Micki Krimmel with the team. Photo by Pulp Secret’s Charles Schneider.
The one and only Micki Krimmel was recently visiting New York for the first time in years, and we asked her to come and do a workshop with our team about building better community features for our audiences.
Besides being the only person I know of who has a photo of herself with Al Gore up on Flickr, Micki has been a web guru to countless people in her work at Participant (where she helped Mr. Gore build the massive grassroots movement at climatecrisis.net), Revver, WorldChanging, and most recently as a social media consultant and entrepreneur.
Out of our two hour brainstorming session about our networks and shows came a number of suggestions that would be great for anyone building an offering around video content on the web:
1. Everybody should be a community manager.
It doesn’t matter if there’s a person in your company with a title of community manager, or director of community. Every person on the team should be involved and responding and keeping the conversation going.*
*Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody, is required reading for anyone in our space.
2. Whuffi can be more valuable than money.
Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom describes a future where all material needs are met, so people are incentivized by reputation and social capital - Whuffi. This is something that happens in communities all the time — people can often get things done by virtue of their social reputation or prestige that money can’t. Tara Hunt’s new book is all about it. [Micki added on her blog: "My point here was about incentives. It’s common for people to want to provide material incentives to people for participating in their community. People don’t talk to each other for prizes. They do it for other, more personal reasons. They do it for social capital, for whuffie, or as Clay Shirky says in Here Comes Everybody, Love."]
3. The most scalable way to respond to people is openly and publicly.
Micki cited tools like Get Satisfaction as a way to respond to customer questions in a public, easy to access way, as well as elements in our networks like Indy Mogul and ThreadBanger that turn responses to viewer questions into content for the whole audience.
4. Consider ending every video with a question.
This is pretty self-explanatory, but a simple way to get audience responses that not enough video creators do. Ze Frank did it brilliantly. We recently ended our breakout Ultra Kawaii hit (2mm+ views), “Animal Idol”, with a question that’s garnered over 30,000 comments and counting across the web (according to TubeMogul, we’re still averaging over 750 comments a day on that episode, despite it being up for two months).
5. The easier you make it to participate, the more people will.
It’s easier to favorite or digg something than rate something, easier to rate something than comment or review — which is consistently why less people do each of those things. You could follow a question (see #4) with a simple thumbs up/thumbs down polling widget. Our new Nite Fite site is going to include a simple tool to poll people during and after every episode, and it’s going to be interesting to see if people use it more than they use comments.
6. People put something on their blogs because it says something about them, not because they want to promote a product they like.
Think about that one for a while.
7. The difference between your YouTube channel and your site is often like the difference between a public and a private space.
We talked about this for a while: for instance, how comments on a YouTube video tend to be about the creators, where comments on your own site tend more to be addressed to the creators. The difference between one place and the other can be like the difference between watching a movie in the movie theater with a bunch of strangers, and watching it at home with a group of your friends.
8. Don’t just reward the top participators.
Having all kinds of participation is valuable. Look for ways to welcome the newest people who post for the first time or join the community.
9. If you don’t have the tool, that doesn’t mean don’t do it.
Engage people with whatever tools you have. A great example from our own world is the Indy Mogul “Request an Effect” page, which addresses rule #3 above with a pretty basic tool: a blog post with a super long comments thread. However, with over 1000 comments page has gotten so hard to use, we’re probably not getting as much participation as we could (see rule #5) — if we replaced this page with a browsable, searchable forum of some kind where people could vote on favorites, it would get even more use.
10. Don’t worry about exclusive content for your site.
Content goes where it wants. What’s exclusive about your site is the community experience you offer — it can be a safe place, where you can get to know people with common interests. Making that the best experience possible is the real key to building unique value in your site.
Thanks, Micki! So I’m curious — anyone reading out there: useful? What would you add to Micki’s advice?
November has passed us by. It’s gone, never to return again. Most Novembers are perfectly normal … people go about their daily grinds, accomplishing the tasks before them, doing what needs to be done and then checking out.
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