Welcome to the fourth issue of Social Signal's e-newsletter, Mixed Signals. We think you'll find it a useful round-up of news, ideas and upcoming events.

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When online communities attack!

Keeping your site rage-free

A horrific campaign of attacks on a much-loved blogger (click here for the background) has reignited a long-running debate over civil online behaviour. One leading voice in the social web has gone so far as to call for a blogger code of conduct.

From flame wars to hate speech to death threats, online communities have always had the potential to turn ugly. And once they do, a vicious circle can form; gentler users leave for sunnier destinations, and without their calming presence, conflicts escalate more quickly.

But this doesn't have to happen to your community. Here are a few simple steps you can take to stay on the right side of the line separating healthy conversation from verbal abuse.

• Your initial users will set the tone for those who follow. When you're setting up your community, open it at first to a limited number of participants. Choose people whose conversational skills you admire – people with a proven ability to agree to disagree, and (even more important) to listen.
• Set clear boundaries from the start. Make it clear when users join that this is a space that's going to be free of personal attacks and verbal violence. And phrase it positively: for the vast majority of your users, this is going to be a big plus.
• Give users a way to report objectionable content (such as a "flag this as offensive" button). Respond quickly if they do.
• Consider adding a "preview" step before a user confirms they want to submit a comment or post. Even a few seconds of reflection can be enough time for someone to reconsider a hasty, angry rejoinder.
• If a conversation seems to be spiralling out of control, don't be afraid to intervene. Remind the participants that disagreeing with ideas is fine, but attacking individuals isn't. If the discussion is getting too heated, and especially if it reaches the stage where new arguments aren't being advanced any more, suggest that they move on to another topic.
• Watch out for mobs ganging up on new users who ask "dumb" questions, or who reopen issues that old-timers think were settled long ago. You don't need to be heavy-handed; just treating the newcomer's post with respect can shift the tone of the discussion.
• Set clear rules and enforce them consistently, regardless of how you feel about the issues at play. Let your community know what to expect when a user steps outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour – whether it's a warning, suspension or (in extreme cases, such as the repeat offenders who deliberately try to provoke conflict, known as "trolls") outright banning.
• Be vigilant, but don't let paranoia stifle passion. If you've set a positive tone from the beginning (and if your community isn't focussed on party politics, Macs versus Windows or other religious conflicts), genuine mouse rage should be very rare.

In other words, participation – the heart of any online community – is also its immune system. Encourage that positive participation, and your community will be resilient enough to fend off the flames.

Reflected-glory marketing: building brand with Web 2.0

Web marketing 1.0 taught companies and organizations one simple principle: brand big. Make your brand visible and consistent by spreading your logo and brand message across your site (ideally with a few demonstrations of your web team’s Flash prowess) and throughout the Internet (through the awesome power of banner ads).

That approach worked great – or at least ok – in the era of content push. But while a great Web 1.0 site was as good as the marketing and web team behind it, a good Web 2.0 site is only as good as the people who contribute to it. And that makes all the difference.

You can have the best web developers in the city and the smartest marketers in the country, but if your customers don’t want to play – if they don’t want to put their words, profiles, voices, photos or videos on your site – you’re going to have a hard time creating a Web 2.0 community.

The trick is creating a site where people want to play. For a few lucky brands – like media companies, Nike or Apple – customers care enough about the product or brand that they’re happy to come and talk about your products. For everybody else, the best way to tap the power of Web 2.0 is to create an online community that has intrinsic value, and let the activities of that community reflect positively on the parent company's brand.

We call this approach “reflected glory marketing.” A site creates reflected glory for its parent brand when it convenes a conversation about something that customers care passionately about, and nurtures the conversation first and the brand second.

You can see RGM at work in:

...Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. Unilever created the campaign because it recognized that women wanted to challenge media images of beauty, and the conversation that ensued has been gold for the Dove brand.

...ChangeEverything.ca, the site we created for Canada’s largest credit union, Vancity. By giving people a place to write publicly about changes they wanted to make in their own lives, their communities, or the world, Vancity gave birth to a lively community that has earned the company a flood of positive media coverage, all of it aligned with their brand.

If your company wants to create an online community, reflected glory marketing may be the best way to ensure that your community finds its audience – by creating a community that actively engages your customers, and trusting that community to reflect well on your brand.

When you create an online community you are becoming a web application provider: in a sense, you’re in the same business as YouTube, Flickr or Facebook. Just like those companies, you’re offering your customers a chance to find great content or meet new people. Just like those companies, you’re trying to get your customers to create their own content or participate actively on your site. And just like those companies, you need to offer customers a compelling reason to engage.

That compelling reason is your site’s core concept: the problem you’re offering to solve, the specific conversation you’re convening, or the kinds of people customers can meet on your site. Any great RGM community rests on a great concept: something that defines the bounds of the community and makes it different from – and in some way, more valuable than -- the YouTubes or Facebooks of the world.

