Building Successful Online Communities

Frances Coronel & Zhen Liu
Connective Media Technologies
Spring 2017
Cornell Tech

Transcript

1. Building Successful Online Communities Frances Coronel and Zhen Liu
2. 2 So what are online communities anyways? Definition
3. “ By online communities we mean any virtual space where people come together with others to converse, exchange information or other resources, learn, play, or just be with each other (Kraut 2012).
4. Challenges In order to become successful, online communities have to succeed in a number of different challenges. The first two we will be discussing are: » Starting a new community » Attracting and socializing new members 4
5. Levers Online communities can be designed to achieve the goals that their owners and members desire. These are levers of change which are features that are deliberately and strategically chosen, e.g. » Community structure » Selection, sorting, & highlighting » Feedback & rewards 5
6. Quora Challenge: Starting a new community Lever: Feedback and rewards Quora is a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users.
7. Quora This platform seems to have achieved where its competitors have failed by successfully drawing the participation of both a rapidly growing user population and specific domain experts that generate invaluable content in response to questions. Wang, Gang, et al. "Wisdom in the social crowd: an analysis of quora." Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web. ACM, 2013.
8. Goodreads Challenge: Attracting and socializing new members Lever: Content, tasks, & activities Goodreads is a "social cataloging" website that allows individuals to freely search Goodreads' extensive user-populated database of books, annotations, and reviews.
9. Goodreads Challenge: Attracting and socializing new members Lever: Content, tasks, & activities Users can signup and register books to generate reading lists. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys/polls, blogs, and discussions.
10. Linkedin Challenge: Encouraging commitment Lever: Selection, access controlling Linkedin, the online networking tool, encourage the commitment of their members by offering valuable content. Not only through selection and sorting useful information, but also by access controls.
11. Power of being the best 11 Research from Putnam Investment, Oct 2013
12. Power of being the best 12
13. “ Lurkers are reported to make up over 90% of several online groups Lurker demographics: Counting the silent Nonnecke, Blair, and Jenny Preece (CHI2000)
14. Google Maps Challenge: Encouraging contribution Lever: Feedback and rewards Google Maps has a sub-community which uses level and points to provide feedback and reward contributors. Also, they have offline events and activities to extend the encouragement.
15. Rewards Combining online or virtual rewards with rewards services which have monetary value is a way Google using to encourage contribution. 15
16. Reddit Challenge: Regulating behavior Lever: Roles, rules, policies Most large online discussion groups, and especially those that deal with controversial topics, attract trolls as well as commercial spammers. But does regulating behavior always imply good behavior?
17. Rules New York Times have a group of 40+ people for monitoring the comments on their website all the time. 17
18. 18 Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: How I Work a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community —Wikipedia
19. Summary What are the 5 major challenges an online community faces? 19 In order to become successful, online communities have to succeed in a number of different challenges. » Starting a new community » Attracting and socializing new members » Encouraging commitment » Encouraging contribution » Regulating behavior
20. Summary What are the 8 categories of levers an online community can utilize? 20 Levers are features that are deliberately and strategically chosen. » Community structure » Content, tasks, & activities » Selection, sorting, highlighting » External communication » Feedback and rewards » Roles, rules, policies, and procedures » Access controls » Presentation & framing
21. Discussion Time! “The stratospheric rise of emoji is essentially fulfilling the functions of nonverbal cues in spoken communication.”
22. Discussion Time! What communities online do you use daily? What part of these communities is attracting you the most?
23. Discussion Time! One of the design challenges we discussed was “encouraging contribution” - how would you say any online community you’re a part of addresses this challenge?
25. Discussion Time! One of the levers discussed was “feedback and rewards”. Besides those already discussed, can you think of any other online communities that use this lever?
26. References » Presentation template by SlidesCarnival » Kraut, Robert E., Paul Resnick. Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design. MIT Press, 2012. Chapter 1. » Research from Putnam Investment, Oct 2013 » Lurker demographics: Counting the silent, Nonnecke, Blair, and Jenny Preece (CHI2000) » Wang, Gang, et al. "Wisdom in the social crowd: an analysis of quora." Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web. ACM, 2013. 26