marc siegel - Cultivating Community2024-03-29T10:46:04Zhttps://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/feed/tag/marc+siegelHuman-Centered Aspects of Community Management [Video]https://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/human-centered-aspects-of-community-with-marc-siegel-video2013-09-11T15:40:28.000Z2013-09-11T15:40:28.000ZCrystalhttps://cultivate.ning.com/community/CrystalC<div><p>Communities are collections of people, with desires and egos, so instead of worrying about community in terms of technical platform or UX Design, let's focus on what makes people tick and want to participate in our online communities. Humans are at the forefront of this discussion led by longtime community manager, <a href="https://twitter.com/marcsiegel" target="_blank">Marc Siegel</a>.</p>
<p>Using his experience in a variety of communities, including B2B and consumer product and support, Marc Siegel took us through the steps necessary to create, build, and nourish a human-centered online community experience. Watch the recording below:</p>
<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yH_DhMYHvWY?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></p>
<p>Below are a few of the points that really resonated with us, and we'd love to know what elements of Marc's presentation struck a cord with you. Join the discussion over at the <a href="http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/human-centered-community-the-discussion" target="_blank">Ning Creators network</a> or share your response as a comment below. </p>
<p>People come for content, but stay for relationships. If you can become interested in some of the other people in the community, learn a bit more about them, and start having conversations with them, you've created a relationship. The simplest way to do this is by actually using a member's name when conversing with her, and it's also good practice to share your name when signing off. </p>
<p>When talking to your community members, make sure to be open, honest, and transparent. This is especially important when resolving disputes. If you don't know about something or can't speak to it, it's best to be upfront about that and avoid "squirrely" responses which can erode trust.</p>
<p>When criticism is levied within your community, censoring that content is not the answer. Acknowledge the criticism and let your members know that they're being heard, even if nothing can be done about it at the moment. </p>
<p>One of the most useful aspects of human-centered community is the ability to really involve your community members into decisions about a product. Power-users in your community are the ones who are already invested in your organization or product and the more you can take their constructive feedback to the product team or involve them in the process, the more your community will come together.  </p>
</div>Upcoming Webinar - Human Centered Communityhttps://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/upcoming-webinar-human-centered-community2013-09-03T21:54:13.000Z2013-09-03T21:54:13.000ZCrystalhttps://cultivate.ning.com/community/CrystalC<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2208285?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p><span class="font-size-3">Communities are collections of people, with desires and egos. Instead of worrying about community in terms of technical platform or UX experience, let’s focus on what makes people tick and want to participate in our online communities. We’ll keep humans at the forefront of this discussion.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Using his experience in a variety of communities, Marc Siegel will take you through the steps necessary to create, build, and nourish a human-centered online community experience. <font color="#75AF2D"><a target="_blank" href="https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/220615182" xt="SPCLICK" name="attendee_gotowebinar_com_" id="attendee_gotowebinar_com_">Join us</a> </font>September 10th to learn the ins and outs of connecting with your community in a humanized way.</span></p>
<p style="color: #476a73; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #000000;" class="font-size-3"><strong>Tuesday September 10 at 10am PDT</strong></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; color: #476a73; line-height: 22px; text-align: center; font-weight: bold;"><span class="font-size-3"><a target="_blank" href="https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/220615182" xt="SPCLICK" name="attendee_gotowebinar_com_" id="attendee_gotowebinar_com_"><img style="border: 0px solid; width: 150px; height: 46px;" name="Cont_4" src="http://creators.ning.com/images/signupnow.png" alt="sign up button" align="middle" hspace="0" vspace="0" id="Cont_4"></a></span></p>
<p style="color: #476a73; text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><span style="color: #000000;">(find your</span> <a href="http://everytimezone.com/#2013-9-10,300,6bj" target="_blank"><font color="#75AF2D">local time here</font></a><span style="color: #000000;">)</span></span></p>
<p style="color: #476a73; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #000000;" class="font-size-3"><strong>Key Takeaways:</strong></span></p>
<ul>
<li><span class="font-size-3">How to humanize interactions with a community</span></li>
<li><span class="font-size-3">Activating volunteers to take leading roles within your community</span></li>
<li><span class="font-size-3">Tailoring engagement to different member stages</span></li>
<li><span class="font-size-3">Effectively designing products within the community</span></li>
</ul>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><strong>About the Presenter:</strong></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281928?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281928?profile=original" class="align-left" style="padding: 5px;"></a>Marc Siegel lives in San Jose with one wife, two daughters, and various pumpkins. He’s been doing online community since before the Web existed for NASA, IBM, and several startups, both in consumer and B2B. He has built several support communities where customers help one another solve problems, offloading paid support. Marc’s passion is helping companies get close to their customers, especially for product ideas.</span><br> <br> <span class="font-size-3">A recording of this webinar will be available on the Ning <a href="http://cultivate.ning.com/community-management-talks" target="_blank"><font color="#75AF2D">Community Management Talks</font></a> channel, and you can follow the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #NingTalk.</span></p></div>Special Initiatives for Online Communitieshttps://cultivate.ning.com/ning-blog/special-initiatives-for-online-communities2013-06-25T16:00:00.000Z2013-06-25T16:00:00.000ZGuest Contributorhttps://cultivate.ning.com/community/GuestContributor<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2208268?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>Successful Community Managers are experts in facilitating conversations, and we’re all learning best practices on seeding new discussions, responding warmly, etc. These topics are the bread-and-butter of Community Management. In this article, we want to explore special projects or initiatives that add to the community mix. </p>
<p>Our goals are twofold. We hope to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Generate discussion on the projects we did; what else should we have considered?</li>
<li>Learn about special projects you’ve done or are contemplating? Our projects were for the consumer Internet space. What segment are you in and how do your circumstances change things?</li>
</ul>
