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Music Artists Routinely Give Away Their Most Valuable Resource and Don’t Even Realize It

Posted by Patrick on December 8th, 2014 in Community Cultivation, Managing the Community

Disruptive MultimediaI’ve been thinking a lot about music artists and community recently, thanks to Ryan Leslie and Nathan McCartney of Disruptive Multimedia. They are on a mission to convince music artists of the value of connecting directly with fans. When I listen to them, I really believe they are trying to get artists to understand the value of actively managing your community.

The sad fact is that most music artists are all too happy to hand their community over to a third party and lose the direct connection. When you send a fan to iTunes to buy an album, iTunes keeps 30% of the revenue – and 100% of the relationship. The revenue cut isn’t a big deal, but the relationship is everything.

And yet that is what most artists do when they try to sell music. They send people to iTunes. They transfer the relationship to Apple, who knows everything about the buyer. Meanwhile, the artist knows nothing. Too many artists are accepting of this arrangement. Data is power, and Apple holds the power. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

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Online Community MetaFilter Charges $5 for New Accounts

Posted by Patrick on October 16th, 2014 in Community Cultivation

MetaFilterThe other day I wrote about qualifying new members and the idea of making it harder for people to register on your community. A highly visible example of this is MetaFilter, a 15 year old, well known online community that has charged a one-time $5 membership fee for ten years. They also make you wait one week before you can create a new post. You can respond to posts by others, but not start your own.

A lot of community managers would be scared to even attempt such a thing. Clearly, it has worked for MetaFilter, or they wouldn’t have done it for so long.

I mentioned this in my initial post, but it bears repeating: a measure like this is meant to mitigate the challenges of success. If no one wants to join your community for free, then no one is going to want to join it for $5.

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Seeding an Online Community = People, Not Content

Posted by Patrick on October 2nd, 2014 in Community Cultivation

When people talk about seeding an online community, they often talk about content. As in, “if we post X pieces of content, then people will reply to that content.” One person, or a few people, post a bunch of content then wonder why no one replies.

This is backwards.

Seeding isn’t about content. You aren’t seeding content to encourage people to engage and stick around. You’re seeding people (sounds kind of like a horror movie).

Optimal seeding is when you bring a good selection of quality people on board. When a potential member visits your community for the first time, you want them to see quality interaction between members who represent what your community can be. Not simply “content,” but people.

You can have all of the content you want, but if you don’t have the people, all you’re left with is articles waiting for the first comment.

Changing Your Community Software Won’t Save You

Posted by Patrick on July 14th, 2014 in Community Cultivation

There are organizations that host online communities that have been or are now successful that have also been able to get away with not making a full time paid employee responsible for the community. Managing, growing and moderating the community just falls to whatever time other paid people can make available, and to volunteers.

I don’t think anything is wrong with that, necessarily. But what I notice is that when things get stale or activity declines, what happens is that some of these organizations throw a software update at the community. A redesign, new software, a substantial upgrade in feature set – something along those lines.

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Online Community Onboarding

Posted by Patrick on June 30th, 2014 in Community Cultivation

OnboardingI recently asked what I could help you with. Brent Wilson of Whipp Media and Josh Barraza of The Exotic Pet Network both suggested that I discuss community member onboarding. Thank you for the response, Brent and Josh.

Onboarding has typically been used to describe the process of helping new employees at a company to pick up the skills and information they need to become solid contributors to an organization. Even though members aren’t your employees – far from it – the Wikipedia page for onboarding is a really interesting place to start.

Take a look at the onboarding model adapted from Talya Bauer and Berrin Erdogan. Even though it is meant for new employees, one can see how it could be readily applicable to an online community. Drawing from that model and the Wikipedia page, let’s walk through the conclusions that researchers have come to and how they apply to online communities.

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How to Build a Successful YouTube Show

Posted by Patrick on June 19th, 2014 in Community Cultivation

YouTubeFrom September 22, 2012 through August 19, 2013, I hosted Soda Tasting, an online show dedicated to soda reviews and appreciation. In less than a year, I was able to develop a show that was receiving 500 views a day and had more than 1,000 subscribers, trending upward.

I left a show that was growing because I decided to focus my time elsewhere and to hit some new fitness goals. Since I stopped producing the show, it has only continued to grow. I’m kind of surprised by that, but it speaks to the quality of the content and the way I positioned it. One can only imagine where I’d be if I had continued to publish new, quality content.

People complain that there is too much competition on YouTube. That it’s too late. That everyone popular simply got in early. Those are made up obstacles and excuses that don’t give enough credit to the people who are popular on YouTube and the work they have put in.

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Inactive Account Emails Are Annoying and a Wasted Opportunity

Posted by Patrick on June 12th, 2014 in Community Cultivation

On October 15, I received an email from Empire Avenue, letting me know that my account was in danger of being marked inactive. “You are about to lose status, leaderboards and more!” It said my account had not been active for 27 days and, in order to keep my account, I had to login.

I received the same email on November 23, February 3, March 23 and May 13 and June 10. I may have deleted some in between, I don’t remember.

Empire Avenue was once a buzzed about social site and has settled into being a community of people who enjoy the service and the idea of a stock market for online personalities. Which is fine. I’m not active on it. I log into it once in awhile and spend the accumulated currency.

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Carefully Choose the Companies Who Come Between You and Your Community

Posted by Patrick on June 2nd, 2014 in Community Cultivation, Developing Your Community

When there are new tools that we can use to engage with our community, we tend to focus on the great features those tools have, how easy they are for people to use, the cost of them and the value they offer.

One thing that gets lost, but that should always be at the front of our minds, is how the tool separates us from our community. If we wish to stop using the tool, do we have access to the community data? Or can the tool effectively hold us hostage?

If they can hold us hostage, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it, but you just have to be very aware of what you are doing. For example, Facebook and Twitter would fall into that camp of tools. You are engaging with people, but you can’t take your database of Facebook Page likes and do anything off of Facebook with it.

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Comic Book Resources to Delete Forum with 12.9 Million Posts; Launches New Community with Stricter Moderation

Comic Book ResourcesComic Book Resources (CBR) is a large, long-running and influential comic book website, featuring news, reviews, blogs and an active community. Created by Jonah Weiland and launched in 1996, the site’s media kit reports that they receive more than 24 million pageviews per month from over 6 million unique visitors.

On Wednesday, Weiland announced that CBR’s current forums would be closing and would remain online for 14 days, in order to allow members to retrieve old content they wanted to save. The old forums have 12.9 million posts, with public discussions going all the way back to 2006. In their place, a new community was launched. None of the old content, nor membership information, was preserved. I learned of this story through Mark Wilkin.

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Are Online Community Members Who Introduce Themselves More Likely to Become Active Contributors?

Posted by Patrick on April 21st, 2014 in Community Cultivation, Research
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Creative Commons License photo credit: mauwf

When I was on #CMGRHangout a little over a week ago, I said I would be interested to know if members who post an introduction in our introductions forum were more likely to become active contributors.

My friend Chrispian Burks wrote some database queries for me that allowed me to look at the KarateForums.com database. KarateForums.com is a mature community with a lot of data to play with, so it makes a great example for communities like it – focused, niche interest communities.

You can check out the data below. I decided to look at members with a certain post count or higher and then see what percentage of them posted a thread in the introductions forum. The data isn’t perfect, but it is pretty close.

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