Partly it’s the eye-popping visuals and technological wizardry: it’s earning most of its international revenues from 3d theaters (which charge higher admission). Saturday Jan 9th was the biggest day in IMAX box office history, with China bringing in “staggering and record-breaking” revenues.

But the varied reviewers are finding their own points of resonance with the movie:

Andrew Leonard wrote in Salon that Avatar is “all things to all people,”  with everyone from neo-cons applauding its “deeply conservative, pro American message” to left-wing professors commenting that “the jungle pantheism that now pervades the psychoactive counterculture has gone thoroughly mainstream.”

William Kern in his article in The Moderate Voice pointed to a couple of non-US reviews (links below are English translations):

- from Belgium:  Oscar van den Boogaard in De Standaard describes “feeling like a Neanderthal who’s seen his first airplane,”  the diverse audience, the story line of “the brutality of man…[who] destroys what’s foreign to him…parallels between Iran and Pandora….”

- in the China Daily, Raymond Zhou speculates that “…at the moment a giant bulldozer appeared on the screen,  I had an ‘aha’ moment…that there is a specific Chinese interpretation one could make”  related the ongoing conflicts in China between modernizing property developers and local Chinese who fight to protect their homes.   Here’s another article on how “the Chinese see a message in Avatar” about local homeowners fighting brutal developers.

Meanwhile,The Korean Times has this cartoon of a blue Na’vi befriended by a patched-robe Arab, African and other developing world peoples, while in the background three imperialist figures  (a cowboy, a foreign legion soldier, and a pith-helmeted policeman) watch with consternation.

Dmitri Gorshokov writes in RT (Russian media channel) that Avatar’s message is that “if we don’t start solving our ecology problems we’ll be in big trouble….and those who watch the news…will find the scenario, in which a stronger race invades a weaker one for its resources, annoying familiar.”

William Langly in the UK Telegraph comments on  director James Camerons’ “working class background” and quotes Cameron as saying he tries to  “live with honor” in the Hollywood world where “a handshake means nothing” to most people.

So perhaps the discussions about how the movie could have been so much better with a more nuanced, complex storyline — are missing the point. Perhaps it’s the very straightforward nature of the storyline and characters that allows for such a range of interpretations to be projected upon it.

Six things I learned:

#1) We are still  in early days with online communities – especially communities related to corporate entities — communities sponsored by, or of interest to,  corporations.   Companies are gingerly figuring out how to build online communities, or how to interact with the communities that already exist.

#2) Many people are figuring out the basics. The fundamentals of how to launch and manage a community is the main focus of today’s Community Managers (CMs).  Learnings are out there, but the knowledge base is new and unevenly distributed. Much of the knowledge is in people’s heads (not codified into articles or books yet).  Thus, CMs have to proactively learn on-the-job . Many CMs are first-timers in their role, and often there’s nobody in their company who can advise them on CM.  So they have to look outside and self-educate.

#3) There will always be tension between the social dynamics of online communities and the objectives of the corporations that interact with them.   Community managers have to navigate this tension and advise others in their company about how to manage it.

#4) Many companies and CMs struggle with ROI for communities.  Many CMs have not had to think in terms of an ROI analysis before, and many of them have had limited interaction with Finance and executives who think in terms of ROI.  See here for notes on how to do a good ROI (including things like cost avoidance and increased average value of customer).

#5) CMs have an invaluable front-line perspective on customers — but companies are just beginning to figure out how to effectively leverage the CMs’ experiences.  Most CMs are producing scheduled report-outs, but it’s unclear how effective they are at getting “heard” by the rest of their organization.  This is an area for skill development for many CMs.

#6) Business communities differ from consumer communities. (Business online communities = developer communities;  product support/customer help communities; business partner communities; etc.)  Participation patterns and other behaviors vary greatly across the range of business communities, and from consumer communities.   Yet much of the popular wisdom  is still based only on the better-known consumer communities.

See here for notes on B2B communities.  Impact Interactions is a consulting firm that’s developed some expertise in online business communities.

Related links:

The list of sessions is here.  Most sessions have summaries / notes posted.

Forum One (the conference sponsor) has a number of articles about online communities on their website.

Jessica Margolin posted her top five takeaways here.

Mike Mace with Rubicon Consulting wrote this post about online communities from the corporate perspective.

Useful presentations on online communities for business: overview presentation on Enterprise 2.0, Top 10 Reasons to Build an Online Community, Building a Robust Online Community, The Business Case for Online Communities, a step-by-step overview for building an online community.

Online “riots” or protests are not random, despite appearing to be spontaneous.  They have patterns.  One pattern is a set of emergent roles that individuals assume.   People take on one or more roles based on the individual’s interest and skills/ability to perform those role(s) effectively.

Below are some of the roles that I’ve seen in  online customer protests. I’m using examples from AmazonFail, since it was recent, but other protests show similar patterns.

1) Aggrieved -  people  injured or offended by the company.  In most large-scale online protests,  the Aggrieved are a class or group, not a single person. In AmazonFail, there were two groups: the impacted authors, and those who saw the situation as an attack against GLBT topics/people.

2) Spark – someone who gets the initial audience.   A Spark has to describe the issue in a compelling way and have “enough” readers for the word to start to spread. The main Spark for Amazonfail was Mark Probst’s post.   Sparking doesn’t always “take” (as this example shows.)

