community

Some of the best comic material comes from listening in to conversations on the local bus. A journalist’s best source is the trusted insider to conversations and events as they unfold before they become public. In business, having access to timely information, often gleaned from conversations round the water cooler, can profit the individual and potentially damage her company.

We’re not the only consultancy to encourage our customers to do persona profiling; but we’re probably more ambitious about it than most, hoping you’ll get much more than the usual benefits of market understanding and usable design. As characterisations of typical customers (current or future), if you only treat your personas as people you can interrogate or sell to, you are going to let them – and yourselves – down. They’re worth more than that.

Give us the widgets

“We’ve got to have a Twitter widget” – one of the key phrases used by web teams in 2008 and 2009. Prior to that, the best thing since sliced bread was having a Google map on your Contact Us page, or perhaps a nice AJAX-powered dynamic postcode lookup gadget. The truth is, some popular new technical tools are here to stay and others will fall by the wayside. The challenge for any organisation looking to take advantage of these emerging tools is the sheer pace at which they appear, gain ubiquity and, in some cases, drop off the radar.

I used to have a colleague who constantly worried about “getting all the ducks in a row”, by which he meant, I think, knowing what the elements of the task were and tackling them in the right order.

A few weeks ago we asked if you have a social media policy, and gave you some ideas for how to create a simple plan which will enable your internal team to help support the audience-facing representatives of your company or organisation.

What happens when someone asks you a tricky question in your community, website, Facebook page, Twitter page or blog?  Do you answer them? How long does it take you to answer? If you don't know the answer, do you know the appropriate person to contact in your organisation? Does that person understand the importance of timeliness in a web environment?

Stories get our attention. Good stories are easy to remember. Story-telling is the oldest form of human interaction, and helps convey meaning, values and custom. If we ignore the power of story-telling in building our online communities we are missing one of the most powerful conversational assets. Yet how many sites looking to engage with their audience demonstrate an awareness of this natural form of interaction?

When a membership organisation or specialist magazine upgrades its web presence, it frequently concentrates on the impact of the new interactive functionality. That’s hardly surprising: opening itself out to community demands new skills, new habits of mind, and a new business model. But, while planning a community launch to produce lots of user-generated content and lots of ROI, don’t forget to spring-clean the copy you generate in-house too.

As always, the best way to answer the question is to think about real life. Personally I find joining an existing community (like a sports club) a fairly stressful business.

Recently one of the Community Champions in a community I manage came forward to suggest that we link to a controversial video circulating on the internet. She approached the community team in private, in the separate Community Champions area of the discussions, as she was not yet certain that it was appropriate to place the video into the public-facing area.