Community Manager. It’s a role that has evolved into a must-have position for any company wanting to connect on a deeper level and communicate directly with their consumers. With today’s new media technologies, it’s the perfect way to find brand advocates, solve customer issues and ultimately, build meaningful relationships. There are many qualities and skills to be had by a Community Manager and I could easily list them out myself. Instead, what better way to find what makes a CM valuable than by asking my own community on Twitter.
In the social media world, we talk about building community and conversations all the time. Well, Matt Harding has definitely taken it to the next level and in 42 different countries:
This amazing video shows how simple creating a community can be. It just takes is a little effort and giving people something to talk about. In this case, it was Matt spanning the globe to spread the joy of dancing.
Be sure to visit Where the Hell is Matt? for other great videos.
With as many social networks that are popping up on almost a daily basis, how do these sites get us to stick around? We’re aware of the many benefits from the networks we frequent; APIs/apps, website traffic, conversations, networking - the list goes on. But how do newcomers grab a hold of a piece of the social networking pie?
For the up and coming site that has made the biggest splash as of late, Plurk seems to utilize Karma as one of their main features (and incentives). Users receive Karma for numerous actions taken on the site, which include adding friends, plurking consistently throughout the day and getting responses to plurks. On the other hand, you can also lose Karma due to spamming too many plurks, getting a friend request rejected and getting unfriended by a user. As the Plurk learning curve has slowly died down and the community has evolved, people are quickly learning the pros and cons of Karma.
With the specific guidelines above, it seems quite easy for users to ‘game’ the system to increase their Karma and get the incentives of smileys and high rankings. Where I see the major downfall is in the content. I see numerous plurks a day about people complaining that their Karma went down and that they need to bring it back up. There have also been several discussions on whether people Plurk just for Karma. I understand that the premise of Plurk is about having fun but Karma brings a sense of forced interaction and ultimately, a form of bribery that diminishes the value of its content.
I’m by no means bashing Plurk as I feel it is a very interesting network with many benefits but there’s too much of an emphasis on Karma. How far can they really take it? Offer more incentives? More user features? It’ll be interesting to see how they’ll continue to use Karma after the smileys. Regardless of what will be offered, it just gives users more incentive to figure out how to increase their Karma to reach those ‘goals’.
Darren Rowse of ProBlogger posted a question yesterday - Which Social Media Sites Would You Use if You Could Only Use 3? In a little more than a day, his post garnered 125 responses.
From his Plurk, I noticed several users wanting to see some data. Being the statistical geek that I am, I tallied up every single qualified vote (yes, I really did) so we can better gauge the social activities of Darren’s audience.
By The Numbers:
Now, for what you’ve all been waiting for; the top 3 social media sites voted on by the ProBlogger community:
The top 3 voted sites are Twitter, StumbleUpon and Facebook. From the comments that I read, the ProBlogger audience seems to put an emphasis on communication and networking uses for Twitter, staying connected with friends and family through Facebook and the amount of traffic being sent from StumbleUpon. The last point is interesting and could in fact have relevance to ProBlogger’s audience, showing that the value of website traffic is key when choosing which social media site to frequent.
The rage (and I mean RAGE) of the week has been the new microblogging site to hit town, Plurk. It’s a fun, ajax-filled, timelined conversational network that gives users the feeling of freedom with what they talk about and share with their friends; did I mention that they have weird creatures as their logo?
Some have deemed it a Twitter killer, while others feel it’s just too over the top. I’ve been actively utilizing it this past week and have admittedly become addicted. Addicted, yes. A convert, not just quite yet. I won’t get too in-depth with the inner workings of the site as ReadWriteWeb has posted a great review of the service, but I do have some thoughts on how Plurk could create a system overload for some.
Real-Time Updates
Plurk gives real-time updates on your profile page that shows new ‘plurks’ or responses from your friends list. A cool feature as you’re kept up-to-date on the conversations going on but has become overwhelming. This aspect of Plurk has almost forced me into rehab. It creates a constant urge to check, update, view all, mark all as read, etc.; it’s seriously like a drug. The feature makes using the site very time consuming. Although, it’s all contingent upon the number of friends that you have and how often they’re plurking (yes, I giggled when I first said it too), but it vastly shows the difference between Twitter and Plurk. Twitter can give you constant updates through Twhirl or other apps as well, but there was never a sense of urgency to check updates every single minute. Plurk creates this need to continually update all responses and plurks, which becomes very chaotic to those with larger networks. I’m by no means captain popular but even with over 80 friends, the time needed to truly stay up-to-date with my network’s conversations becomes too much.
If you’re not aware about Common Craft’s ‘In Plain English’ show, head over there right now! They’ve created an informational series that simply explains the many mediums of the web through fun and creative videos.
They’ve just released a new video, Social Media in Plain English:
Through the use of a simple story, their newest show explains how Social Media works through communities and the user-generated content each unique network provides. Reiterates that the voice of the people is what makes a community or product special, it’s just a matter of finding your niche; or ice cream shop.
I'm an online marketing professional with a focus on building community-centric strategies through social media. I'm passionate about my career as well as the people I work with. The views expressed here are of my own and not those of my employer. © Sonny Gill 2008. All Rights Reserved.
