Category Archives: Reputation

2013-Jul-29 · 20:26

The true meaning of points

Community reputation points are pointless if the community does not buy into their value. As a community manager, it is your job to discover the values that create that buy-in.

I’ve written at length now about how online reputation and rewards work to motivate contributions from your community. But before you rush to create a sophisticated system with bells, whistles, points, and badges, you need to make sure that they will be in tune with the values of your community. Why is that? Because if they aren’t, people won’t care about them, or worse, will take it as a sign that you are out of touch (which frankly, you would be).

A good online reputation and reward management system would reflect what matters to your community members, and merely* capture and quantify that value in the form of online reputation.

Let me give you an example scenario to illustrate the point.

Points are awarded every time a community member shares a forum post via social media. When rolled out to the community platform, Community 1 sees a spike in sharing activity and rise in SEO relevance. Community 2 does not see a measurable traffic increase, and the function is barely used; in addition an angry thread is started by a super-user about how instead of rolling out useless junk Company 2 should better fix existing bugs in the system.

So what went wrong with Community 2 and why was there such a backlash? We know that this can work, and we have seen examples of that in action. Then why is the manager of Community 2 being flamed for doing what is considered to be an industry best practice?

The (sometimes infuriating) answer to this question is that nothing is inherently wrong with this logic, until you put it in the context of your community. So let’s examine our two communities a little closer.

Community 1 is maintained by a software company which offers mobile productivity apps for smartphones. Their community forum is open for anyone to read, and only registered users can contribute. Discussions revolve around integrating the user’s existing services (such as calendars, email, exchange directory, etc.) with the apps as well as troubleshooting. By encouraging sharing of helpful Q&A threads, the community now is more visible on social media, reaching more users, as well as attracting new customers. This extra cross-linking also helps the community’s pages to be displayed higher on the search results page, allowing users with problems to find a solution sooner.

Community 2 is run by a home security company, which offers both software and hardware solutions. The forum is only accessible to verified customers, and closely moderated. Product support is strictly confidential, and forum discussions focus on best practices and special cases. Social sharing may lead to broken links and login prompts in the best case, and to confidentiality breach (if someone decided to quote part of the shared content) in the worst. Encouraging social sharing by points rewards will predictably not go over well, since this is not an activity that serves the values of the given community.

So in short: think before you reward. If you are unclear on what your community values, figure that out first. You are the one being paid the proverbial big bucks to help the community thrive, so do your homework, lest you look silly later on.

* “Merely” in this context doesn’t imply that it’s going to be simple or easy. It implies however that the points system is an add-on to the value system inherent in your community, and cannot function without it.

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2013-Jun-6 · 00:08

Rewards and Achievements

Participation is its own reward, but public recognition is better. Build a system of rewards and achievements that makes sense and provides real benefits to your community members.

As promised, I am back from the visionary ether of what rewards and achievements could (and should) be. Today, I am looking at very practical ways to expand (or start) your rewards program that you can implement right away.

It’s pretty awesome to be part of a community of like-minded individuals who share your enthusiasm for a given project or technology. A lot of people get a kick out of that. Over time, top contributors emerge, and some sort of a meritocratic order forms. However, if you are hoping for vigorous growth and high levels of engagement early on, figuring out a meaningful way to reward desired behaviours would be a good use of your time.

If your mind immediately jumped to images of convoluted brand loyalty programs with miles or points which can be exchanged for a wide selection of goods or services, you may feel intimidated. Who has the budget and the time to manage all that? But fear not! There are ways to run an effective rewards and achievements program on the cheap, using the tools that you already have, and some creative thinking.

Step One: Find all the data

To reward people for things they have done, you need to know what they’ve done, how much of it, and when. This becomes easier ir you’ve already got a forum, because forum platforms usually  have reputation points management built in. Most often participants get rewarded a point or two for posting a message (whether an original thread or a response), and if their answer is selected as the “helpful” or the “correct” one by the original poster, there is a bonus of maybe five or ten points. There may be additional points earned for other in-forum behaviours, such as joining a group or following other users. Whatever it is, if you have an online forum, you have some sort of data to start from.

You may not realize that there are other sources of data that may be available to you. They may not be automated and easy to consume, but they are there. Here are a few examples:

  • User group attendees, speakers, and user group leads
  • Conference, webinar, and seminar attendees
  • Lists of bloggers who cover your products
  • List of people who reshare your content on Twitter and other social networks

Step Two: Reward the right people

By studying as many sources of data as you can, you will be able to identify the people who contribute more than average. The goal of a rewards system is to encourage these folks to do more: More blogging, more presentations, more learning, and more sharing.