The great challenge in creating an RGM community is identifying the killer concept that will capture your customers’ imagination and make them genuinely excited about participating in a conversation that’s associated with your brand.

Here are five questions that can help you capture the benefits of reflected glory marketing:

• Do your customers care passionately about your brand? If your customers pay for the privilege of wearing your logo, or create independent fan sites to talk about your products, you don’t need RGM. Your customers will be happy (thrilled!) to participate in a brand-centric conversation, so give them that opportunity instead.
• What do your customers (or potential customers) have in common? Are your customers mostly drawn from a single demographic? A single region or town? Do they share a common set of values or a particular problem that brings them to your (virtual) door? That commonality defines the space in which you can create your online community.
• What do your customers love to talk about? Your community needs to generate significant enthusiasm – and active contribution – if it’s going to thrive. So focus on a topic or question that your customers are already talking about. If you don’t know what they’re talking about, use a blog search tool like Technorati to find people who have written about your brand (or about your general type of product or service) and then browse through their blogs to identify the topics they care (and write) about most.
• Which of your customers’ values and interests resonate with your brand or marketing message? Maybe most of your customers are young men, and maybe young men love talking about action movies. Sure, you could create a great site for uploading film clips and talking about different movies – but if your product is deodorant, there’s not a lot of resonance between the site concept and your brand. Unless…your site focuses on really stinky action movies. Now you’re moving in the right direction.
• What can you offer your customers: content, relationships, or a tool? People will discover and return to your site if it offers tangible value. The most frequent kind of value you can offer is content that either educates or entertains. An alternate approach is to give customers a tool that they need on a daily or weekly basis, like a way of organizing online photos or storing their favourite web sites on a particular topic. A third option is to foster relationships that will draw people back to the site – but you still need either great content or useful tools to get them there in the first place.

Once you’ve identified the niche that will bring your customers together in a passionate, consistently growing conversation, you’re ready to start building your site. Here are three rules to bear in mind:

• Brand as lightly as possible. People will be much more likely to participate in a community that feels like an end in itself – or a way of accomplishing something that is personally or socially valuable – than one that feels like one big ad. You definitely want a visible logo, but try to keep it relatively unobtrusive, and skip the massive banner ads promoting your latest product or intiative.
• Separate church and state. Your RGM site is where your customers connect, create and collaborate, while your organization’s primary web site is where your customers find out about (and perhaps buy) your products and services. Since nobody likes to share their feelings in the middle of a shopping mall, you’ll want to keep these sites separate. Don’t push products on your RGM site (though it’s fine to have a link to your main site or a products page) and make it clear that user profiles created on your RGM site will not be shared with your marketing department.
• Explain your motives. Your site needs an “about” page that explains why you’re sponsoring this site. Make it clear you share your customers’ interest in the topic or conversation that is the site’s focus. Be honest about your hope that the site will reflect well on your brand and help you connect with customers. And be clear that you plan to keep sales and marketing efforts in one corner of the site, or off the site altogether.

Every business and organization dreams about having customers and supporters who care passionately about their brand. Reflected glory marketing helps to generate that passion: you’re the custodian of a community that has entered your customers’ lives and become home to their social relationships, heartfelt beliefs or creative enthusiasms.

The value of that passion isn’t just realized in clickthroughs or online purchases. It’s realized in every good word those customers say about you – not just on your own site, but across the blogging world and in their real-world communities.

Focus on Facebook: Two takes on the social network of the moment

 

Falling for Facebook

by Alexandra Samuel

I'm besotted with Facebook. I can see it becoming the primary way that I – and many other people – interact online. So if you aren't on Facebook already, join now. Now.

Still here? Don't tell me, you need actual reasons to join. Fine, here goes:

