told that they were actually lurkers back well into the last decade. In two distinct cases, that means they waited at least 8 years before registering or posting on a site they use almost daily.

So what’s it all mean? My feeling now is that you’ve got to assume that the active participants on your site are the tip of the iceberg. They’re responsible for helping to make the experience rich and vibrant, but you’ve got to realize that many of your dedicated users may actually never really contribute.

New information? Not hardly…we’ve been discussing the lurker factor on online bulletin boards since pre-internet days.

Tags: bulletin boards, forrester, jeremiah owyang, lurkers, participation rates, social media

Twitter, FriendFeed and Overexposure of the Personal Brand

I’ve said it before, but this post especially requires that I state it clearly again: I am a New England Yankee.

That means that I possibly have a heightened sense of propriety and generally would consider a lot of things marketing-wise as crossing the line that some of you might not have a problem with.

I’m noticing lately that a lot of marketing types are spending a lot of time on micro-blogging tools such as Twitter, FriendFeed (the new darling), Plurk, etc. I’m sure many have convinced themselves that a lot of what they are doing is “creating social media brand awareness” for their products. The truth is that Twitter is more about branding for the personal brand, and as such I find in most cases, it creates a level of over exposure that’s downright harmful to your personal brand.

Think about Jason Calacanis, who was for a while offering all kinds of contests, giveaways, etc. via Twitter, trying to increase the awareness of the Majalo Search Engine (disclosure: I signed up to contribute when it first started, but honestly never did produce any results for them). For a time, it seemed that the Twitter stream I was getting was all Jason, all the time. “I’m going to have lunch with xxx here. Burritos, yum” or something like that. The signal to noise ratio was so high that I really began to dislike what Calacanis was doing. I didn’t even know him and I was starting to develop a strong dislike.

Jason mentioned on the This Week in Tech podcast this week that he has a lot of people who can’t stand his online persona, but actually become good friends when he meets them. And for the record, I really enjoy hearing Calacanis on podcasts, and I’m sure I’d like him if we were to sit down for a beer sometime. However the Twitterati Calacanis was, for a time, utterly annoying.

Similarly Jeremiah Owyang - he’s been a perennial link in my posts, but when Forrester did their conference in March this year, I had to un-follow him for the time being, I just didn’t need to know whenever anyone decided to go to the bathroom at the conference, or what specific CEO he was talking to.

On the other side, I see a lot of the Twitterati catering to prurient interests to build their following. Yes, sex sells, for the most part, you’re selling yourself here. Do you really want the interest that brings? If you’re even thinking about that, you might want to talk to Ariel Waldman, community manager at Pownce, who’s now got her own stalker, with all the fun that brings. Oh joy!

The problem we have is that so many of us are making the mistake off blending our personal and our professional lives. In business, I prefer not to be known for my ability to consume Mojitos…although personally I really like them. Yet, I blend my Twitter posts with a weird mix of both professional and personal information (yeah, do as I say, not as I do).

I think too many of the Twitterati are making the fundamental mistake of overexposing their personal brand via social networking, to their personal and professional detriment. Your thoughts?

Tags: ariel waldman, blogging tools, brand awareness, crossing the line, jason calacanis, jeremiah owyang, personal brand, signal to noise ratio, twitter

Reel-Time.com Acquired By NameMedia

In what has become an utterly bizarre turn of the tables, NameMedia Inc. has bought Reel-time.com - the site I have been working with since 1995 or 1996 as managing editor, head geek and general do-what-needs-to-be-done guy, is now owned by my current employer.

It’s a great thing for Thorne Sparkman, who is now able to repay the investors in the site. David Churbuck (he blogs on this story here)  and I had been almost completely disengaged and had no financial stake in the final buy out. The big winner is honestly the community which now will actually move forward, vs. being in a holding pattern.

Last September, when I posted my final Fishwire Report for the Boston Region (a report of what’s going on for saltwater fly fishermen) I swore it would be the last. Yesterday, I wrote two of them…handling both Boston and Cape Cod. The good news is that I was for the first time able to write them during normal working hours, instead of getting up at 4 in the morning.

Reel-Time.com was a niche online community before anyone had any idea that such a thing could exist. In a lot of ways we invented, identified or were afflicted by, just about anything you now hear about termed as “Social Networking” or “Social Media.”

So as things change, in many ways they stay the same for me.  I’m now back where I began, at Reel-Time.com and after 13 years, I couldn’t be happier.  Now if I can just get some fishing time in.

