all posts tagged “best practices”
Why Paperworks: All About Constraints
Posted by: leelefever on June 23, 2007- 5:00pm
Categories: best practices, lesson, ourwork, paperworks, show
Since our first couple of videos came out, I've been talking to a lot of people about what makes the Paperworks format work. Aside from the content/message, I often say that a set of constraints is what makes the format a great fit for our goals.
In this case, a "constraint" is a rule that we have decided not to break in making our videos.
Examples: We only use certain materials (paper, whiteboard, markers, string), we won't make a video over 4 minutes long, we only use our hands to tell the story and we don't use any external music (just humming, snaps, claps, etc.). Further, everything we make in the format is 100% copyright infringement free. These are the Paperworks constraints and they have a huge impact.
You might think that having constraints is limiting, but I think the opposite. Constraints are liberating. By narrowing the scope of possibilities down to only a few ways to present ideas, we can eliminate needless decision making and complexity.
Consider these examples:
Materials: By limiting ourselves to paper, markers and a whiteboard, we don't have to think about all the things we *could* do with flash animation, 3D, focus, perspective and the like. Our materials, while limited, keep us lightweight and simple.
Time: By limiting the video's possible length to 4 minutes, we limit ourselves to major points. We don't sweat the small stuff.
Hands: By using only our hands, we don't have to think about clothes, hair, make-up or even facial expressions.
Music: By not using external music, we don't have to pick the right song or worry about being sued.
The Lesson: The lesson is that constraints work to limit the number and depth of decisions we have to make. By eliminating the decisions about technology, presentation, music, etc. we have time to focus on the core of what makes Paperworks work: the ideas.
The essence of the Paperworks format is simplicity - bringing down the bar of technology and presentation to it's most basic level. By doing away with fancy graphic and soundtrack options, we can make room to think more deeply about the idea and concept that will convey the message in the simplest way we can. Further, it's a format almost everyone can use - it's not limited by complex technologies.
A Bit of Inspiration: If you haven't read The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, I recommend picking it up. It made me think about the hidden dangers of having too many options. Another inspiring book is Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, which I reviewed briefly here.
Your Community is a Party Waiting to Happen
Posted by: leelefever on May 20, 2007- 5:00pm
Categories: best practices, community, lesson, recommendation, Social Design
You can find the slides for this talk here.
 What makes a party feel like a party? Is it the music? the people? the food? alcohol? It's hard to say really, but when the right ingredients are mixed with the right atmosphere, it comes alive and becomes an unforgettable experience. All a host can do is make sure the right atmosphere and ingredients are in place and hope for the best.
As it turns out, the same is true for online communities. The job of the community host is to set the stage for community to develop - to combine the right ingredients with right atmosphere. If the conditions are right - an engaged and successful community may develop over time.
Curiously, hosting parties and online communities share a lot of consistencies. In both cases, there are timeless ingredients that work together to create an environment that leads to success. Here are 12 ingredients that go into having a great party or hosting a successful online community:
1. Your party needs a reason to celebrate. The best parties are for a special occasion, a birthday, a holiday, an announcement. Members want to come together for a purpose, a shared interest or common experience. Otherwise, why have a party
- Online communities need a focus or purpose. If your community doesn't serve a need or have a purpose, why would people show up? If your purpose is defined, make it obvious to new members. Think about setting goals and tracking progress towards a shared goal. But, don't be one-dimensional consider related subjects and resources.
2. Your party needs good planning. Nothing kills a party like running out of food or alcohol. A party with too little food is a tragedy that could have been averted with good planning. Too much is better than not enough. Plan well.
- Online communities have the potential to grow exponentially.Make sure the technology and the people involved are prepared to handle growth. Be flexible and prepare for the community to have an influence on future plans. Target specific kinds of people you'd like as members. Define and redefine success as needed.
3. Your party needs a place. If people are going to interact, they need a home of some sort. Members need to know where the party is happening and what they can bring. It helps if the place is well kept, easy to use and looks familiar.
- Online communities need a web site that serves as the community's home. Start small and build the site's structure based on the member's needs. Plan for skyscrapers, but start with apartments. The community should feel like home for your target members.
4. Your party needs a host. The party's host is the glue that holds everything together. They don’t have to be the center of attention, but they do have to be there to tell people where to find the restroom and when the food is ready. They orchestrate and organize.
- Online communities needs a community manager or host to serve as the touchstone of the community. Good hosts are active members of the community and constantly engaged. They work with the site's designers and developers. They protect the community and advocate for it's members. They are accountable to members and the site's owners. They provide balance.
5. Your party needs basic rules. Most rules are common sense and barely need repeating (don't feed beer to the dog!), but some provide members with a way to know what sort of party it is. Are kids allowed? Can we bring something? Should we dress in costume?
- Online communities need guidelines. Guidelines enable the community to have set expectations about their participation. These are not the Terms of Service, but rules of the road - dos and don'ts. The best guidelines are written in plain language and in a personal tone. Fun helps too!