• It's huge, and it's growing. While Facebook started as a network for college students, it opened up to anyone who wanted to join in September 2006, and grew more than 75% – to almost 25 million users – by February. I haven't found numbers more recent than that, but I can say that between 1-3 people in my own personal address book (1500 email addresses) are joining every day.
• Your friends are already there. If you import/connect to your address book when you sign up , you'll discover all the folks you know who are already on Facebook. This is a great way to keep in touch with them. You can even find out who in your universe is already on Facebook, before you sign up yourself.
• It mixes business with pleasure. Unlike LinkedIn , which feels like some sort of massive rsum swap, Facebook brings a personal side to its user interactions. More than half of my Facebook friends are colleagues or professional acquaintances, and now I'm finding out about their personal passions as well as their professional pursuits.
• It's one-stop shopping. Facebook offers blogging, photo sharing, messaging, web-to-mobile communications, social networking, and groups.
• It's a window on your world. Once you've added your contacts to your list of Facebook friends, your Facebook home page will be the best place on the web for you to find out what's going on with the folks you know. My favourite part of Facebook -- the thing that makes it truly addictive -- is checking in to see what's going on with all my friends and groups. I can see my friends' latest status reports, their latest new friends and groups, their notes, their photos....all in one place. The best way to get how cool this is is to take a look, but I don't think I can really share a screenshot because that would mean sharing details on my friends' activities. And that underlines what is so great about the Facebook feed: it feels far more personal than what you'd normally see on the wide open web.
• It's pretty. God knows, I've fallen in love with my share of social media tools, but most of them have required me to look past a barebones or even downright ugly interface in order to appreciate the inner beauty of content sharing, social networking, or whatever. In contrast, Facebook has a very polished interface.
• It can help you connect with your community. Facebook has now got an API -- application programming interface -- that lets people extend Facebook with all sorts of little applications and enhancements. (Check out some of the options so far .) And that API is going to see Facebook integrated into more and more 3rd party sites. If you find it easier to connect with your members, supporters, customers or friends on Facebook than to lure them into registering on your own site (and for most organizations, it will be MUCH easier to connect via Facebook) you need to start thinking now about how you can integrate Facebook's community and functionality into your own site.

I'll have more to say about Facebook -- and especially about the options for integrating Facebook with external web communities -- in the coming weeks. But if you want to understand why this matters, you need to join Facebook now. And once you do, be sure to add me as a friend!

Instant mobilization

by Rob Cottingham

In the past few months, Facebook has suddenly jumped into the mainstream. Already the place to be networking for high school, college and university students, Facebook is suddenly hot with parents, professionals and the public at large.

One reason why: the tools are almost supernaturally easy to use. Adding friends, updating your profile, changing your status message – you can do them all in seconds thanks to a clean, simple interface that makes judicious use of now-famous AJAX technology.

And one of the easiest things of all to do is to create and join groups. There are thousands of them on Facebook. And while most are dedicated to things like pop culture and lifestyle, a growing number have a social change focus.

Here's a little story: a while ago, in preparation for the launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability web site, I created a Facebook group called "Turn It Off! British Columbia". It's named after a 30 Days initiative that aims to get as many British Columbians as possible to turn off their lights and conserve as much energy as they can on May 16th.

It took me less than a minute to create the group, fill in a profile and upload a logo. Another minute, and I'd sent an invitation to eight friends, asking them to join.

Five days later, there were 60 members.

Bear in mind: there was no promotion, no supporting web site (it hadn't launched yet), and not even a request in my invitation that my friends pass the news on.

This is a testament to two things: the compelling nature of the idea, and the phenomenal boost that ease-of-use can lend to collaboration. If you're hoping to bring people together online, you could do far worse than check out Facebook.

ChangeEverything.ca honoured by the Webby Awards

Vancity's first social web foray makes an international splash

Nominations for the Webby Awards came out this month... and danged if ChangeEverything.ca isn't one of the Official Honorees.

The Webbys, dubbed the "Oscars of the Internet" by the New York Times, is pretty much the high-water mark for

Our client, Vancity, is listed alongside names like AOL and Weber Shandwick. As the Webbys' site says, "Of the more than 8,000 entries submitted to the 11th Annual Webby Awards, fewer than 15% were distinguished as an Official Honoree. This honor signifies an outstanding caliber of work."

We're walking on air here, of course, and we're pretty proud of what we've achieved. But more credit goes to Vancity, their online visionary William Azaroff, and most importantly the site's moderator Kate Dugas.

And more than to any of us, the real credit ought to go to everyone who's participating in ChangeEverything.ca, from the folks who just leave an occasional comment or vote in one of Kate's polls to the regulars whose contributions make the site such a vibrant, inspiring community.

Our hottest blog posts

In case you missed them, here are some of the hottest posts from the past several weeks on the Social Signal blog:

Risk and social media: "The real risk doesn't lie in having a project that doesn't succeed, or doesn't succeed in quite the way you'd hoped. The real risk is being taken by organizations that aren't investing in learning those conversational skills – because increasingly, the public is coming to expect them. And if a company, organization or agency isn't listening, they'll turn to one that does."

Setting the stage for participation: "Online communities succeed only if users participate. The number of opportunities to participate online is exploding (share your photos! rate your teachers! comment on this video!), but time is the new land: nobody's making any more of it. Increasingly, a user who decides to participate on your site is making a conscious decision not to participate on another one."

Does your organization have a Wikipedia entry? Start monitoring it now: "If your organization is listed in Wikipedia, the community-edited online encyclopedia, congratulations. Quite apart from the virtues of collaborative editing, Wikipedia entries often rank at or near the top of Google search results. Now break open your RSS aggregator. You're going to want to add a new subscription immediately... because nearly anybody could be editing your entry."

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