Kim's take on building a succesful community is a terse how-to manual which
stresses to "serve a clear purpose in members lives". According to the author, by following this
maxim it "will attract and keep them coming back."
Though at first sounding a bit too QVC like for my personal tastes, this
article is interspersed with anecdotes and case studies. This is much more of a marketing tool guide on
how to succeed in the social Darwinian sphere that we have become so heavily
reliant on- the Net. His characterization of a thriving community is one where
the owners of that community have articulated a vision, defined a purpose for
why they are in business, defined and understood their core customer,
their current and future (anticipated) needs, clarified goals (inclusive of
both member's and the site's owners) and finally ( hopefully up and running!)
developing brand personality (i.e. carving out your place in this vast sphere).
In business it is a given that the needs of a customer are to be understood
and met if one is even contemplating selling or providing a service where the
customer/viewer is central to the transaction. Kim elevates this thought
process a notch or two by getting Maslowian on us! As web communities are
comprised of human beings, Maslow's hierarchy of needs are equally salient in
the web realm as they are in our quotidian life (crafty, I thought!)
The form these needs take in an online environment are:
Physiological- System access, maintaining your identity and participating in
a community
Security and Safety- Protection from hackers, the sense of "level
playing field" comes into play in this theory
Social- Having a sense of community and belonging
Self-Esteem- The ability to be part of a community, contribute to it
and being recognized for your efforts (i.e. contributions)
Self Actualization- the ability to take on a community role that develops
skills and hopefully opens up opportunities
According to Kim, the fulfillment of needs paired with goals that take into
account members (Needs) as well as the company stakeholders(Goals), along with
a master list of community goals is a
necessary launching pad for any e-community.
However, if the aforementioned is the launching pad then knowing the
difference between WHO you want your target audience to be and understanding
who they are is perhaps the vehicle
necessary to make an e-community fly. This
can of course be done via surveys (in person/online) and focus groups. Ultimately
the findings contained within will result in a mission statement that will
allow for further focus and purpose which when fused with dynamic/interactive
branding conveys a community’s personality and hopefully translates into
views/hits and success. Of course,
success these days is as subjective as beauty.
I think Kim's case studies are insightful examples of how eCommunity stakeholders have successfully responded to changing needs of members and owners. However, because learning what practices to avoid may also benefit informed planning, I would have appreciated Kim's take on an eCommunity that's failed to keep pace.
In the news today, Ars Technica aired grievances that members of Jaiku (microblogging) have had with the service since Google bought it. Access to user accounts and mashup apps have been unreliable. If Jaiku members can't participate, the developers have failed to meet the most basic physiological needs of their members, who have complained directly and on message boards, but haven't received a response from the inside. Perhaps some transparency might reassure members that they're at least being heard. If someone sends a message, and it's ignored, their self-esteem will be hurt. As the Ars Technica article suggests, members may jump ship to competing services where they'll feel appreciated.
In this reading, Kim discusses the key criterion behind building a successful e-community. The author presents several sound pieces of advice, ranging from having a clear purpose to understanding the needs of the community. Having read chapter 2 of the Wenger et al. reading, I found myself comparing the two readings. While Wenger et al. stress the importance of maintaining a balance between three structural elements behind communities (domain, community, and practice), Kim appears to focus a lot more on the concept of community. Kim proposes that understanding the needs of the target audience, or the community, is the most important step, even more important then the site owner or organization’s personal vision. In some sense, this argument makes sense; after all, a thriving e-community must actually attract people.
However, in comparison to Wenger et al., Kim’s analysis seems somewhat oversimplified. Of course, this is only a small portion of Kim’s book, so perhaps the author addresses some of these concerns later on. However, from this week’s Kim reading, the concept of community takes on a rather different direction from Wenger et al.’s community of practice. In Wenger et al.’s definition, these communities are heavily centered on this shared understanding and common practice, while as in Kim’s idea of an online community, large portals like iVillage and NetNoir, are communities that appear to simply share a common interest in a general domain. In other words the community discussed by Kim is literally what Wenger et al. coin as a community of interest.
In addition, I am skeptical about the best practices and precautions proposed by Kim. To me it seems like any additional community feature should most importantly stay true to the company’s own views (unless they are literally wrong). Indeed, there is the argument that the needs of the target audience should always be any firm’s primary focus, but if the author is going to relate these best practices and strategies to existing business and organizations, then the author should also take into consideration that some of these might be large, established, organizations that have well-framed visions already. Similarly, while Kim’s reference to Maslow’s Hierarchy makes sense and is interesting, it also seems a little idealistic. We should not forget that a lot of people participate in communities anonymously and different individuals have varying level of needs and motivations. Some may be content that they can spend access time and energy to casually engage in an online community, while others may aggressively participate because they are trying to establish a reputation.
Submitted by Tracy Liu on Thu, 01/10/2008 - 16:30.
0
points
I am wondering about the relationship between these two communities. From my perspective, all online communities are subset of community of practice, is it?
what would be the consequence when we move the community of practice to the Internet? Does the communication between members are more efficient or almost out of control? For instance, E-mail correspondences between research members always take me much more time to think about the proper conversation, why not just a face to face meeting in 5 min?
Submitted by LizBlankenship on Thu, 01/10/2008 - 19:20.
1
point
Do you perhaps mean that communities of practice are a subset of online communities? I would agree with that, but I would disagree with your statement that all online communities must be communities of practice. To summarize Wenger's concept of community of practice as I understand it, a community of practice is a type of community that is generally more professionally oriented around some kind of shared activity or career (think or look back to the example of Chrysler). Also, as we discussed in class, the entry to such a community is by peripheral participation; you just happen to be a used car salesperson and thus belong to the community of practice shared by used car salesperson.
An online community, on the other hand, could be focused around any number of shared things and could have purely social goals, something which is not a primary goal of a community of practice.
I am not sure that anything in this Kim chapter directly related to communities of practice but I hope I helped to clarify the difference.
Submitted by Daniel Zhou on Fri, 01/11/2008 - 00:09.
3
points
I might argue that "online communities" and "communities of practice" are two sets that have intersections, but not necessarily have inclusion relationship.
Kim's advice on starting an online community stops short of offering readers a 2 for 1 deal on the latest model. "Find a need a fill it" reeks of marketing, brand-image, and corporate board rooms. Let's find a nice community and be sure to give ourselves the biggest piece of the pie.
But once I got past reflexive resistence, I could mentally remove a lot of Kim's bottom line perspective and find some useful practical tips. Making a "creation myth" doesn't really appeal to me. But having a document of shared community experience rings true. Families used to have crests and coat of arms. Intramural sports teams have team cheers and spend sideline time retelling (and embellishing) the best plays of the season. Church groups record the deeds of their saints in religious texts. I dig it.
Just don't make me feel like I'm selling my soul for a few more warm fuzzies.
