An RMIT media student reflecting and blogging on her experiences at uni, on making and learning.

Williams and Cothrel define online communities as ‘groups of people who engage in many-to-many interactions online’ and form ‘wherever people of common interests are able to interact’ (2000, p.81). It would seem simple enough therefore, to join and form our own. Over the past twelve weeks, we have delved into the world of social media, online communities and explored and developed our own participatory online projects. In developing the online magazine, Home Made Helpings, I have discovered a entirely new way of looking at social media and the way it can be used, especially in the sense of interacting and, even forming, online communities. I learnt a lot about the idea of the community in an online environment, and discovered that what most interested me about the project was how social and participatory strategies can be used to generate engagement and user contribution. By using different social media platforms, mainly through Twitter, I was able to observe how different online communities were formed, and attempted to tap into those communities using several strategies, and with varying degrees of success. It is the formation of online communities and how they operate that has interested me the most throughout this project, and the presence of these communities and spaces is what I intend to reflect upon in the following report.

My own role in this project, aside from contributing content to our Tumblr, was to seek out followers and interact with the food community via our Twitter account, and to post regular updates and tweet regularly, which I would try to do at least a couple of times a week. The tweets were designed to attract followers of a similar interest to our theme, and I would attempt to raise their profile by using trending hash tags, or creating my own. However, using trending hash tags, while having a higher probability of being seen, didn’t necessarily mean that we’d attract our target audience, and I soon stopped using the trending hash tags, and would simply use food related ones. Whenever a new article was posted on the Tumblr, I would link to it on the Twitter feed, and use food related hash tags in order to get people to follow the link. Some of what I did, similar to what was being done on the Facebook page, was to tweet people directly using ‘@’ mentions. I would either ask people if they would like to contribute to our Tumblr, or simply compliment them on their own Twitter account or blog, in an attempt to establish a dialogue with them.

Establishing connections in an already existing community was the hardest aspect of managing the twitter account. Whilst I had found a number of existing food communities with their own twitters accounts, their followers would sometimes number in the thousands. Tweeting them directly would often result in no response or re-tweet. I observed that while there were certain people that these food bloggers would seem to interact with on a regular basis, for the most part they would simply tweet their own content, or links to their own blog. A greater deal of success was reached by following and tweeting people who didn’t have such a large amount of followers. It seemed to me that, quite reasonably, those with a larger amount of followers and a very well established community, didn’t feel as great a need to interact and gain people’s attention, rather than those who, like us, were just starting out and keen to build up their own small community and online ties to different. people.

Frequency of the posts seemed, rather surprisingly to me at first, to have little effect on the number of followers that one could gain on Twitter. I believe it was less the number of the posts that counted, but the content that you linked to, or whether your tweets could be seen as interesting or funny. I know that a number of the accounts I followed would tweet incessantly, and often only links to a site where you could buy cookware or home wares or something along those lines. I originally thought that I had followed enough people to have a nicely diluted and varied twitter feed, but often times I could have many posts in a row from the one twitter user. Not only did I not appreciate this, finding it annoying, in the end I even stopped following certain people because I felt that they were spamming my twitter feed. Moving a conversation or interaction with someone from the physical world to the online world it seems, does not negate the fact that sometimes, people are annoying. I tried to make myself aware of these online ‘manners’ and would tweet only once or twice a day at most. It was for this reason (that of avoiding being a ’spammer’) that we made the decision not to link our Twitter and Facebook accounts, so that any tweet would automatically show up on our Facebook news feed. Having used both Twitter and Facebook for personal use, I feel that Twitter is more easily accessible and, being in a more open, public environment there is a tendency to tweet more than you post to Facebook. I also tried to time my tweets for when the other users would be most active, but seeing as half our followers were from the U.S or different time zones, and others were from Australia, it had the tendency to become slightly confusing.

It is difficult to judge the overall success of our project. The number of followers on both the Facebook and Twitter accounts was almost exactly the same throughout the twelve week run of Home Made Helpings, give or take a few, however user contribution, for the reasons I have outlined above, was rather low and we had much better success on that count on Facebook rather than Twitter (what we consider our biggest success came from an interview with a food blogger who we contacted via Facebook). Considering that this is the first time any of us had used social media in this way before (personal use of Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr aside – and none of us had used Tumblr before as a matter of fact), I feel satisfied with what we were able to accomplish, but I also understand that part of the real purpose of this project was to foster our understanding of how online communities operate and this experience was able to give me a good grounding and some first-hand knowledge of that. Looking back, I don’t think there is a lot we could have done extremely differently. I personally feel that it might have been beneficial for us if I had asked for people to re-tweet us. In identifying things important maintaining a healthy online community, Williams and Corthrel outline that community relations is one of the most important. As they put it, ‘…the main reason people participate in communities – online or otherwise – is to interact with other people. Where there is little or no face-to-face interaction, nurturing and strengthening connections can be a delicate balancing act.’ (2000, p.91). The connections we  forged during this project needed constant attention and ’strengthening’, otherwise they would have dropped off and not survived. I quickly learnt that if I wanted people to interact with me on Twitter, then I need to tweet at them again and again – but then the ‘delicate balancing act’ came in. I had to be mindful of what I saw as the line between establishing a connection with someone, and just plain out spamming them.

