Forumcon 2014 Musings - Episode 19
Scott and Randy share thoughts and observations inspired by ForumCon 2014, held in June.
Episode Summary:
- Greetings from @themaria Maria Ogneva from SideCar
- Upcoming Conference: FeverBee’s Sprint October 29-30, 2014
- Upcoming Conference: CMX Summit November 13, 2014
- ForumCon Organizer Lucy Bartlett rocked it.
- The paper not presented, Randy’s Five Questions for Selecting an Online Community Platform
- The twitter stream for the event.
- A NodeXL map for the event
- Downvoting Considered Harmful doesn’t return the results Randy thought (something for a future blog post!), but read this: I Love My Chicken Wire, Mommy by Ben Brown, and of course, Don’t Display Negative Karma, Redux: Unvarnished by Randy.
- Richard Millington on the Science of Addictive Communities
- Courtney Couch on Purposful Design
- David Spinks’ slides
- Crista Bailey gave hard data and deep insights from the Curly Hair community
Transcript
Randy:Welcome to episode 19 of the Social Media Clarity Podcast, I’m Randy Farmer,
Scott:and I’m Scott Moore.
Maria:Hi! My name is Maria Ogneva, that’s @themaria. I work at Sidecar and I love Social Media Clarity Podcast.
Randy:For us, that’s an age-old problem and it’s only getting worse. That’s partially because we’ve confused social media marketing with community management. Social media marketing, in fact it doesn’t treat people on the other side of a discussion as people.
Welcome to the Social Media Clarity Podcast, 15 minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media in platform and product design.
Hello and welcome to episode 19 of the Social Media Clarity Podcast. I’m Randy Farmer.
Scott:I’m Scott Moore. First, there are two online community conferences taking place this fall in San Francisco and tickets are available now.
October 29th and 30th is FeverBee’s SPRINT hosted by Richard Millington. Geared toward practical advice for community builders, the first day is a full day intensive on specific community skills. The main conference will have top community builders from Google, Wikipedia, OpenTable, AirBnB, the Community Roundtable and even FetLife giving specific how-to talks. A limited number of tickets are available at sprint.feverbee.com.
On November 13th, the CMX Summit organized by David Spinks takes place also in San Francisco billed as the world’s largest gathering of community professionals. Speakers Ryan Hoover, CEO of Product Hunt; Gina Bianchini, CEO of Mightybell; and Douglas Atkin, global head of community at AirBnB are among the lineup. Tickets are available now at cmxsummit.com.
If you attend either of these conferences, chances are good, one of the Social Media Clarity hosts will be there. Say hi. We look forward to meeting you.
Randy:Today’s episode is casual conversation about ForumCon 2014 which took place June 19th.
Scott:I went to ForumCon last year in 2013 and it was an interesting group. It was much more forum oriented. Many more forum owners were there and this year was a broader mix. There were more B2C community managers, more branded community managers, some social media folks who were also there. It was a diverse crowd and I thought that was really interesting to see this year.
Randy:I hadn’t attended previously, so I have no reference for comparison. I came because Lucy Bartlett who is the primary organizer of this event originally had asked me to present my paper on Five Questions for Selecting an Online Community Platform.
Due to constraints and timing, that didn’t happen and I’d like to thank her very much for putting on what I thought was a really great conference because I tend to favor on conferences which are much less structured. She managed to bring in a large number of participants in a single track conference who all were in a very sharing mood and I thought a lot of great techniques were shared even if some of them are little controversial.
Scott:She did a great job. She’s been very active in the Bay Area in the community manager meet up space. It was great.
Randy:Due to traffic unfortunately, I arrived late and miss the opening networking session and lightning networking session. When I came in, it was an early session - The room was full, it was packed and on the screens on the side, on each side was a Twitter stream following the hashtag forumcon.
Of course my first tweet out is, “Ran into traffic. Now I’m mugging for the big screen on Twitter.” I always find it fascinating when an event has large screens following a Twitter stream. What did you think about the Twitter streams?
Scott:I have to admit, I almost never watched the screens because I have no ability to interact with what comes up on the screen. During conferences, I do follow the hashtags, so I wind up buried in the hashtag search on Twitter or whatever client I might be using.
There, I have a chance to respond and also I have the client open if I want to say something because usually I would like to make sure that if there’s something I hear that I think is good, I want to make sure it gets out even if I’m not the one who’s saying it.
Randy:I find the hashtag stream fascinating in a couple of ways. One is it’s a second set of voices. If there’s a panel out front, it’s a way to respond a little bit to the panel, but it also self-elevates you a little for those who are looking at those screens with a lot of listeners because of the big screens or the people following the tags on their own PCs or devices. There’s a second tier of speech going on, but not everyone participates in that.
Scott:Absolutely. One tweet that came across the screen that stood out for me was a comment encouraging to have more female speakers at the conference and at future conferences. I would have probably missed that in the tweet stream because it did get re-tweeted a few times, but it kept coming up on the screen. The algorithm of the screen was such that it repeated a lot of tweets.
I agree with you that the screens do provide a secondary voice or an instigation for additional conversations. If people don’t tend to participate on Twitter, then they get to see kind of what those who are participating on Twitter are doing. There is that second back channel that’s being made public.
At the same time, it can alert people to something that in a way that in a way the Zeitgeist is talking about and then it can dive back in to their Twitter feeds and see, “Hey, do I want to respond to this? Do I want to participate in this?”
Since we pay attention to the actual mechanics of social networking and how information passes around, we did get NodeXL maps. I did pull up a bunch of tweets and aggregated them together just to see what was going on.