I agree with Erin's point, that what Kim is offering here is a very nice and concise account of what to do when starting up a Web community. I especially liked Kim's case examples and the note on page 26 stressing that users need to interact with not only static images/links on a site but also with each other. Unlike the Powazek chapter, though, this tells a reader what to do, but not how to do it. As a result I found it informative and fun to read, but not really insightful in the way that Powazek's was by ending on a series of questions.
Still, the piece succeeds by defining a purpose as “identifying an ongoing, unmet need that your members have in common and which your community is uniquely suited to address” (3). She outlines types of communities (5) including family, work, play, spirituality, and politics which all encompass four types of communities: geographic, demographic, topical, and activity-based (5). There is a very interesting diagram/chart/explanation of user needs which start as basic (physiological) before transcending to abstract (self-actualization) which takes place on pp. (8-9). She then gives a how-to to researching and building an online community with examples from other sites. Like other articles she also stresses “undestanding your audience” (14) here by giving surveys and conducting focus groups. She finally advises things like creating a mission statement, having a site tag, creating a backstory, and branding the site in order to create a unique community.
An important point that is made right in the beginning of chapter 1 is the fact that communities evolve, change and expand over time. Many examples i have come across in the past were not as scalable to the growing community and increasing diversity of the interests and goals of it's users. The result is a clustering of members in certain areas of communities that break apart.
I am a little surprised about the very short part on "Clarify your goals" on page 9. It seems that there is more to a successfull community as stated by Kim. Furthermore i think the two principles are not detailed and clear enough developed. I don't agree, that return on investment specifies success, if that refers to the initiator or creator. Because some communities can exis beyond the initial "investment" without further investing any efforts.
At the same time, i don't think that the amount of members defines a successfull community rather than the quality of contributions and consistent activity.
In regards to figure 1.7 on page 15 i want to underline, that the type of incentive is directly connected to the type of member you address. Using different ways to motivate people to contribute ensures, that you get opinons of people with different goals and therefore a more representative result.
Got the basic idea of how to build up a successful community. The idea is clearly elaborated and I totally agree that community evolve over time to keep pace with changing needs of its members. Though I don't have experience building up any communities yet, I was pretty much convinced of the criteria that the author has pointed out in order to get the community successful and I feel it helpful to keep in mind in case I would do such a job in future.
Kim's article on building successful online communities offered some pragmatic tips on how to address member’s needs in an online community, but the inclusion of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs seemed ill suited. By trying to define user’s needs as discrete stratified layers it seems that the designers are assuming a natural progression and one that may or may not be valid. Furthermore the pyramid would also seem to suggest a development trajectory based on these assumptions. For instance, the third tier--social--assumes that the users will be inclined to form groups at some stage in the developmental of the site. This assumption would lead the site’s administrators to install chatting or blogging functions to the site. However, I don’t think that it is necessarily the case that the users first goal is to form group rather than contribute to a site and be recognized--which would a later stage according to Maslow’s pyramid.
Following this template for a site’s design would also seem to suggest a lack of interaction between the different stages. While the first two tears are certainly requisites for an online community I’m not sure that a user may not have characteristics of the other stages simultaneously. To me it seems that if a user would wants to belong to a community they would do so because they felt that their contributions were valued and that they had some role in the community. But this model seems to suggest that an individual won’t experience these thought simultaneously. Ultimately the model certainly has some truth to it, but trying to apply it the way that the author does seemed like a poor fit.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Submitted by Rozaidi Rashid on Thu, 01/10/2008 - 23:15.
0
points
I thought mapping the Maslow's pyramid to the online community was "cool".. (yeah.. because it's cool.... so flame me). Maybe because that's the first online adaptation of the Maslow hierarchical of needs that I've seen. It does provide some sort of gauge as to where a community is, but I agree witth jared that "if a user would wants to belong to a community they
would do so ... because they felt that their contributions were valued and
that they had some role in the community"
I highly agree with Jared that the usage of Maslow's pyramid is ill suited and not "cool" as Nik stated.
The pyramid can to some extend be used to compare different social classes or similar. While one class is struggling to satisfy basic needs like surviving and security other classes can worry about things like self-realization. In my opinion nearly everybody that has the time to spend time in online communities is passed the first couple of levels of needs. I also don't feel that security is a very basic need in many communities. In most cases people are either not aware of or indifferent to security threats. People use online communities for whatever needs they want to satisfy at that point. This could follow a pattern analog to the pyramid, but it most cases it does not.
Generally Maslow's pyramid has to be viewed with some criticism. If I remember right from my undergrad psych lectures there has been no real empiric evidence for Maslow's model so far. The success of the model is not based on it's predictive qualities but on its straightforwardness and that it is so easy to understand. So it definitely has some value (especially for consulting work, it just looks very scientific), but it must be used much more carefully.
Much of what I would say about the Kim, I said on the Powazek. For example, Kim offers a similar triad: 1) what type of community am I building, 2) why, and 3) for whom? Fortunately, she also points out the inevitability of surprise and the necessity of evolving the community over time.
I'm not sure why she attempts to attach her ideas to Maslow (a popular reference but somewhat discredited academically: it has been demonstrated that primates will attempt to satisfy other needs before physical ones). Nevertheless, it does not ruin her perspective. The pantyhose community example on page 19 is instructive re: "surprise." What is more dismaying is the company's response. For example, I can imagine an advertising campaign that incorporated their new knowledge and showed many women in pantyhose and a few men and had and said "for anyone" which would've boosted their sales and consumer satisfaction.
Finally, on the issue of a mission statement. A mission statement is a lot like a constitution. Unless it states how it can be revised and how it will respond to the community, then it can be dictatorial. It explicitly creates insiders and outsiders, and a mission statement runs the risk of explicitly excluding a segment of your audience that 1) you didn't know about and 2) that is crucial to your success. For example, if the pantyhose company had excluded men as Kim suggests, then they would also have excluded their access to information about men wearing pantyhose, i.e. their own customers.
In addition, her recommendation of having an internal mission statement and an external, i.e. public, one, is typical of corporate thinking. This kind of "lying as practice" is a reason why so many community attempts fail, i.e. there is a failure of trust generated by initial dishonesty. Furthermore, communities generated for corporate reasons always carry profit as an unstated motive.
Some of these points are not critical of Kim per se, but of broader issues in online community.
-------------------------------------------------------- PHartzog@umich.edu
--------------------------------------------------------
The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser
Submitted by John Blair on Thu, 01/10/2008 - 22:06.
1
point
John Blair
Phartzog, I enjoy reading your posts / rants(my impression, not necessarily your intent) - and tend to agree with many of your thoughts. In this example, it seems that you are omitting the intended audience of the book, (intentionally I presume to dedicate time to your other points), whom I feel would benefit greatly from the somewhat rather obvious considersations one should make when heading down this particular path. However, I can assure you that as a product of the corporate world for far longer than I care to recall, the obvious often eludes project teams. I'm sure that this is in some part to the pressures of that environment that people are rarely afforded the luxury of time to actually do all of these activties, and their management likely wants the finished product and doesn't much care about the long road to produce it. Corporations exist to make money, and those at the top rarely are allowed to forget that. Unfortunately this has developed into short term (quarterly) performance thinking and nearly anything associated with them is going to have a profit aspect to it in some manner, which frequently does not consider the customer community in a long term light.
