We’re smack in the midst of the thirteenth season of National Novel Writing Month, an online writing community based on a simple (if daunting) goal: 50,000 words in one month. That’s almost 1,700 words per day, and even disciplined aspiring writers can struggle to hit 500. What makes Nanowrimo possible and fun is its thriving community, both online and offline. That’s where Sarah Mackey, Nanowrimo’s official Community Liason, comes in.

After participating in an internship with the Office of Letters and Light (Nanowrimo’s parent company), Sarah eventually came on as a full-time employee. Since then she’s actively helped grow Nanowrimo’s community, posting to the blog, videos, Facebook, and more. Nanowrimo’s grown from just a handful of writers to hundreds of thousands, many of them connected through the Internet. Sarah helps make that happen.

She generously agreed to answer a few questions for us. Read on to hear her take on community building, Nanowrimo’s history, productivity, working remotely, and how to motivate writers to get across the 50,000-word finish line.

1. First some background: how did you originally find out about Nanowrimo?

I heard about NaNoWriMo on an online message board I frequented back in 2002. It seems like a life time ago now! I started writing again in 2001 after a long hiatus, so it was perfectly timed to get me a little more committed to writing regularly. I recruited several of my friends, and the rest is history. I’ve won every year since!

2. Apart from size, how does today’s Nanowrimo community look different than when you first started?

The thing that’s most remarkable about it is the changes in technology since 2002. Back then, laptops were hot commodities and much less common than they are now, so when you went into a coffee shop to work on your novel with a couple of friends, yours was the only computer in the whole place. Now, you’re lucky if you can find a free plug. I didn’t have my own laptop then, so I borrowed my Dad’s when I went out to write. I think it was 5 or 6 years old at the time and it weighed a ton. Now when I go to write-ins, the folks without laptops are the exception, and there’s this amazing range of technology – some people even write on their cell phones!

The online community has changed so much since then as well. In 2002, it was much more unusual to be part of a web-based community, and people were far more skeptical about meeting up with groups you met on the internet. I feel like in the 10 years since, the internet has become far more mainstream. We’ve also got so many more ways to connect now – in 2002, it was all based around the website, but now we’ve got Facebook, Twitter, all kinds of other ways that we communicate with participants and the participants communicate with each other.

3. How did you come to be a part of it as an official Community Liaison?

This is actually kind of a long story! In 2003, I signed up to be the Municipal Liaison – that’s what we call our regional volunteers – in my home town of Edmonton Alberta. As NaNoWriMo grew, so did our region here. In 2008, my co-Municipal Liaison and I went down to San Francisco for the annual fundraising gala. We ended up having dinner with Chris Baty that weekend, and he and I started talking about some of the projects we thought the Office of Letters and Light (the parent non-profit of NaNoWriMo) should be working on. Once I got back home, I started working on some of those projects. I went back to school in 2009 and spent two months interning at OLL as part of my program requirements in 2010, and at the end of that, I was hired to do contract work. After a year of that, the Community Liaison position opened up, and we decided I could do that job remotely from home here in Canada. So I started out as a volunteer and gradually got more involved over the years, and now I work for OLL full time. I think the first time I said this was my dream job was around 2004, so it’s pretty amazing to actually be here!

4. What is the most underestimated part of your day-to-day?

Answering email! The sheer volume is pretty overwhelming sometimes, but I’m getting better about putting systems into place. I find that how I’m feeling about my job is directly related to the number of unanswered emails sitting in my inbox.

5. Do you use any tools to keep track of your responsibilities?

I keep thinking that I just need to find the perfect app or website and I’ll suddenly become magically more organized, but it hasn’t happened yet. Despite my fondness for technology, my tried and true organizational method is actually just a notebook and pen. The notebook is divided up into sections based on my major areas of responsibility, and I have a whole section of it that’s just for to-do lists. I used to just have one giant notebook for everything, and that was hard to keep track of, but having things divided up a little better has made it more manageable.

I also date everything obsessively, so I can flip back through meeting notes to find when I talked about something. We use Google Apps in the office, so I try to keep my Google Calendar moderately up to date, and we have a shared Google Doc between everyone in the office where we track what we’re working on. (Although, writing that, I realise how long it’s been since I’ve updated that!)

6. What challenges do you face working remotely in the magical land of Canada?

I think it helps a lot that I started out with those two months when I was in the office in person, because it meant I established relationships with the people in the office. I also go down every November, which helps a lot. But I’m pleasantly surprised by how well I’m able to stay in the loop from here. I have Google Chat open all the time and I chat with my coworkers pretty steadily throughout the day. (It helps that I’m tirelessly nosy about what’s happening in the office.) I Skype into staff meetings every week, and I check in with the people I collaborate with the most on a weekly basis, either by Skype or by phone.