3) Town Crier - spreads the news  — the “have you heard this?” folks.  This role creates a full-scale protest.  Twitter is an ideal tool for Town Criers. From April 11-14, there were thousands of #amazonfail tweets.

4) Roll Caller – posts/tweets about the news — not to pass along the information (since at this point, there’s already multiple posts on the topic)  but to publicly demonstrate their support.  People may feel social pressure to participate in Roll Call because *not* participating can look like they *don’t* support it.

5) Activist – creates  online protest locations / petitions.   Facebook Pages/Groups and petition sites are typical protest tools.  Another example:  a blogger that orchestrated a Google bomb around Amazonfail.

6)  Joiner – people who sign up on the protest lists/pages.  Like Roll Calling, Joining is an easy way for people to feel like they’re contributing to a worthy cause.

7) Investigative Reporter -  researches the situation and shares  results.  Here’s an example where a blogger did a master list of books impacted by AmazonFail.  Here a blogger looked at the books’ metadata tags.

8 ) Theorist -  people who speculate about underlying causes.  These speculations can be complex and often involve references to past events that are suspected of being linked to the current problem. One of the most popular theories on AmazonFail was this post about how AmazonFail might be the result of an online group of troublemakers called Bantown.  Another example of a Theorist post here.

9)  Paranoid – subcategory of Theorist. These posts show a strong suspicion of authority (incl. companies and governments).  Tend to see everything as an intentional plot.  This post includes quotes that tend towards the Paranoid view (”…Amazon is a bully….it’s all about sales…they want to be Walmart…”).

However:  what looks like paranoia at first can start looking plausible, esp when there’s an incriminating data trail (example here, where a post that initially sounds paranoid starts sounding justifiable when you read the history).

10) Tinhat – subcategory of Theorists, but crazier than Paranoid.  See the comments on this thread for tinhattery type comments (”…some unnamed company ((Apple)) is attacking Amazon over the online music market…”)

11)  Contrarian – argues that the protest is off track — misinformed, overblown, etc.  Here’s one example.

12) Troll – subcategory of Contrarian who writes an inflammatory opinion to exploit the emotionl/attention of the protest crowd.  Blatant trollery is usually quickly spotted and warned against.  More subtle trollery, like the anonymous coder who claimed to have engineered AmazonFail, take time to debunk (via Investigative Reporters).

13) Expert – subcategory of Theorists, the Expert actually knows something about the industry or company being discussed.   The Expert provides background, context and explanations based on their specialist knowledge.  Here’s a post by a person familiar with ecommerce architecture.

14) Insider – related to  Theorists and Experts — people who claim inside knowledge (as in the stereotypical “I have this friend….”).   Here’s a post and another from persons who cite conversations with Amazon employees.

15) Historian – people who collect and organize the history and key links related to the protest in the days/weeks/months as the situation unfolds. Here’s an example and another .

16) Celebrity – a “name” who adds the weight of his/her reputation to the debate.   Example: this post referenced Neil Gaiman weighing in on Amazonfail, as indeed he did. Clay Shirky commented in the aftermath here.

17) Professional – the mainstream news outlets — usually those organization’s blogs.  Amazonfail was mentioned in various mainstream media outlets, including UK Guardian, LA Times, Washington Post, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, ZDNet , Globe & Mail,  Gawker, etc.

If anyone’s come across similar typographies for emergent roles in online protests — pls comment here or email me, I’d love to hear about it.

Useful articles on Amazonfail:

The New York Times has an interesting article on algorithms — how they’re both unthinking automata and also human artifacts that reflect human mental models and biases.

Church of the Customer blog gives a nice list of the many ways that Activists participated in Amazonfail.

Clay Shirky’s after-the-fireworks essay is here, in which he examines the mob effect of online protests.

B.L.Ochman’s “Lessons from Amazon, Domino’s Debacles” is here.

Other references re: online customer protests – books on related topics:

I can’t find any books or articles that are specifically about online customer protests — please anybody who knows of one, post it in the comments.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky (2009 reprint). Awesome book — not about online protests per se, but an overview of how social networks change the power dynamic between individuals and traditional organizations.

Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World by Matthew Frazer and Soumitra Dutta (2008). Similar to Shirky’s book, by a couple of guys associated with INSEAD.

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin (2008).  How self-0rganizing groups form and grassroots leaders emerge.

Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory & Practice, edited by Martha McCaughey and Michael Ayers (2003) — a bit dated but still good.

Other links re:  online protests:

List of WordPress blogs with “amazonfail” as a tag.

For one example of another large-scale customer protest with emergent roles, see Strikethrough 2007. Summary:  LiveJournal (popular blogging platform) reacted to a complaint/threat about pedophilia on LJ (complainer was later discovered to be a small – perhaps single person -  protest group). LJ hastily deleted a number of journals for “improper content/TOS violations,” in the process impacting a number of innocent groups and causing an uproar among its customers.

Topic of this panel:  how games are bringing learning out of schools and into the rest of the world.  What can games tell us about how people learn and solve problems.

Gaming today is deeply social — related to the community around that game — who else plays it that you know, people that you meet through playing.

Different types of games require different types of thinking and problem solving.

Traditional schools emphasize individual problem solving.  Group collaborations are traditionally seen as cheating. Yet learning is often a highly social activity — games and online activity shows that.

