Swift Kick Central

Private Communities and Engagement - The 90-9-1 Rule

Online community ninja, Jakob Nielsen, is one of the original brains behind the 90-9-1 rule. Stated simply, the rule goes...

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

Wikipedia is a classic example. 99% of Wikipedia users never contribute to the site. Of the 32 million Wikipedia unique visitors in the US, 68,000 are active contributors. In other words, only .02% of US Wikipedia users actually contribute to the site. Wikipedia isn't alone in experiencing such inequality. The rule applies to almost any online community.

Engagement matters, and almost every online community would give a few fingers for more user participation. Lurkers make up a site's largest set of eyeballs. Without lurkers, 90% of the possibility of new engagement is eliminated. Private platforms are often used in higher ed as a way to maintain control (both legally and mentally). By hiding content and contribution behind password protected areas, a community is eliminating 90% of it's possibility of new engagement.

The Student Affairs Collaborative has been our experiment in an open, peer-to-peer, learning community. The SA Blog, The SA Forum, and The #SACHAT are all open systems that allow, and welcome with open arms, lurkers. Lurkers are learning, and often times come back to contribute.

Nelsen says that we can't overcome participate inequality, we can only move the shape of the curve.

We're experimenting with even more ways to create open communities in higher ed, because we believe open communities lead to increased engagement. Not to mention they are cheaper to build and maintain and are great for SEO.

Allow more lurkers in. Make participation easier for lurkers. Reward contributions. Publicly promote your 1%.

Making Them WANT To Do It (Apathy vs Engagement)

If you have ever attended a conference with us, you know we enjoy mixing stuff up through the use of Flashmobs and Blender Events, both of which stem from our Dance Floor Theory Leadership Training. The goals are to:

1. Have Fun
2. Increase Engagement
3. Build Relationships
4. Create Pattern Interrupts
5. Induce Positive Confusion (one reason why)
   

While some activities are repeated from conference to conference, others come from brainstorming sessions with the participants.

At a recent conference in New York, the associates (a.k.a. people/companies who pay money to attend with the intent of selling their product) were complaining to the conference organizer about the lack of conference attendees participating in the exhibit halls and showcases. As the grumbles of agreement erupted from the crowd, the conference organizer turned towards us and asked if we could send out a Flashmob txt about exhibit hall times and showcase times. Our reply? "No, that's not how it works."

It's not about making them HAVE to do it, it's about making them WANT to do it.

If we were to do what the conference organizer suggested, the Flashmob txt would have been something like this:

TXT A: @ 2:30pm the exhibit hall opens up, make sure you're there!

Instead our txt message was this:

TXT B: In the exhibit hall @ exactly 2:35pm howl to the moon for 10 secs like a pack of wolves. Then stop and walk on like nothing happened.

In TXT B we're making them WANT to do it, like they are missing out if they don't attend. TXT B achieves all five goals from above and, for the purposes of the conference, it also gets more attendees to participate in the exhibit hall.

TXT B also removes the marketing from the activity, which is a common mistake when attempting community engagement. If you're marketing, you're marketing, not relationship building.

The difference between them HAVING to do it and them WANTING to do it is the difference between apathy and engagement.

'Fun' can be the change behavior. If you're still not convinced, check out these ideas from The Fun Theory:

To implement change on your campus, start by creating an "I Wish List..."

• I wish more students would recycle
• I wish more students would walk to campus vs drive
• I wish more students would attend events
• I wish more students would smile
• I wish more students would wash their hands
• I wish more students would...

Next create a list of current solutions for each item:

• Post signs above recycle bins
• Don't do anything
• Flyers, posters, emails
• Don't do anything
• Post signs in every bathroom

Lastly, circle up with 2-4 other people and generate a brainstorming list of creative engaging ways to solve each problem that they will WANT to do. Then try it out and if you really want, you can collect quantitative data to determine effectiveness (e.g. Did more people wash their hands?).

It will take more time to implement some of these ideas, but, to repeat from above, it's the difference between apathy and engagement.

p.s. If your idea is really good, try submitting it to the Fun Theory Award for a chance to win $3,600.

The Value of Leveraging Network Nodes In The College Community

Last spring, I was traveling on a public bus from Laguardia Airport in New York to my hotel on the north side of Manhattan. When I got on the bus at the airport, the bus driver was in a heated argument with someone complaining about being charged twice for the ride. The bus driver was clearly not amused and went from zero to outrage in ten seconds. Trying not to be his next target, I smiled, paid and sat down in the first open seat.