Overall, I am satisfied with my contribution to our social media experiment, as it were. I feel that it has been a valuable learning experience for me in terms of navigating the world of online communities. Online communities are forever prevalent, as ‘the thirst for making connections, for communication, is insatiable and that is why new communities form every day’ (Preece, p. 350) The most difficult part is determining what your audience, or targeted community members are looking for, but once we had a clearer idea of what we wanted to offer it became easier to interact, and sometimes even fun.

Preece, J 2001, ‘Sociability and usability in online communities: Determining and measuring success’ Behavior and Information Technology Journal, vol.20, no.5, pp. 347-356

Williams, R & Cothrel, J (2000) ‘Four Smart Ways To Run Online Communities’ Sloan Management Review, p.81-91

Week 12 – We made it! 9 articles (and possibly one or two more coming out this week) and a couple of dozen of twitter and Facebook followers later, Home Made Helpings is wrapping up. We did our presentation today – four minutes can really fly by! It was good to reflect on how the focus of our project has changed, our successes, and things we could have done a little better. In terms of the content that we have up, and what we originally wanted, there isn’t a great deal of difference in what we ended up with. We wanted people to submit to us family recipes and memories from around the dinner table. We didn’t get a lot of memories per se, but we ended up focusing a lot more on the traditional/ethnic meals instead. As Michael said today in the presentation, most of our success came with one on one interactions – Anthony’s interview, Loan’s submissions from her friend Monika and even my interactions with the BakingDuet on Twitter (they’ve been working on a piece for us, but they did warn me they had to do it between their own uni/college work). The interaction may not have been exactly what we hoped for (the Twitter accounts we encountered especially, seemed to prefer posting their own content without retweeting or interacting with others).  The content we were able to produce though, I’m quite happy with – it’s varied (video, photo and text) and I think they’re quite engaging.

I’m not going to post my marks here you nosy people! You’d think the internet was a public place or something….

I will say that I think I gave myself a fairly reasonable mark, and that over the course of the semester I’ve been tracking pretty well in terms of contribution to the group and group project. I deserved what I gave myself.

When it came to assessing my peers – Carmen, Michael and Loan – I was more than happy with my group as a whole as well. They’ve all put in fantastic work to Home Made Helpings and I’m glad I had them as my group. One more post to go and we’ll have a completed magazine, and our project presentation is in next weeks lecture.

Woohoo! We’ve survived Integrated 2!

…oh wait, we still have an individual report to write….I’ll get right on that!!!

Weeeell……We are up to date with the number of articles that we require (I think we may even be one ahead). I have an idea for another that I could possibly do while we wait for a couple of our twitter followers to reply to our tweets asking them to submit something.

Our last article was an interview with fellow Facebook page and food blogger Anthony, of Anthony’s Italian Recipes Just Like Grandma Used to Make. It’s a pretty in depth interview with him, thanks to Michael for organising that, and to Carmen for getting it all prettified on the Tumblr. We had some issues getting it up on Tumblr in the beginning so that it was all the right size, but it’s there now, so I suggest to anyone who comes across this, to go take a look. We have 29 followers as of this date on our Twitter account and 31 likes on Facebook – not as prolific as we would have hoped. The problem I’m finding on Twitter is that the people I follow, or the people who follow us are already in tight-knit communities of their own, and while they communicate frequently with one or two of their Twitter ‘friends’ (maybe they know each other in real life, I’m not sure) it takes a bit more doing to start retweeting and replying to people they don’t know. Some of them just ignore me completely when I tweet @them. Others ignore everyone completely and just repeatedly post links to their own content (to my mind, these people are spamming and their posts are starting to annoy me). However, there are a few who are promising (these are the ones I tweeted at asking for content, as I said above).

At RMITV I’m getting some more experience/knowledge of the social network phenomena/fact of life. Studio A has a new segment this season, in which we ask a social media question at the start of the show, and ask us to tweet answers during the show. We come back to it at the end. Last weeks question was ‘What should be the name of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s baby?’ The question is posted a couple of hours before the show, so we have time for some good responses. Now, I’m not the online producer, I’m just a humble camera op, but I will say this: Follow the twitter account ladies and gents and get involved!

Just my random/brief/slightly disconnected lecture notes for this week.

Commercial enterprise in social media.

Social media as an exchange of information “If they engage with you, you will engage with them.”

5 steps for setting up your social media programme:

- Consider the questions that people will ask. Think of these questions up front. Be frank. Be sincere about your objectives and missions.

- Become a lurker. Comment on other peoples blogs. Look around. You want people to read your stuff.

