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From HBR: Six Ways to Find Value in Twitter's Noise

via hbr.org

A nice short article that actually shares some good advice on listening to social media. The author puts forward the following six guidelines to help you avoid making assumptions about the trends you see the data:

  1. Learn about the competitive landscape;
  2. Look for unexpected themes;
  3. Dip deeper into the stream;
  4. Look for user experiences;
  5. Learn why negative words are coming up; and
  6. Learn about conversation dominators.

These guidelines are mostly applicable across all kinds of social media and not just Twitter.

Of course when it comes to listening to social media, it helps if you target something specific like the iPad launch, which attracted over 500,000 tweets. :-)

Don't forget to design a community management model for your social innovation

As I'm sitting here at the Community Managers' Roundtable, I'm also thinking about Social Innovation Camp coming up this weekend (and kicking off tonight).

Often when we think about this idea of social innovation enabled with Web 2.0 technology, the ideas we come up with relate to some simply Website to meet some global or broad need to collaborate, connect or simply share information. The benefit of course is that simple Web 2.0 technologies can have massive scalability (although the Twitter experience shows that if you are the top of the long tail, good architecture still counts). From small things, big things can indeed grow.

But I'm reminded again today that it is far too easy to get caught up with the lure and magic of the social technologies themselves to create a positive social outcome. But community management is something that needs to be considered in the design of that social innovation. There are a number of areas that come to mind:

  • Marketing - how will community management help you to build and maintain your user base?
  • Supporting Users - not everyone is Web savvy, so how will your help them to get the benefits of your social innovation?
  • Continuous Improvement - when you want to improve how your site works, who are you going to ask for input?
  • Risk Management - are you proactively nurturing a community, to create a positive and trust-based environment? And when issues come up, who and how will you manage them?
  • Infrastructure - what about the community of geeks who maintain your site?
  • Meta-Community Management - that is, managing other community managers (who might be volunteers) that support your site.

There are probably more issues we could list, but hopefully you get the idea that community management has an important role to play in a successful social innovation.

So if you've got a great Social Innovation Camp idea, have you thought about your community management model and how it will support the (not for profit) business model for your site or tool?

Community Management and Government 2.0

I'm attending the Australian Community Managers' 3rd Roundtable meeting today, in Canberra.

This morning had a government focus, starting with Craig Thomler who spoke about his experiences of managing communities for the Department of Health & Ageing and then facilitated a discussion covering issues such as the use of advertising, viral and organic communities, moderation and risk management.

I then provided an overview of the community management aspects of the Project 8 Online Engagement Guidelines. As I explained this morning, community management - as a function and as a role - is central to the approach we outlined in the guidelines. So far when I've been speaking about the guidelines, I've really provided just an overview of the whole package of materials and the online engagement framework. This time I had a chance to talk about the chapters 4 and 5 from the Online Engagement Guidelines that cover:

  • Community Management How-To; and
  • Roles and Competencies (and Policies).

I then put some of this theory into context by looking at the Gov 2.0 Taskforce itself and the ALRC pilot as case studies.

Considering all the people and experience in the room today, I was very happy with the feedback to the concepts I described:

This image licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND

This afternoon, @Warlach is talking about his new role at Earth Hour (which is coming up on the 27th March) and later we'll be hearing from Venessa Paech from Lonely Planet.