All that said, I too found the reference to Maslow rathering surprising, but considering the audience of the material, feel it to be a rather useful reference to them.
Overall, the article is very basic in nature and is a good companion to the other readings because of this, as they too tended to be foundation type pieces.
Just as Paul says, this perspective can be seen as adapting integrated marketing positioning approach to understand how to establish an online community, in both mental and material ways. The main purpose and practice is to discover, articulate, and establish the way that the e-community can deliver values to people.
However, here is what is different of building e-community from what we had in traditional integrated marketing: e-community can be totally designed as what we want it to be, rather than finding the possible value that can be extracted from an existing product. During the process one forming the purpose of the e-community, she is also forming the ideas of the e-community as aggregate minds of a bunch of people. In short, designing an e-community is much like designing an aggregate mind of a group of people. Technical plasticity endows us almost infinite possibilities of doing this configuration. Therefore, this point is just reinforcing Paul’s idea that how the discrepancy between internal and external statements can lead to failures. That is because all the minds have been built in the formation of the community, the confliction would result in the incoherence of the community itself.
This reading seems like a guide for an entrepreneur who wants to write a business plan about an online community. From my point of view, this reading is very similar to Powazek’s, but more detailed and pragmatic. It even described how to conduct surveys and run focus groups.
It seems that Kim spent a lot of time talking about how to communicate the mission of the site with your audiences. It includes crafting the mission statement, communicate your backstory, and develop your brand personality. I especially like the idea of backstory, it seems like a legend and gives audiences a common ground to communicate with each other. It might increase the identity of users of the community as well.
In the beginning of the chapter, Kim stated that “because communities evolve, your purpose will change along with the shifting social and economic landscape of the web.” I am just curious how we can detect the change and how to keep pace with the changing need of members and owners. It seems abstract to me.
Rebecca touched on a couple interesting components of the Kim reading. The first, the apparent marketing-style approach presented by Kim, has been lamented by a couple students in this discussion. While I agree that Kim's approach is a bit sterile, I think that it's an honest perspective. Perhaps surveys, user analyses, mission statements, and the like seem like cold methods for community building, but they're heuristics for improving the success of your community. If you build a community out of warmth, happiness, and bunnies, maybe you'll feel like you took a more personable approach to your work, but if it fails to find an audience, your work may very well be in vain. In this regard, the marketing-style approach isn't just an effort to maximize profit (be it financial or otherwise), but a responsibility to a project's stakeholders.
On a completely separate subject, I wanted to address the question of how to detect change within a community. I've spent a considerable amount of time with a few online communities, and have watched them go through several iterations/evolutions. The only way (that I know of) to detect change within a community is to hold an active part in the community yourself, and to provide methods for feedback from the users. In the arena of virtual worlds, shifts in the communities can often be recognized by changes made in the demands on the development staff. As an example, game players may stop requesting vorpal swords of death and destruction and start demanding My Little Pony. This is a pretty clear cut demographic shift. As suggested in the reading, tangential uses of a community can also indicate an evolving population, as was the case of the men discussing pantyhose. Finally, if you want more solid data, you could conduct surveys of your members and compare against previously collected data. am a part. These surveys have helped the developers to adapt the community system to its current userbase, which has persisted and evolved for close to 20 years now.
Submitted by Rozaidi Rashid on Thu, 01/10/2008 - 23:24.
0
points
The list of questions by Kim is much like Powazek, but I like the observation that communities evolve, especially successful ones. The more general a community starts, the more sub-communities will emerge as it grows. What is important is for the community manager/adminstrator to remember to review the site's purposes from time to time. But the difficulty is knowing when is the right time to do that. Some sites shelf-life seem to be shorter than others. Any research on this?
Submitted by LizBlankenship on Thu, 01/10/2008 - 19:48.
1
point
I enjoyed how easy to read this chapter was and felt that it brought out some interesting ideas regarding Maslow's pyramid, emphasizing the need for a mission statement, etc., but I know how highly regarded this book is by Amy Bruckman and others prominent in the field and so far I'm content but not overwhelmingly impressed.
One thing I noticed was on the PDF copy made available to us, someone had written in "marketplace??" next to Figure 1.2 page 5. I'm going to focus on that for this post.
Does this unknown intruder into Kim's book have a point? In the figure, Kim was listing types of communities as they relate to parts of life, listing Family, Work, Play, Spirituality, and Politics as areas of life with types of communities for each. In light of the idea "marketplace" being thrown at this figure and the later mention of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, doesn't it seem that there might be a place in this figure for necessities, consumerism, or knowlege sharing in some form? A community that comes to mind is http://www.kidswithfoodallergies.org/, where people come together not because of a hobby or spiritual need, but rather a practical need of sharing insights into coping with having children with food allergies.
I think this is yet another attempt to define the different types of online communities. The truth is, however, that there is no easy definition.
For the most part, all of the advice in this chapter seems like common sense. The most entertaining part was the story about the L'eggs company and their unforeseen community demographics. I agree with the previous commenters that this chapter really describes what should happen, but not really how to do it. Knowing this is the introductory chapter, I think the point was to provide a foundation for what lies ahead in the book.
Also, tangent: I was the proud owner of a lot of land in Geocities. Hollywood/Hills/7923, to be exact. Ah, the golden days of the internet. Don't ask me how I remember the exact URL.
Submitted by Sean Munson on Thu, 01/10/2008 - 21:36.
0
points
Kim says to start defining your community with three questions:
what type of community am I building?
why am I building it?
who am I building it for
And then just dives right into saying "find an unmet need of your members !" That's cute, but it doesn't address the questions with which Kim starts. How do you decide on your members? The needs and membership questions seem very tightly coupled, and I think that the question of who you want your members to be often needs to be considered in parallel to thinking of unmet needs, but unfortunately doesn't seem to be given much treatment, and the chapter seems to assume that your pool of members is just handed over on a platter. I'm disappointed to see such an important question reduced to a (somewhat bizarrre) assumption.
I also question her cookie-cutter approach. You need a mission statement.. and then an external mission statement... and a tag line. She gives some examples, but provides fairly rationale (or explanation of situations in which you might not want to follow these steps), and doesn't really even talk about what the missions and tag lines did for each community.
The chapter also reads strangely in another way. While Kim talks about studying (through surveys and focus groups (what about other methods?)) the members, she talks very little about involving them. This seems to be a fairly commercial approach to online communities (perhaps her audience), but I would have still expected to see a bit of discussion about ways to involve some members early on in setting up and shaping the community: this seems like a good way to get a better-designed community (if you are good at managing the different personalities) that would come with members who take some ownership of the community and are more committed to its success.
