4Talent Inspiration Session – Building Online Communities like Flickr and Habbo Hotel – Part 4
I’ve been sharing my notes from Channel 4’s 4Talent Inspiration Session on Online Communities. A one day intensive workshop on building and growing successful online communities, it took place as part of Birmingham’s first digital festival, Hello Digital.
This post covers my notes from Heather Champ, Director of Community at Flickr’s talk.
What I’ve shared so far:
Part 1 – Community Consultant Ed Mitchell’s talk on talk on public sector online community initiatives
Part 2 – Emma Monks, Senior Manager, Moderation and Safety at teen friendly virtual world, Habbo Hotel’s talk on teen behaviour on Habbo
Part 3 – Ally Branley, Community Manager at Channel 4′s tips on community management
Before I start, I must warn you that this is a pretty long blog post.
The usual disclaimer: I have typed up my hastily scrawled notes from a busy workshop session here, attempting to reproduce my favourite quotes and tips ‘in Heather’s own words’. If you attended Heather’s talk and read anything erroneous in the paragraphs that follow, please shout out in the comments.
Heather started off by sharing that she is Canadian, born to English parents who emigrated before birth. Lives in San Francisco. She showed this cool slide with the words:
“A Cannon will be fired during this performance.”
Having said that, if someone passed round a swear box during her talk, it would have had very few coins in it.
Graduated with an Art degree in 1986, can’t remember where from. “My year of Ennui Sandwiches.”
Her degree included no business classes, she was taught to paint etc. Self-taught graphic designer, learned Photoshop 1.0, when there was only 1 layer and ‘Delete’.
Worked at Princeton, 1994 as a special projects manager. Whilst there(?), the School of Architecture introduced her to the web.
Web 1.0 about a push of content to the web. She worked as a web designer on projects for lots of failed Web 1.0 companies including AOL, Benetton and Cartier.
Started posting scanned pictures –self portraits of herself taken against reflective surfaces online at her site at Jezebel’s Mirror.
Started another site called Friends of Jezebel’s Mirror (FOJM) in 2000 where people could share their own self portraits, taken against reflective surfaces.
Combined her love of photography and community.
FOJM became The Mirror Project. She likes to think of people coming online as a project.
Flickr provides points for people to come in – interests, collaboration etc.
Heather’s heroes in the context of building online communities were a number of early early adopter websites and their owners. The ones I remember were:
From the mid-late 90s: A Woman on Fire; Kottke.org, The Fray, oscillate
2001, 2002 onwards: about personal storytelling, the web made it possible for people to share stories.
Examples: dooce.com, “grew up a Mormon no longer that way”. Transparent blogging about her life. Spoke about creativity at Blogher.
“Flickr is a multiverse of communities”.
They recently investigated their ‘darknets’, the people using Flickr in unconventional ways, much of this done by the guy(s) who algorithmically explore interestingness on Flickr.
They discovered a number of huge connected Indian families using Flickr to share family photos.
Heather interjected her talk with lots of great tips for community builders. Here’s the first:
Heather Champ’s Community Building Tip #1:
Lead by example. Bubble up the good by leading to where you want to go.
Examples of great online communities:
MetaFilter – pioneering community blog/discussion site (my words not hers).
FilePile – closed community with unique content commenting tools ( my words not hers).
Threadless – great example of a niche community done good. She shared that the guys behind it have a great “Don’t be evil” mantra - large sense of social responsibility.
Flickr metrics:
3 billion views a month
2.9 billion photos (and video)
52 million monthly visitors
30 million members
5000 new uploads/minute
I think she said they make 5 copies of every image that could go up.
She joined Flickr 3 and a half years ago after the Yahoo acquisition.
Grown steadily since pre-launch in December 2003, all the way up to their “Oh sh*t” moment when Yahoo! closed down Yahoo! Photos in May 2007.
It was only in the US and English speaking countries until June 2007 when it launched in 7 languages.
Never did any marketing, grew by word of mouth. This is how like minded people came into communities.
Open – there are more ways of getting photos out of Flickr than in. Open APIs.
How it grew initially was the Flickr badge.
Photos on Facebook very different than on Flickr.
Heather Champ’s Community Building Tip #2:
Figure out what really succeeds in certain aspects of community building and using these building blocks. Don’t re-invent the wheel.
The challenge:
Now there are 2.9 billion photos on Flickr. Specific voice and tone, a playfulness, how do we grow that? How do we deal with this when dealing with larger scale?
Heather’s tips for the future:
- Increased regulation – concerned in the US because it is an Election Year. There is the issue of ‘Techno Panic’, getting across the reality of what online community is versus what the media think.
- Online communities to step up and create best practices. There are cycles in online communities, debates that repeat themselves every so often.
Heather Champ’s Community Building Tip #3:
Don’t create walled gardens.