It’s the little things you miss out on, being remote – the conversations that happen in passing, as it were. But my coworkers are really great about filling me in on those types of things, and by being a little annoying about asking what’s going on, I keep up pretty well.

Mostly it’s challenging when they’re having a beautiful California day and I’m buried in three feet of snow. Those are the days I wonder what it would take to get a visa to work in the US.

7. Nanowrimo is a remarkable grassroots effort, with volunteers all over the world hosting write-ins and spreading the word. The forums are also an active source of inspiration. In your opinion, what is the most important thing the community does to help Nanowrimo succeed? How do you help foster that?

I think the most important thing the community does is just exist. Writing is so often a solitary, lonely pursuit, and having this supportive community surrounding you makes the writing process so much more appealing.

So much of that community is created by the in-person component, and we have more than 650 volunteer Municipal Liaisons around the world organizing those events. I oversee those volunteers, and I like to think that because I was one of those volunteers for seven years before I worked for OLL, I can really be useful to help those MLs with the challenges they face and celebrate their accomplishments.

I’m also really delighted with the community that we’ve formed in social media. That was a big focus of my internship last year, and it’s just exploded since then. We’ve now got more than 53,000 followers on Twitter and more than 80,000 people have liked us on Facebook. It’s been really great to have those additional ways of reaching out to the community, and it’s also led to lively discussions and a really effective way for folks who don’t have the in-person events to still be a part of the community.

8. You mention “peer pressure is the most important tool to make your word count soar.” Is this something you’ve built into Nanowrimo’s community itself? What other elements of social psychology come into play?

There’s definitely an element of peer pressure built into the community! We provide a lot of tools to track not only your own word count, but the word counts of your friends. We encourage head-to-head challenges, and we’re working on our widgets right now that automatically track those challenges. We also run a Twitter account, @NaNoWordSprints, that’s specifically meant to offer that mix of peer pressure (“Write for 15 minutes RIGHT NOW!”) and support. We’ve recruited a team of volunteers around the world to help with that account this year, and as a result we’re running those word sprints for 12-18 hours a day, all hours of the day, and it’s a place where someone will offer up a challenge and then congratulate you when you achieve it.

Our Municipal Liaisons are also really great at that supportive mix of peer pressure and collaboration. It’s really motivating to know that someone is looking out for you and cheering you on, and I think that presence really helps keep people going when things get challenging.

9. What advice can you give to people looking to start their own writing communities, online or off?

I think one of the things that’s most effective about NaNoWriMo and its community is the sheer breadth of it. You might be writing your space western alongside someone who’s writing a historical romance novel. So many writers are really focused on narrowing the scope of their writing community, but I think you lose out on a lot of potential allies when you do that. Writers have more in common with each other than I think some communities give them credit for. Sure, we have people in the genre forums who get into the nitty gritty details that apply only to that genre, but at the same time, everyone can sympathize when you hit a plot hole so deep you have to redirect your entire story around it.

I also think there are so many tools that are out there for communities, it’s just a case of taking advantage of them. I see so many hashtags on Twitter for virtual writing groups, and Google Plus has actually really taken off with writers, and there are people hosting Hangouts, where people write together or have discussions via the webcam Hangout feature, which I think is extremely cool.

But don’t be afraid to start small. Sure, there are 250,000 people participating in NaNoWriMo now, but it started out with just Chris Baty and 20 of his friends. Sometimes the evolution is gradual, sometimes it snowballs more quickly, but you just don’t know until you start.

10. And of course, how’s progress with your entry this year?

It started out really well but I’ve gotten a bit bogged down this week. Week two is notoriously hard to get through, because you’re past the exciting beginning part but haven’t made it to the point where things start to gel. So I’m a little behind, but I’m going on a writing retreat this weekend that should help a lot. I’ll get there eventually!

For more information about Nanowrimo, or to connect with a local writing group (there are TONS), head over to the official Nanowrimo site. If you’re currently participating, stop reading blogs and get writing! Good luck!

An annual event going back to 2008, the Mario Marathon is an amazing example of building a community through word of mouth, relentless promotion and clever interactions with fans. It’s one of the earliest examples of a gaming marathon benefitting charity, which involves streaming gamers playing the games to a live audience over the course of several days.

The team of Mario Marathon volunteers has done an impressive job growing their community each year – no easy task considering the long downtime between each event. The Mario Marathon has reached over 500,000 gamers to date, and through them raised over $125,000 for Child’s Play.

Following our recent experiment in online charity gaming, we reached out to Mario Marathon co-founder Brian “Shirt Guy” Brinegar to learn more about how it’s done. Read on for his insights on community building and how to motivate members for a common good.

