Overview: Communications Tactics

Good overview of the year+ - long debate about comments, trolls & social media, "from the baby-and-the-bathwater dept ... This sudden disdain for traditional comments raises the question: is Facebook somehow immune to stupid comments? Is forcing all news conversation on to Facebook's terms really an improvement in meaningful dialogue?... It's lik…

Interesting reaction to Reuters, who argued "Much of the well-informed and articulate discussion around news... has moved to social media and online forums... But is that enough justification for giving up comments? ... not everyone is on Twitter, and not everyone is on Facebook, and so any conversation or interaction that occurs there will be in…

""How to stop trolling online?” is the question of the moment. From [Quora's] inception, its efforts have been geared towards “making quality scale,” ... also meant keep making the application a safe place for users to write... It has introduced a new anti-harassment feature, where users are prompted to flag any comment or post ... Quora moderat…

Unsurprising that LinkedIn promoted this post.... the comments rapidly turned into an interesting conversation on Linkedin v. Facebook... people seem to comment more on LinkedIn posts than elsewhere. Perhaps the return of blogging that people are starting to talk about is next.

"Your community, as it grows, is not really your choice. ... Your first 10 members will define your 100 will define your 1,000 will define your 1,000,000. The only choice you have as a business and as a host is who you invite to be your first 10-100 members. After that, you sort of have to get out of the way and then meet the needs of this new thi…

"Continuing its tradition of airing its internal discussions outside the office, the staff at Jezebel today called out the higher-ups at parent Gawker Media today over some pretty disgusting trolling at the site." I wonder how much more loyalty Jezebel's community feel for the site because they air their internal problems so publicly? I wonder ho…

"Canadian researchers have confirmed what most people suspected all along: that internet trolls are archetypal Machiavellian sadists.... via Heather-Anne MacLean's post: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140730175026-5723090-don-t-feed-the-trolls-research-reveals-psychopathy - Online trolls are psychopaths and sadists, psychologists …

"The only kind of moderation that scales with the community is the community. ... Through the trust system, Discourse communities develop a natural immune system that repels the trolls, spam, and hate that eventually tear apart communities on other forum software. - Stack Overflow Founder's Next Big Thing: Reinventing Online Communities – ReadWri…

"The experience of talking about race, ethnicity and culture on the Internet is nearly always deeply disenchanting. People don't even talk past each other; they talk right through each other. Prejudices harden. We find ourselves confirming our worst stereotypes of one another. And that's before the slurs fly." Some great lessons for making it wor…

As Michael Silverman puts it, "a brilliant online community has more potential than your current social networking strategy", and he isn't even talking about EU communications. The only downside, not mentioned, is that convening a community requires: - web publishing technologies which do not date from the previous millennium - real online commu…

" If we wanted more email subscribers, we’d have to make it easier for people to subscribe." Quartz's new approach to enewslettre subscription, which has seen daily subscriber rates double since February, is like the 'Quick Subscribe' feature I always propose for online community sites: - some users may create an account to subscribe, but most wo…

There are more good recommendations in here than can be summarised, but if I had to choose one, it's: "Integrate the developers and editors, from where they sit to whom they report to. If you’re going to do social journalism well, you’re becoming a technology platform company... Almost all the important breakthroughs in social media have come fro…

“Comments from readers are probably one of the thorniest problems for online publishers of all kinds… and the methods for dealing with them are all over the map... We spoke to online editors and community managers at 104 news organisations from 63 countries across the globe, plus a selection of experts from the corporate and academic worlds to id…

Interesting survey of HuffPo, Techcrunch & other experiences with changing commenting systems and policies. - HuffPost policy banishes trolls — and drives away some frequent commenters | Poynter.

Some key points from "The Benefits of Quality Content and Genuine Social Engagement ... to create great, sharable, engaging content and become an active participant on social platforms: - Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them.... - Content that gets highly shared is content with heart. Real stories, re…

Exactly 11 years (give or take a month) after we figured out how thematic architectures on EUROPA could support online conversations with what we called the 'interested general public', the EC rediscovers it all over again: "This would give us the opportunity to reach interested audiences, and create a space for real engagement. It also means shi…

"“The level of discourse — the difference — was pretty stunning,” Orr said. The people posting through Facebook Comments displayed anger, but it didn’t have to be heavily moderated. “On the articles, it immediately plunged into the lowest common denominator — racism, threats, vulgarity. It was night-and-day.”"

"the new feature ... gives both Gawker authors and readers the ability to filter comments based on the writers and commenters they follow, or whose content they have “liked” or given a star to. So readers can click on Denton’s name and see not only the posts he has written, but also a specific selection of comments that he has chosen to show, from…

"But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benef…

" Popular Science has officially shut off its comment section, pointing to research showing that disagreeable comments hurt the reading experience. Or, at least, the reading comprehension. One study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that mean comments under an article about nanotechnology "polarized readers," taking attention away f…

"a new kind of reblogging functionality so that readers can top the articles they share with their own headlines and introductions.... “Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers. And at some point the distinction should become meaningless."

Airbnb presents “Hollywood & Vines.” A first-of-its-kind short film made entirely out of six-second Vines submitted from all over the world. (via Airbnb - Hollywood & Vines)

"what is a Community Manager? Because the term takes on such a broad role, we are going to break down the best practices of Team Hüify Community Managers!"

That's right - curation. Now officially Web2.0-buzzword-of-the-month (not quite sure which one).

Constructive discussions generally require good discussion documents. One of the Commission's major contributions to any European online space should therefore be a EUROPA that supports the conversations

Trans-European online Communities of Practice should become a key element in the European online community, but examples so far are few. This post looks at DG INFSO, which has been using online community principles since 2002, two years before the phrase "Web 2.0" was invented.

Following rapid and significant expansion into new markets and sectors of governance and policy, innovative union of nation states ("European Union", or EU) seeks an experienced Online Community Manager to gain buy-in at all levels throughout our 27 Members, as well as with external stakeholders on a global level.

Of course, when we launched the first interactive website for the IST Event (IST 2002) we didn’t know it was a Web2.0 site. That term only appeared two years later