April 25, 2012 San Francisco Online Community Meetup presentation by Marc Siegel of Simraceway

1. Human-centered
Aspects of Community
Management
Marc Siegel
marc@simraceway.com
msiegel@gmail.com

2. My background
Teachers and students
Software developers
Casual game players

3. My current job
Race car simulation game
Winners of online races win nice
prizes, i.e. trip to California to drive real
race cars
I am currently hiring for
• Customer Service Reps ($14-16/hr)
• Associate Community Manager
(mid-$40s / year)

4. Humanize interactions
• People come for content but stay for relationships
• Address people by name or handle
• Sign notes with your name
• Provide robust profiles to help people relate:
• Allow individuals to share about themselves free-form
• Have system keep track of updates: posts, badges, etc
• Highlight fresh or good profiles

5. Communications
• Be open, honest and transparent
• If you don’t know or can’t share, simply say so
• Squirrely answers erode trust
• Don’t delete negative comments; instead
respond with the best spin possible
• Create feedback loops
• Let the members have lots of influence in
determining the community roadmap
• Always be grateful for constructive criticism

6. Make it easy for
newcomers
• Provide a “Visitor’s Center”
• Name is not important; could be
“Getting Started” or “About us”
• Include the following:
• Frequently Asked Questions
• A guided tour
• Membership requirements
• Help/Search
• Press releases
• Links to notable people

7. Volunteer leaders
• Promote certain members to be volunteer
leaders; choose them carefully
• Delineate their responsibilities
• Provide training if need be
• Provide perqs for participating:
• SWAG, early access to software, connections to key
people, private group for discussion
• Distinction online (icon with their screen name)
• Monitor their continuing participation

8. Roles within the
community
• Greeter – welcome newcomers
• Host – facilitate the core activities
• Content expert – provide compelling posts for other members
• Editor – evaluate content
• Cops – remove people/content that violate the community standards
• Teacher – teach members to become leaders
• Events Coordinator – plan and run events
• Support – answer questions about the system
• Manager – evaluate and support leaders
From “Community Building” by Amy Jo Kim

9. Stages of participation
• Visitors: people without a persistent identity in the community
Membership Ritual: letter, gift, event
• Novices: new members who need to learn the ropes and be introduced into the
community life
• Regulars: established members that are comfortably participating in community life
Leadership Ritual: selection, training, graduation
• Leaders: volunteers, contractors and staff that keep the community running
• Elders: long established regulars and leaders who share their knowledge, and pass
along the culture
From “Community Building” by Amy Jo Kim

10. Encouraging participation
• Seed discussion
• Don’t open empty forums
• People are reluctant to go first
• People need examples to follow
• Create some dummy questions/answers
• If you can find helpful cohorts, great
• Else create dummy accounts for just this
purpose
• Provide variety of use cases

11. Encouraging more
conversation
• Answer in open ended ways
• Even if you are providing a definitive answer, say
“has this worked for other people”
• Ask questions
• Don’t’ respond immediately; allow the community
to answer
• Exception: if bad info has already been posted,
respond quickly to avoid people chasing bad info

12. Designing products via
community
• Throughout the design/build cycle, get feedback
from customers
• The better your product reflects customer
desires, the more successful it will be
• Examples:
• Simple: Christmas theme at Mindjolt
• More elaborate: continual back and forth between
development manager and community at IBM

13. Analytics trumps
community input
Regardless of input, Shard 5 tests so much
better, so it will be used going forward

14. Bonus question: Twitter
• “LinkedIn is dead; the way to search for work
is by Twitter”
• Huh?