For the next 30 minutes, I watched the driver mumble under his breath and shake his head in a perpetual state of anger. Each new passenger who entered the bus needed to only glaze quickly into the driver's eyes to see he was not happy.

The bus made its way into Harlam at about the same time the local high schools were getting out. I was worried about mixing an angry driver with agitating teens. At the first stop in Harlam, two teens jumped on the bus with big smiles and extended a ribbon-tied rolled-up piece of paper toward the driver.

Congratulations! For all the hard work you do on Bus Route M60, you've been awarded the Platinum Honorary Certificate of Greatness!

The driver didn't grab the paper, so the teens placed it on the dashboard and then jumped back to the sidewalk and darted down the street. Visibly annoyed, the driver closed the door and drove on.

A few streets later, we stopped at a red light. The driver used the pause as an opportunity to reach, untie and open the rolled certificate. Impressively, the certificate used fancy Letterpress printing, color images and even had a foil circle stamp at the bottom. I couldn't make out all the text, but at the top it read,

The Platinum Certificate of Greatness is Awarded to Members of Society Who Demonstrate a Commitment to Making Our Lives Better.

I watched as the driver laughed under his breath and then cracked a smile. It was like a magic spell was released when he opened the certificate because, from that moment forward, his attitude totally changed.

A taxi behind us laid on his horn because the light had switched to green several seconds prior. The bus driver calmly said, "ok, ok. I'm moving."

Amazing! Ten minutes ago he probably would have gotten off the bus to physically engage the taxi driver. When new people entered the bus, he welcomed them with a smile, which inspired the new bus riders to grin back.

I sat there in awe as the entire culture of the bus changed. People started smiling,laughing, and talking.

It's amazing how such a simple act targeted at exactly the right person can have such a large impact on the entire community.

The bus driver was a network node for the community. A node in that he connected with hundreds of people on his route throughout the day. His positive or negative attitude was contagious to the people he came in contact with and it set the tone for the culture of the bus.

Teachers and staff members are network nodes for college campus communities. They come in contact with hundreds of students throughout the day. If the teacher or staff member is in a bad mood, that feeling can be contagious to the students he/she comes in contact with.

As we talk about engaging and growing the college community, let's not forget about the teachers and staff members as the network nodes. What can we do to engage them more? Very few student activities' departments we work with have a formal plan on how to engage teachers and staff members. Teachers and staff members are very much a part of the campus culture and shouldn't be ignored.

The other interesting idea that stemmed from this situation is why would the teens bother to take the time to create such a fancy certificate, wait for the bus to arrive, present it to the bus driver and then run away and not see the end result of their effort? Some might answer that they did it for laughs or for fun or as a dare or class project. All of which might be true, but there is something bigger at play here; the teenagers' tiny action had a huge impact on the community's reciprocal social capital.

As author Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone defines it:

I'll do this for you now, without expecting anything immediately in return, and perhaps without even knowing you, confident that down the road you or someone else will return the favor to either me or someone else in the community. A well connected person in a poorly connected society isn't as productive as a well connected person in a well connected society.

More on the concept of reciprocal social capital and why and how you can create it in your community in my next post. Now get back to work!

How to Make Student Engagement Contagious

In 1969, famed psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a social experiment looking at the contagiousness of engagement. Wired magazine's Jonah Lehrer accurately summarizes the experiment:

In this study, Milgram had "confederates" stop on a busy city street and look upwards at the sky. He demonstrated that when one person was looking up, 40 percent of passerby also looked up, just in case something interesting was happening. (There was nothing to look at, just sky and buildings.) When two people were looking up, 60 percent of passerby looked up. When there were three people, the percentage jumped to 65 percent, and, when there were four people, nearly 80 percent of strangers stopped and stared upwards.

Here's a video of the experiment in action:

In the unrelated setting of the 2009 Sasquatch Music Festival, a replication of Milgram's experiment occurred as seen in the video below:

The first dancer was alone for a long while, but loved every moment. Some would consider him to be a bit socially off. Then #2 shows up, and from his facial expression, seems to look back at his friends as if he were doing it as a dare or joke. Then, #3 shows up and this is where it gets serious. From that moment on, the level of engagement exponentially grows. This is no longer one person dancing, or a dare, or a joke; this is a contagious social movement.

