yumio.net Blog

I don’t think I’m being conceited to think that the 2006 marketing campaign “Ask the Planet” for Yahoo! Answers paved the way for yesterday’s online townhall Q&A Obama

http://www.whitehouse.gov/openforquestions/

Here is a list of all the Celebrities that have used Yahoo! Answers as a public invitation to ask them questions or answer a question they posed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_answers#Special_guests

Here is what I presented to a bunch of MBA students at Stanford Business School last Sunday about running a Crowd-sourced Community.

While composing the preso for a talk about Crowdsourcing that I presented last Sunday at Stanford Business School, I thought of a catchy way to describe the Community Manager’s job.  Community Manager = Chief Thank You Officer – the person that makes sure that everyone who deserves to be “thanked” in a community is thanked.

From my experience at both Yahoo! Answers and at FixYa, I came up with a theory that Crowd-sourced communities can best be described as a marketplace between providers of content (sellers) and consumers of content (buyers).  The currency that makes most of the free content generation possible is “thank you’s”.  The key ingredient to making this work is that most providers of content need nothing more than an authentic “Thank You” for them to feel that their contribution (whether its an answer to a question, a video, or photograph) is appreciated, and worth the trouble of posting.

From this perspective, I think that Community Managers are filling in a hole where sometimes the “market” doesn’t work and the content providers are not compensated with proper appreciation.  This is especially true when there is not enough consumers of content – or when content production far outstrip the audience.  So Chief Thank You Officer is also a “market maker” often found on stock exchanges.

A community manager’s job is also to curb abuse – which often is when there is improper feedback (mean-spirited, personal attacks, meaningless responses) from a consumer of content to the provider of content.  Yes, there is also provider – provider conflict that community managers get into, but I do think the chief purpose of online community management for a crowd-sourced site is making sure that Thank You’s are doled out to the right people in the community.

During the 80s and 90s, the only common uses of the word “social” as an adjective in front of a noun was for “social studies” that you took in elementary school, and maybe “social security”.  Then in the middle of this decade we started to see it applied to Web 2.0 concepts (e.g. social bookmarking, social networking, social software, social graph) but now it is proliferating out of control – (e.g. social gaming, social commerce, social broadcasting, social media).  The only letter in the alphabet that does not generate a Google suggester in the G-Toolbar is the letter X (social X-box is not yet a common term).