I just spoke today with Andy Lopata, who wrote an interesting piece on CEO networks.
Seems like a simple enough concept, right? If you want to be thought of as an expert in your field, besides just knowing your stuff, if you could figure out how experts — not wanna-be experts, but true “A-list” experts that people respect, quote and hire — act, then acting like them, rather than acting like a wanna-be, should boost your credibility even more.
Fortunately for you, there actually are a few things that those A-list experts have in common regarding how they behave in online communities, and this has been a key focus of my study over the past five years. I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while and finally have as part of the launch of the new collaborative blog, Tribal Seduction:
5 Ways to Act Like an Expert in Online Communities
Now please understand… this isn’t about gaming the system to pretend to be an expert when you’re really not. This is about making some smart decisions about how you use your time and how you engage people in online communities. You’ll find, as you put these into practice, that not only will they slowly but surely enhance your reputation, but they’ll also give you more time than your typical engagement pattern. You can use that time to go do the same thing in another community, or to go do other things to enhance your expert reputation, like write a blog or better yet, a book.
Shara Karasic is an online community consultant and currently the Community Manager for Work.com (where I’m Community Leader for the Sales & Marketing Channel). Shara is a heavy user of social networking / social media sites (she maintains an extensive, up-to-date list here).
Shara was recently interviewed for Tech PR War Stories about social media strategies and sites PR professionals should be exploring for their clients.
Download and listen to the interview here (16:05 MP3)
Work.com has a ton of how-to guides on social media and social networking you might want to check out:
Every so often in the business-oriented online communities in which I participate, the issue of free speech and censorship comes up, usually from someone (or several someones) who is testing or pushing the envelope of the acceptable boundaries within the community — profanity, flame wars, etc.
Is free speech an absolute right within online communities? Can an online community, regardless of its size and membership requirements, establish and enforce a more restrictive code of conduct?
There is a long, well-established precedent for moderation/governance in online communities — even ones that are open to the public. Whether it has been tested for constitutional validity in court or not (and I haven’t found any court cases, but would greatly appreciate any references anyone may have), online communities have for years been in the practice of having codes of conduct that were far more restrictive than constitutional protections. Even large, open membership communities have moderators who are able to edit or delete posts and suspend or eject members who violate those codes of conduct. To say that the boundaries of constitutionally protected free speech is applicable to any privately-owned online community is to go contrary to decades of business practices.
Do blogs change this? What about sites like Gather, Ecademy or AlwaysOn, in which individual blogs are aggregated or displayed in the front page and other pages? One could make the argument that blogs are somehow different because of the fact that they are an individual voice rather than a community space. However, the aggregation of them on the front page and the nature of the threaded comments would, I think, negate any such argument. The site may call them blogs, but if they’re aggregated and allow comments, they’re still really just one big threaded discussion forum. I doubt a court would see a substantial difference simply based on the slight technical difference.
Even so, most hosting companies, including blog hosting companies, also have terms of service that are more restrictive than free speech limits, typically restricting hate speech and pornography, among other things. For example, WordPress.com prohibits the use of PayPerPost. Is that a violation of a blogger’s right to free speech?
Under the Uniform Commercial Code, we all have the right to voluntary restrict our free speech by contract, and when we join an online community we are doing just that — subject to whatever the terms of service are. In fact, the contract doesn’t even have to be explicitily signed in order to be in effect. Consider that when you walk into a theater or restaurant, you give up some of your free speech rights. Do anything that is significantly unpleasant to other patrons — talk too loudly, let your kids run wild, etc. — and you’ll be warned and eventually ejected.
Why would anyone expect an online community to be any different?
You do have the right of free speech, but the owners of a community also have the right to establish and enforce codes of conduct within the community, and be joining that community, your right of contract supercedes your right of free speech.
