Energizing Online Communities with Live Text Chat: The KISS Principle

One of the top goals of community managers is to increase site stickiness and have your members come back for more. While regularly updated content and social interaction can help achieve this goal, asynchronous online discussion forums can use the help of live events to energize the community and promote social interaction. In today's hyper connected world, we are continually being conditioned to expect faster response time and slower lag. Regularly recurring live events can be a great way to satisfy the thirst to connect in real time and keep community members interested.

So why a live text chat? What about live webcast, desktop sharing or video streams? After all, a text chat is just not sexy compared to live multimedia events, right? In my previous life as a live event project manager, I have worked on hundreds of live media events; everything from your run of the mill infomercial webcast to Apple's live keynote event video stream. While live audio/video events are exciting, they are also expensive and problematic. What if one part of your complex signal chain breaks? What if the presenter has a sneeze attack? What if an unexpected thunderstorm messes with your satellite up-link signals? There are a lot of "what ifs" in a live media event. I've seen the worse of these "what ifs", and trust me, they are NOT good for your career as an event producer or sponsor.

Let's also look at what live webcast and media streams mean to your audience members. While these events are sold as "interactive" events, how much interaction do your audience members really have with the presenters and other audience members? In a 60 minute webcast, the presenters will typically dedicate 20 minutes to Q&A. You will be lucky to get through more than 2 dozen questions in one live event. Also, during the presentation segment, you are really depending on your presenters' communication skills to keep your audience interested. Face it, a few interactive polls will NOT wake up an audience member who's dozing off. And only so many people are willing to burn away one hour of their precious day for a chance to win that iPod.

A live chat event, on the other hand, is all about audience interaction. Ideally, your presenter should be someone your audience members desire to have real time access to. In the high tech industry, your power users will have a desire to be the first to know. And in a developer's community or technical community, real time access to a tech guru is a very real reward you can present to your community members. Recently, we have had a very successful chat event in Juniper's J-Net Community, and global community members stayed up till well past midnight in their local time zones just to interact with our experts.

Let's not forget about the logistic benefits of a live text chat. Compared to live media streams or screen capturing sessions, text chats have lower chance of technology and talent related failures. VIP's are also much more willing to volunteer for live chat events. After all, you do not need presentation skills to type. The conversation pace of live text chats set an informal tone, and the grammar and spell checker from your word processor should be able to prevent your presenters from sending out any embarrassing mistakes.

Of course, this is not to say that live text chat is the be all, end all solution for live events. Live webcasts and video streams definitely have their values when events are conducted correctly. However, if you are looking for a simple and efficient way to energize your online community, I believe it will be worth your time to take a look at this often overlooked live event tool.

Please leave a comment below if you have any questions or thoughts on conducting a live text chat. In future blog articles, I will outline some of the success strategies I've used in the past for live interactive events.

When Businesses and Personalities Collide

It’s a no brainer: as companies explore word of mouth marketing and introduce brands to the social web, social media savvy employees will be your strongest advocates, acting as the “special forces” troops in starting the groundswell. According to a study conducted by Edelman, 40% consider consider conversations with company employees as a creditable source of information (where as only 13% consider corporate advertising creditable). If your social media super stars are strong influencers in online communities targeting your customer base, it would make sense to empower them, right? After all, in a perfect world, each social media savvy employee can engage in positive conversations about your company's products and services, introducing exponential influences for brand building and customer loyalty efforts.

However, we do not live in a perfect world, and when old school “control” oriented management structures collide with the democratized social web, things can often get very complicated. When the topic of social media initiative comes up with friends and colleagues, it’s not uncommon to hear horror stories of “when social media efforts go bad”.

When social media savvy employees begin to attract large followings on social media platforms and mix personal messages with company related messages, should management and PR be worried? Enlightened companies should already have updated social media policies in place to prevent obvious problems such as disclosing confidential information and financial outlooks. However, things are much more complex when it comes to things NOT included in the guidelines. Should managers take it upon them selves to impose limitation on language, profile photos and use of social media platform during work hours? In my conversation with colleagues and associates, I've heard of horror stories from managers spying on employee's Facebook accounts (measuring "productivity") to unofficial, none HR sanctioned pressure to censor employees profile photos (we are not talking about offensive photos here. These are studio shots which are considered "too glamorous" for conservative business cultures).