Communities developing social intelligence.   People learn the “subject” as well as learning social interaction skills with other people — how to learn from, teach, communicate with, form effective relationships with other people.

Our media are developing a whole ecosystem of social communities around them. Even something like TV which is very linear narrative — there are lots of people in different communities related to a specific TV show, which allows people to have different understandings of the show, and gives people the opportunity to discuss the show, alternative plots, character motivations etc.   Different viewers can have very different perceptions of a show, based on their own viewing and their discussions with others/their community.

Traditional story (book, movie, TV) vs game / game play  — two different narrative styles.

There are now “game schools” where game designers get trained.  It’s becoming a discipline in itself (like there are film schools or creative writing schools).   So, going forward, we may see more sophisticated game design because the thinking and skills in the discipline have developed and are being codified and taught.   And, we have an audience of experienced gamers/consumers who can use more sophisticated games.

Many applications could benefit from a more “games” approach — such as doing your taxes etc.

There’s an issue with teachers/schools opposing “games” in the school — opposition to “games” and “fun” in school.  That idea that school should be “work” and not “fun.”

But in fact — games are “work” — good games are hard and require effort. The brilliance of games is that they make people able to engage with the work in a different way.

Games aren’t about “fun” per se — they’re about “engagement.”   Games suck people in — get people into a flow state.

One example:  strategy games & others give players a ton of charts/graphs/data, so that people can analyze game play and figure out how to win.  It’s the kind of complex data and analysis that are often a negative experience in a formal schooling session.

Big complex games teach people to see the world as a large complex system with hidden rules — that’s the core idea behind science — to figure out the system and the underlying rules.

No, games don’t represent the world fully and accurately — no model or theory does that.   “All theories are wrong, but some are useful.”

Some game designers have “unconscious competence” in designing games — they do it, but can’t articulate what they’re doing or why it works.

One issue to consider: what view of the world, what outcome, and what emotional state is a game presenting/encouraging.  There’s a lot of opportunity for a wider range of experiences to be represented in games (not just shooter games, car races, etc.)

Flower and Flow — very different game designs/types (from the traditional sense of computer games).

Some leaders / older generation sense the importance of games for learning etc.  Henry met a political leader in Latin America who was convinced that World of Warcraft was the future way to educate people in leadership skills.

Playing WoW and other big online gamest has created entirely new communities online / with fewer geographical restrictions.

The book Bowling Alone — described how the bowling game was a location, common activity, place for discussion.  Now: WoW and other online games / game guilds / game communities are a new form of civic culture.

So called “serious” game industry — making games for “serious” purposes like health care, civic education, etc.  But that field hasn’t taken off / been as successful, compared to entertainment games.  Why not?  Complicated issue.

Best games aren’t limited to traditional disciplines — best games are non-disciplinary/multiple disciplines.  So as long as we think in terms of “a history game” or “a health learning game” that’s a potential problem / obstacle to designing a good game.

In the beginning — “serious” games were designed by academics, who had a very formalized model of learning theory The wrong educational theory results in bad games.

“Game mechanics” –  what makes a game effective as a game.   This is hard,  and many “formal” educators and learning experts don’t know how to do this.

Different attitudes towards making mistakes — when mistakes are penalized, it discourages learning.

Games let you walk in another person’s shoes — you get to be in another place and take action there.

Games allow you to feel guilt — as compared to watching TV/movies.  Because games require the player to take action and make choices — the player gets to experience guilt and consequences in a game.

Ivan’s talk:

Who are fans?   Fandom often makes people think of ComicCon and sci fi, but there are a lot of fans, of lots of kinds of media and other stories/books/properties.

Fan short for fanatic — has negative connotations — also more recently geekish connotations. But fandom comes in a lot of flavors: music, literature, sports, TV, movies, brands/products etc.

Last 20 yrs: fandom has become a mainstream behavior.  Moved from being marginal — to now to being encouraged — generating fans is the objective of a lot of media business models.  Entertainment properties esp try to create / attract fans.  The relationship between brands & individuals has become complex, confused — are we “friends” ( Facebook fan page)?  are we “fans” (as of celebrities)?  are we “consumers”?

Friendship implies reciprocal relationship. “Fan” implies an admiring but one-way relationship.

Sometimes this relationship gets confused (ie musicians or brands emailing people to ask them to become fans and join a fandom community).

Fan vs Friend vs Follower (different relationship assumptions). Brands experimenting with these concepts of relationship.

Fandom has gone from being unacceptable/weird/underground to being acceptable/encouraged.

Fandom isn’t just about consuming things, watching things, buying things — it involves creative, interactive, social behaviors.

Brands/celebrities coming to appreciate this. If you want fans, you have to let them create and interact.  People are not going to be passive obedient recipients for a brand.

Five modes of fandom:

1) “Fan of X” becomes a point of identity for people.  “I am a fan of X” helps to identify you to other people.

2) Fan interests leads people to learning new skills and pursuing new types of knowledge — skills/knowledge that from the inside of a fandom makes sense (ie learning elvish or memorizing sports scores) but may not make sense outside of that fandom.

3) Production. Fans create stuff. Fanfic, costume play (cosplay), role playing, etc.  Again mainstream media / companies have begun to encourage this / admire this rather than ignore or repress it.