I'll acknowledge that a lot of my criticism may come from a combination of reading just one chapter in the book, but overall I found this chapter fairly disappointing. The one-size-fits all approach for online community design may work for some, but not for me.
The author explains clearly initial steps to create a successful community. There are similar to how a brand is created and gets its own loyal consumers. The fundamentals the author is using are indisputable. They are applicable in real life as well. Any service providers has to service the needs of its consumers, to survive.
The community owners need to have clear purpose in mind. Understanding the needs of the users will help the community owners to define the purpose. The community goals are then formed by merging the needs of the users with the goals of the community owners.
Next the purpose and goals of the community needs to be sold to the end users and within the company. This is done using mission statements, tag lines, back story. If the package is sold well the end result will be the creation of a brand. This brand personality can then be continuously tuned.
I wonder if some of the popular social networking sites were started with such clear goals and purposes. I think their success was due to many reasons - one of them could be purpose and serving needs of community. Also it seems naive to think the goals of the owners will naturally map to the needs of the community.
I'm with Sean - disappointed. And, I wouldn't trust the advice of an article like this in 2008. Maybe, as something to suggest to someone with minimal web experience who needs to set up an online community, but hasn't participated in one herself. Online communities have evolved dramatically since this article was written, the business landscape has changed, design best-preactices have evolved, etc. Sure, some things don't change -- relevancy to community members' lives, return for investors -- but that kind of thing is assumed, or just so fundamental. Rather than reading that your community should be relevant to members' lives, I'd prefer to see strategies for achieving and maintaining relevancy. This is just super beginner stuff.
With regard to the article being dated - I was off-put by page 3. The questions presented are:
-what type of a community am I building?
-why am I building it?
-who am I building it for
Notice the emphasis on "me" the builder. The approach is very top-down and that the organizer will dictate purpose. A more current approach would be to talk about the community that the *members* will be building.
Best takeaway for sure was the L'eggs example. Would have loved to have read more about relevancy for the male pantyhose enthusiast community - it could be a great organic example. There are plenty of places online for men to talk about wearing pantyhose. Why did they gravitate to the L'eggs site, or was it just enthusiasts of the brand?
Although I would like say I, too, find the creation myth distasteful, it would be less than honest. I'm a sucker for them, I've scanned the backs of my cereal boxes looking for them (or something besides nutritional content to read). I like the "tell-your-story" concept, if its honest.
If I'm at some back-woods bar and grill and the menu's creation myth suddenly turns fantastical (papa joe then disappeared into the woods after delivering his secret sauce recipe into our hands), then I'm out. But, amidst the near-nauseating array of products, I like Dr. Bronner's soap because its nonsensical moral maxims are entertaining.
As much as I would like to say that I am immune from the bells and whistles of marketing, its a science. I think sites that play by whatever gestalt techniques and little tricks that are out there will win. I don't have cable and still know that "with Geiko Direct a 15 minute call can save me 15 percent or more on car insurance" and that "like a good neighbor state farm is there."
Sites that don't take these dynamics into account will surely be destined to be sooner forgotten. Overall, I think Kim makes some general aesthetic points about community design that are useful but not neccessarily innovative or new.
Submitted by Daniel Zhou on Fri, 01/11/2008 - 00:24.
1
point
Judging by the style of the chapter, I would assume its audience would target to businessmen and designers, not academics. So it's understandable that the piece somewhat lacks depth.
The main point of the chapter is to stress the importance of a "purpose" to
online communities. The big three questions are:
What type of community am I building?
Why am I building it?
Who am I building it for?
How to define your goals:
Step1: Member's needs
Step2: Owners' goals
Step3: Create a "master list" of your community goals.
While most points Kim made in this chapter make sense, like some other posts here, I also feel that what Kim was trying to say is nothing more than some common management practices, such as knowing your customer, goals, mission statements, etc. I am wondering maybe when Kim wrote this book, people were too crazy about online community that they simply forgot these basic principles, and Kim (and others) was just trying to re-tell the principles to them. That said, I am not as disappointed as some people here. While her arguments and points may not be comprehensive or unique enough, at least Kim pointed out a way to start, and that is a good starting point.
Submitted by Satyendra on Fri, 01/11/2008 - 02:19.
0
points
I agree with Daniel and others who've mentioned about the lack of depth of the article.
The author states the obvious that one must try to understand their users and their goals and then prioritize the list of their goals. While theoretically this sounds good this and perhaps this is true for a community of people interested in discussing cultivation of oranges, this kind of approach breaks down when you want to design a site like twitter or you tube. How do you create a demographic profile of your site's typical visitor if you are aiming for a site like that.
Further the author mentions that one should understand the goals of the users and the owners should be understood and then gives a variety of good methods you can use to do that. However, there is little mention of the steps to analyze and structure the results, or design strategies in case these goals are not aligned with each other and other such possibilities.
I believe the paper would have been much more useful if it had more depth.
I'd just like to point out, that despite the ravaging this chapter recieved from the class, that this is a fairly reputable book on putting together community websites targetted at a non-technical crowd. I definitely agree this has some cheezy elements, but it's the first chapter of a 380-page howto, not the soup to nuts guide for starting a community site.
Besides, she referenced slashdot at least she's got some taste.
I tend to agree that I was surprised by the critical comments of this chapter. Some books are written for academics, and some for practitioners, I would say that this book is for the latter. As such, it provides straightforward information on how to build a community that is written more from the business and marketing perspective than other readings we have had so far. It's the only one so far to mention the needs of the *owners*, and discuss how these needs must also be met for a community to be successful. But is this a bad thing? I think all of the advice is useful, and gives community builders some things to think about that may not have been obvious. And, though some people have taken issue with including Maslow's hierachy of needs, can anyone say that there is not *some* truth to it - to satisfy your users' basic needs before getting to any of the fancy stuff with your site?
The best advice to come from this article I think is the need to be flexible when building a community. A good community is one that listens and responds to its users' needs, even as these may change and evolve.
As a final note, I thought it was interesting that when I tried going to several of the sites listed in the examples, such as MomsOnline.com or ParentSoup.com, I discovered that both had been taken over, by Oxygen and iVillage respectively. While I don't know the full story of how these sites changed, could it be the case of what was mentioned in this chapter - that the communities may have met the needs of the users, but didn't meet the needs of the site owners? Even the most vibrant communities will not succeed unless they provide some incentive or gain to the community owners as well - a point well taken.
I just wanted to reitereate that I find guidesline this useful -- they provide a quick overview of the types of things you need to think about when building an online community for people who haven't really thought about this topic before.
If I were building an online community I think I'd want my team to skim this chapter so they'd have some common ground going into a discussion on online communities. [We as academics studying ecommunities are not really the target for this writing -- but it's useful to skim and make sure we've thought about everything they touch on]
Purpose+Vision+Mission Statement may = Success?