Wavedash: Thanks again for the chat! To start off, are you surprised that charity gaming marathons have caught on to such a degree?

Brian: I was not entirely surprised. Gaming marathons are a fun way to bring the gaming community together to support a cause and they are relatively easy to get started. We’ve also tried to support the community by providing some documentation on how our events have been created.

WD: Are you finding it harder to differentiate yourself from the increased competition? How do you keep potential new viewers from saying “Oh great, another marathon”?

Brian: I always spend an excessive amount of time and money trying to top the previous year. I hope this shows when someone happens across our stream. We try to add a level of interaction and attention to detail that would be hard to establish on the first go around. We also have a huge advantage of being established as one of the early marathon groups which provides some additional access to get the word out.

WD: How did you grow your community of stream-watchers in the early days?

Brian: Initially, we were just very very lucky. At the beginning of the first Mario Marathon we were featured on both Penny-Arcade and Kotaku. This provided us with a ton of traffic. For the second year we weren’t sure
what access we would have to major gaming sites like these, so we pounded the pavement, sending information to every media outlet we could find contact information for. We also try to keep past donors and supporters informed of the annual event via e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter.

WD: What are the best fan interaction ideas you use to keep viewers engaged?

Brian: It’s all about constant communication. The Internet provides the opportunity for a vast amount of two-way communication unavailable in any other media. We use channels such as Twitter, Facebook, IRC Chat, Fanart, and Skype to facilitate this communication as well as a way to hold contests and audience challenges. This year we’ve added something we call “React Time” which lets the audience applaud, boo, taunt, and laugh at the team by clicking buttons on our website. A system analyzes these reactions and triggers actual sounds we can hear.

WD: Aside from those who donate loads of money, who are your most valuable viewers/chatters? Are some members better for a healthy broadcast than others?

Brian: Everyone that watches the Mario Marathon is very important. Those ofus who put the event together really are nothing without the people who support what we’re doing. Every person who donates, helps to spread the word, or interacts during the event plays an important part in making it successful. There are also a small number of people who stick around throughout the year, act as moderators, and generally provide feedback and ideas for improving the event. These people really add to Mario Marathon in an unmeasurable way.

WD: What viewer behavior has surprised you the most?

Brian: The fact that viewers show up to watch a few old guys play video games for days on end pretty surprising all on its own. Beyond that I’m surprised by the dedication and support the community provides. Many
people go out of their way to provide support that we could never expect. For example, this year viewers have stepped up and contributed prizes, an amazing T-Shirt design, and what will ultimately be an amazing promotional poster/prize. This kind of support comes from all over the world. Its a surprise to anyone I tell about the event.

WD: What is the optimal time to announce a marathon and start generating buzz, but not fall off people’s radar?

Brian: We’ve announced Mario Marathon about 5-6 months out each year. Since we only hold one real event each year this gives us plenty of time to promote the event. Also, because Child’s Play Charity runs their donation drive in November and December it’s important for us to get on their schedule before they stop updating the site for the year. Keeping the buzz going can be very difficult. We start a media blitz about two weeks prior to the event. This includes press released to print and television, e-mails to gaming sites, etc.

WD: How do you reconnect with viewers from previous marathons? Do you see the same viewers returning year after year, or is it largely fresh faces?

Brian: Yes, there are a lot of names that pop up year after year. We have over 1,100 attendees from previous years signed up to attend via a Facebook event. Of course, there are a ton of new people every year, some stop in for a few minutes, others become a part of the community and stay connected year round.

WD: The “achievements” are great! What benefits have you seen since they were implemented?

Brian: We’ve always had an internal list of promotion “achievements,” which are goals for promoting the event each year. Last year, for Mario Marathon 3, we made this list public in the form of achievements. The thought
was that some of our viewers may have connections or resources we do not have internally. If they are willing to use their connections to help promote the event we want to provide some direction. The achievements also act as a kickback to the various groups that do support us. Having an achievement titled, “Can I has Joystiq?” does a little to show how much we value Joystiq’s support.

WD: Do you have any plans to further “gamify” your event, like you did with achievements?

Brian: Absolutely, I’m very interested in the ability of games to teach and influence people’s actions. For example, I use my Discover Card to buy almost everything because I earn points which I can use to receive “prizes” (cash back bonus rewards). This is a very simple game, but it influences what I do. Some games, like Animal Crossing reward players for returning each day. We try to use these concepts to promote engagement and reward those that participate throughout the event. This year, we’re introducing a feature called “Social Trivia” which lets people all over the world participate in a multi-day trivia contest. Our structure of donations unlocking levels is another game-like element, there are very small measurable and achievable goals that all add up to a huge amount of money for Charity. If we started with a single goal of $125,000 it seems insurmountable. Lastly, we are adding a set of audience participation games, which will let members of the audience actually plan some custom games with the team, right from their web browser. Think 1 vs. 100.