6. Your party needs a bouncer. Parties are famous for bringing out the best and worst in people. A few unruly folks can ruin everyone’s fun. Sometimes the host has to enforce the rules and kick a few people out to improve everyone's experience.
- Online communities need someone who is empowered to remove or deal with members who threaten the community's culture or standards. Trolls, spammers and other miscreants can be toxic to a community and the role of the bouncer is to deal with them in a responsible manner,. Guidelines and Terms of Service often help with enforcement. Enable your members to identify the problem members.
7. Your party needs an invitation. How else is anyone going to know about it?
- Online communities need ways to create awareness. Give members badges that they can put on their blogs. Give them ways to invite their friends. If the community is connected to a business, work with marketing to ensure that customers are aware it exists. Prompt members to blog about it, consider word-of-mouth.
8. Your party needs a few introductions. “Hello My Name Is�? tags are not a bad idea. Give people a way to find people like them and interact around something in common. Games can be a great ice breaker.
- Online communities depend on member profiles that reflect interest, activity and needs. Make sure the profile fits with the community. Consider the highly developed profiles on social networking sites. Also, provide a safe place for new members to introduce themselves to the community.
9. Your party needs an event. Maybe it’s a toast, or a movie or a limbo contest, but it helps to bring people together around a mid-party event. Get people out of their seats and inspire them to get involved.
- Online communities thrive on connection. Connections are made stronger through face-to-face meetings and specific events that offer members a chance to come together around something specific and timely.Have a contest or a special event online.Invite a special guest, mix it up, make it new.
10. Your party needs a way for the attendees to pitch-in. People love to party, but partying can be messy and they want to do their part to help clean up. They won’t mind, ask them to help do the dishes or take out the trash.
- Online communities can be mobilized.Let them pitch in and help solve a problem. Be prepared to share your needs and ask for help. The members can help you organize the site through tags or ratings. They can help you manage content through reporting inappropriate behavior. They can lobby their congressman on your behalf. They want to help – give them a chance.
11. Your party needs multiple ways to participate. The best parties appeal to different types of people. If tequila shots are the only way to party, people will not feel comfortable. You might find that people want to play Jenga or run the video camera. Make these options available and let them find their thing.
- Online community participation options have grown.Community doesn’t have to be about discussion. Let members start a blog, add tags to content, edit a wiki page or vote on a photo. Consider options to “add as friend�? or “join this group�? like social networking sites. Consider how small modes of participation can be a gateway to deeper contributions.
12. Your party needs variety. A party of complete strangers can have difficulty getting rolling. The best parties are a mix of old friends and new friends. Often, the old friends have social status in the group and serve to bring the new folks into the fray. The old friends set the tone and serve as an example for others.
- Online communities need a means of expressing and perceiving social status.Enable members to display a measure of their experience or reputation based on participation, length of membership, ratings by fellow members or a combination of factors. This gives new members context and helps build trust. Members need veteran members to use as positive examples.
In Seattle? Come to My Refresh Talk This Monday
Posted by: leelefever on May 15, 2007- 5:00pm
Categories: best practices, community, event, Speaking
This coming Monday, May 21st at 6pm, I'll be the speaking at the Refresh Seattle event at the Ballard Library. My talk is brand new and called "Your Website is a Party Waiting to Happen". As the description on the site says:
Lee will decode the world of online communities and boil all the hype down to the basic strategies and elements that make online communities work. You'll leave this talk with easy to remember ways to host a successful online community and/or throw one hell of a good party.
As you may be able to tell, the talk is about what hosting real world parties can teach us about online communities. It takes a fun look at the 12 (or so) elements that make both successful.
I hope you can make it - you can RSVP here.
Refresh Seattle is part of Refreshing Cities, "a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in their areas."
Matt Haughey knows community. He is the founder of MetaFilter, a very popular community site that is based on enabling members to blog about stories that are important to them. It's a real success story in the community world and I consider Matt one of it's real innovators.
He recently started a new blog call fortuito.us where he is hoping to post an article a week on his experiences. His most recent post is Some Community Tips for 2007, which serves as an interesting review of the things he feels are important in making MetaFilter successful. I encourage you to go read the whole post.
The major points are:
- Take emotion out of decisions (be patient and don't make rash decisions about members)
- Talk like a human, not a robot
- Give people something they can be proud of (enable them to customize their profile and experience)
- Bring users in during community decisions
- Moderation is a full time job
- Metrics spread out the work
- Guidelines not rules
One of Matt's quotes stuck with me:
If you're building a community you have to love what you're doing and be the best member of it. It takes great care and patience to create a space others will share and you have to nurture it and reward your best contributors. It's a decidedly human endeavor with few, if any, technical shortcuts.