Kim's take on building a succesful community is a terse how-to manual which
stresses to "serve a clear purpose in members lives". According to the author, by following this
maxim it "will attract and keep them coming back."
Though at first sounding a bit too QVC like for my personal tastes, this
article is interspersed with anecdotes and case studies. This is much more of a marketing tool guide on
how to succeed in the social Darwinian sphere that we have become so heavily
reliant on- the Net. His characterization of a thriving community is one where
the owners of that community have articulated a vision, defined a purpose for
why they are in business, defined and understood their core customer,
their current and future (anticipated) needs, clarified goals (inclusive of
both member's and the site's owners) and finally ( hopefully up and running!)
developing brand personality (i.e. carving out your place in this vast sphere).
In business it is a given that the needs of a customer are to be understood
and met if one is even contemplating selling or providing a service where the
customer/viewer is central to the transaction. Kim elevates this thought
process a notch or two by getting Maslowian on us! As web communities are
comprised of human beings, Maslow's hierarchy of needs are equally salient in
the web realm as they are in our quotidian life (crafty, I thought!)
The form these needs take in an online environment are:
Physiological- System access, maintaining your identity and participating in
a community
Security and Safety- Protection from hackers, the sense of "level
playing field" comes into play in this theory
Social- Having a sense of community and belonging
Self-Esteem- The ability to be part of a community, contribute to it
and being recognized for your efforts (i.e. contributions)
Self Actualization- the ability to take on a community role that develops
skills and hopefully opens up opportunities
According to Kim, the fulfillment of needs paired with goals that take into
account members (Needs) as well as the company stakeholders(Goals), along with
a master list of community goals is a
necessary launching pad for any e-community.
However, if the aforementioned is the launching pad then knowing the
difference between WHO you want your target audience to be and understanding
who they are is perhaps the vehicle
necessary to make an e-community fly. This
can of course be done via surveys (in person/online) and focus groups. Ultimately
the findings contained within will result in a mission statement that will
allow for further focus and purpose which when fused with dynamic/interactive
branding conveys a community’s personality and hopefully translates into
views/hits and success. Of course,
success these days is as subjective as beauty.
AM
Jaiku falls down Maslow's pyramid and won't get up
I think Kim's case studies are insightful examples of how eCommunity stakeholders have successfully responded to changing needs of members and owners. However, because learning what practices to avoid may also benefit informed planning, I would have appreciated Kim's take on an eCommunity that's failed to keep pace.
In the news today, Ars Technica aired grievances that members of Jaiku (microblogging) have had with the service since Google bought it. Access to user accounts and mashup apps have been unreliable. If Jaiku members can't participate, the developers have failed to meet the most basic physiological needs of their members, who have complained directly and on message boards, but haven't received a response from the inside. Perhaps some transparency might reassure members that they're at least being heard. If someone sends a message, and it's ignored, their self-esteem will be hurt. As the Ars Technica article suggests, members may jump ship to competing services where they'll feel appreciated.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080108-jaiku-users-flee-to-twitte...
Some thoughts on Kim reading
In this reading, Kim discusses the key criterion behind building a successful e-community. The author presents several sound pieces of advice, ranging from having a clear purpose to understanding the needs of the community. Having read chapter 2 of the Wenger et al. reading, I found myself comparing the two readings. While Wenger et al. stress the importance of maintaining a balance between three structural elements behind communities (domain, community, and practice), Kim appears to focus a lot more on the concept of community. Kim proposes that understanding the needs of the target audience, or the community, is the most important step, even more important then the site owner or organization’s personal vision. In some sense, this argument makes sense; after all, a thriving e-community must actually attract people.
However, in comparison to Wenger et al., Kim’s analysis seems somewhat oversimplified. Of course, this is only a small portion of Kim’s book, so perhaps the author addresses some of these concerns later on. However, from this week’s Kim reading, the concept of community takes on a rather different direction from Wenger et al.’s community of practice. In Wenger et al.’s definition, these communities are heavily centered on this shared understanding and common practice, while as in Kim’s idea of an online community, large portals like iVillage and NetNoir, are communities that appear to simply share a common interest in a general domain. In other words the community discussed by Kim is literally what Wenger et al. coin as a community of interest.
In addition, I am skeptical about the best practices and precautions proposed by Kim. To me it seems like any additional community feature should most importantly stay true to the company’s own views (unless they are literally wrong). Indeed, there is the argument that the needs of the target audience should always be any firm’s primary focus, but if the author is going to relate these best practices and strategies to existing business and organizations, then the author should also take into consideration that some of these might be large, established, organizations that have well-framed visions already. Similarly, while Kim’s reference to Maslow’s Hierarchy makes sense and is interesting, it also seems a little idealistic. We should not forget that a lot of people participate in communities anonymously and different individuals have varying level of needs and motivations. Some may be content that they can spend access time and energy to casually engage in an online community, while others may aggressively participate because they are trying to establish a reputation.
Community of practice and online community
I am wondering about the relationship between these two communities. From my perspective, all online communities are subset of community of practice, is it?
what would be the consequence when we move the community of practice to the Internet? Does the communication between members are more efficient or almost out of control? For instance, E-mail correspondences between research members always take me much more time to think about the proper conversation, why not just a face to face meeting in 5 min?
community of practice
Do you perhaps mean that communities of practice are a subset of online communities? I would agree with that, but I would disagree with your statement that all online communities must be communities of practice. To summarize Wenger's concept of community of practice as I understand it, a community of practice is a type of community that is generally more professionally oriented around some kind of shared activity or career (think or look back to the example of Chrysler). Also, as we discussed in class, the entry to such a community is by peripheral participation; you just happen to be a used car salesperson and thus belong to the community of practice shared by used car salesperson.
An online community, on the other hand, could be focused around any number of shared things and could have purely social goals, something which is not a primary goal of a community of practice.
I am not sure that anything in this Kim chapter directly related to communities of practice but I hope I helped to clarify the difference.
I might argue that "online
I might argue that "online communities" and "communities of practice" are two sets that have intersections, but not necessarily have inclusion relationship.
Warm Fuzzies For Profit
Kim's advice on starting an online community stops short of offering readers a 2 for 1 deal on the latest model. "Find a need a fill it" reeks of marketing, brand-image, and corporate board rooms. Let's find a nice community and be sure to give ourselves the biggest piece of the pie.
But once I got past reflexive resistence, I could mentally remove a lot of Kim's bottom line perspective and find some useful practical tips. Making a "creation myth" doesn't really appeal to me. But having a document of shared community experience rings true. Families used to have crests and coat of arms. Intramural sports teams have team cheers and spend sideline time retelling (and embellishing) the best plays of the season. Church groups record the deeds of their saints in religious texts. I dig it.
Just don't make me feel like I'm selling my soul for a few more warm fuzzies.