Connecting the ideas together gets me thinking about the role of student leaders on campus. The current paradigm for student leaders is to host engaging activities (e.g. dance party, cookouts, musicians, etc) and then try to get people to participate. Most schools have a very difficult time achieving success with this model. Also in this model, student leaders tend to look like the sole person dancing by themselves looking a bit off from the rest of the social scene as was the case with the Sasquatch dancer. Yes you are called a leader for being #1, but the real engagement doesn't happen until #3 shows up.

In terms of student engagement, maybe student leaders should stop trying to be #1 by hosting the events and instead find the random #1s on your campus and support them by being #3.

Stop creating events that you think are good and look for students on your campus that are doing cool stuff and support them. Stop being the leader and start being the supporter.

Say Hello to the First Official Red Rover Newsletter

We've joked about making the tag line for Red Rover be, "Students Actually Use It!" The proof of course is in the pudding which we've already talked about.

We see the students as our "customer" first and the admin/staff as our "customer" second. Most higher ed software solutions seem to think the opposite. Just look at the complex user interfaces with "comprehensive solutions" and you'll know the student wasn't their primary focus. We think a bottom up approach is more effective.

One of the strengths of Red Rover is going to be in the connectedness of it's members to each other. Our goal is to help facilitate a strong Red Rover community that is in line with our bottom up approach.

We already have a Student Affairs Collaborative Blog, a Student Leader Collaborative Blog, a Collaborative Project Wiki Space, and a New Features Usersuggest Forum.

We have more ideas in the pipeline and today we just released our first official Red Rover Newsletter to help us better connect to our users and help them connect with each other. There is a separate monthly newsletter for the Admins, Student Leaders, and Regular Students. The goal is to give them tips on how to be more effective within their respective roles through the use of Red Rover.

If you're interested in signing up for the different newsletters, you can do so below:

THE ADMIN NEWSLETTER:
Email:

THE STUDENT LEADER NEWSLETTER:
Email:

THE REGULAR STUDENT NEWSLETTER:
Email:

Don't Market. Build Well. And Then Community Content.

Found this over at Logic + Emotion - for us and every other entrepreneur out there, it's essential.

| View | Upload your own

There's a little caveat in this theory when it comes to innovation within your target segment.

When, for example, your target market needs education to understand why your product is useful. Let's just say your product relies on Facebook App viral dynamics, uses tags and meta data, and will be the center of a filtered RSS feed ecosystem in education, well then you have to do a fair amount of education. It's not really marketing per se, it's just scaffolding. Building a foundation of understanding so that folks can appreciate.

Conference on the First Year Experience and the Genius of our Community

We often feel really dumb in our work when we repeat the same silly mistakes. This time we wasted four days of work thinking we could come up with the answer on our own instead of asking for advice from the rich pool of knowledge around us.

Last week we reached out to our community of academic professionals for help on what our booth banners for the upcoming FYE conference should say. We posted our current design on the Red Rover marketing wiki page and invited everyone to leave opinions. Their feedback was invaluable as they are in the same job roles as the conference attendees.

Musicians often get to say how they have the coolest and most supportive fans. We'll I'd like to say the same thing about our community of support. Your knowledge is deep, your passion is alive, and without you we would still be swimming in the shallow end. Some of you we just meet, some were there in the beginning and some of you even before that. You are the coolest fans and we appreciate every bit of your advice. Just be patient with us as we'll surely waste another four days before remembering that you probably already know the answer :)

The three main themes from the feedback were:

- Have a catchier center tag line
- Emphasize free
- Ditch the word 'generation' as it's too limiting

With the feedback fresh in our minds and a printing deadline for the conference, we reworked the banners and here's the 'final' (I use that word loosely) version of the banners.

 

We are actually at the conference right now and testing the banners in real time. So far the response has been fairly positive. I suspect much more so than had we went with our original design.

We are annoyed with our use of every buzz word possible because everyone is using them and our message gets lost. Also, the center banner with the black text on red is too hard to read without the correct lighting.

So we want to start the brainstorming session for the next round now and figure out how to be the anti buzz word, the anti 40K solution, the anti in house portal that no one uses, etc. Thoughts?