By rewarding them publicly, you will also send the message to the other 90 percent of the community that you (and the company you work for) value all sorts of contributions, not just forum Q&A. You will be surprised what people come up with once they know that they can color outside the lines. I have seen volunteers creating video tutorials, writing whole books, creating free training coursework, and even fly to another country to help jumpstart a user group.

Your focus will be not on defining what you want the community to do, but rather keeping your eyes out for the reward-worthy actions and making a big deal out of every one. Find a cool new blog? Blog about it. Maybe even start a monthly “community blog roundup” where you link to that month’s community blog posts. Got a bunch of active user group leads? Interview them on your podcast if you have it, or mention them in a community newsletter at the very least.

Step Three: Find rewards worthy of your community

Now I am assuming that my readers are bootstrapping most of their community projects on the minimum budget. If you have more, bully for you, but we’ll be here, improvising if you don’t mind.

Here are a few low-budget ideas that you can implement today, on your own or with minimal support from other groups in your company:

  • VIP program invitations: If you have a VIP program already, invite them in. If you don’t–what are you waiting for? These are your VIPs. Treat them as such. Make some noise about admitting/nominating/anointing new people into the program, so that they feel special, and everyone else knows that they are. A good VIP program will have a recurring admission schedule, a special time when the new VIPs get announced. Make it like Xmas or some other holiday: the wait and suspense is half the fun, but there’s a great reveal at the end.
  • I have already mentioned callouts and public kudos. Costs you nothing, and gives everyone involved warm and fuzzies. And don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s a cheap trick: heartfelt sincere gratitude never gets old. Remember, it’s your job to keep the community running; these folks don’t have to help you, yet they do. So thank them, and mean it.
  • Share responsibility. Invite top contributors to guest-post on your blog, make them moderators and user group leads, allow them to help you with things you wished you had bandwidth for, but never get around to doing: official schwag, curation of guest articles, even selection of the next generation of VIPs.
  • If you have a few hundred bucks lying around, you could try issuing physical trophies, or special schwag, such as backpacks or apparel. These work best if the people you want to honor are already in the same place, such as your annual user conference in Vegas. Rent a ballroom, buy some beer, and have an award ceremony for the creme de la creme. The effect diminishes if you have to mail the goodies, but you can have fun with asking the recipients to share photos of themselves with their trophies — on the forums or social media.
  • Speaking of annual user conferences: If you can beg, borrow, or steal some event passes for the VIPs to attend for free, you’ll be able to demonstrate that you put your money where your mouth is when you say “thank you.” You will have to convince the group running the conference to give you some passes, so prepare with good arguments of why they should miss out on revenue for your community people.
  • If you can’t get the free passes, maybe you can convince the organizers to allow you to reserve front-row seats in the general session for the VIPs. We’re back to zero-cost option here, and this may be a good fallback position. They still have to pay to attend, but get special treatment while there.
  • Now that you’re getting used to cajoling other groups in your company into giving you freebees, how about reaching out to the product group and asking for early access to information for your VIPs? Launching a product? You’ve got bloggers. Get them into an embargoed pre-launch briefing, set them up with the media kit, and they will write about your launch. At least some will. The rest will feel privileged to have been allowed into the inner circle.
  • Another cheap or no-cost thing to do is provide your superstars with exclusive access to internal people. It can be a dinner with the CEO at the aforementioned conference, or maybe a WebEx meeting with the product manager where they can share feedback.

As you see, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to show appreciation and recognize the people who make your community vibrant. What you will spend a lot of will be time: finding the right people, and finding the right rewards. But that is what true love is about: time you spend on them. Because they already spend a lot of time on you.

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2013-Jun-1 · 21:41

Don’t gamify. Engage!

Don’t try to game your users into doing something you want. Instead, use meaningful achievement tracking to encourage community contribution and motivate personal growth.

Forum points are great as a motivator for some folks, particularly the ones who are good at answering questions. However leaderboards can also be extremely demotivating for newcomers. Someone just joining your community may see the huge gap between their reputation level and that of a seasoned participant as an insurmountable obstacle. This leaves you in a little bit of a bind: how to keep your top contributors motivated while also encouraging participation from new members?