WD: Is a charity gaming marathon a good way for an existing gaming community, website or company to engage with members? Why or why not?

Brian: The internet provides an amazing number of new ways to communicate with lots of people, be it live video, social networking, or a custom online game, all of these things that bring people together are going to engage and likely grow a community. A gaming marathon is a popular way to bring these technologies together, but I believe it’s the massive amount of communication that really engages the members of a community. The one advantage that a charity event provides is a sort of beacon for everyone in the community to point at an say, “Look at this! Look what we were able to accomplish as a community.” I hope that the members of the Mario Marathon community realize how much they have accomplished and how important they are to the process.

WD: Finally, do you have any parting tips on how would-be marathoners can find and grow an audience?

Brian: Just ask. Ask people to share on Facebook, post on message boards, and send out Tweets. This kind of first hand word-of-mouth support can go along way. Of course, the group hosting the marathon needs to do their share of work to make sure the show is something people want to share, but once you’ve got that setup, just ask.

~–

To donate money to Child’s Play through the Mario Marathon, visit their donation page. For more tips on how to run an online charity event, visit the Mario Marathon’s handy how-to guide Notes On Running a Gaming Marathon.

The fourth annual Mario Marathon webcast kicks off on June 24th.

Watch live video from UTD Zac’s Livestream on Justin.tv

UPDATE 3/27: All done! Original details of the marathon are still available below.

Huge thanks to everyone who participated. Special shout-outs go to the r/pokemon Reddit community and to Serebii.net. Both communities were hugely supportive in the chat.

The final playtimes were:

• Pokémon Blue: 8:30
• Pokémon Gold: 4:39
• Pokémon Sapphire: 11:57
• Pokémon Diamond/Pearl: Roughly 11 hours. Had to be cut short due to an unfortunate software crash during the E4.
• Pokémon Black: 5:57
• Total time: ~42:10

As of the end of the marathon, you all helped raise $385 for Japan. Thank you so much again to everyone who donated, and to everyone who helped spread the word.

The fundraising page will continue to be available for the next few weeks. If you would like to donate, visit http://www.mercycorps.org/fundraising/jasonm3d.

Grats everyone!

——
Original post:

>> Participate in the Pokémon Marathon for Charity

Some good friends of mine are currently undergoing a weekend Marathon of all 5 generations of Pokémon games, all in the name of raising money for victims of the Japan Earthquake. @JasonThinks, the generous mastermind behind the event, asked if I would be interested in taking on one of the games, and if they could use Wavedash as a landing spot. Of course I said of course. And so, the great Pokémarathon is underway!

How does a gaming Marathon help the victims?

Charity gaming marathons have been growing in popularity for the last several years, ranging from fan-run to quite extravagant. The goal is to pick popular and/or nostalgia-laden games that gamers would enjoy watching played live. This usually involves a series or genre, such as “all Zelda games.” While watching, viewers have the opportunity to donate to that marathon’s cause. It’s a wonderful grassroots gaming phenomenon that has a real impact on the world.

Sounds nice. What are you marathoning exactly?

We’re attempting to run through the 5 primary Pokémon games by Sunday night.

• Pokémon Blue (Done in 8:30!)
• Pokémon Gold (Done in 4:39!)
• Pokémon Sapphire (Done in 11:57!)
• Pokémon Diamond/Pearl (Done, minus the E4 due to a software crash, in 11 hours)
• Pokémon Black (Done in 5:57!)
  Total time: ~41:30

Who are you donating to?

The Pokémarathon is driving donations to Mercy Corps, a non-profit currently running several online benefits for Japan. It’s easy to set up a donation page, so individual fundraisers don’t need to mess with Paypal, pledges or transactions. Their widgets and share features take care of it for you.

For more information about where donations to MercyCorps go, visit their Japan Earthquake Relief homepage.

How do I watch? And how do I donate?

You can watch, chat and donate at the following page:

http://www.wavedash.net/pokemon-marathon-for-japan/

If you would like to donate directly, you can use the widget currently sitting in the sidebar.

Our heart goes out to the victims and their families. Hopefully we gamers can continue to band together and provide assistance. Thanks to Jason, UTDZac and the rest of the crew for putting this event together, and thank you to everyone participating in the chat.

Three things I learned this week:

1. Always have an exit strategy, no matter how small your community initiative is. For example: “email poll results to project manager at 6pm, then close the thread.”
2. Facebook Fan Page posts that use the word “vs” get shared far less.
3. People would much rather hear about 50% of a feature now than 100% of a feature later.