Tags: david churbuck, reel-time.com, social media, Social Networking, thorne sparkman

The Shine is off Social Networking

Say it ain’t so, Joe! Over the past few weeks, it’s begun to look like Social Networking, the current darling of the conference and consultant set, might have jumped the shark.  I personally would peg the exact point where it went careening off track as the day that Waste Management (the guys that probably run your local honey truck) opened their own social networking site.

But it goes far beyond that.  Earlier this week Om Malik wrote a very interesting piece showing that social networking may have flattened out, or even may be decreasing. He notes:

Today there are numbers out from comScore that indicate plateauing growth for the big two — MySpace and Facebook — in the U.S. Last week, Revision3 canceled “SocialBrew,” an online video show dedicated to social networking. Meanwhile, Monster killed its Tickle social networking service (first reported in April by TechCrunch), following closely on the heels of CondeNast’s shuttering of Flip and Verizon’s decision to close up its virtually unknown network, which had managed to garner a mere 18,000 members. (Verizon has shifted its community to Facebook.)

And these just might be the tip of the iceberg, for there are way too many me-too networks out there failing to find the traction, and hence the volume, needed to grow their revenues. The lack of monetization will only accelerate this process.

I’ve also been detecting a subtle change in the “conversations” on Twitter lately, with some brave few actually taking a stand against the social networking Kool-Aid.  In one telling argument, it came down to a final comment from the prime Kool-Aid drinker that “You just never got Social Networking,” reminding my of my favorite line from a movie I dearly love, The Duellists, in which the lead character, D’Hubert, (a Napoleonic era officer who has served from Spain to Russia and back) is condemned with the single statement “You never loved the Emperor.”  Indeed, one might as easily be condemned for “Not being Politically Correct,” or whatever the actual flavor of the moment is.

Also, I find the current “Proactive Customer Support” wherein companies monitor social networking apps to create a two tier service network, in which the middle to upper income have a vastly different support experience than the lower middle to poor do.  Think about “Comcast Cares” on Twitter, a Comcast rep, who actively searches out support issues to help fix them.  I’ll bet he’s finding most of the problems are centered in Bel Aire, not in Compton.

Social Networking wasn’t invented by the current crop of Powerpoint wielding wannabes, and it’s been around a lot longer than most would suggest.  Honestly, I see it actually predating the internet, going back to the days of computer bulletin board services (Do you remember them?).  Most of the basic fundementals of Social Networking were really polished in online forums, on IRC, and in the first Instant Messaging Apps.  It’s not utterly new, in most cases, this is just a better presentation.

Some general Social Networking notes:

• “Join the Conversation” - I’m growing tired of hearing this.  If you already aren’t talking to your customers, then maybe there’s a reason.
• Just because Facebook says we’re friends, it doesn’t mean I will loan you money…
• Why is it the GuruVangelistPerts on Social Networking seem to Twitter from bars or about going to bars so often?

What is new, is that there is now a widespread understanding of Social Networking and it’s overall importance in both web design in particular and marketing in general.  I realize many readers may be rather upset at my saying the Emperor has no clothes, but indeed, that is not what I am saying. I am saying it’s a waste of time to talk about the clothes, rather than the more substantive issues about the Emperor, like taxes, etc.  When the medium is the subject of the message, there is a problem with that medium.

I’ve said it before, I say it again here.  Social Networking and Social Media are not ends unto themselves.  They are aspects of good web design, and should be employed as such.  To use Social Media for Social Media’s sake is a waste of time.  There is a limit to the number of Social Networks I want to be a part of, and I personally would prefer to have more in common with my fellow users than simple ownership of a computer.  Niche communities are the way to go…as Om so brilliantly notes.

Tags: comscore, condenast, facebook, kool aid drinker, social networking service, social networking site, techcrunch, twitter, waste management

Revisiting the Implied Responsibility of Comms Providers

Regarding my post yesterday about the Implied Responsibility of Comms Providers, two things happened over night that bear mentioning.

• Twitter again was down for a couple hours starting at 4pm EDT, or so.
• Users were a lot less charitable in their comments.

I really think they’re at stage 2 in the matrix I provided, but I’ve seen the first signs that they’re moving from step 2 to step 3, which is a very bad thing for Twitter. Jeremiah Owyang tweeted this morning:

Hey are you on Friendfeed? It’s more reliable than twitter, and there’s a meta-conversation there http://friendfeed.com/jowyang

And that, my friends is how things start to go down hill.

(BTW, I re-read yesterdays post - I definitely would have benefited from more coffee and from a copy editor’s assistance. I may clean it up over the weekend…)

Tags: friendfeed, twitter