4) Participation. Giving audiences opportunities to influence brands.   ARGs (alternative reality games) are an example — allow fans to participate in activities (Dark Knight ARG had people dress up as clowns and create havoc).

Pro westling is a fandom — from the outside, looks silly/naive. But the fans know that it’s a narrative and that fans have roles to play.

5) Appropriation. Once your product/story is out there in the world — you don’t own it anymore.  Fans will do something with stories/products and reinterpret them in their own ways — often in ways that companies/IP owners don’t like and that go counter to the “official” brand meaning.

Henry’s talk:

Henry referred to his comment at SxSW last year that “Web 2.0 = fandom without the stigma.”   Fans and fan behavior used to be mocked as geeky etc.  Now fandom is more acceptable and more open but there’s still stigma.  Most fans draw distinctions about their role in fandom, how in / how out they are.

Web 2.0 has enabled and promulgated behaviors that already existed in the fan communities.

If you look at history of new technologies — fan communities have long been early adopters and adapters of new technologies — such as early radio, walkie-talkies, podcasts (Harry Potter communities got into podcasts early) etc.    So at any point in the 20th century, audio technologies were being pushed forward by fan activities.

In the 19th century — amateurs/fans used hand presses to create “zines” on various topics to circulate around.  And, men and women were involved in these activities (even in mixed groups).   Women as well as men were willing to experiment with amateur press technologies early on.  People traded information through the mail, often without knowing each other face to face.

Old fandom also worked as a social network.  Most every old sci fi writer, agent, publisher, etc. started out in a sci fi fan society.   Mutual support system, social network, sharing knowledge, developing skills etc.

The woman/fan who pushed the “keep star trek on the air” was an early consumer activist in media.

Fan communities are a type of “brand” community — they advocate around a certain media brand / activity.

Skill development:  fanfiction writers practice “beta reading” where more experienced fanfiction authors act as editors and writing coaches for other writers.

Anime fans “subbing” or adding subtiles to Japanese anime videos — this helped to create a broader audience in the US / english speaking countries for japanese media properties.

Remix culture. Men and women have been doing remix videos for 20-30 years — back before digital technologies — mixing and cutting video, sound, etc.

ComicCon — now a huge public event, massive attendance, used by media companies to promote their properties.

Some new properties are purely online and rely purely on fan support:  Joss Wheaton’s “Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog” is a purely internet property.

There is a long history of people suggesting that fans could directly support new media stories — we’re just reaching the point where that is financially and logistically possible.

Fans are interested in mastery — of obscure knowledge, details, etc.  This creates a market for detailed secondary materials/books to be sold.  For multi-generational media properties — the future generation of creators is born in the fan community.

Collective intelligence — fans pooling their knowledge — creating online knowledge communities.

Fandom as source of activism.

Barack Obama as Fan in Chief — Obama knows the Vulcan salute, reads and collects comic books, reads Harry Potter to his kids etc.  His campaign used a lot of web 2.0 (originally fandom) types of behaviors.

Abigail’s talk:

Should Fan Productions Be Free?  issue: can / should fans make money from their activities?

Fans make money for a lot of people, and fans make things that people value.

Right now, fan creations are treated as free.   We’re in the middle of an IP battle about the reuse / repurposing of owned IP.  So right now, fans are trying to avoid lawsuits — and a big way they try to avoid lawsuits, is that they give away their fanworks.

However there are two types of trade cultures: monetary vs gift. These two types of trade cultures exist side by side.  In every society, people sell some things for $$, and people give things away (for other reasons than money).

Fanfiction — written primarily by women and given away / shared for free.  How big an activity is fanfiction / how many people write / read it?  A lot.  Fanfiction gets about a dozen mentions in mainstream media per week. Fanfic is written about all kinds of media properties/characters/real people/books etc.   but to date — fanfiction has not been monetized.

But other types of fan creations have been monetized. Hip hop came from sampling, which is a fan remix product.  it’s very similar to fannish activities — but it’s an accepted form of music now, and people pay for it.

Doujinshi — fan created anime magazines.   And, fans make doujinshi of Harry Potter and other western media stories. They are sold for a small amount (usually just to cover costs).

Fan films:  like “George Lucas in Love“  made by a fan.  you can download it for free or for $1.99 online.

Game Mods (mostly male manufactured) and have better license arrangements w/ the original game companies — can be marketed as their own product, with the approval of the original game company.

Fan literature — lots of new books reworkings of classic literature — Shakespeare, the Bible, Moby Dick, Jane Austin, etc etc.   There are lots of these every year, and some of these are bestsellers. But, these are only allowed for non-copyrighted works.

Concerns by some female fanfiction authors of not wanting fanfiction to be visible — that it will result in women/fic being labeled as sexually deviant. But: pornography is well known commodity on the internet and is widely accepted and profitable.

Participants:  Karly Hand, Erin Portman, Peter Shankman, Brian Solis

Rising dominance of social media — challenge to traditional agencies.

Agencies having to face the fact that the tools of social media are available to everybody —  very few “PR exclusive” channels/tools.

Should I still do press releases?  Yes  — but don’t write them like a traditional boring press release. Yes put them on the wire (for free) — but more importantly: get the story out in social media.

Smart PR agencies are assigning people specifically to monitor and leverage social media.

