Wall Street Journal builds walled community

Community 2.0 drew my attention to this article on ComputerWorld about the Wall Street Journal dipping a toe into the web 2.0 waters with a walled community which does the usual stuff - 0rofiles, form groups, add photos, interact with others - but only to paid subscribers.

As the article suggests, there are several reasons why this seems to be a bad idea - when you're playing a numbers game (which community is - the hard part is getting critical mass) you can't really afford to be too picky. Plus you can't invite your friends to join you there unless they too are (or become) subscribers.

On the other hand, the exclusiveness of such an online community does have its merits - keeping out the internet nutters, interacting with your peers in a safe environment.

We have some plans for experimenting on the edges of this approach in a couple of our markets so I'll be interested to know how WSJ's initiative fares.

Q. How do you know when you've got a real online community going?

A. They start writing poems about each other?

Getting a reputation

Thanks to Jim for pointing out this useful summary of reputation systems published by Yahoo.

We use several of these in our communities - sometimes all at once because we (by which I mean "I") don't really know our nascent communities quite well enough to know which (if any) pushes their buttons or - indeed - whether reputation matters to them at all.

But now that Yahoo has gone to the trouble of offering us a simple guide, maybe it's time to put some more thought into it...

RBI Community Editors Live Blog - Friday 13th June 2008

On Friday, 13th April (gulp!) some of RBI's Community Editors will be live-blogging their day.

We're doing it for a number of reasons: to raise the profile of Community Editors (and what they do!) in RBI; to explore further the potential of CoverItLive and to have a bit of fun.

As a visitor to the blog you'll be able not only to see what they are up to, but help them out with suggestions and ask questions.

Signed up to take part so far are:

• Simeon Brody, CareSpace (social workers' community)
• Stuart Clarke, Airspace.aero (aviation community)
• Isabel Davies, FWiSpace (agriculture community)

To be reminded nearer the time, just fill out the form below:

Why would anyone want to blog with us...?

I was delighted to read Robert Niles' article on Online Journalism Review: Five steps to encourage readers to blog on your website

As my regular reader knows, we have been rolling out Community Server across many of our websites. The original intent was merely to up our game in terms of discussion forums, but we have also been using the photo gallery and blogs functionality with some surprising results.

In Farmers Weekly Interactive (our first launch) we weren't sure whether to bother switching on the blog functionality. Would farmers really blog?

The answer, it turned out, is yes, yes, yes, yes and several more in that vein.

Robert Niles explains why people might decide to blog in one of our online communities rather than elsewhere:

Anyone can start a blog, for free and in minutes, using established and popular services such as Blogger and Wordpress.com. What would entice a reader to avoid those options in favor of maintaining their blog on your website?

The answer is one word: community.

Most readers, like professional writers, want an audience for their work. Putting a blog online isn't like putting a magazine on the rack at Borders. Starting a blog on Blogger, while technically simple, does little to put a writer's word in front of a potential audience. Promoting the new blog remains the writer's responsibility, and many fall short of the challenge.

Launching a new blog within an established website community, however, gives a new blogger a head start on promoting his or her work. Within the community, bloggers become the audience for their fellow bloggers' work. And if the blogging community is part of a larger content-driven website, such as an online newspaper, non-writing readers can more easily find and become fans of a new blog.

He then goes on to provide five steps for encouraging this which I won't rip off here; read them on his article.

Co-incidentally, we've been doing a bit of work lately on encouraging the people who are blogging on our community sites to do it more, faster better etc - this article is going to help us encourage even more people to blog with us, thanks Robert.

Journalists and online etiquette

I always feel a bit foolish blogging about a blog about a blog, but I recommend Andy Dickinson's post about some peeved Guardian journalists whose community interaction received a robust reaction. You can just imagine them crying "but I'm a journalist!" when they were encouraged to participate in social media and then again when they were disagreed with.

It's tough: journalists didn't become journalists to do this kind of thing because journalism has moved on and (many) journalists haven't. You can understand their horror.

What magazine websites will look like in four years

Very worthwhile reading David Cohn's post on FastCompany.com and how it is embracing social media (from user-generated content blogs, to bookmarking, crowdsourcing questions and letting people make business contacts. Cohn's drift is that this is the future for magazine websites and he interviews - at some length - the brains behind FastCompany.com, Ed Sussman.

It's more than just about community, it's about changing the relationship between journalists and readers/users, something that we've made some modest strides with ourselves in one of our markets.

Definitely worth reading.

A community tale to warm the cockles of your heart

As it's Christmas.

Farmers Weekly has had a thriving online forum for many years.

This year they upgraded their software to provide a faster, more fully featured service (including photo-sharing and community blogs) using the Community Server platform.

The result is a thriving and growing community (the 1,000th new member signed up this week) which has strengthened in the most unexpected ways.

The photograph above shows two of the most active members - kansasfarmer and AllyR and their respective spouses (Mrs kansasfarmer and Mrs AllyR, of course).