Something I said this week that was wrong, wrong, wrong:

“Nah, we don’t need to make an official poll. The thread itself certainly won’t get more than 50 replies.”

Something I look forward to saying next week:

“Ahh, now hashtags make complete sense.”

You’re at a party and a stranger smiles at you. What do you do?

You smile back. Maybe you say hi. Maybe you wink. Then you introduce yourself and shake their hand. You present some acknowledgement that opens the connection. Then you both move on – it’s a party, after all.

The amazing part comes later in the party. Even if you went there without knowing anyone, so long as you return every smile, you can walk up to those people at any time and strike up a conversation. Even better: they will walk up to you and strike up a conversation.

Building an online community works the same way.

One of the most important tools in a Community Manager’s kit is availability. This is what makes you different from the marketing department. It’s what separates you from being strictly customer service. It transforms you into QA’s secret weapon.

When people talk to you, talk to them.

Some Ways Community Managers Make Themselves Available

• Responding to Facebook messages
• Accepting friend requests
• Following fans on Twitter
• Following up in forum threads
• Answering @replies

The emphasis here is on interacting after the initial contact. You can’t conceivably reach out to every player, nor can you launch into a deep conversation in every email chain. But you can respond in such a way that shows you’re listening.

Proving that you’re listening is often more important than what you say back. It proves that you’re present, and leads to more people being willing to strike up a conversation.

Boundaries Are Still Important

Respond as much as possible, but keep your goals in sight. If you make yourself too available with no overall strategy, then you will get overwhelmed with short interactions that don’t benefit anyone.

Even worse, you’ll set the expectation level too high, and people start getting angry that you don’t respond to 100% of your Facebook pokes.

An example: I always accept friend requests from players. Simply responding to these requests gives me a direct line to communicating with our influencers. It takes on a Twitter-like style, where I can post a status update about a new feature or a bug, and immediately receive feedback. It also creates Pulse for me to check – their game-related posts appear in my feed, so I can check on overall sentiment at any time.

The downside? I now receive a significant number of Facebook messages regarding in-game bugs and issues. While this is great in many ways, direct messages are woefully ineffecient for us when tracking and resolve bugs. For problem resolution, our forums have much better tools.

It also frustrates people when they send me a message, and I’m unable to respond.

To fix this, I make sure to establish expectations early and often. When a player contacts me about a bug, I still respond – but I ask them to make a forum thread and forward it to me. This way I’m still establishing that connection, and our workflow is maintained, and I’m not struggling to keep track of a dozen private messages. I also post status updates that remind my friends that the best way to get in touch with us is through the forums and email.

Return the Smiles

Once players start reaching out to connect with your Community team, you have received a gift. Every connection puts you in a position to take advantage of serendipity. You’ll observe new behaviors in your game, or you’ll randomly come across a hugely influential and interesting Fan Page you never knew about.

This takes time, and the benefits aren’t immediately apparent. What’s the difference between closing a dozen bug reports, and adding a dozen Facebook friends? The former has an immediate benefit, and the latter just leads to more work. Now you’re getting status updates, wall posts and Facebook messages that don’t factor into your daily duties.

But you’re also now exposed to new kinds of information. Once your players are reaching out to you, your interactions take on greater value.

That’s a good thing.

Image by Borderlys

Quora.com is the latest buzz in an industry that is all about buzz. Everyone’s talking about the Q&A site, including community and social media managers – who are always looking to strike oil in an emerging platform. I took a stab at it, and I’m impressed.

Which surprised me, because I don’t care about Q&A sites. Well, I didn’t.

Yahoo Answers is more fun to troll than it is to use. Formspring is very popular, thanks to its emphasis on blog and Twitter integration, but to me, it always looked like an ego stroker rather than an actual tool. Wiki Answers is just… a mess.

When I signed up for Quora, two things happened that immediately communicated what the site is about. This is the holy grail of design: for your users’ first experience with the product to tell them exactly why it’s useful.

Show, Don’t Tell

First up: when you log into Quora after making an account, the question promoted to the top of your home page is “How do I get started using Quora?”

This elegant introduction is the most valuable kind of tutorial. You learn how to use the product by using it, rather than through a separate “lesson,” video, or About page. The first question has everything Quora’s social mechanics are built on: following, voting, and suggesting.

Compare that to Wiki Answers, which overwhelms you with posts (my home page had the gem “How much formula 8 lb baby“), and thrusts the “ask a question” bar in your face with no explanation.

What is that? What’s the difference between “All Sources,” “Community Q&A,” and “Reference Topics?”

Assume nobody will ever read your “About” page, and that everyone will skip your tutorial. Show them, don’t tell them.

