Aaron Strout : Citizen Marketer

Online Community Business Forum '08

• Believed a good magazine was a great way to connect people into communities
• Argued that "context" vs. "content" is king
• Purpose of a community is to do something, otherwise it's an inert entity - needs a point of view to make it come to life
• Community, context, content and co-creation are the new 4Cs!
• 1) Work is personal 2) knowledge is power 3) computing is social 4) break the rules
• New ROI is "ROP" - return on purpose

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Blogosphere
• GetSatisfaction
  

• Question of how do you interact with all the communities out there?
• Rawn of IBM said that there is an issue of communities (like FB groups) becoming siloed
• Communities aren't yours, they are your customers!
• 100% of engagement is not necessary all the time - people will ebb and flow

• eBay partners with their customers to co-moderate their forums
• Apple has a team of 8+ moderators, for a time this went down to one - just Mark and this impacted the number of people participating in Apple's forums. Spam became a big issue when moderation resources went down
• Rachael mentioned that having their members moderate was good but interesting because they acted more like members than employees - this helped eliminate some of the internal jargon that eBay employees used
• Rachael and Mark both said that they originally used avatars/personas but have evolved to insisting on people using their real names. They said that it's important to have authenticity in their forums
  
• Another CRUCIAL piece to getting customers/members to "play nice" is offline events.  Customer events big (like eBay Live) and small. It adds trust among one another and with eBay. Very often, they can take detractors and turn them into evangelists!
• One of the audience members asked how one can rationalize for internal detractors, facilitating conversations with customers that hate you or want to boycott you. - Rachael said that it's tricky to navigate but it's critical for companies to show that they are listening. One of the biggest issues is the fact that you have to remember that you're setting a precedent.
• Mark reports into the KM area (up through support) within Apple
• Rachael said one of the other issues that they run into is having their most avid community members develop a sense of entitlement
  

• Moderating diversity
• Age
• Culture
• New/old
• Re-engaging the dead?
• How to foster diversity?
• Volunteer moderators
• Managing
• Internal/external (public statement)
• Training
• "Cutting Your Losses"/Lack of Consensus
• Split opinions
• Managing fallout
• High volume/low quality
• Proper Education
• Users violating copyright
• When contributors leave
• Internationalization/Localization
• Volume Immigration

• Internationalization/Localization
• Cultural differences are difficult to deal with e.g. Germans don't blog
• One of the biggest issues dealing with local laws and content storage
• UI/ergonomic issues can be tricky
  
• Best practice - don't force people down a path i.e. make them participate in a local group if they don't want to
• VMware actually has had a lot of success in forcing international groups post in English to facilitate greater conversations
• Diversity
• It's tricky to get people from other areas of the world to post - sometimes it's a matter of overcoming the embarrassment of getting over the first post
• One solution is to create an "international" group - people are more willing to be more tolerant/forgiving
  
• FB is allowing its "crowd" to vote on best translations - seems to be working - consensus was uniform and incredibly fast!
• Lack of Consensus
• Accept the fact that certain people are going to go
• Get back to what the original purpose/value of the community is
• Sometimes "pruning" can help bring more growth and better quality
  

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