One of the things it’s important to point out is that there was a portion of the attendees at ForumCon who are absolutely valuable who did not participate in Twitter, so we can’t really take all of what’s going on in Twitter as the voice of everyone that was participating and to not discount what those folks got from the conference or had to say about the conference or contributed to the conference.
Randy, what was the biggest impression you got from ForumCon?
Randy:I was very excited about how everyone shared their positive knowledge. Sometimes it would make controversial statements. There was a lot of advancement of the art over previous years, but I’m surprised how much reinventing the wheel continues to happen every year and this has happened for at least 15 years at conferences like this.
Scott:I have this exact same impression. There are few things that I thought, “Wow …” I don’t know if it’s a generational thing or if it’s that we just really haven’t fixed these problems to the point that people forget what the source of the problems are.
Randy:We had this interesting phase where we were doing audience participation and everybody is a panelist and we form little groups. Not to talk about the format per say but the conclusions were interesting. One of the questions was, “How do you deal with negativity and down voting?” I shouted out, “No down voting!”
When people reported around, our side started with no down voting and then we talked about negativity separately, but as we crept along, people kept adding, “Well, say you can use down voting if you’re really careful” or “Some people kind of use it and after they work it really hard, it kind of works …”
It’s like, “No folks, we figured this out a long time ago. It’s written down. You can look it up. You can type in down voting considered harmful on the web and you will find out all the challenges that are associated with it. Yes, some people can, but not you. Just because you want to, doesn’t mean you know how to do it.”
What about you? What was yours?
Scott:Mine was there was a comment about one of the problems with civility online is that we fail to recognize that there’s a human being on the other side of the screen. That struck me because I dealt with this as almost one of the first issues when I first started with virtual communities in a virtual world is that we had to really work hard to make sure that we were trying to humanize the other people.
It was actually one of the key conflict mediation and community moderation methods that we used is to try to get the other person to remember there’s another human being on the other side. And that it seem to be a key moment in a talk, struck me as, “Wow, this should be inbreed. This should be in our DNA with no thoughts anymore about it.”
It also made me think, “Maybe, we really haven’t solved the problem. Maybe we really haven’t been addressing how to make sure that people are being treated like humans or that we’re minding each user that there is another human being on the other side of this username.”
Randy:For us, that’s an age-old problem and it’s only getting worse. That’s partially because we’ve confused social media marketing with community management. We’ve talked about the separation before. Social media marketing, in fact it doesn’t treat people on the other side of a discussion as people. They are customers. They are buyers. They are eyes. The entire industry is formed to giving them names which is anything other than personifying.
Scott:I wouldn’t lay it all at social media’s feet especially since the context of that came up in the discussion of forum technology which was almost as antithetical to social media marketing as you can get. I don’t disagree with you. It’s somewhere in there and that also we view, increasingly, people who are participating in communities as content creators and that’s also another step away from here’s a person who has emotions and community is about relationships.
Yeah, I just think maybe we really haven’t properly addressed it with not just our social work but the technology work that we are doing.
Randy:To reinforce the conference from this, several of the speakers didn’t necessarily call this out precisely in this forum. If you looked at how they talked about approaching, establishing, and nurturing your communities, they drove it home over and over and over in the constraints whether it be Richard Millington talking about the science to create addictive communities or Courtney Couch talking about purposeful design.
Even one of the earlier kick off talks by David Spinks, he put up some five bullet points all that surround that. Scott, you attended two of these now, what did you find interesting and a note for ForumCon 2014?
Scott:Two things. One, it’s a fascinating world. There’s an entire world of folks who are building forums and working on monetizing forums and they’re genuine communities and there a different group of folks. I was really glad to see that this might be an interesting mix of this. I am a huge fan of diversity because that just helps evolve on all fronts. We learn things from people who we don’t tend to talk to.
I cheered when I heard it throughout the day, the support for anonymity and pseudonymity in communities in context in that it was caveated with ‘In some communities, it’s worthwhile and in some communities, it’s not going to work out so well.’ I thought that was great to hear that from all sides from the community manager, the branded community managers, and the forum folks.
Randy:It’s good to see that some things have advanced. They didn’t hear anyone up on the stage saying, “The solution to everything is Facebook IDs, true IDs, unified IDs. That’s an improvement.
Scott:I heard two speakers call out for 4chan specifically as here is an anonymous community that has a culture of actually beating on each other in order to build trust and connection with each other. It was a diversity of what community means. It was an inclusive definition of community. Just because you want a nice branded community and that’s safe that people are saying nice things about you and your company does not mean that that is what all community should be.
Randy:I thought the Curly Hair Community story was particularly compelling.
Scott:She spoke last year. I heard her speak and talked about the Curly Hair Community. It’s really interesting to hear the update and the impact that they were having particularly Target that they got to change their curly hair products from ethnic to …
Randy:Textured.
Scott:Yeah. That’s a definite success story and it’s an impactful success story.
Randy:Exactly. An online community changed branding information for major chemical companies. That’s pretty powerful.
Scott:Yeah, that was awesome. Thank you Lucy Bartlett and VigLink for ForumCon. You helped stimulate a lot of thought with a whole lot of people and we really appreciate it.
Randy:Thanks to all the speakers and participants and the people who tweeted.
Scott:Awesome.
Randy:Till next time, catch you later.
Scott:Bye.
Randy:For links, transcripts, and more episodes, go to socialmediaclarity.net. Thanks for listening.