A "what to" but not a "how to"
I agree with Erin's point, that what Kim is offering here is a very nice and concise account of what to do when starting up a Web community. I especially liked Kim's case examples and the note on page 26 stressing that users need to interact with not only static images/links on a site but also with each other. Unlike the Powazek chapter, though, this tells a reader what to do, but not how to do it. As a result I found it informative and fun to read, but not really insightful in the way that Powazek's was by ending on a series of questions.
Still, the piece succeeds by defining a purpose as “identifying an ongoing, unmet need that your members have in common and which your community is uniquely suited to address” (3). She outlines types of communities (5) including family, work, play, spirituality, and politics which all encompass four types of communities: geographic, demographic, topical, and activity-based (5). There is a very interesting diagram/chart/explanation of user needs which start as basic (physiological) before transcending to abstract (self-actualization) which takes place on pp. (8-9). She then gives a how-to to researching and building an online community with examples from other sites. Like other articles she also stresses “undestanding your audience” (14) here by giving surveys and conducting focus groups. She finally advises things like creating a mission statement, having a site tag, creating a backstory, and branding the site in order to create a unique community.
Comments on Chapter 1
An important point that is made right in the beginning of chapter 1 is the fact that communities evolve, change and expand over time. Many examples i have come across in the past were not as scalable to the growing community and increasing diversity of the interests and goals of it's users. The result is a clustering of members in certain areas of communities that break apart.
I am a little surprised about the very short part on "Clarify your goals" on page 9. It seems that there is more to a successfull community as stated by Kim. Furthermore i think the two principles are not detailed and clear enough developed. I don't agree, that return on investment specifies success, if that refers to the initiator or creator. Because some communities can exis beyond the initial "investment" without further investing any efforts.
At the same time, i don't think that the amount of members defines a successfull community rather than the quality of contributions and consistent activity.
In regards to figure 1.7 on page 15 i want to underline, that the type of incentive is directly connected to the type of member you address. Using different ways to motivate people to contribute ensures, that you get opinons of people with different goals and therefore a more representative result.
Familiar pyramid
Got the basic idea of how to build up a successful community. The idea is clearly elaborated and I totally agree that community evolve over time to keep pace with changing needs of its members. Though I don't have experience building up any communities yet, I was pretty much convinced of the criteria that the author has pointed out in order to get the community successful and I feel it helpful to keep in mind in case I would do such a job in future.
Pyramids and Rhizomes
Kim's article on building successful online communities offered some pragmatic tips on how to address member’s needs in an online community, but the inclusion of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs seemed ill suited. By trying to define user’s needs as discrete stratified layers it seems that the designers are assuming a natural progression and one that may or may not be valid. Furthermore the pyramid would also seem to suggest a development trajectory based on these assumptions. For instance, the third tier--social--assumes that the users will be inclined to form groups at some stage in the developmental of the site. This assumption would lead the site’s administrators to install chatting or blogging functions to the site. However, I don’t think that it is necessarily the case that the users first goal is to form group rather than contribute to a site and be recognized--which would a later stage according to Maslow’s pyramid.
Following this template for a site’s design would also seem to suggest a lack of interaction between the different stages. While the first two tears are certainly requisites for an online community I’m not sure that a user may not have characteristics of the other stages simultaneously. To me it seems that if a user would wants to belong to a community they would do so because they felt that their contributions were valued and that they had some role in the community. But this model seems to suggest that an individual won’t experience these thought simultaneously. Ultimately the model certainly has some truth to it, but trying to apply it the way that the author does seemed like a poor fit.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-Jorge Luis Borges
Maslow Online
I thought mapping the Maslow's pyramid to the online community was "cool".. (yeah.. because it's cool.... so flame me). Maybe because that's the first online adaptation of the Maslow hierarchical of needs that I've seen. It does provide some sort of gauge as to where a community is, but I agree witth jared that "if a user would wants to belong to a community they
would do so ... because they felt that their contributions were valued and
that they had some role in the community"
Wrong usage of Maslow's pyramid
I highly agree with Jared that the usage of Maslow's pyramid is ill suited and not "cool" as Nik stated.
The pyramid can to some extend be used to compare different social classes or similar. While one class is struggling to satisfy basic needs like surviving and security other classes can worry about things like self-realization. In my opinion nearly everybody that has the time to spend time in online communities is passed the first couple of levels of needs. I also don't feel that security is a very basic need in many communities. In most cases people are either not aware of or indifferent to security threats. People use online communities for whatever needs they want to satisfy at that point. This could follow a pattern analog to the pyramid, but it most cases it does not.
Generally Maslow's pyramid has to be viewed with some criticism. If I remember right from my undergrad psych lectures there has been no real empiric evidence for Maslow's model so far. The success of the model is not based on it's predictive qualities but on its straightforwardness and that it is so easy to understand. So it definitely has some value (especially for consulting work, it just looks very scientific), but it must be used much more carefully.
questionable motives
Much of what I would say about the Kim, I said on the Powazek. For example, Kim offers a similar triad: 1) what type of community am I building, 2) why, and 3) for whom? Fortunately, she also points out the inevitability of surprise and the necessity of evolving the community over time.
I'm not sure why she attempts to attach her ideas to Maslow (a popular reference but somewhat discredited academically: it has been demonstrated that primates will attempt to satisfy other needs before physical ones). Nevertheless, it does not ruin her perspective. The pantyhose community example on page 19 is instructive re: "surprise." What is more dismaying is the company's response. For example, I can imagine an advertising campaign that incorporated their new knowledge and showed many women in pantyhose and a few men and had and said "for anyone" which would've boosted their sales and consumer satisfaction.
Finally, on the issue of a mission statement. A mission statement is a lot like a constitution. Unless it states how it can be revised and how it will respond to the community, then it can be dictatorial. It explicitly creates insiders and outsiders, and a mission statement runs the risk of explicitly excluding a segment of your audience that 1) you didn't know about and 2) that is crucial to your success. For example, if the pantyhose company had excluded men as Kim suggests, then they would also have excluded their access to information about men wearing pantyhose, i.e. their own customers.
In addition, her recommendation of having an internal mission statement and an external, i.e. public, one, is typical of corporate thinking. This kind of "lying as practice" is a reason why so many community attempts fail, i.e. there is a failure of trust generated by initial dishonesty. Furthermore, communities generated for corporate reasons always carry profit as an unstated motive.
Some of these points are not critical of Kim per se, but of broader issues in online community.
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PHartzog@umich.edu
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser
corporate vs. community
John Blair
Phartzog, I enjoy reading your posts / rants(my impression, not necessarily your intent) - and tend to agree with many of your thoughts. In this example, it seems that you are omitting the intended audience of the book, (intentionally I presume to dedicate time to your other points), whom I feel would benefit greatly from the somewhat rather obvious considersations one should make when heading down this particular path. However, I can assure you that as a product of the corporate world for far longer than I care to recall, the obvious often eludes project teams. I'm sure that this is in some part to the pressures of that environment that people are rarely afforded the luxury of time to actually do all of these activties, and their management likely wants the finished product and doesn't much care about the long road to produce it. Corporations exist to make money, and those at the top rarely are allowed to forget that. Unfortunately this has developed into short term (quarterly) performance thinking and nearly anything associated with them is going to have a profit aspect to it in some manner, which frequently does not consider the customer community in a long term light.