First: you have to read & listen. Find out where the communities already are online, before you try to send out communications.

Be careful when a PR agency writes a blog or does other social media communications and doesn’t make it transparent who they are and what company is sponsoring the blog.  Don’t try to do grassroots social media communications and pretend to be someone else.  If it’s the CEO’s blog, then the CEO better be writing it, or at least have a major role in writing it.

Companies should stop paying $20k to agencies for focus groups — the first places to listen/get info is from existing online sources of information/communities.  All companies should be tracking Twitter and Facebook conversations and company mentions.

Risk with social media — that companies & PR agencies will overuse them, just like what happened with email — email got ruined as a comm channel by companies spamming it, overusing it.

The difference between “putting out a message” and “managing a message.”   Old style: control the message.  Today: participate in the conversation, get your story out there.

How to measure the success of a social media marketing campaign?  Basic metrics: followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook.  But those are simplistic #s and can be misleading. It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish — be
clear on target metrics up front.  Are you aiming for # of blog posts, click through on a specific destination url, or what.

Examples of successes & failures.  One example:  Peter Schankman had a bad experience at McDonalds and twittered it — McDonalds sent him $$ on a gift card to make up for it. McDonalds has an automated search online to pick up
when anybody mentions McDonalds online — and they responded to him because he’s Schankman.

Panel asked for feedback about the recent Skittles twitter stunt.  The company got lots of negative feedback on it. Comments: it took their agency 15 hrs to figure out something was wrong and take action — that’s forever in online time.

When should a company do this monitoring in-house versus outsource to an agency?  Can do either….but you do need the tools / infrastructure to do this in-house.

Also remember that people across the company need to be listening and responding — so it may make sense for the company to create a new core team to handle the tools/processes for this, as a service to the rest of the company.

One way to learn: go out and find somebody who knows this and get them to teach you — college students, etc.  But — be careful — some people may know how to use the features of the tools — but they may not have any sense of how to use this as a business tool and they may not have sophisticated communications skills.

There are no universal rules for social media — it depends on the individual and the community.   There’s no absolute rules about “how to use twitter” etc.  That’s another reason to listen and learn before jumping in to communicate and be active.

What is the future business model for PR agencies?  (since the old one is becoming obsolete)  Old model = assumed control.  But reality was about the ability to steer or shape perception. That is still true. Agencies never had as much control as was assumed in the past.  Now there’s more wanna-be influencers out there than ever — but that means smart PR agencies have to keep up with these new voices/competition.

How agencies can add value?  By providing adult supervision — experience, strategy, how to serve business goals.  Metrics — agencies are familiar with the need to show ROI and metrics.  Established relationships with bloggers and bigname online influencers.  Plus, analysts, PRwire & Businesswire are still important, and agencies provide access.

Old PR stuff is dead:  broadcasting messages at audiences. One way comms, not responding/not listening.

Building Strong Online Communities

Panelists: Ken Fisher (Ars Technica), Alexis Ohanian (reddit.com), Drew Curtis (Fark), Erin Kotecki Vest (BlogHer).

This panel was about how to create or build a new community online.

( NOTE:  many tweets commented that there actually wasn’t much content on attracting / building community — most of the discussion was about moderating a community you already have.)

How to balance your own/founder’s vision for the site versus what people in the community suggest and want to see.

There are many voices in a community. You have to listen but also take any single person with a grain of salt. You often get a few people who have a particular axe to grind/hot button, and they complain about that in threads etc.

Beware the tyranny of well organized minorities — they often don’t represent the wishes of the silent majority.

Reddit uses the search tool for twitter to see when people are talking about reddit.

Most community feedback: through posts on the community site itself, and through emails to support etc.

Most members are NOT frequent participants in online discussions. On Ars Technica — only 4% of readers actually visit the discussion forums.

On the other hand — when you have “enough” people actively complaining about something ( no magic number here — 40 people? 50 people? you have to decide for your community ) — you need to respond in some way. You want members to know that you’re listening and you care.

It’s important to provide a “feedback forum” where people can just log their feedback / complaints (separate from other discussion threads/forums).

As the community grows, so does the amount of feedback. You will need to scale up resources (employees or volunteers) to help stay on top of it.

Core principles that your community provides / adheres to — need to be clear in the community guidelines — and need to enforce. Over time, the community (may) become more self-policing.

Fark has the “nark” button — a “flag” or “complaint” button for a user to complain about somebody else’s post being offensive — throws the comment into a queue that the moderators have to review. (However note that some users will use the Nark button just as part of their activity on the site, as a lark or to harrass other users — not for a valid purpose. Also note that moderators have to go back to the full thread before judging one comment out of context — context is key.)

Drew:  “If I were on FARK as a user myself, I’d get an infraction at least once/month because I drink a lot.”

Need to clearly state the rules and publicize them — and quote the rule when someone is banned or a comment is blocked. Have to be careful, however, about writing a huge list of dos and don’t. That’s not effective.

What do you do with unacceptable content — pull it, or leave it and comment on why it’s not acceptable? BlogHer deletes that content and the moderator notifies the writer why the comment was killed. Other sites don’t delete at all, or don’t delete as frequently. It also depends on ability to “undelete” comments later on, put them back in. In some communities, participants don’t like it when comments are deleted.