This is an important point for businesses that are considering community: passion matters. You can have support from the CEO, the best software and the coolest design, but if there isn't a passionate and engaged person (or team) keeping the community rolling, your goals for the community may not be reached.
How do you identify these people? There may already be people in your company who are passionate about community, but this fact never appears on their job description.
- Do any of your employees blog (personally or otherwise)?
- Do some employees who have big ideas for the company web site, but never seem to get support?
- Have you asked your employees about their online community activities/experiences outside of work?
These questions may help you find these people. Talk to them, give them a chance to have an influence and you may find that your company already has experienced and passionate community leaders.
More on 43 Things "Neighborhood Watch"
Posted by: leelefever on April 17, 2007- 5:00pm
Categories: best practices, community, seattle, Social Design, spam
A little while back, I wrote about a brand new feature from the Robots who created the online community site 43 Things . The feature is "neighborhood watch" and it enables "community members in good standing" to contribute to fighting the site's growing spam problem.
Just to day Daniel Spils posted a follow up describing how it has worked so far.
In attacking a problem of this scale, we knew we’d have to turn to our community of users and a few automated tools. Enter Neighborhood Watch and automated spam-catching scripts such as Robotcop and Robotscout. Since Neighborhood Watch debuted, we’ve defeated more than 3,000 spam accounts set up to prey on 43 Things. We’ve also nuked a few dozen creeps and miscreants. Along the way, we’ve had just 2 errors – which happened to the same account.
He also describes some of the innards of the system:
The system is not a simple thumbs up or down vote. It uses a voting algorithm coupled with voter reputation to determine whether or not to suspend accounts.
Here's to fighting the good fight with the power of your community.
Stewart Butterfield on CNN.com
Posted by: leelefever on January 21, 2007- 4:00pm
Categories: best practices, business, community, flickr, interview
Stewart Butterfield is one of the co-founders of Flickr, which is a photo sharing site that has been the subject of a near-absolute love-fest among geeky types for years. It has become one of the most cited examples of Web 2.0. I use it everyday and so do my friends. Flickr does do so, so many things right. Anyway, Stewart was interviewed by CNN recently. (watch Video with different content)
My favorite answer from the interview:
CNN: What's the key to making online communities work?
A lot of our success came from George, the lead designer, and Caterina. Both of them spent a lot of time in the early days greeting individual users as they came in, encouraging them and leaving comments on their photos. There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them too.
My least favorite:
CNN: How can big business benefit from Web 2.0?
Butterfield: I'm not sure there's any clear path for them to benefit but we're starting to see more and more talk of Web 2.0 in the enterprise business press. A lot of it is not about the application of any special technology; it's just common sense and obvious ways of making things better.
I think he's basically saying that it depends on the business and the influence of Web 2.0 is too broad to define a clear path for everyone. However, here is how I might have answered instead:
Web 2.0 means that barriers have been lowered on the Internet and new opportunities to work with real customers are sprouting every day, just as I (Stewart) mentioned above. Big businesses won't succeed or fail because of the Web 2.0-ness of their web site. What will make the biggest difference is how businesses react to the changing expectations of customers who have new power online thanks to changing perceptions about the Web. The benefit comes from turning these new kinds of customer relationships into a competitive advantage. The business who gets closest to the customer wins. One of the reasons for the hype is that Web 2.0 is all about enabling these new relationships to happen.
onPhilanthropy - Four Steps to Better Online Communications
This article is focused on helping nonprofits understand some of the basics of communicating on the web and relates some of the new trends.
Web pros won't learn anything new in the article, but I think it's a good example of an article in simple language that's built for the audience.
The four strategies Newley relates are:
1) have an easy-to-use Web site that caters to
their audience,
2) adopt an email strategy,
3) achieve search engine visibility, and
4) consider using Weblogs and RSS
I'd say that #s 3 and 4 go hand-in-hand. Google loves weblogs and may be one of the more valuable reasons for weblogging. Here's a case study I wrote on that subject.
Four Things Every Web Site Headline Must Do
If you're writing a headline or heading for a site page, here are four things you need to keep in mind, four elements that demand your attention, four separate ‘audiences' you need to satisfy.
1. Make the reader feel he or she is in the right place
2. Make the reader feel good and want to continue
3. Appeal to the search engines
4. Satisfy the needs of the company or organization
How to Effectively Conduct an Online Survey
Good stuff from Marketing Profs...
First and foremost, you need to decide what the objectives of the study are. Ensure that you can phrase these objectives as questions or measurements. If you can’t, you are better off looking at other means of gathering data, like focus groups and other qualitative methods. Online surveys tend to focus more on quantitative data collection.
Via: MarketingWonk.com formerly Up2Speed (amuzing story about why here.)
HBS Working Knowledge: Loosen Up Your Communication Style
I thought this was an interesting article about communication styles in leadership positions. I've certainly seen the "data only" style and it served only to glaze eyeballs. Good points on symbolic and emotional communication.
Via: Online Facilitation
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