All that said, I too found the reference to Maslow rathering surprising, but considering the audience of the material, feel it to be a rather useful reference to them.
Overall, the article is very basic in nature and is a good companion to the other readings because of this, as they too tended to be foundation type pieces.
Mind Building: What E-Community Integrated Marketing Can Be More
Just as Paul says, this perspective can be seen as adapting integrated marketing positioning approach to understand how to establish an online community, in both mental and material ways. The main purpose and practice is to discover, articulate, and establish the way that the e-community can deliver values to people.
However, here is what is different of building e-community from what we had in traditional integrated marketing: e-community can be totally designed as what we want it to be, rather than finding the possible value that can be extracted from an existing product. During the process one forming the purpose of the e-community, she is also forming the ideas of the e-community as aggregate minds of a bunch of people. In short, designing an e-community is much like designing an aggregate mind of a group of people. Technical plasticity endows us almost infinite possibilities of doing this configuration. Therefore, this point is just reinforcing Paul’s idea that how the discrepancy between internal and external statements can lead to failures. That is because all the minds have been built in the formation of the community, the confliction would result in the incoherence of the community itself.
Some Thoughts
This reading seems like a guide for an entrepreneur who wants to write a business plan about an online community. From my point of view, this reading is very similar to Powazek’s, but more detailed and pragmatic. It even described how to conduct surveys and run focus groups.
It seems that Kim spent a lot of time talking about how to communicate the mission of the site with your audiences. It includes crafting the mission statement, communicate your backstory, and develop your brand personality. I especially like the idea of backstory, it seems like a legend and gives audiences a common ground to communicate with each other. It might increase the identity of users of the community as well.
In the beginning of the chapter, Kim stated that “because communities evolve, your purpose will change along with the shifting social and economic landscape of the web.” I am just curious how we can detect the change and how to keep pace with the changing need of members and owners. It seems abstract to me.
Marketing Approach and Community Evolution
Rebecca touched on a couple interesting components of the Kim reading. The first, the apparent marketing-style approach presented by Kim, has been lamented by a couple students in this discussion. While I agree that Kim's approach is a bit sterile, I think that it's an honest perspective. Perhaps surveys, user analyses, mission statements, and the like seem like cold methods for community building, but they're heuristics for improving the success of your community. If you build a community out of warmth, happiness, and bunnies, maybe you'll feel like you took a more personable approach to your work, but if it fails to find an audience, your work may very well be in vain. In this regard, the marketing-style approach isn't just an effort to maximize profit (be it financial or otherwise), but a responsibility to a project's stakeholders.
On a completely separate subject, I wanted to address the question of how to detect change within a community. I've spent a considerable amount of time with a few online communities, and have watched them go through several iterations/evolutions. The only way (that I know of) to detect change within a community is to hold an active part in the community yourself, and to provide methods for feedback from the users. In the arena of virtual worlds, shifts in the communities can often be recognized by changes made in the demands on the development staff. As an example, game players may stop requesting vorpal swords of death and destruction and start demanding My Little Pony. This is a pretty clear cut demographic shift. As suggested in the reading, tangential uses of a community can also indicate an evolving population, as was the case of the men discussing pantyhose. Finally, if you want more solid data, you could conduct surveys of your members and compare against previously collected data. am a part. These surveys have helped the developers to adapt the community system to its current userbase, which has persisted and evolved for close to 20 years now.
Living communities evolve...
The list of questions by Kim is much like Powazek, but I like the observation that communities evolve, especially successful ones. The more general a community starts, the more sub-communities will emerge as it grows. What is important is for the community manager/adminstrator to remember to review the site's purposes from time to time. But the difficulty is knowing when is the right time to do that. Some sites shelf-life seem to be shorter than others. Any research on this?
written in the margin
I enjoyed how easy to read this chapter was and felt that it brought out some interesting ideas regarding Maslow's pyramid, emphasizing the need for a mission statement, etc., but I know how highly regarded this book is by Amy Bruckman and others prominent in the field and so far I'm content but not overwhelmingly impressed.
One thing I noticed was on the PDF copy made available to us, someone had written in "marketplace??" next to Figure 1.2 page 5. I'm going to focus on that for this post.
Does this unknown intruder into Kim's book have a point? In the figure, Kim was listing types of communities as they relate to parts of life, listing Family, Work, Play, Spirituality, and Politics as areas of life with types of communities for each. In light of the idea "marketplace" being thrown at this figure and the later mention of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, doesn't it seem that there might be a place in this figure for necessities, consumerism, or knowlege sharing in some form? A community that comes to mind is http://www.kidswithfoodallergies.org/, where people come together not because of a hobby or spiritual need, but rather a practical need of sharing insights into coping with having children with food allergies.
I think this is yet another attempt to define the different types of online communities. The truth is, however, that there is no easy definition.
Lots of Common Sense Stuff
For the most part, all of the advice in this chapter seems like common sense. The most entertaining part was the story about the L'eggs company and their unforeseen community demographics. I agree with the previous commenters that this chapter really describes what should happen, but not really how to do it. Knowing this is the introductory chapter, I think the point was to provide a foundation for what lies ahead in the book.
Also, tangent: I was the proud owner of a lot of land in Geocities. Hollywood/Hills/7923, to be exact. Ah, the golden days of the internet. Don't ask me how I remember the exact URL.
disappointed by lack of depth and one-size-fits-all approach
Kim says to start defining your community with three questions:
And then just dives right into saying "find an unmet need of your members !" That's cute, but it doesn't address the questions with which Kim starts. How do you decide on your members? The needs and membership questions seem very tightly coupled, and I think that the question of who you want your members to be often needs to be considered in parallel to thinking of unmet needs, but unfortunately doesn't seem to be given much treatment, and the chapter seems to assume that your pool of members is just handed over on a platter. I'm disappointed to see such an important question reduced to a (somewhat bizarrre) assumption.
I also question her cookie-cutter approach. You need a mission statement.. and then an external mission statement... and a tag line. She gives some examples, but provides fairly rationale (or explanation of situations in which you might not want to follow these steps), and doesn't really even talk about what the missions and tag lines did for each community.
The chapter also reads strangely in another way. While Kim talks about studying (through surveys and focus groups (what about other methods?)) the members, she talks very little about involving them. This seems to be a fairly commercial approach to online communities (perhaps her audience), but I would have still expected to see a bit of discussion about ways to involve some members early on in setting up and shaping the community: this seems like a good way to get a better-designed community (if you are good at managing the different personalities) that would come with members who take some ownership of the community and are more committed to its success.
