A Vertitable Online Community Smörgåsbord

Anyone who remembers the wonderful 1973 animated adaptation of E.B. White’s immortal Charlotte’s Web remembers the hilarious musical number in which Templeton the rat eats up every last delicious morsel once the county fair has shut down for the night.

I felt a bit like Templeton last night at the Online Community Round Table organized by Bill Johnston of Forum One Network. There was almost too much good information to consume.

I Twittered the heck out of the event, which apparently added value for a lot of my followers. I got a lot of encouragement to write a blog post out of all my notes.

Before I get into the stream-of-consciousness, I’d like to wrap up a few main takeaways from the event:

1. Online community starts with the people in the community, not the technology. Know their needs and habits intimately and build your feature set accordingly.
2. Communities with robust existing user bases often police themselves more effectively than administrators can.
3. Communities have active and passive contributors. Lurking is a contribution, too.

Below is a list of my tweets in a reasonable approximation of chronological order with annotations where necessary:

• @choconancy is talking about knowledge sharing. Sometimes technology supports people, sometimes it’s the starting point. Contradicts POST. [Nancy was talking about starting knowledge sharing databases for within companies or professional associations. The POST I was referring to here is the POST method advocated by Forrester.]
• Sometimes new leadership and culture shift can kill internal community initiatives,, sometimes they are so bottom-up that it doesn’t matter.
• ppl sometimes don’t appreciate online community resources until it adds direct value in their personal experiences [In other words, sometimes some people within an organization are not supportive of spending time and resources to build online knowledge bases until those information repositories help them directly.]
  
• Sometimes the “not invented here” mentality really gets in the way of organizational mandate
• @nancywhite is her username, not @choconancy whoops!
• Kim malek is talking about the tensions between creating an invitation only community while working to grow membership virally.
• Invitation only as an acquisition tactic, like how bleeding edge online tools raise hype
• Discussion about core groups policing the group with regard to invitation-only vs. open
• An audience member observes that effective online groups usually represent a diversity of perspectives grouping around a common experience.
• Talking with these online community geeks is reinforcing my takeaway sentiment from SXSW: geeks can save the world
• Some people huddle together for warmth, others are there for content
• Peer review becomes seriously important the more bottom-up the content becomes
• Community managers should ask 1) should we try to scale ip size of community? And 2) why do we want to grow? and 3) will growth benefit us? [The third question was originally supposed to read “will growth kill the community?” but I ran out of characters.]
• TED conference is trying to scale while remaining meaningful [A presenter was showing how the TED conference was using online community building as a way to maintain the personal connections built at its conference while growing the audience.]
• We’re getting a demo of the TED online community
• TED profiles are content rich and very specific. You have big buckets for privacy. Users can tag themselves. Looks a lot like facebook.
• There’s no social graph representations that we can find. Wish they were doing that.
• Online overlays help conferences to flesh themselves out. [We talked a lot about how the online overlays of Twitter, Facebook and Meebo were integral to the SXSW experience this year and last year. I referenced Jeremiah Owyang’s post on how online backchannels were the source of groundswells during the conference.]
• Discussing conferences that use compulsory registration vs. optional off-site resources.
  
• build vs join issue: engagement metrics are challenging when you use someone else’s tools.
• Gates foundation education practice is trying to increase HS graduation rates, working to connect principals and teachers for information
• How do you build online communities for non tech-savvy people? How do you determine what people will do?
• I get a massive high from these networking/discussion events. I really need to do this more often.
• People often don’t know what will make them happy. [This was in reference to an audience member’s comment that the idea that people can tell you what features on an online community site will make them happy is a faulty premise. I agree.]
• Don’t chase too many features. Non tech communities are by definition not early adopters.
• “cool shiny factor” vs. Bare bones and iterate [This reminded me a lot of the logic that goes into developing successful Facebook applications. The best developers are the ones that repeatedly throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. This is also remeniscent of the Chorus methodology now in use at Eli Lilly to determine the best compounds for late-term efficacy studies.]
• The major theme of this conversation appears to be that knowing your niche audience and how they function is essential.
• I have a lot of new empathy for teams like facebook and myspace thst are trying to serve hugely diverse groups.
• Reading and absorbing content is a seriously underrated “passive contribution” to a community.
• how do we incent passive contribution? Show what someone is listening to. [One audience member brought up Last.fm’s Facebook application which shows what channel users are listening to. The idea behind this is that it incentivizes reading and making passive contributions by adding content consumed to an aggregate of someone’s expertise as it’s represented online. Some audience members point out how easy it would be to game a system like this.]
• That would add massive value to my practice of following individual attention streams as a way to monitor relevant online conversations. [I advocated this methodology in a PRWebinar I gave about a month ago and elaborated on it here.]
  
• This does raise some concerns with regard to privacy, people really sometimes do just want to lurk.
• This is what mybloglog is for.

If you found this information just the tiniest bit useful, then you really need to be engaged with the Online Community Round Table group on Facebook and keep apprised of when they’ll be holding an event in your area.

Update: This post was originally supposed to go up over at Web Community Forum, but due to jetlag, my exhausted brain made me post it here instead. Now that you’re done reading, head on over there for more great online community resources.