All Posts By marcdanziger

There’s a documentary just out about the soldiers in Iraq called “Brothers At War“. I haven’t seen it and don’t know much about the film (my son is in the Army, so I’ll probably go watch it).

But the distributor – Samuel Goldwyn Films – is doing an interesting thing which directly connects with my image of “social media marketing” – they are offering the people interested in the film a process to get it shown in their area by preselling 1,000 tickets, and providing a kit (pdf) and support in putting together the group buy.

They are using Web based tools to build out a consumer-led marketing program.

Damn clever, if you ask me.

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We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

That’s the preamble of the US Constitution, and it’s a great thing to think about when you’re talking about launching a community. It clearly sets out what the community is for, and creates a simple, concise vision of what it can be measured against…

…to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…

Communities need constitutions.

In a presentation I’m doing about social media and small business, I say that business owners should seek critics out and ‘Embrace the Negative’.

Find the people who say negative things, and reach out to them too. Why they are unhappy? If you can – make it right. If you can’t, explain what you learned and what you will do differently. Send a personal email, send them a coupon for $5 off the next time they come.
Just like the positive comment – it’s not the economic value that matters; it’s the fact that you’re paying attention.

Well, that’s a lesson the White House seems to be taking to heart:

When New York Times columnist David Brooks accused the White House last week of “shaking confidence with its hyperactivity,”

Most of the work I do is with organizations that want to ‘create’ social media tools to enable community. I think of myself as a community designer, sometimes. But as I’ve been thinking about social media and small business lately (for a project that’s in the germinal stage), I’ve come to an interesting thought: It may be more important to think about the active users of social media; the participants in communities than about the owners of the tools or founders of the communities.

I have a politics blog, where there are five or six relatively active authors. But there are fifteen or twenty very active and engaged commenters – and to an extent the community is as much about them as it is about me. Several of them comment across multiple blogs and have well-established online identities and reputations.

I push my clients hard on the issue of active engagement and moderation as a way of setting tone – and elevating quality – in communities.

A great article today in Slate talks about what that looks like when it works:

Why is the Internet the place where civil discussion goes to die? It must be something in the tubes. Before there even was a mainstream Internet, in 1990, Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Mike Godwin coined Godwin’s Law: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” If you put a group of slightly asocial, opinionated people behind usernames, the conversation descends into flame wars and miscellaneous insanity.

And everyone who had led communities knows what that’s like…but with a lot of effort,

Because real community ROI can be hard to measure (so we use proxies for it like cost-per-impression comparisons with advertising, or offsets for physical event costs), we often tend to measure the ‘health’ of our communities by the level of activity.

New members, posts-per-member, churn (new members – members who are inactive or quit) are fairly typical metrics that I’ve used in looking at communities.

But for myself, I’ve also been obsessed with ‘quality’ as a community metric; both in terms of how ‘upward-norming’ the community is, and how well the community fulfills the intent of the community sponsor. I’m not sure how to quantify it, but I think we all know it when we see it.

‘Upward-norming’ is simple; it’s the willingness of community members themselves to intervene and react to typical online bad behavior;