<p>A year ago, in the summer of 2012, we started a new community from scratch for Simraceway (SRW), a PC-based racing simulation game. Our customers were passionate enthusiasts, so it was not long before the community buzzed with activity, providing customer-to-customer support, lots of feedback for the SRW Product team, and new business via SEO-tuned threads. </p>
<p>To this mix we added the following initiatives:<a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281792?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281792?profile=original" width="96" class="align-right"></a><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281814?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281814?profile=original" width="93" class="align-right"></a></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><b><i>Community Champions:</i></b></span></p>
<p>Customers are recognized for extra contributions to the community or the company. Champions were handpicked, not system-generated. They often earned their designation by being especially helpful in the forums or live chats. Others helped with outreach or hardware/software troubleshooting. SRW had about 18 Champions after one year. Champions appeared online with a special badge and markings.</p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><b><i>You vs. SRW:</i></b></span></p>
<p>Every Friday for one year, various SRW employees were available in-game to race customers. The morning featured a one-hour session for experts, with big bragging rights up for grabs. Three hours in the afternoon were for casual racers. The chat conversations that occurred between these races helped humanize our company and foster personal (emotional/loyal) relationships with customers.</p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><b><i>Conversations with SRW</i></b><b>:</b></span></p>
<p>We held several live Google Hangouts, each with about 7 customers and 3-4 SRW Product people. The discussions lasted for one hour and were focused on what ideas and feedback the customers had for our company. Our internal plan was to do a lot of listening and much less talking. The first few sessions included highly-skilled players. Before the initiative was stopped, we next planned to involve less-skilled players, and to use Hangouts-On-Air to broadcast the sessions to a much wider audience. </p>
<p>Simraceway was very good at taking customer ideas from our (asynchronous) community and implementing them into our product. However, these live sessions were transformative for both customers and internal Product staff in the immediacy and intimacy of the session.</p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><b><i>Testers:</i></b></span></p>
<p>About 40 customers (in various locations and with various system configurations) were organized to help test our releases, both game code and car/track assets. After software updates cleared our internal QA department, the Testers received a copy one week before General Release. In this week, bugs and issues could be surfaced and corrected before problems affected our worldwide audience. The Testers were excited to have the first crack at things, generating early buzz in the community. As of this writing, the Testers are organized but have not yet been used for a release.</p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><b><i>Desafio América Latina</i></b><b>:</b></span></p>
<p>Simraceway (game and web) was not localized and only appeared in English. This hurt us in some key racing markets like Brazil. A customer we called “Rock-star” came forth with an idea to organize a series of events where the title and descriptions were in Portuguese, and on the day of the event, the in-game chats were filled with Portuguese speakers. Rock-star recruited other Brazilians to help, and involved the community in choosing the event specifics. This team of Brazilian sim-racers was also responsible for marketing the event widely. Over time, the idea grew to also include Spanish speakers in Latin America and Spain.</p>
<p>While we loved the idea, the implementation did not go so well. The customers were ineffective at bringing in many Portuguese and Spanish racers. Besides language, a localized payment scheme was another pitfall. SRW did not have a good mechanism to allow common Brazilians to easily put money into the game.</p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><b><i>Masterclass:</i></b></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><b><i><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281875?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281875?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="500" class="align-center"></a></i></b></span></p>
<p>Simraceway is a game of skill, where players improve by practicing, by better understanding racing theory (racing line, corner apex), and by studying faster racers. We recruited a group of elite racers to add their unique touches to a pre-designed curriculum and teach vital racing techniques to others. Currently, this Masterclass has not yet gone operational, but we have recruited 5 customers who have personalized both Beginner and Intermediate curriculums and who will serve as Instructors. The Beginner class will be primarily canned videos watched anytime, and then augmented with live Q&A sessions. The Intermediate class is done in-game, with one volunteer Instructor doing lead-follow laps with a small (~4) group of lesser skilled racers. For the first few sessions, SRW’s professional drivers will review footage of the lead-follow sessions to coach our Instructors and ensure the class is meeting high standards. Leveraging customers to teach customers allows for community management resources to be utilized more creatively.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">These are the special programs we have organized. We’d love to discuss your thoughts on these initiatives or your own.</span></p>
<p> </p>
<p><span class="font-size-4">About The Authors: </span></p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281903?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281903?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="100" class="align-left" style="padding: 5px;"></a><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=178087630" target="_self">Ojan Namvar</a>, Simraceway Community Manager - Ojan Namvar, a 24-year old with an overpriced B.A. of Philosophy from the University of Redlands, will be relocating back to the Bay Area shortly. A lover of all things tech, he has been given a great introduction to the world of startups by his current endeavors with the free-to-play simulation racing game Simraceway. A licensed EMT, bedroom musician, and craft beer dilettante, Ojan hopes to one day combine his interests into something that could pay the rent. Until then, his passion for building computers and communities has satisfyingly served as his creative outlets. You can email him at onamvar88@gmail.com.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281930?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1281930?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="100" class="align-left" style="padding: 5px;"></a><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcsiegel/" target="_blank">Marc Siegel</a>, (former) Simraceway Manager of Community and Customer Service - Marc Siegel lives in San Jose with one wife, two daughters, and various pumpkins. He’s been doing online community since before the web existed for NASA, IBM, and several startups, both in consumer and B2B, including developer relations. Marc’s passion is helping companies get close to their customers, especially for product ideas. When people think they’ve helped build something, they’ll be loyal as puppies. He has built several support communities where customers help one another solve problems, offloading paid support. Marc is currently looking for fulltime or contract/temp work opportunities. You can email him at msiegel@gmail.com.</p>
<p> </p></div>