Then the ground shook

Ok, so I got how Quora worked. You could follow people. You could vote up answers. You could subscribe, filter and tag. But why should I care?

That’s when my desk neighbor turned to me and asked, “Hey, did you just feel an Earthquake?”

I hadn’t – I’m a Texas boy, and would have jumped out the window at the first sign of the floor moving. (Perhaps not an advisable earthquake survival strategy.) I turned to Twitter, XKCD-style, and only saw tweets consisting of “Earthquake!!!” and “Woah, did anyone else feel that?” I turned to Facebook, and saw similar claims.

I refreshed Quora, and at the very top of my feed was the question: Was there an earthquake in the SF Bay Area the afternoon of January 7, 2011? The first answer had links to the official USGS earthquake tracking service, details on the location and severity, a Google Maps screenshot of the epicenters, and a collection of reports from Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Jose, San Mateo and San Francisco.

Quora is significantly better than Facebook at predicting what questions interest me. At the time of the earthquake, Facebook’s suggested questions for me were “What’s a good place to take a sewing class in SF?”, “What are your favorite Restaurants in Redwood City?”, and “Why do have nipples?”

Maybe it was luck, but I’m impressed. Quora immediately demonstrated its value, and now I’m eagerly exploring other ways it can be useful.

On a completely unrelated note, feel free to follow me on Quora. I’m currently exploring the Community Management, Social Media and Video Gaming sections, and I’m sure I’ll venture into more.

And we’re back!

It’s been an exciting couple of weeks for me. I recently landed a gig as an online community manager for a prominent social gaming company. More on that later, but the short version has me living in San Francisco and kick-starting an exciting new career. Good times!

As a result of this long job hunt, I’ve been through a lot of job interviews. Some good, some bad. With the economy as rough as it is, and considering how competitive both the video game and social media industries can be, even a great interview often ends with “good luck in your search.”

But this post isn’t about how to land any community manager job (check out Blaise’s fantastic article for help on that front.) It’s about how to figure out if that specific position is right for you.

Nearly all interviewers will end with “So, do you have any questions for me?” Once you’ve finished impressing them with your savvy, well-informed questions about their products and company history, make sure you ask:

Where does the online community manager sit?

Will you be sitting with the engineers, the marketing team, or the customer support team? Or another team entirely? Because of the jack-of-all-trades nature of community management, and because many companies are hiring one for the first time, every organization has a different view on the CM’s role. The physical place that you sit gives you a great snapshot of what your primary tasks will be.

If you’re sitting with the engineers, your primary task is probably to engage with your members and relay bugs that the community finds. With marketing, you’ll be more focused on blogger outreach, social media and community involvement. Of course, you’ll probably be doing all of this regardless, just in different proportions.

The good news is, community management is such an encompassing role that once you get in the door, you can mold it into your ideal mix of abilities. All you have to do is be awesome at it.

Find out where your chair is, and you’ll learn a lot more than if you asked “so tell me about the position.”

Last week I attended a presentation by Shama Kabani as part of a lecture series put on by the Dallas chapter of Social Media Club (and also featuring a fantastic talk by the inimitable Eric Swayne). Shama is the president of the Dallas-based online marketing firm Marketing Zen Group and author of The Zen of Social Media Marketing.

Shama’s presentation was loaded with wisdom for exciting a social media following. The most important takeaway: people use social media to show off their identity. Keeping up with friends is nice. Sharing photos is cool. But showing yourself is what it’s all about. Any brand trying to build a community must first figure out how people will incorporate that brand into their online identities. (Social game developers know it’s also the secret to selling virtual goods.)

To accomplish this, Shama coined the ACT model for social media marketing — Attract, Convert, Transform. And it’s a great way to look at online community building.

Shama details the ACT model over at the Marketing Message Blog:

A is for Attract. To attract means to get attention or stand out. Practically, this means attracting traffic to your website—your main online marketing tool. Nowhere is social media marketing more successful and useful than in the “attracting” phase of online marketing. During the attraction phase, you are trying to drive traffic to your site and stand out from the masses.

C is for Convert. Conversion happens when you turn a stranger into a consumer or customer. And there is a difference between the two! A consumer may take in your information or even sample your product, but he or she may not always buy. That’s okay! Over time, that consumer may become a customer. The more expensive a purchase, the longer it may take. This means that you constantly have to work to convert people into consumers and customers.

T is for Transform. You transform when you turn past and present successes into magnetic forces of attraction.

Looking at this strictly from an online community management perspective, the ACT model matches both the lifecycle of a successful community and the lifecycle of your members themselves. When you’re first launching, your goal is to attract new members (but not too many). As your community matures, your membership coalesces into a more active group. Maybe they start referring to themselves as “Goons” or “Redditors”. Maybe they start holding offline events. Finally, once it hits critical mass, your community (hopefully) becomes a self-sustaining force that uses a rich history to draw in new members.