In a dramatic transition from online to "IRL", kansasfarmer and Mrs KF visited the UK this year and stayed with various members of the online community (the dollar being what it is, this was probably the only way they could manage it!).

Other highlights included one of the members blogging very personally about the process of adopting a child in China. Meanwhile another farmer blogs from Transylvania. You couldn't make it up.

Farmers are - by the nature of their jobs - quite isolated and the fact that they develop such strong relationships and take the trouble to blog about their lives to the rest of the community is really heart warming.

Moreover - from our point of view - it has quite dramatically changed the way that news decisions are made. Journalists are able to see what the hot topics are as they emerge on the forums and get feedback, information and try out ideas.

This is a fundamental shift in journalists' attitudes and - indeed - to the way that we go about communicating.

When the dreaded Foot and Mouth Disease reared its ugly head again this year, the forums proved the fastest, most effective way of getting bullets of news out to the community (especially overnight).

Moreover, it gave the community a way of feeding back what exactly they wanted the journalists to research - everything from "Can I move my cows from here to here?" to "If this outbreak has come from a government lab, can we sue the government?".

It's brought the Farmers Weekly brand, magazine, website and journalists much closer to the people they are serving.

And - dare I say it - puts the farmers very much in the editorial driving seat. Fantastic.

Gets you right there, doesn't it?

One user at a time. Or possibly two at a time.

Work here continues apace on rolling out our new community software to various websites. Some of these are replacing old technology and are thus delighting their users with much improved functionality and performance.

But a couple of brave markets are trying to start communities from scratch and of course they are finding it very hard work.

At our weekly Community Editors meeting yesterday, one of them said he was getting in touch with a mate who had offered to participate in the new site and asking his mate to ask his mates to go along too.

It struck a chord with me as I had come across this ad the day before:



The line that hit me was: "Your web site does not attract thousands of visitors - only one at a time. Your web site must cater to individuals".

How true, especially of an online community.

I think that as a business we often lose site of this because we are used to doing things en masse: marketing, publishing magazines, news emails.

Thinking about forums in this mass-media way doesn't work very well with communities: what's required is for ONE person at a time to find it useful. Well - two people as they need someone to communicate with. I suppose what I'm getting at is that we need to be working really hard viewing people as individuals and engaging with them as individuals.

As a though excersie, I thought "If I didn't have the amazing resources of this company available to me and I was starting one of these forums from scratch, how would I go about it?"

Well, I'd get my mates in and get them to get their mates in....

Maybe it's not entirely literal; maybe it's slightly metaphorical.

But that's where I'm heading with it.

Why journalists make ideal online community leaders. Maybe.

Interesting article on Online Journalism Review with the tantalising title: !Why journalists make ideal online community leaders".

Now, I kind of know where they are coming from, but the main arguments:

Journalists know how to ask relevant questions
Journalists anticipate the effect of their words
Journalists know how to find the lead
Journalists know how to promote

are a bit on the lame side really.

If the aim is to give journalists the confidence to engage with communities online, then fine but if I were recruiting, I'm not sure I'd call journalists "ideal online community leaders".

Some are of course. We have an excellent community editor who was previously a journalist, but as a recruiter, a journalist wouldn't be my starting point.

If I were going to be controversial, I might come up with an article called journalists make terrible online community leaders and my points would be:

Journalists like to decide what's important
Journalists despise user generated content
Journalists don't want to be community leaders

Not all of them of course. Just some.

The original article is here.

Oh, and as a PS, I think there's one thing I would add to the list:
Journalists are familiar with media law.

UPDATE and a PPS: Thanks to my colleague.Adam for spotting this excellent rebuttal (where do people find the time?)

Care in the farming community

We talk - quite blithely sometimes - about developing online communities in our business. But sometimes something happens that gives you a minor epiphany as to what that really means.We are in the process of upgrading our rather pedestrian forums into something nearer to social media in several of our markets.

We decided (for a variety of reasons which I won't go into) to go with Community Server which - in addition to forums - offers image sharing and community blogs

The first of our titles to implement this was FWi the online companion to Farmers Weekly magazine.

This already had a very well-used forum but thanks to the new functionality and the skills of the Community Editor Isabel Davies (a new role, incidentally) the whole thing has flourished and - to get back to my original point - given us a whole series of surprises.

Did we expect farmers to be into uploading photos? No. (the image gallery is now the biggest traffic generator)

Did we expect farmers to want to blog? No. That we have five people blogging is amazing.

But it's the human community stuff that has really amazed us. One regular US contributor came over to the UK for a holiday with his wife and spent the whole time staying with friends he had made through the site.

Another member who is in China adopting a baby is blogging about his experiences.

We are principally hard-nosed business publishers, so naturally these kinds of things don't appear in our list of metrics and success factors. But when they happen, you just know that our aim of giving farmers a space of their own has had some success.

If we weren't hard-nosed business publishers, it might bring a tear to our eyes.