It is tricky, if all you can track are forum interactions, and you can resort to using “top 10” lists for the hour or the day to give everyone a chance to see their name in the lights. Sure. That will work for some people: namely the same ones who were motivated by the points all along. They are the ones who already spend hours on the forum, ready to pounce on an unanswered question. Maybe an improved points system will reach a broader mass of them, but they do not make up the majority. This is why I believe that any points-based system will forever be lacking effectiveness.

It’s not all about points.

Let me rephrase that: It’s not at all about points. Points are just an easy way out. Quick, and seemingly fair. But does your community truly exist on the Q&A forums? What about bloggers, user group leads, dedicated customers who take your training and achieve professional certifications? What about makers of video tutorials, and curators of compatibility lists? How many points do they earn if they don’t post in the forum? Zero.

Is their contribution any less valuable? Or as their points status indicates, completely devoid of value? No.

So what do you do? How do you capture all the other stuff that is not just a Q&A binary?

It will take work. Years, probably, and still you’ll never be done.

And it will take support and buy-in from groups in your organization that you may never worked with before. Such as channel marketing and training. So this is not for the faint-hearted.

Tell you the truth, I have yet to finish building such a platform in the wild, but inside my head, it would look something like this:

  1. Create a system that captures behaviours online. Some automatically, and some, you should be able to capture manually. Each behaviour that you capture can be called an achievement, and you can view it as a LEGO block that you can make other things from.
    Example: Post on your blog about Linux. OR Give a presentation at your user group meeting.
  2. Those other things can be called quests or missions or whatever you like. You get to write the rules how each of these quests is completed: ten of the same achievement, or maybe any combination of ten achievements from the same “family” that fit together well.
    Example: Post about Linux once every month for 12 months completes the “Blogger” quest. OR Five blog posts, one magazine article, two public presentations, and a podcast complete the “Public Figure” quest.
  3. Make it more of an honor system than a rigid bureaucracy. Allow people to claim achievements, and periodically/sporadically audit. Community is good at sensing BS, so rely on self-policing and moderators more than bureaucratic enforcement, and you’ll be golden.
    Example: Allow me to claim my “blog post” achievement by simply logging in and submitting the blog post URL. Issue the achievement badge immediately, but also list the event in the activity feed for all to see. Have a red flag or other abuse reporting functionality built in, so that others can report fraudsters.
  4. Start with a small, well-defined scope. Don’t forget the forums! Find a way to translate all those points earned daily into achievements, so that everyone can benefit. Thankfully, forums already capture a lot of data, so just come up with a balanced system where forum activity won’t drown out the rest — because it’s that “rest” that you’re really creating the system for (see opening paragraphs).
  5. Once everyone is on board, and obligatory bugs, quirks, and ruffled feathers have been dealt with (remember, you are unseating the reigning elite here, so be prepared), you can begin adding achievements that are traditionally not viewed as “community” or “social-media” like. Professional training and certifications are an example. Same can be done for partner training and certified system integrators. You will find that many of these programs are very similar to a quest in your system. It may take completion of a number or classes and an exam to become a certified partner. In many cases, there is already a system tracking it, so what you’ll do is integrate it with your system, in a way that makes sense.
    This is a really tricky part, and will require that you work together and get buy-in from people who you may not usually work with. If your company is large, there will be many more players involved, and progress will be slow, but in the end, you will have a system of achievement and recognition that will capture more than just forum posts, and will therefore reward and elevate people who contribute to your community in a variety of different ways. And we all love variety, right?

One day, somewhere, I want a chance to build such a thing, and then my joy will be great. Until then, it’s going to remain a vision for me to aspire to with all the community work I do: build each piece in such a way that were there a chance to expand it into this sort of an all-encompassing rewards system, it would naturally fit. If nothing else, it ensures that I never lose sight of the big picture and the overarching goal of running a community program.

In closing, this is more of a visionary post than the usual hands-on guides that I have been posting here. I promise that the next one will be practical again.

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2012-Aug-24 · 22:56

The Importance of Reputation in Online Communities

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to participate in a panel on importance of reputation in online communities. I was privileged to share the limelight with the most excellent community managers: Bill Platt of Engine Yard, Sean O’Driscoll of Ant’s Eye View, and Annie Fox of Buzznet. We were quite an unruly bunch, and almost gave our moderator Caroline Dangson a heart attack when we decided to have a drinking game on-stage. Some say, it was diluted Coke, but there are no guarantees. Enjoy.

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