I'll acknowledge that a lot of my criticism may come from a combination of reading just one chapter in the book, but overall I found this chapter fairly disappointing. The one-size-fits all approach for online community design may work for some, but not for me.
Useful guide for starters
The author explains clearly initial steps to create a successful community. There are similar to how a brand is created and gets its own loyal consumers. The fundamentals the author is using are indisputable. They are applicable in real life as well. Any service providers has to service the needs of its consumers, to survive.
The community owners need to have clear purpose in mind. Understanding the needs of the users will help the community owners to define the purpose. The community goals are then formed by merging the needs of the users with the goals of the community owners.
Next the purpose and goals of the community needs to be sold to the end users and within the company. This is done using mission statements, tag lines, back story. If the package is sold well the end result will be the creation of a brand. This brand personality can then be continuously tuned.
I wonder if some of the popular social networking sites were started with such clear goals and purposes. I think their success was due to many reasons - one of them could be purpose and serving needs of community. Also it seems naive to think the goals of the owners will naturally map to the needs of the community.
Simplistic and Dated
I'm with Sean - disappointed. And, I wouldn't trust the advice of an article like this in 2008. Maybe, as something to suggest to someone with minimal web experience who needs to set up an online community, but hasn't participated in one herself. Online communities have evolved dramatically since this article was written, the business landscape has changed, design best-preactices have evolved, etc. Sure, some things don't change -- relevancy to community members' lives, return for investors -- but that kind of thing is assumed, or just so fundamental. Rather than reading that your community should be relevant to members' lives, I'd prefer to see strategies for achieving and maintaining relevancy. This is just super beginner stuff.
With regard to the article being dated - I was off-put by page 3. The questions presented are:
-what type of a community am I building?
-why am I building it?
-who am I building it for
Notice the emphasis on "me" the builder. The approach is very top-down and that the organizer will dictate purpose. A more current approach would be to talk about the community that the *members* will be building.
Best takeaway for sure was the L'eggs example. Would have loved to have read more about relevancy for the male pantyhose enthusiast community - it could be a great organic example. There are plenty of places online for men to talk about wearing pantyhose. Why did they gravitate to the L'eggs site, or was it just enthusiasts of the brand?
We'll discuss the designer's role in class
I think, "They own it" is also too simplistic...
On branding and Creation myths
Although I would like say I, too, find the creation myth distasteful, it would be less than honest. I'm a sucker for them, I've scanned the backs of my cereal boxes looking for them (or something besides nutritional content to read). I like the "tell-your-story" concept, if its honest.
If I'm at some back-woods bar and grill and the menu's creation myth suddenly turns fantastical (papa joe then disappeared into the woods after delivering his secret sauce recipe into our hands), then I'm out. But, amidst the near-nauseating array of products, I like Dr. Bronner's soap because its nonsensical moral maxims are entertaining.
As much as I would like to say that I am immune from the bells and whistles of marketing, its a science. I think sites that play by whatever gestalt techniques and little tricks that are out there will win. I don't have cable and still know that "with Geiko Direct a 15 minute call can save me 15 percent or more on car insurance" and that "like a good neighbor state farm is there."
Sites that don't take these dynamics into account will surely be destined to be sooner forgotten. Overall, I think Kim makes some general aesthetic points about community design that are useful but not neccessarily innovative or new.
Lisa McLaughlin
a summary
Judging by the style of the chapter, I would assume its audience would target to businessmen and designers, not academics. So it's understandable that the piece somewhat lacks depth.
The main point of the chapter is to stress the importance of a "purpose" to
online communities. The big three questions are:
How to define your goals:
To articulate your vision:
Common management practice?
While most points Kim made in this chapter make sense, like some other posts here, I also feel that what Kim was trying to say is nothing more than some common management practices, such as knowing your customer, goals, mission statements, etc. I am wondering maybe when Kim wrote this book, people were too crazy about online community that they simply forgot these basic principles, and Kim (and others) was just trying to re-tell the principles to them. That said, I am not as disappointed as some people here. While her arguments and points may not be comprehensive or unique enough, at least Kim pointed out a way to start, and that is a good starting point.
lack of depth to be of real value
I agree with Daniel and others who've mentioned about the lack of depth of the article.
The author states the obvious that one must try to understand their users and their goals and then prioritize the list of their goals. While theoretically this sounds good this and perhaps this is true for a community of people interested in discussing cultivation of oranges, this kind of approach breaks down when you want to design a site like twitter or you tube. How do you create a demographic profile of your site's typical visitor if you are aiming for a site like that.
Further the author mentions that one should understand the goals of the users and the owners should be understood and then gives a variety of good methods you can use to do that. However, there is little mention of the steps to analyze and structure the results, or design strategies in case these goals are not aligned with each other and other such possibilities.
I believe the paper would have been much more useful if it had more depth.
tough crowd, it's only the first chapter folks
I'd just like to point out, that despite the ravaging this chapter recieved from the class, that this is a fairly reputable book on putting together community websites targetted at a non-technical crowd. I definitely agree this has some cheezy elements, but it's the first chapter of a 380-page howto, not the soup to nuts guide for starting a community site.
Besides, she referenced slashdot at least she's got some taste.
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oostendo@umich.edu
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Thoughts on Chapter 1
I tend to agree that I was surprised by the critical comments of this chapter. Some books are written for academics, and some for practitioners, I would say that this book is for the latter. As such, it provides straightforward information on how to build a community that is written more from the business and marketing perspective than other readings we have had so far. It's the only one so far to mention the needs of the *owners*, and discuss how these needs must also be met for a community to be successful. But is this a bad thing? I think all of the advice is useful, and gives community builders some things to think about that may not have been obvious. And, though some people have taken issue with including Maslow's hierachy of needs, can anyone say that there is not *some* truth to it - to satisfy your users' basic needs before getting to any of the fancy stuff with your site?
The best advice to come from this article I think is the need to be flexible when building a community. A good community is one that listens and responds to its users' needs, even as these may change and evolve.
As a final note, I thought it was interesting that when I tried going to several of the sites listed in the examples, such as MomsOnline.com or ParentSoup.com, I discovered that both had been taken over, by Oxygen and iVillage respectively. While I don't know the full story of how these sites changed, could it be the case of what was mentioned in this chapter - that the communities may have met the needs of the users, but didn't meet the needs of the site owners? Even the most vibrant communities will not succeed unless they provide some incentive or gain to the community owners as well - a point well taken.
I just wanted to reitereate
I just wanted to reitereate that I find guidesline this useful -- they provide a quick overview of the types of things you need to think about when building an online community for people who haven't really thought about this topic before.
If I were building an online community I think I'd want my team to skim this chapter so they'd have some common ground going into a discussion on online communities. [We as academics studying ecommunities are not really the target for this writing -- but it's useful to skim and make sure we've thought about everything they touch on]