The ACT model also dovetails with the Membership Lifecycle for Online Communities, first put forth by Amy Jo Kim. According to Dr. Kim, online community members go through five stages:

1. Lurkers – newly exposed members who consume content without creating any. Many won’t even have registered. You’ve attracted them, but haven’t yet converted them into a real member.
2. Novices – Something triggers the lurker to contribute. For instance: a heated debate, an interesting topic, a new game release, a need for technical support, or a witty comment. The lurker has built enough comfort and trust to be willing to join up, but is still low on the reputation totem pole.
3. Regulars – After a period of sustained contribution, the novice becomes a regular both in terms of proficiency and in reputation. They are fully converted and participating in your community, rather than just consuming it.
4. Leaders – Your most valuable regulars will eventually take ownership of different aspects of your community. They have earned so much respect that, even if you haven’t endowed them with moderation-type powers, they still wield a great deal of influence. These are your movers and shakers. They create the memes, in-jokes and conversations that constitute your community’s engine.
5. Elders – Inevitably, users move on. This is another part of your community’s transformation. It must have an ability to adapt to a new environment. An elder still has great influence in an online community, but is probably no longer actively contributing.

Your goal as online community manager is to guide both your community and your members through each of these steps. Attract the right people. Convert them into useful, content-producing, experience-improving members. And then build on those successes to transform the community as a whole.

Major thanks to Shama for the fresh perspective.

Image credit: Steve Snodgrass

Today, 4-16-10, is Foursquare Day. Rejoice, Foursquare users! (Foursquarers? Foursquares? Foursies?) Finally, you have a day of celebration where you can attend parties filled with Foursquare users. And earn a special badge. Also, you can check in to places. And stuff.

If you’re neither a Foursquare user nor a social media news junkie, you probably have no idea what that means. In fact, to the non-koolaid-drinker, the idea of a Global Social Media Holiday is exactly the kind of self-indulgent narcissism that is “wrong” with Social Media. Can you do that? Can you just… declare a holiday? And then get thousands of people to celebrate it?

Yep. You can now. And for online communities it’s really, really smart.

According to the official Foursquare Day website, here’s how it started:

Nate [Bonilla-Warford] is amused by simple number relationships like squares and primes and he makes a big deal about Pi Day each year. The thought struck him that since four-squared equals 16, it would be great to check into Foursquare on the 4^th 16^th of the year, otherwise known as 4 / 16 or April 16^th.

Nate floated the idea on Foursquare’s Getsatisfaction.com forum on March 12, 36 days before April 16th. An entire week passed with no activity before Kenneth Glanton suggested a Foursquare Day badge. He shared the idea with many of his friends on Twitter. Prompted by Ken’s enthusiasm and the recent excitement over Foursquare’s success at SXSW, Nate wrote up the Foursquare Day proposal and started a Facebook event on March 22, with 25 days left.

Nate then joined forces with Laura Petrolino and Jessica Barnet, which led to the creation of a Facebook Fan Page, multiple blog posts, and an official Foursquare Day Twitter account.

The idea took off. Users are hosting over 150 events all over the world today. Users. Not Foursquare. The Foursquare users. Foursquare Day is grassroots community building at its finest.

This is different than a corporation hosting hundreds of mini events. With social media, average users now have the ability to coordinate a network of simultaneous events. An influential blogger will suggest an idea, that idea gets put in motion, and then hundreds of people around the country think “wow, that sounds fun” and duplicate it.

For another example, look at mommy bloggers. Mom’s Nite Out started in similar fashion, with influential blogger Maria Bailey suggesting a national “night off” for moms to get together and have fun.

From the official Mom’s Nite Out website:

The National Mom’s Nite Out is the first nationally organized celebration of motherhood Intended to bring together today’s moms, physically and virtually, The National Mom’s Nite Out will unite over 150 social media groups, companies, local playgroups, mommy bloggers and mother social networks in giving moms a well deserved night off.

It worked. Hundreds of events popped up around the country. Power members among the mommy blogger community took it upon themselves to host them. “Hey, is anything going on in New York City? No? Ok, I’ll host one!” This led to a trickle down effect as more bloggers and readers followed suit.

Live events have a dramatic effect on your online community. When your users are the ones empowered to host live events for like-minded people, it multiplies that effect exponentially. They create a positive feedback loop, not only by instilling a strong sense of camraderie, but also by exposing your community to non-members in a fun and interesting way. How many people who don’t watch football attend Super Bowl parties?

This is exactly the kind of emergent behavior that Foursquare needs to target in order to melt faces.