There are many different ways to look at the mix of personal vs professional personas. As we venture into this brave new world of intermixing personal brand and business agenda, let's not forget a few points which are often overlooked:

• As we encourage employees to participate in the social web, we need to keep in mind that social media super stars attract followers because of their unique personalities. People connect with people, not banner ads. When you strip the personalities away from your employees, you will end up with spambot like social media accounts. No body wants to "friend" a contact that repeats the press release in their status update verbatim and send out marketing spam day after day.
• When employees feel like they have to hide their personal life and create a 2nd "company approved" accounts to please management, you have failed in the groundswell effort from within. Chances are, the only people connecting to these shill accounts are managers and other employees, and the content from these accounts are probably as transparent and genuine as traditional marketing messages. Your customers will quickly unsubscribe when they do not find value added information. Once again, people want to connect with real people, not another press release feed. Few customers are interested in feeds with only cheerleading shouts and updates on how hard your employees work.
• I am not a fan of "implied" anything. Employees with strong social media followings should not imply that they are company spokespersons, nor should there be implied expectation from management to make them into "rogue mouth pieces". You can be a strong fan of your company's product and services, but it's always a good idea to remind your audience that your opinions are your own, and you do not speak for the company.
• Finally, the golden rule of all online communications: If you don't want it to be printed on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper, don't write it. You can't "whisper" in the online world, and everything you write will become an extension of your personal brand. Think before you comment.

What are some of the issues you are seeing in with the integration of personal and professional social media communication? Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

*Photo Credit: Flickr user "Kathryn"

Google Wave: Initial thoughts

The announcement of Google Wave last week has generated a lot of buzz on the web. By combining email, IM and wiki in a real time collaboration platform, Google Wave has the potential to be the next game changing killer app, drastically changing the way we communicate. I've read a number of reviews in the past few days, and it's been interesting to see many different opinions and predictions around this hot topic. After digesting much information, some of my initial thoughts around Google Wave are as follows:

• Synchronous vs asynchronous communication. Will Google Wave eliminate the need for unproductive meetings? The email/IM/wiki mashup in real time will potentially change corporate cultures by introducing new workflows and change the very definition of meetings. It will be harder to hide behind endless email threads and meeting requests. However, it will also introduce new challenges to time management and project management, becoming a potential for constant distraction. What will this do to employers'/individuals' expectations for "always on, always real time" communications?
  
• Forums, social networks and collaboration software. What will be Google Wave's impact to companies/products such as Lithium, Jive, Facebook, and SharePoint? The freedom to unlock content from isolated platforms and bring them into the Wave will be liberating for end users, but how will social media and collaboration platform vendors differentiate themselves and survive the tidal wave? Can you survive without being a part of the developer ecosystem?
  
• Interpersonal communication vs. mass communication. Social media and collaboration technologies continue to erode the line between interpersonal communication and mass communication. It appears that Google Wave will continue to blur this line as well. What will be some of the privacy and content ownership issues resulting from this new way to communicate?
  

As we hear more about Google Wave in the next few months, I am sure more conversations will be created around the impacts of Google Wave. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Leave a comment below if you'd like to share your thoughts/blogs on Google Wave.

The quest for more screen real estate: NEC CRVD

We all know that one can never have too much storage or too much screen real estate. Check out NEC's 42.8 inch curved monitor. Stack three of these together and you'll be ready for world dominiation (or a really, really large spreadsheet).

Via Engadget

Windows 7 demo videos from Computex 2009 Taipei

From YouTube user "nicylin", hot off the press.

Part I:

Part II:

Via Mobile01

Coming soon to a TV near you: YouTube XL

Yesterday YouTube released YouTube XL: an optimized YouTube UI for the TV screen. While initial reviews were mixed, I believe this is an excellent move on Google's part to counter Hulu. By targeting HTPC and game console installations out there, Google is eager to invading your living room with YouTube XL. Once again, we see that the line between TV screen and PC monitor continues to blur. Before we know it, the "channel surfing" days of none interactive television may be a thing of the past.

Slideshow of Flickr photos tagged with "Computex" and "2009"

Dynamic slideshow of all public photos on Flickr tagged with "Computex" and "2009".