These are my notes from the NSW KM Forum‘s “Online Communities – Making It Happen” event that was held tonight at the Wesley Conference Centre in Sydney.

These are not verbatim quotes from the presenters. They are my jotted notes and may contain misrepresentation of ideas, or may mislead due to the lack of context.

Presentation 1: Angela Beesley
Vice-President of Community Relations for Wikia Inc and chair of the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Twitter: @wikiangela

• Wikipedia is a global community.
• The 1% rule applies to Wikipedia. Approximately 1% of visitors are contributors.
• More edits = better quality. Wikipedia would like to encourage more edits.
• Wiki syntax has been a barrier to participation.
• Community dispute resolution is important.  Develop a resolution process. Wikipedia learned this painfully and is still working on the process.
• Encourage new community members.  Make them feel welcome.
• The first steps of new community members should be easy.

From the Q&A after her presentation:

• Wikipedia has terms of use that state that companies should not edit their own content due to a conflict of interest (I wasn’t aware of this and have mixed feelings about it – obviously you don’t want every company/product page to be a marketing spiel but some facts about companies may be best explained from within).
• HP setup a wikia wiki around a product successfully.
• World of Warcraft is one of the largest wikia wikis with around 70,000 articles.

Presentation 2: Christy McCarthy
Community Relations Manager for WorldNomads.
Twitter: @crustyadventure

• WorldNomads began as just a travel insurance company.
• In 2005, WorldNomads established the not-for-profit Footprints Network – while purchasing travel insurance people could choose to contribute ($2 I think). They’ve raised $600,000 for charity since then.
• Customers were thankful for the ease of the contribution process, being able to make a difference.
• In 2006 they setup a blogging platform for people to document their travels.
• The travel blogs bring in visitors via search engines and attract people who might not even know the brand.
• In 2006, they created podcasts for learning the basics of a range of languages based on the top destinations of their community and their community’s top requested languages. These were provided for free and attracted a lot of downloads.
• The audio files used in the podcasts have now been re-purposed for iPhones and are available for free from the iPhone App store. 5 of the top travel apps are WorldNomads language apps which provide exposure of the WorldNomads name. (I wanted to double-check this from home – the reference is that WorldNomad has 5 places in the top 20 free travel apps in the App Store)
• Travel Scholarships demonstrate the passion for the travel industry and provides great content.
• In 2008 they knew their community was also active on Flickr and Youtube. Learning to communicate with these channels has been a new thing.
• Be open to new discoveries.
• Twitter brought the biggest surprise they never imagined providing not only B2C but B2B interactions.
• It takes time to create community.

Presentation 3: Mark Pollard
Strategy Director, McCann Sydney and CEO of Stealth Magazine.
Twitter: @markpollard

• Topic was “7 Things You Can Learn From Hip Hop” (I’ve seen this presentation in a condensed format previously at Ignite Sydney).
• In 2008 Stealth Magazine had 200k visitors.
• Mark has been experimenting with the blog, checking reaction.
• Pay your dues. Understand your scene.
• Understand dynamics of influence.  Look for the constructive.
• Keep it real always. He found that if he posted under his own name rather than a handle/username/nickname he felt more accountable for his comments on the message board.
• Anonymity isn’t cool. Seeding isn’t cool. Whisper campaigns aren’t cool. Getting paid to talk is wrong.  Instead invest in long term relationships.
• Healthy beef and disagreement can help communities.
• It’s okay to step back from the community.
• Don’t worry about negative comments. Groups are mostly optimistic (I found the Bazaarblog graph that Mark displayed).
• Let people self moderate.
• Don’t forget to step away from the computer. Offline makes online more fulfilling.