Overview: Online Community Management

So you think "President Trump" is the worst case scenario? The rise of American authoritarianism provides the best article I've read explaining the Rise of Trump, even if it's a bit longer than previous favourites. It covers psychological research into authoritarianism, the profile characterized by a desire for order and a fear…

A short post on the financial costs of not having a European Public Sphere.

we analyzed over 1 billion posts from 30m brand pages on Facebook.

if he tried to make ads that were beautiful and perfect, it wouldn’t work and his fans would know... his work routinely pulls in millions of views because he’s transparent with his audience... mostly teenage boys know when they’re being peddled a product.

building community means intentionally creating a culture, every step of the way... It’s hard to overstate the importance of community guidelines... members ... didn’t want to be a part of a community where people were fighting all the time, but had been afraid to speak up in the discussion, lest they get dragged into the fray. with every post, e…

many marketers spend their resources on talking at people, not listening. The key is to find the space between what you want to talk about as a marketer and what they want to talk about as a consumer. That small slice is the opportunity for true engagement and will shift the conversation from monologue to dialogue. Attention is a gift, and what yo…

My sadly underwhelmed response to @sidewireinc’s gr8 “Today’s Internet is Optimized for Noise”

Social activity on a website can increase users’ commitment to the site and willingness to pay for its services... social engagement could solve the conversion challenge ... users enjoy free content that the website provides but are unwilling to contribute to the site monetarily. The bad news is that it’s not enough to just add participatory optio…

Asking humans to judge each other can be a surprisingly powerful thing... But invoking a sense of being watched isn’t the only way platforms subliminally encourage social behaviour... persuasive design: if you want people to do something, don’t explain why, just show them how... If extremists seek to spread fear and shock, counterspeech might aim…

The afternoon session at Future Media Lab 2016 showed that while European media are warming to the idea of using advanced language technologies to share content across borders, their audiences are already well ahead of them.

Betts ... became the first data head to join the publisher’s board, recognizing data’s importance in growing its subscriptions and audience. Today, he heads up a 30-person team focused on customer analytics and research. Here are lessons from Betts on data maturity and driving audience engagement... While subscriptions are critical ... it’s not t…

"It tears conversations apart, and it's really confusing when some people have been live-tweeting an event and those things get scattered all across my timeline."

I spent a few minutes viewing the Twitter profiles of some of the people who've followed me recently and I was struck by how much of their TweetStreams were simply RTs of other people here in Brussels. Don't they have anything original to say?

Bots are to modern messaging apps what APIs were to Web 2.0; a way to build on top of other services, experiment, and create a new way of interacting with existing services... what inspiration can we draw from the past that might help us to think about designing Conversational UIs?

Reposting your blog on LinkedIn and Medium is a no-brainer. Which is precisely the problem - it takes no brains.

what started as a cynical in-joke has become a bad habit, and an excuse for enabling abuse across the web... The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable... we denigrate a form that use…

“We can’t cede the social world to large companies.”... discussed the Times’ attitude toward commenters and shared the results of a Times survey that asked commenters why they comment:... News organizations, he said, need to make building community around news more of a priority. (Though, of course, that’s easy for an editor from the Times to s…

Three months into Dialog, I’m excited to say we’ve succeeded in creating a well-lit place for thoughtful, live conversations between the Digg community and the people who make the best stuff on the Internet... Clear community guidelines work. Pre-moderation works. And most of all, the amount of personalized attention we’re willing to give each use…

Tap into the wisdom of your citizensYour city platform for citizensourcing

With independent journalism increasingly looking like an endangered species, a EU communication strategy that helped European media build the European Public Sphere would be a smarter longterm move than propaganda and brochureware

As a reporte... there may be a simple solution to the bad commenter problem: You. When reporters get involved, it results in fewer uncivil comments, according to research... “it’s like a teacher walks into a classroom and suddenly all the kids are quiet and fold their hands at their desks.” Here are a few tips and best practices for reporters in …

uncivil comments dropped by 15 percent when reporters were participating in the conversation

a closer look at what types of comment sections news organizations ... value they are adding to news organizations’ overarching strategies...a list of questions to ask and best practices for news organizations seeking return on investment...key questions, considerations and links to further reading for evaluating what commenting strategy works bes…

The job of politics... finding common cause with people who aren’t like you. But current incentives seem to point in the opposite direction... I blame the internet ... You can’t take on inequality and injustice with a coalition of people who use the same slang, listen to the same music, and post the same emojis that you do.You have to be willing t…

Plebiscite-pushers have got Europe's voters hooked on the cheap rush of direct democracy

the idea that everyone is like us is called the “false-consensus bias.”... Online it means we can be blindsided by the opinions of our friends or, more broadly, America... morphs into a subconscious belief that we and our friends are the sane ones and that there’s a crazy “Other Side” ... that just doesn’t “get it,” ... not as intelligent as “us.”…

On Tuesday, the American people will see a multi-platform streaming and social broadcast of the State of the Union that reflects the ways people experience live events in 2016. We’ll be reaching people where they are — and making it possible for them to engage, respond, and share the President’s speech themselves in new and different ways... vide…

bringing new technology into the newsroom to change how the outlet commissions and publishes opinion pieces ... expand the coverage beyond just text, into visual story formats that can be accessed and shared across different platforms.... the FT's comment section is a "huge source of strength and a very valuable asset".... a new Facebook commu…

The extremist adherents of this new political correctness have essentially taken a flamethrower to the public space and annihilated its center. Topics in American life that once were the legitimate subjects of debate between liberals and conservative are now off-limits and lead to immediate attack by the cultural establishment if raised at all. An…

In recent years, a core group of commenters have helped to transform The New York Times for the digital era. Their voices have enhanced our journalism, offering new information, insight and analysis on many of the day’s most pressing issues.These frequent commenters have also become a community, one that has its own luminaries.But who are they? We…