Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
I?’m in Seattle, WA participating in the Web Design World Conference representing the WOW as an exhibitor and media sponsor. The promoters of the event lined up a number of terrific speakers for today presenting on a wide variety of Web design and Web development topics. For example, today?’s lineup of speakers included:
•Heather Champ, Community Manager at Flickr
•Jared Spool, Founding Principal User Interface Engineering
•DL Byron, Principal Textura Design
•Michael Ninness, Senior Product Manager Adobe
•Steve Mulder, Director of Emerging Interactions, Molecular
•Dan Rubin, Founder and Principal Webgraph
For today?’s podcast, I had the pleasure to interview Heather Champ, Community Manager from Flickr. As most of you already know, Flickr is the online photo sharing website with hundreds of thousands of members worldwide. Flickr also recently announced a ninety-second video sharing service as well.
In her keynote address entitled “Shepherding Communities” Heather shared her experiences and I?’ve outlined the complete list below. I?’ve also posted a three minute video of Heather on the WOW Technology Minute website.
If you?’ve thinking of establishing a community for yourself or for your clients, you owe it to yourself to pay close attention to following recommendations and today’s interview:
•First, establish a community guidelines
•You?’ll need to have some thick skin
•Create the tools for self management of your members
•Communicate
•Own it
•Don?’t wait (stick to your announcements)
•Avoid creating super villains
•User generated discontent (losing site of your members)
•Make Lemonade (making the best of a bad situation)
•Change is hard (the first 48 is the toughest)
•Embrace the chaos
Look for interviews with a host of other notable speakers in future podcast. Tomorrows podcast will feature an interview with Jared Spool, Principal User Interface Engineering on the topic Wen 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype.
Today?’s sponsor of the WOW Technology Minute is sponsored by Concentric offering small business and shared web hosting solutions.
Register for the FREE WEBINAR: Combating Spam! Wednesday, 7/30 @ 10:00am PST where will be discussing “Perimeter Email Protection” as an email security solution that can protect your business from spam, viruses, directory harvesting.
To register for this FREE one hour Webinar contact: robert(AT)joinwow.org
Transcript of Shepherding Passionate Communities – Heather Champ
BILL CULLIFER: Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute here at the Web Design World Seattle Conference. I have the pleasure to be interviewing Heather Champ, Director of Community at Flickr. Heather, good evening and thank you for agreeing to this interview.
HEATHER CHANT: Oh, it?’s my pleasure.
BILL: Heather, you were the keynote presenter today on building communities. Can you expand on that and give us a summary, to the subscribers of this podcast, what that keynote was all about?
HEATHER: What I wanted to share was things that we?’ve learned. So we have a very large and passionate community of people who are uploading their content and even we?’ve been surprised in terms of how people use Flickr, sort of what the activities are, what the behaviors are. And I guess the one thing I?’d like to talk about is one of the slides I had was “Make Lemonade.” I think there?’s an incredible opportunity. There are going to be times when things go wrong, so I like to think of when the universe hands you lemons, make lemonade.
A couple of years ago we were going to have to take the site down. Typically when we do that we like to put a banner up top where we can say how long the downtime is going to be. On this day my Director of Operations came up and was like, “We need to take it down.” I?’m like, “We?’ll do the banner.” He was like, “No, you don?’t understand. Now.” So what we did was we switched out our usual Flickr visage and we put up a coloring contest. We had a black and white image of the Flickr dots with nothing in them and asked people to print out the page and tag it a certain, like do something with it and then tag it with “flickr coloring contest” so when the site would come back up we?’d pick one and give them a year of Pro. We had over 2500 people participate and the images were just so awesome that we gave away 14 Pro accounts. And everybody who participated we gave three months of Pro free. In the end unexpected downtime is really a no-win situation, but in this event we really kind of turned it into something that was really wonderful and people had a good time.
BILL: Yeah, fantastic. I love that example. And also I?’m curious to know, did you go into this business model thinking that this community would be as active, as pro-active, as they are?
HEATHER: Well, I think Flickr is kind of like the frog in the warm water in some ways. The community has grown up around us and it was, when I first joined back in 2005 there were 17 million photos. Now we?’ve got 2.6 billion photos. So it?’s kind of come up around us. If you told me three years ago, “You?’re going to be managing a community of 2.6 billion photos,” I?’d be like, “No way, I can?’t deal with that.” But I think we?’ve grown and we?’ve learned as the community has grown and learned. So I think it?’s really what you make of it and the opportunities that come to you.
BILL: And you?’re embracing the chaos.
HEATHER: I love it. I absolutely do.
BILL: You?’re making the best of it. So I understand that you also started offering video just recently. How long has that been?
HEATHER: April 8, 2008. We now, Flickr supports video up to 90 seconds playback and it?’s really awesome. There have been some incredible videos from around the world that people share.
BILL: I bet. And we can check it out at www.flickr.com.
HEATHER: Absolutely. Thank you.
BILL: Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters. Thanks for your time Heather.
HEATHER: Thank you so much.
BILL: Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is sponsored by Concentric offering small business and shared web hosting solutions. Register for the free webinar “Combating Spam” Wednesday, July 30th at 10am Pacific Standard Time. We?’ll be discussing premier email protection as an email security solution that can protect your business from spam, viruses, directory harvesting. To register for this free one-hour webinar contact Robert at joinwow.org.