Let people use photos. It’s the meta data, tags and titles that matter.
Heather Champ’s Community Building Tip #4:
Don’t be afraid to make difficult decisions.
Once you’ve decided what isn’t appropriate, stick with those decisions.
What is a community manager? Shepherd, editor, cheer leader, advocate…
“Being a Community Manager is like being a piñata. People beat you with sticks and you still need to give them candy”.
Definitely my favourite quote of the day.
On a filtering system:
Flickr use a 3 point ‘categorisation’ system:
Safe content – Moderate content – Restricted Content
Consequently, appropriateness is classified by content rather than by artistic nature.
There are those who will think the Terms Of Service are great for everybody else but not for them.
It’s about the rights of individuals versus the rights of community.
“Teeter-totters around this melcrum.”
What it takes to be a good community manager: good judgement, diplomatic, sense of humour, thick skin.
She shared about Flickr’s flagging system which allows them to make very granular decisions in terms of actions.
There are email response times of between 4 hours and 3 days and a high priority queue for reporting abuse, response time: 24 hours.
Heather Champ’s Community Building Tip #5:
Communicate expectations.
Ensure your Terms of Service are ‘human readable’. Flickr go one further and have Flickr Community Guidelines which she helped put together. Not a list of ‘Don’ts’ but a list of Dos.
Twitter and Vimeo based their community guidelines on Flickr’s!
Build in tools that let members let you know when stuff is offensive. For example on Flickr, if a photo is flagged several times, the (creator’s) account is flagged.
Let users block other users. If you are blocked: you can’t comment on the user’s photos, sets, you are removed from contacts, cannot favourite their photos etc.
Don’t moderate language. At this point, Emma from Habbo Hotel added that on Habbo they let teens turn their ‘swear filter’ on or off.
Heather doesn’t think community managers should be net nannies. You are adults, create spaces online where we as adults take responsibility.
Communicate! Give members the tools to allow you to scale.
Heather Champ’s Community Building Tip #6:
Don’t wait to inform about change
She gave an example about how Flickr waited 18 months to inform users that they would need a Yahoo! ID for Flickr. They informed users 6-8 weeks before the change.
She also shared about the ‘Wii’ incident when pictures tagged ‘Wii’ were pulled into a Yahoo! page put together for the Wii, without checking the license on each photo.
She showed a cool overlay illustrating how the images being shared changed from pictures of the Wii to images that said ‘Yahoo! sucks’ because the community found out what was going on.
“Have an overall respect for content – legal and right and respectful.”
“Don’t burn through goodwill through bad decisions.”
Change is hard – Stewart Butterfield initially started Flickr to share pictures with his grandmother.
I noticed that when she attributed photos from Flickr in her slides, she always used the following convention:
cc Photographer’s Name FlickrPhotoURL
Interesting.
Make lemonade – don’t take the entire site offline if you can, make rolling changes.
When maintenance work had to be done on Flickr, they ran a competition asking people to print off an image they were using as a splash page and to upload a picture of themselves doing something creative with it.
The prize was a Flickr Pro account.
It was so successful they gave away 15 Pro accounts and also added 3 months free Pro membership to the accounts of everyone who took part.
Should you have ‘news story’ issues that can rapidly scale out of hand, she recommended doing a round robin or setting up a tag team to monitor the issue on the site.
To illustrate, she shared the example of when a thief uploaded pictures of a break-in to a company’s offices onto Flickr by mistake. Flickr had to be up on the issue as tons of new members joined the community when the news broke.
Another example – when Flickr enabled geo-tagging of pictures, a gentleman uploaded 83 photos from islands around Greenland(?) to spell the F word!
This outpouring of creativity was met with tools that made it possible to hide inappropriate pictures from others on Flickr after they are uploaded.
That’s it! Heather shared a lot more than that, faster than I could write and I only noted the points that stood out to me. Great talk…
Next up is my notes from the small group session. Some fantastic and very specific advice on community building from the pros and some very knowledgeable delegates. Goes live tomorrow.
On this and some of the other presentations…
What do you think?
Which is your favourite community building tip?
Let me know in the comments.
UPDATE: A little swamped with other work to post my notes from the small group sessions here. However, I will make the effort if people ask specifically. Leave me a comment and let me know.
Related posts:
- 4Talent Inspiration Session – Building Online Communities like Flickr and Habbo Hotel – Part 3
- 4Talent Inspiration Session – Building Online Communities like Flickr and Habbo Hotel – Part 1
- 4Talent Inspiration Session – Building Online Communities like Flickr and Habbo Hotel – Part 2
- Sheffield Melts Creativity – Melt 2008 Inspiration Session – Part 4
- Sheffield Melts Creativity – Melt 2008 Inspiration Session – Part 2
