Enabling a Mobile Friendly Community

With the help of an extremely talented team of designer, web architect, community visionary and marketing gurus, I've introduced J-Net community members to a new mobile UI from Lithium. It's certainly very encouraging to see a large number of positive comments and praises from our community members. To me, the enthusiasm we saw really validated the media convergence movement to the "three screen and a cloud" vision. As a community manager, it is extremely satisfying to roll out a well received feature that truly helps our community members engage and collaborate more, with a "cool factor" to boot.

The advantages to having a mobile enabled community are fairly obvious, but the consequences of making the wrong mobile decision can have long term negative effects. After all, we have *one* opportunity to do it right when it comes to gaining time share on the second screen folks look at the most. A problematic deployment would have discouraged users from accessing our community via mobile device, and it will be difficult to gain trust and momentum with a second attempt. The new Lithium mobile platforms offers quite a few bells and whistles, but following are two primary reasons why I think Lithium's "got it" when it comes to community mobile UI:

1. Clearly, device agnostic solutions are the wave of the future. While we could have taken the app store route and developed a community app for the most popular mobile device, we would have ended up with a large number of disappointed users complaining about cross platform support. Developing an app for multiple mobile platforms and maintaining multiple versions of the app would've certainly been an unwise investment and a capital drain. Granted, mobile apps have their places in this world. However, there is already a powerful application that takes online discussion data from a community databases and render them according to device screen/capabilities: it's the mobile web browser. Lithium's device detection feature renders outputs according to device/browser sizes and capabilities, and it is a much more scalable solution compared to custom apps.

2. Simplicity and functionality. Lithium's UI designers have created a page layout that is light yet functional. There are no excessive images and codes to load, yet most key functions are available. With the mobile UI, we are allowing our community members to gain productivity with pockets of time previously wasted (waiting in line for coffee, train and bus rides...etc). It's not aimed at replacing or competing with PC screens (not with the current generation of smart phones anyway). Lithium's implementation has the right balance between functionality and simplicity. This elegant solution allows our community members to participate in forums and blogs, while saving some of the less frequently accessed features for the desktop UI.

We are now on the 4th day after the mobile UI launch, so far everything seems to be working fairly smoothly. Is this mobile UI perfect? Of course not. As with all new technology implementations, there are always a few minor glitches. The key is that these minor issues do not degrade user experience, and I am confident they will be patched in future releases. We've ran a few contests soliciting user comments as well as screenshots/photos, and the response has been very enthusiastic. Although I sincerely appreciate all of the positive praises, my favorite user comment cuts to the chase, and it really gave me a good chuckle:





Ain't that the truth in today's hyper connected world ;-)

Web Community Vlogs in the B2B Environment

The art and science of building strong online communities continue to evolve rapidly, and one of the toughest challenges for web community managers out there is to "keep them coming back for more". Community management and power user development are both important to maintain the health of your online community. However, to jump start a new or stale community environment, an injection of useful and interesting content must be a top priority.

Faced with this challenge last year, I was tasked to re-launch an existing technical community on a new platform and take the current activity level to a new high. This was no easy task. After all, B2B products and services are just not as sexy as the next high tech consumer gadget. How do you keep an existing community base interested and lure them to bookmark your community as a destination site? Further more, how do you make it so engaging that they can't wait to share the positive experience with their colleagues? For me, the answer was in rich media and community advocate personalities.

I am fortunate enough to work with an extremely talented team here at Juniper Networks. After much consultation with my team members, the community vlog was born.

I have to admit, even those of us directly involved with the vlog program were slightly skeptical when it was first launched. Deep down inside, I firmly believed in what I was doing: My thesis in graduate school was on the convergence of video and multimedia PC presentations, and I've never looked back since then. I know webcasting works, I know rich media experiences enhance the learning process. However, I've never applied what I know to a B2B technical community setting before, and my fingers were definitely crossed when the first video was launched.

With the help of our award winning staff producer Kevin Eck and an extremely talented community advocate Tawnee Kendall, the vlog program was a hit. My talented teammates were able to make the community vlogs interesting, yet not cheesy or over the top. Community members slowly began to feel like they know "J-Net Tawnee" personally, and praises began to fly in via PM, email, Facebook and Twitter. Value added contents were presented to the community via short, engaging vlog videos. As a result, we began to see registration, page view and participation increase exponentially.

Under the guidance of our manager Paul Gilliham (a seasoned web professional with some serious site architecture and user experience expertise under his belt), we continued to tweak the program, update content and enhance our user management/ranking programs. Today, the difference between that old community we inherited two years ago and our current community is clearly a contrast between night and day.

The current community vlog on our user promo program is embedded below. For the rest of our community vlogs, check out the Juniper Media Center YouTube Channel. I hope you find these videos interesting, even if you are not in the networking equipment industry.