Viral live events have a profound impact on gaming communities, too. Just look at any video game that has a robust grassroots tournament scene. Almost always, these tournaments developed in the living rooms of average gamers. They invited others to play, who in turn invited others to play, and so on until suddenly you have 6-figure prizes and rockstar professional gamers.

The lesson: powerful viral growth happens offline.

If you’ve been reading up on social gaming, you’re probably familiar with terms like “microtransaction,” “core gamer,” “casual gamer” and “viral.” Maybe even “Freemium.” But buried in all the talk of Farms and Fish is a new lexicon that combines old school statistics with the latest in search engine analytics.

So, for those of you who are neither stat geeks nor analytics jockeys, here’s a crash course in basic terminology for social games metrics.

ARPU
A term carried over from Telecom companies, Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is measured as total revenue divided by the number of subscribers. This includes revenue from subscriber fees, virtual goods, affiliate marketing and ad impressions. Because social games are so metrics-heavy, ARPU can be broken down by day, by country, by demographic, or by pretty much any other metric.

Churn
The turnover rate (or “attrition rate“) of a social game’s active players. The noise level in casual gaming is extremely high, which means social games have a user base that is constantly changing as gamers abandon the game or delete the Facebook app. Churn refers to this constant loss and gain of members.

Cohort
A common term in statistics, a cohort is “a group of subjects who have shared a particular experience during a particular time span.” In social gaming metrics, cohorts are used for analyzing retention. By organizing users in groups such as “everyone that visited on June 10th” and analyzing the percentage that revisit, you can pinpoint what promotions are having the greatest effect.

DAU
Daily Active Users (DAU) is just what it sounds like: the number of active users over the course of a single day.

DAU/MAU
The DAU/MAU ratio is one of the hot metrics in social games. Comparing Daily Active Users to Monthly Active Users shows roughly how many days per month your average user engages with your game. If you have 500,000 daily users and 1 million monthly users, the DAU/MAU is .5, translating to the average user logging in ~15 days per month. The DAU/MAU ratio is strongly correlated with social gaming success.

According to Lisa Marino from RockYou, the minimum threshold for DAU/MAU is .2. This is necessary for a game to hit critical mass virality and engagement.

Engagement
Facebook players typically have dozens of “active” games at a time. Engagement measures how long they spend playing your game. How many features do they access? Are they spending hours or seconds? How many pages does the average user view? What percentage are returning visitors?

Entry Event
An entry event is the first action a user performs when they enter the game. Online social games can track every action you perform, and the Entry Event Distribution is one of the more important metrics to follow. What do your users do first? Which entry events are the most effective at bringing people back?

For example, you might find that a majority of your users log in when they receive a gift, and the first thing they do is check that gift. By determining the more popular entry events, you can push more resources towards them, thus increasing retention, engagement and re-engagement.

Exit Event
The opposite of entry events. Exit events are the last actions a user performs before exiting the game. Tracking the Exit Event Distribution helps show why users are disengaging with the game.

K Factor
K Factor measures the virality of your product. K Factor = (Infection Rate) * (Conversion Rate). An Infection Rate is how much a given user exposes the game to other players, such as through status updates or email invites. A conversion rate, as marketers know, is when that “infection” results in a new sign up (or “install”.)

Put more simply, a K Factor of 1 means every member is bringing you one additional member. A high K Factor is treasured by social game publishers, because it becomes a very effective vehicle for bringing in new players.

Lifetime Network Value
The value a user provides to your network over the course of their entire “lifetime” on the network. For instance, is the user contributing to viral effects? Evangelizing the game? Contributing positively to ARPU? This is compared to the User Acquisition Cost, or how much it costs (via marketing and viral efforts) to bring in new members.

According to Facebook app analytics provider Kontagent, a (very basic) equation is 1/(1-k) * Monthly ARPU * User Lifetime.

MAU
Like DAU, Monthly Active Users (MAU) tracks the total number of users in a given month.

Re-Engagement
Gamers stop playing eventually. Re-engagement is how you get them back. It includes re-engaging gamers who have been signed off for an hour, a day, a month, or more. There’s a lot of competition out there, so implementing and tracking re-engagement practices is a must.

Retention
Think of it as the opposite of churn. Retention is how well you maintain your userbase.

Viral Rate/Virality
Viral growth is the name of the social media game. Measured by K Factor, the Viral Rate/Virality shows how much your users are promoting, evangelizing and spreading your game. Because of this, social games are increasingly built around cooperation, competition and the constant addition of new features, which increase virality. Every feature is a source for growth, whether it’s “liking,” Facebook notifications or tweets. Not often confused with “virility.”

Photo credit: Nathanmac87