8. By the numbers
• Many members
• Low overall participation
• SIGs are most active and heavily populated
• Well suited for committees and task forces
9. Probable Causes
• People prefer e-mail
• Yet another place to go online for interaction
• Incomplete feature set for user needs
• Lack or conflict of interest
10.
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13. Make MySTC THE hub for info
• All community online activity in one place
• Body of Knowledge content pool
• STC-wide melting pot
• Main communications resource
Hi there. I’m Bill, and I’m going to talk briefly about how MySTC is being used today and share some ideas on how to improve it going forward.
At the 2011 STC Summit I talked about building online communities. I shared as much advice as possible within the 5 minute time frame, drawing from my 15+ years of experience in managing online communities.
At the end of that presentation, I introduced MySTC to the audience. It had been launched just prior to the start of the conference.
It’s been about a year, so I thought I’d take a look and see how MySTC was being used.
Most groups in MySTC were pre-populated based on membership affiliations. As you can see, SIGs have the largest groups on MySTC.
The more active groups seem to be a mix of SIGs, chapters, and task forces/committees.
Taking a per capita view, the results are interesting. In general, the 10 most active groups have at most 1 post per member to 1 post per 6 members.
We can deduce from these numbers that though there are many members in MySTC, the number of active members is low, and that focused groups are far more active than other community-based groups.
So why might this be? There are a few ideas that come to mind, though this is mere conjecture.
One group is trying an interesting approach by tying group chat in with conference calls. Though this might feel no different from other webinar approaches, this drives traffic to the group.
Now let’s take a look at future considerations for MySTC.
MySTC needs to be mobile friendly. Given it’s built on JomSocial, this should be a relatively easy implementation. The screen shot above is a view from my iPhone. While it renders fine, keep in mind that the entire screen is about the size of a playing card.
STC should continue to make MySTC the hub of all society communication.
It should be very easy to share things from MySTC posts with the world, share internet content within MySTC, and share content from one group or user to another (much like Facebook sharing).
Hook into existing Social Media channels and publish to many, as appropriate.
Easily consume other web media for focused discussion and reference.
A robust collaboration area would be incredibly useful in aiding groups in their endeavors.
There’s so much possibility!
But… We need to use it. We have a green light; it’s live and ready to be used.
As we useMySTC, we should be logging any ideas and issues in GetSatisfaction. Click the Feedback tab at the left of any STC or MySTC page to compose your entry. Also promote others’ ideas, questions, problems or praise to help prioritize the items.