There are ~5,000 banned from FARK at any given moment. FARK does attract a rambunctious bunch so there are always lots of complaints going on all the time.

Note that spammers get deleted ASAP. No mercy there.

Need for moderation may vary from forum to forum, not just from community to community. Example: during election period, much more moderation was required in the political forums.

Have different periods for banning — ban for a week, ban for a month, or permanent ban (permaban). (Fark)

What about people coming back under a new identity? Actually people get very attached to their online identity/ pseud — they want to come back under that old identity and retain that history and set of connections.

Goal is to have banning be infrequent. One site (Fark?) bans only about 1 person every month (not including spanners).

It is possible to have strong heated discussions without deteriorating into flame wars.

People will come back and argue when they’re banned — but you can’t let them distract you from correct moderation.

Making changes to an existing community is often noisy — gets lots of feedback, positive and negative. Can be hard to figure out how to best respond.

You don’t want to listen to your community *too* much — esp right after a change. “Some people if you go to their house and turn their cat figurines around, they freak out.”

One community has a two week time limit — if users are still upset and angry two weeks after a change — then consider changing it back / again.

Some sites use surveys to get feedback — others don’t consider surveys useful.

You need a community space that’s appropriate to your community size. You shouldn’t have a million different rooms/threads that are all mostly empty. Start small — a community needs to develop a group sense / be able to find people.

When managing an online community — don’t let your ego get in the way — you have to be able to take criticism, some of it harsh and extreme. Also be careful not to get sucked into the drama — it’s a big time waste. Deal with the issue and move on.

Characteristics of a good community manager: level headed, calm, neutral, multi tasker. Someone who won’t be rattled, who will handle drama with grace. Someone who can multi task, because you have to switch quickly between issues.

Building a new community site: don’t worry about the competititors — think about your niche and how you’ll stand out. You need to have passion for the topic / niche. Passion and honesty will attract like-minded people.

Most sites don’t allow fully anonymous comments — you have to register and have a name/pseud. Just registering adds a barrier that keeps the worst Anonymous Cowards out. Yes there’s some good feedback that’s anonymous that you will be losing, but most people are able to attach their online name to their comment.

Story of Greenpeace: Greenpeace asked for input on what to name a particular whale. They had wanted some dignified name like PeaceLove but the internet voted to name the whale Mr. Splashypants. Greenpeace was initially annoyed and did the vote again — the outcome was the same. Greenpeace went with the name and actually got a lot of press out of it.

As your community grows, you have to do things to help it still feel small / manageable to the user.

Removing posts for poor content quality — some communities do that, esp for a starting post. You can’t put up “xyz sucks” — you have to give reasons why it sucks. Simply giving a value judgment doesn’t help the conversation.

Some communities put up / down vote arrows next to anything and get useful feedback on the item. Other communities only use with with certain items (individual posts, comments etc.).

The history of a community also matters — adding new features later gets a different response to having them from the get-go.

Have to be careful about up / down voting though. Democracy / populism isn’t always the best way to go. It can bury important views that aren’t popular but are key and should be heard.

What about the issue of quality vs taste — a community trying to attract serious artists, but a lot of the stuff on the site is kitch. How to attract more serious artists? Should they ban / delete the stuff that doesn’t fit their idea of what the site should be? tricky issue.  Can’t force “desireable” people to join, and don’t want to turn off the people who are in fact showing up.

The continued mainstreaming of social media has resulted a fountain of speculation about the future of social networking, always-on connectivity and the increasingly ubiquitous internet.    The usual sides are being taken between technophiles and technophobes, people who see utopia around the (virtual) corner and people who think that we’re going to hell in a (virtual) handbasket.

But there’s a group of people who’ve already spent a great deal of time thinking about where these technologies are taking us:  speculative fiction / science fiction (SF) writers.

A few years back, there seemed to be a rule that nobody was allowed to write anything about online culture without  mentioning Snow Crash (perhaps we should have called that phenomena Stephenson’s Law.)

But now for some reason I rarely see SF referenced  in articles about online culture/ social media / social technologies (at least, not in those articles authored by non-engineers).     (I was inspired on this topic by a discussion on the great site Mashable, where almost nobody cited SF examples; impossible to imagine a similar discussion happening on old-school Slashdot without SF getting referenced.)

SF books seem to be one of those love-or-hate things.  People either read them prolifically or not at all.  Which is a pity, since near-term SF (stories that occur in the next few years-decades,  instead of hundreds of years in the future) have a lot to say about where our technology might be taking us — a nuanced view between techophile idealism and technophobe cynicism.

Note that this doesn’t mean that near-term SF is intended to be an factually accurate prediction of our future.   Great stories aren’t contingent on factual accuracy.   Fiction is about the exploration of the human condition; fiction isn’t meant to be reality TV or a crystal ball.

As Will Hindmarch wrote — accuracy isn’t the ultimate goal of SF, or of any fictional work.   Tolkien’s fans know that Middle-earth isn’t actual ancient earth history, and people still read Jules Verne and HG Wells despite the fact that these authors’ visions of the future are now quaint.  As Hindmarch says, “are we done with Neuromancer because of the ways it seems dated?”

SF can also help to influence the future.  Some of the early readers of Neuromancer (just like some of the early viewers of the original Star Trek series) were very influenced by it, and then made decisions to focus their life’s work on things from the book that had inspired them.  (In Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science, Mark Brake and Neil Hook talk about the interactions and bi-directional influence between fictional works and scientific works, going back to the 1600s.)