So when you find yourself bumping up against the boundaries of behavior in an online community, you might want to consider whether that community is really the right community for you. If so, then you can either adapt your behavior to the code of conduct or you can use persuasive means to try to change the code of conduct. But don’t make cries of “Censorship!” — you gave up that right when you joined.
Sid Yadav writes, “33 Places to Hangout in the Social Networking Era,” a summary with brief profiles of 33 different social networks, each with descriptions and target demographics.
Andrew Shaindlin (who contributed a sub-chapter of The Virtual Handshake) just co-wrote a good piece on Online Networks: A New Tool for Alumni Relations : How third party social and business networking sites can benefit alumni online communities. His coauthor is Elizabeth Allen, Communications Coordinator at the Caltech Alumni Association.
One of the great ironies (and brilliant aspects) of TheFacebook is that it has monetized the networks of Harvard, Yale, and virtually every other university in the US—without paying them a dime! Andrew wrote this piece to explore how university alumni communities should respond to these new services.
From Jason Dowdell (via Claire Delong of Accolo): Konstantin Guericke of LinkedIn writes:
There are two types of acceptance rates…
1.) Those from invitations
2.) Those from introductions.Invitations to connect are generally from people you know and trust already, like former co-workers, classmates, etc.. By accepting an invitation, you agree to make introductions for the person when he/she wants to meet people you or your contacts know. Of the people who send over 10 invitiations, 7% have an acceptance rate of 90% or higher. These kinds of conversion rates are unthinkable in traditional marketing, but only possible via word-of-mouth marketing where there are well-established relationships and bonds of trust.
Introductions are contact requests from people you generally don’t know and who are contacting you about doing business via an introduction from someone you know. When accepting a contact request, you are providing your contact information, so you can start a dialog about the opportunity via phone or email. When people receive an introduction, they accept it (meaning they provide their contact info to the sender) 84% of the time. This is quite amazing given that they generally don’t know the sender, and it’s a testament to the fact that business users realy heavily on social filters — they are much more willing to give their attention and respond favorably to someone who comes introduced (even if the sender is just a friend of a friend of their connection) than if they get contacted directly via phone or email where nobody is vouching for the sender and where they can’t easily look up the profile of the sender. It also shows that most users are careful which people they let into their LinkedIn network and that they give signficant weight to the fact that one of their LinkedIn connections is recommending the sender, based on their direct knowledge of the sender or based on the recommendation provided about the sender by someone they know and trust.
What comparable data can other services provide? Any ideas?
One of the questions David and I are frequently asked, and that comes up as a recurring topic of debate, is, “Which online tool is best for me to meet and sell to the right people?” In our latest Fast Company column, Of Hammers, Wrenches, and Screwdrivers, we take a side-by-side look at online networking communities, blogging, and LinkedIn, and compare and contrast them based upon the Seven Keys framework we introduced in The Virtual Handshake.
While the boundaries between the application of these tools is somewhat fuzzy and they tend to cross over each other, this is a handy, concise overview of the predominant models and how they relate to each other and to your activities.
David Teten notes that Professor Constance Porter wrote more on this topic at Centrality Journal. See Blogs, Social Networking Sites or Virtual Communities: Alternative Paths to Building Relational Equity with Customers (Part 2)
Last year, our ex-employee A.J. Al-Fayez introduced me to two current Harvard MBA students, Matthew Chun and David Morland. Matthew and David are both former engineers and management consultants, with an interest in internet and technology businesses. As a part of John Wells’ class entitled “Strategic Agility: Competing On The Edge,” they wrote a strategic analysis of social networking companies, with a focus on why MySpace overtook Friendster. This article is must-reading for anyone interested in building a successful online community, but particularly the folks at MySpace. It’s very easy to lose buzz and excitement in an online community, just as today’s hot bar can be tomorrow’s hangout for geeks. MySpace has no guarantee that it will retain its current audience in the future, something Friendster knows all too well.
Social Networking Platforms: From Friendster to Myspace and Beyond
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