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GDC2017: Data-Driven Community Management by Rich Millington

Community Summit

Data-Driven Community Management

  • Data-driven CM bores people

  • So let's talk about fire

    • Post-fire, they try to figure out why it happened
      • Can they improve anything?
      • Was it a crime?
      • If something can be improved, is that actually done?
    • Codified by Law Enforcement Assistance Administration
      • How to spot arson
      • Started seeing arson everywhere
    • Experimented: actually arson?
      • "Where does the fire begin?"
      • If fire begins where it normally doesn't, it's probably arson
      • But < 6% of the investigator could locate where the fire began
    • So much of what happens in fire investigation was unscientific
    • Started a forensic approach, very scientific, # of arsons reported dropped
  • How much of CM are things that work & how much is cargo culting?

  • We have not even begin to figure out the potential of our data

    • If you collect the data, does it affect what you do in your community?
    • Find CMs are great at measuring things but not at determining insights & taking action based on it
    • We could be doing so much more here
    • We collect as much data as possible, but don't use it to change what we're doing
  • Measurement isn't as important as how we're going to take the insights we have & improve the outcomes for our companies & communities

  • Good at

    • Seeing what's popular & doing more of that for their community
  • Most community engagement is more about the people using the game than the game itself

  • De-lurking the lurkers

    • How do get them participating
    • Study from IBM: "lurker to leader"
    • Used to believe this wasn't possible
    • Now finding there are systematic ways to do this
    • Avoid novelty ideas
      • "Lurker week"
      • Small bump in participation & no long-term effects
    • Interviewed lurkers
      • Have nothing to offer
      • Have no experience
      • Have no time
      • Don't want friends/boss/family to see it
    • Started making asking questions the most valuable thing people can do in a community
      • Started looking for questions rather than answers
      • Lurkers started participating a lot more, and for the long term
      • STRESS THE VALUE OF QUESTIONS & make it safe for people to ask them
  • How to get newcomers to participate actively

    • Lots of visitors & bouncers (1 in 1000 will become active)
    • How to fix this
      • Don't just drop people in: Laser-focused in the action
        • Don't just leave it up to them or to chance
        • Provide direction/funnel
        • Cohort/analysis tool in Google Analytics
      • Don't just optimise for the first week of participation
        • Easy to get them to participate once; hard to make them participate in the long term
        • Long-term engagement involves psychology
        • Social-identity theory
          • The more we feel a group is successful, the more we participate
          • Provide history, top members of the community, what it takes to participate
          • Context helps people feel engaged & stick around
        • Add some friction to the entry process
          • ask people what they're interested in & provide them interesting content at the very start
      • Automation rules
        • After you join, you get a message from the community
        • After 1 day, 1 week, 1 participation, etc
        • Use this to help bolster social identity
      • In technical communities, encourage newcomers to make their requests as possible
        • Increases newcomer participation due to increased responses to requests
        • Even one response increases chance of participation again to 45% from 16%
      • They find that top 20 discussions in a community consistently end up with 50% of the page views
        • SEO to make discussions easier to find
        • Merge the good discussions into one discussion (if relevant to each other)
        • Can promote them elsewhere (Quora, etc)
      • Spend as much time improving your best discussions as creating new ones
        • Very good way to get people engaged & actively participating
    • Big announcements…often fall flat
      • Hard to get people to engage with them
      • Sticky posts are where announcements go to die & emails don't get read
      • How do you get people to open & read any type of message?
      • People don't progress through communities like we think they do
        • For instance, they often don't start on the home page
      • Figure out where people enter, then how to make the most of those entry points to promote announcements
        • Side-bars on blogs, etc.
        • Go to where the audience actually is, don't assume where they'll be
    • Sense of community
      • Building this
      • People who believe & identify as a member of the community
      • We assume that this just happens & is emergent
      • Yes, it's important that it happens, but we can help it along
      • It can happen, but it often leads to participation inequality
        • Core group & others don't feel they can break in
      • Virtual Sense of Community survey (can find this on the net)
        • Will tell you what you need to do to improve the sense of community
      • Composition of sense of community
        • Membership: people can identify each other
          • Rituals w/in the group
          • Anything which makes people feel a connection with each other
        • Unique shared experiences
          • Stronger sense of community from sharing these
        • Common symbol systems
          • Forum system should reflect how the community speaks & engages
          • Don't force a structure on them which doesn't reflect how they think of things
          • Use the same language as your audience
        • Increase the sense of influence
          • Those who participate are those who feel they can influence it
          • How can we increase this for everyone?
          • Give people an opportunity to show off (let them feel smart, clever, good)
          • Write about what people in the community are doing
        • Create a sense of success
          • How do you make the group feel successful?
          • Most communities don't have a clear common goal
            • Adding one bonds people more in the group
        • Having a shared emotional connection
          • Strong communities react the same ways to the same things
          • How can we encourage this?
          • Create opportunities for people to feel a specific way at a specific time
            • No practical use for sharing information, but bonds people into the group
            • So off-topic can be very good
        • Improve member satisfaction
          • Video gamers can get angrier than anyone he's ever seen
          • How do you make people feel more satisfied instead?
          • Looked at how to measure this
            • Responses from other community members are rated better than those from community managers
            • Turned out to be not that it was the community manager but that the community members were answer the questions quickly
            • Quick answers got a higher satisfaction rating
          • LIFO/FIFO in response methods
            • Generally found that LIFO got higher satisfaction rating
          • Response structure?
            • Direct answers get a higher rather than FAQ links
            • Even if the answer isn't as good as a FAQ or link to better answer
          • Wording?
            • Answers using validation, empathy, guidance get much higher satisfaction rating
            • Increase long term participation & happier community members
    • Are there questions which do better in the long term?
      • Yes. Questions beginning with "How" do much better in the long term
      • Take the time to develop these questions
  • What's the problem with increasing engagement?

    • It doesn't always equal more value
    • If you generate more engagement but it's not clear what the value is…then you'll get cut
    • Must connect engagement with value
    • FeverBee has a page "Classifying the Benefits of Community"
    • Very, very few communities are able to do this
    • Studying it is very difficult
    • Can figure out what metrics you need but must do it in a systematic way
      • Coursera course on introduction to probability & data
      • Outsource it to a data scientist
        • Explain the question, hand them a bunch of data, they can get you answers you wouldn't find
      • Hire someone else to do it
        • PhD grad students are great for this
      • Create a custom dashboard for the metrics & outcomes you specifically need for your community
  • Q&A

@richmillington

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