So if you work in social media — you need to read some near-term SF.   Here’s a few places to start:

Daemon by Daniel Suarez (2008). A top game designer has died, but he left behind a legacy — an online “game” that has its own agenda. As the scheme unfolds, a handful of people are assembling the clues as to where this game is leading.  Out of all the books listed here, this one is probably written in a style that the most accessible / straightforward to the casual reader.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Published 2003 and already both outdated and eerily predictive.  The heroine is a cool hunter and pop culture maven who consults to brands and designers.  She’s hired to ferret out the story behind some mysterious online videos and along the way meets “power-hungry marketeers, industrial saboteurs, high-end hackers, Russian mob bosses, Internet fan-boys, techno archeologists, washed-out spies, cultural documentarians…”

Spook Country also by Gibson (2007)  An ex-rock-star turned journalist researches “locative art” (which uses goggles and GPS to project ghost images/overlays).  But GPS and 3D imaging wizardry are also popular with international spies and criminals looking for a technical edge in moving covert material around the globe.

Rainbows End by Vernor Venge (2006).  Set a little further in the future than the two Gibson books, in mid-century 2000s.   A elderly man is brought back from dementia by a new drug, but has to take remedial classes at the local high school to learn to adapt to a world where virtualization has become deeply imbedded in everyday life.  Meanwhile his teenaged granddaughter stumbles into a plot related to the virtualization of traditional libraries.

I’ll stop there, although there’s plenty more that could be mentioned.

(And if you’re one of the people who doesn’t read SF, be aware that your kids are, and that SF young adult books are forming their ideas about what the future looks like.)

(For more info on UCG and social media: there’s a good white paper here, with lots of examples of companies and business models — it’s from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.)

The BusinessWeek article is balanced and even-handed. It describes the “delicate line” that must be walked: these are for-profit companies that depend on volunteer labor.

Social networks  inhabit a new and interesting societal space that mixes up the traditional contexts for paid vs unpaid activity.  Volunteer work is associated with not-for-profit groups whose activities benefit society.  And people have different expectations of NFPs versus for-profit businesses.

Pine, Gilmore and Joseph talk about the different types of organizations and people’s expectations of each type in their book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. They observe that when an organization behaves against type, people see that as inauthentic,  suspicious, or even exploitative.  People who would cheerfully pick up trash in a public park for free would balk at doing the same for a corporate campus;  the same principle works in reverse when NFPs are seen as “too commercial” to be a genuine NFP.

Social networking companies are walking this line between business and NFP/volunteer space.  A good social network plays the role of host for an online party. Guests don’t begrudge the host the need to cover the costs of the party. But those guests who pitch in and help with party duties will feel deceived and ill-treated if they find out later that the host made “too much” financial gain (in part from their free work).

So “how much financial gain is too much” from the users’ perspective?   Social networks are still a new-ish model,  so people’s expectations of them are still evolving — which means companies need to tread lightly, listen carefully to their users, and expect to make mistakes and do course corrections.

One recent example:  Wikipedia Foundation received criticism around its fundraising – for asking users to contribute $$, while the Foundation paid salaries up to $300k+ and while the great majority of Wikipedia work was performed by volunteer labor.  Wikipedia had made a point of being NFP and not placing any advertising on their site.   Therefore in asking publicly for donations, Wikipedia continued to emphasize its NFP identity but left itself open to criticism that its salaries were “too high” for a NFP.  There was a sense among some users that “we’re already giving them our time, now they want our money, while they pay themselves corporate-type salaries.”

Another example: the Fanlib debacle.  This was designed as a for-profit community for fanfiction writers, but its ties to traditional media companies and (what were perceived as) overly commercial statements made by the company led to accusations from many users that Fanlib was attempting to profit in an unethical way from the volunteer efforts of fans.   Fanlib’s management responded poorly, resulting in more criticism, and eventually the site failed.    It’s an excellent case study, and Henry Jenkins did a great in-depth writeup of the issues — this should be required cautionary reading for any company going into user generated content.

Back to the BusinessWeek article. It touches on a several issues that are common for UGC / social networking sites:

1) the importance of seeding a new social network with initial content. People need to see content when they visit for the first time; empty spaces don’t attract users.  That initial content usually comes from the business actively encouraging people to create it, enlisting known creators in that field to participate, or incenting or otherwise paying people to generate initial content.

2) it’s a small minority of users that create most of the content. The numbers vary, but you’re generally looking at <5% of the user population creating the great majority of the content.   Other users may participate in less intensive ways (for example, by commenting or faving). And the majority of users tend to be readers/lurkers who don’t actively participate.

3) these “super creators” have to see benefit for themselves. Nobody dones things for free, even when they aren’t paid in cash currency;  people need psychic income, paid in a currency other than cash.  Companies need to understand what “currencies” are trading on their site –  hit counts, favs, traffic, etc.   The company needs to understand how its super creators perceive the benefits to themselves:  is it career building,  assisting a valued cause, making cool stuff for one’s friends, etc.

In my anecdotal experience, sites where users are or become significant friends (rather than just casual acquaintances) are stickier, and the super creators stay engaged longer, due to the friendship network.

