Presented February 16th, 2017 Frances Coronel & Zhen Liu Connective Media Technologies Spring 2017 Cornell Tech FVCproductions https://fvcproductions.com

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?

24. 24

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