KonzeptioNerd

Usability and Sociability

Jenny Preece’s Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability (2000) is rather reminiscent of Amy Jo Kim’s Community Building on the Web: a large volume (about 400 pages), generous spacing, amiable line drawings. Preece is a useful complement to Kim: where the latter bases her observations on wide-ranging community experience, the former accesses current research, especially [...]

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Community Marketing Management … for Beginners

I’m reading Frank Mühlenbeck’s and Klemens Skibicki’s Community Marketing Management because I’m currently researching online community theory, but I’m not sure reviewing it here is the best of ideas. Let’s see. CMM has various problems, the biggest one appears to be target group insecurity.
Mühlenbeck and Skibicki appear to be talking to a rather concise audience [...]

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Community Building with Amy Jo Kim

At eight real-world years, amy Jo Kim’s “Community Building on the Web” should be of interest mostly as a socio historical document. But Kim’s advice is still valid for the second wave of online communities - and not only because everyone’s still quoting her left and right. If nothing else, it’s a good starting [...]

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Back to the Farm?

In her 2001 book, technology / sociotechnology journalist Katie Hafner tells the story of abut 15 years of The Well - the first online community to turn into a brand, the oldest online community we’re still talking about and the quasi paradisical state all online communities aspire to return to (not). Hafner chose to tell [...]

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Gigs

If I’ve been a bit quiet lately, that’s because I’m putting all my writing gumption into two presentations on online communities / brand communities I’ll be giving this month.
Deutscher Multimedia Kongress DMMK at Stuttgart, September 19, panel “Online-Communities zur Markenbindung” 3.45 pm
Zweiter wissenschaftlicher Kongress des Deutschen Direktmarketing Verbands DDV at Frankfurt, September 26, after lunch.
(Your [...]

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On the lack of hard data regarding online communities

I’m reading up on online-communities these days.
Tim Keding’s Virtuelle Communities: Erfolgsfaktoren für das Internet-Geschäftsmodell virtueller Gemeinschaften is very obviously a graduation paper. Once you accept this (and the author’s insistence on unidiomatic German), you’ll find Virtuelle Commuities to be a handy little introduction to the topic that can be gathered in one or two sittings.
Keding [...]

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Brand-Mobs (was: Brand-Communities)

At the recent Community Breakfast (see: Social Web World), we talked briefly about brand-communities. So far, few brands have risked the expense and long-term committment required to start up a community. Oliver Ueberholz observed that most brand-communities he’s seen were rather short-term campaigns; intentionally designed to avoid the litmus-test of longevity.
To me, those ultra short-term [...]

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To the Niches

HORIZONT 29/2007 quotes Eprofessional / Fittkau & Maaß study 24. WWW-Benutzer-Analyse W3B.
Findings

40% of experienced web users spend 25%+ of their online-time on smaller, less well known, specialized sites.
30% of web newbies do the same.
52.7% of < 19-year-olds spend 25%+ of their online-time on smaller, less well known, specialized sites.
49.7% of 20-29-year-olds do the same.
So do [...]

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Disposable Identities (Was: “Are You Dr. Jekyll or Mr Hyde?”)

PR-Blogger Klaus Eck muses (in German) about the mashup of private, business and public identities in the Web 2.0 (Sind Sie Dr. Jekyll oder Mr. Hyde?. His gist: There’s no significant split between on- and offline identities (or personalities). The reason: Jykell can split off his more aggressive traits into Hyde and then disclaim responsibility [...]

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Featureitis

Dan Saffer at adaptive path blog has an excellent (though lengthy) comment on the feature overload debate:
[...D]on’t play in the features game at all. Because let’s face it: most features are commodities that will likely be replicated eventually. Instead, it is about the connection between the features that will create both product loyalty and product [...]

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