4) the site should be designed to give creators the tools to monitor their success on the site. People need to see the impact of their work. This is related to the idea of using learnings from game design in architecting social networks. Companies need to build in ways to keep score: number of hits, favs, fans, followers, ranking in various areas, cities, special awards and recognitions, etc.

For UCG, success/rewards come in three main types : a) metrics related to traffic/hits on one’s thread, b) comments, favs or other actions of recognition from other users, and c) recognition from the host company (in the form of thank-yous, attention from “important people” / management, product samples, gift certificates, etc.)

5) There’s a life cycle to “super creators” that companies need to recognize and manage. Potential super creators find the site through some medium, begin to participate, and at some point decide to increase their output and become super creators.   They continue for some period of time, but eventually almost all super creators downshift and become regular low-participation users or leave the site altogether.  Companies should expect this and be aware of how users move through the cycle.

Sites need to monitor their users’ experience cycle: understand where their new users are coming from and what are the triggers or transition points that move users from lurker to participative user to creator to super creator status and then later through the downshift.

Temple Grandin, in her new book Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals talks about the “core emotion systems in the brain” and that humans and animals have the same core systems.  Her discussion of the SEEKING core emotion system got me thinking about customer experience design.

The SEEKING system (always written in caps) is “the basic impulse to search, investigate, and make sense of the environment” (Grandin quoting Dr Jaak Panksepp, a famous researcher in this area).

Grandin continues:

• ” SEEKING is a combination of emotions that people don’t usually believe go together…wanting something really good, looking forward to getting something really good, and curiosity….”

Grandin points out that SEEKING is a very enjoyable and necessary emotion in animals.  Animals whose brains are wired up will push buttons to stimulate their SEEKING brain area.  Animals who can’t express SEEKING behavior (for example, captive animals in badly designed environments) get depressed and mentally damaged.

So what does SEEKING mean for businesses and customer experience design?

First let’s look more closely at SEEKING — there are nuances that are important to understand.

The key elements of SEEKING are:

Satisfying curiosity. This is the investigation of new things.  People and animals are programmed to be pay extra attention to new things and investigate them.  This investigation is emotionally stimulating because there’s the risk that the new thing could be Bad, or the potential that it could be Good.  So part of the stimulation and enjoyment of this part of SEEKING, is the sense of danger and risk, but also the feeling of potential good new rewards.

Learning and performing actions that lead to rewards. Grandin talks about how animals actually enjoy training  — learning tricks and special behaviors — when the training method is properly aligned to SEEKING.  People and animals both very much enjoy interacting effectively with their environment to get good things for themselves.

So there’s two sides to learning and performing:

• being faced with new challenges and new learning opportunities,
• continuing to demonstrate previously learned behaviors and getting the rewards for that.

Grandin talks about the key to training an animal for a new behavior is to give a reward for the smallest initial action in the right direction of the behavior — once the animal starts beginning to do the right movement, you reward, and keep rewarding as they keep going.  So the learning animal gets a positive “blip” the instant they start doing the new behavior, and then more, and then more — that’s how the animal knows that they’re on the right track.

After the animal has successfully learned the behavior, the trainer can back off and only give the reward at the end, and the animal will happily do the whole behavior, in anticipation of the eventual reward.  In fact, the trainer doesn’t always have to give a reward every single time, after the behavior is learned.  The animal may be disappointed that one time but will continue to do the behavior, as long as they get a reward most of the time.

Getting rewards. Rewards are the final prize that motivates the SEEKING system — but it’s not just about getting the reward. Doing the action, making the effort, is essential.

Studies of two animals — a learning animal and an observer animal, both of whom got treats when the learner performed successfully — show that the learner animal is excited and engaged, but the observer animal is more blase.    Our genetics have evolved to make sure that we enjoy the action of SEEKING — not just the final reward.

We know this — people talk about how “it’s the journey, not the destination” and the “effort is what makes the prize worthwhile.”

It’s important that rewards be available but not too available.  Frustration is part of SEEKING. When an animal wants something but can’t have it right away, they get frustrated — just like a person.  Frustration is part of the “wanting-anticipating” energy in SEEKING that drives action and learning.

The secret is to have enough frustration to stimulate the action, learning and problem-solving — but not too much frustration, or the animal/person will get overwhelmed and shut down.  Good animal trainers become experts at noticing when a particular animal is getting overwhelmed, and they immediately change to a previously learned behavior so the animal can feel engaged and successful again.

If you buy into this SEEKING idea — there’s lots of implications for business.   I’ll be speculating about some of these in future blog posts.

Bottom line:  SEEKING is often a neglected part of many companies’ thinking about customer experience.   We talk about “customer satisfaction” and “delighting the customer” and “retaining the customer” and “brand loyalty.”     We tend to think of these as being about the customer having “the really good thing”  — i.e. the customer buying, owning, using and promoting our product.

But the customer’s SEEKING system isn’t just about “having” the reward (the product).    Customers SEEKING are investigating new things, learning and demonstrating skills, and getting some rewards from all that, along the way.   It’s not about the one big reward at the end.   It’s about a whole set of behaviors along the way, and a bunch of little rewards and promises and stimuli along the way.  Some businesses are very good at this, and design this into their product and customer experience. Again I’ll be looking at some of these companies in later posts, in terms of what they can teach the rest of us.