- Do a credit check. Sheer number of social media sites/opportunities to engage. Delegating jobs/tasks.

- Don’t be afraid of commitment. Depth. Engagement – simplest, least risky way to think about social media. Eg, twitter feeds built on exchange. Participation – get people to participate in what you make. Co-creation – risky, time-consuming. If you have people to engage, and a broad community, with many participants who exchange meaningfully – then you can be certain that you’ll co-create.

- Get nightlife working for you. Twitter has a life-span of 1 1/2 minutes? Keep in mind overseas timezones? 12 hour block….Schedule tweets.

Establishing your own blog is a good way to gain followers.

Look for top bloggers/twitterers in your field. What are they doing? Research – don’t go for a ’scattergun’ approach. Target the right people.

List posting.

Not just there to sell a product – there to generate a discussion.

Competitions?

Check out Anthill (online magazine)

Podcasts are good. (Maybe our group could do a podcast?)

E-newsletters.

So our whole objective with Home Made Helpings (well, everyones objective really) is to produce a magazine with user generated content (hopefully!), and to get the public involved and basically create a small community. These people have done it splendidly.

The LAMB – or the Large Association of Movie Blogs – is a community of movie bloggers (of which I’m a part) and the main Lamb page itself is for the most part almost entirely user generated content. They have features that run regularly, the two most prominent being Acting School 101 and the Directors Chair series. The sites admins will choose an actor or a director and ask for submissions from the members by a certain date – articles on the films, biographies, reviews – anything that relates.

This weeks Acting 101 is Cary Grant. They ask for submissions by a certain date, and then link to the different articles for all the members to see.

There is a list on the site of all the members blogs and links to such – at least half the blogs I follow are Lammies, and if you are you can grab a html button to display on your site to indicate you are a member and link to the main Lamb page. Whenever a new member is added to the list, their blog gets a plug:

To date they have over 1000 members.

Each month or so the leading members of the site will run a podcast, discussing news and movies. Members are invited to join and fill spots. Every year the site holds it very own blogging awards, with people free to push for their own blogs nominations and members invited to vote.  LAMBscores are a collection of Lamb members reviews on film, with ratings averaged out.

The LAMB also has a Twitter account and Facebook page. It’s an absolutely amazing way for different film enthusiasts to meet and share their views and knowledge. I’ve formed quite a few online dialogues with different film bloggers, nearly all found through the Lamb, and my own blog has garnered more followers since I have joined. People have told me they found my blog through the Lamb site.

I’m not sure how long this community has been up and running, but members are joining everyday and its alive and flourishing. I think its a really great example of what we’re trying to achieve with our own, though whether we reach the same numbers is questionable, and sadly not very likely in the time frame we have (whether we choose to continue after the course is over is another question).

There is a web series on Youtube called Kids React, by the FineBros. Every week they’ll show a group of kids (regulars on the show) a viral video/youtube star and ask for their reactions. Besides that most of them, including six year old Morgan

Morgan from Kids React

are absolutely adorable, and they often give hilarious answers to the questions, the FineBros. like to ask for viewer interaction and involvement. The videos will often end with plugs from the kids saying ‘Thanks for watching, tell me what I should watch next!” They’ll be left suggestions in the comments, with the duo will then screenshot and include in the opening to the videos, as if to say – thanks for the suggestions, we took them on board. Videos the kids are shown are suggested by the viewers (age appropriate of course). It’s a neat system, and we’re trying to achieve something similar with our Tumblr magazine.

It’s up on our Tumblr now. This one has some slight audience involvement! We responded to a request to make a certain recipe, and posted the results. Keeping with the theme of family meals and traditions I talked about how I associate potatoes (this is a potato recipe) with my Oma’s Potato Salad that I looked forward to on Christmas’, the way only Oma can make it, and I asked for people to submit their comments and feedback. Seeing as we had two text based pieces, I decided to go with another video/photo piece with a voice over commentary/narration.

We’ve got  23 followers as I post this. I’m trying to keep interest in our page up with hash tags, and by retweeting other people.  I got very excited when I saw we had been retweeted, but then I realised that it was me that had done that on my personal account. Oh well, maybe some of the followers on my account will pick us up as well.

You can view the video here. Embedding problems abound with this blog.

Well…we are moving along with this project. Sometime this week, hopefully Thursday or Friday, I’ll be trying my hand at a potato ghost recipe that one of the ‘fans’ on Facebook asked us to attempt. I’ve done a shout out on the twitter account, asking what peoples favourite potato recipe was, or what their family’s traditionally did with potatoes, and I’ll work something in about that hopefully! We have two articles down on our Tumblr, so technically we have six more to go, though I have a feeling we might end up with nine or even ten.

Michaels going to try and interview someone from Facebook who has liked our page – he has his own page about his Italian grandmother’s home recipes, and it fits in with our theme perfectly! It would give us a nice variety of articles to include. The tumblr is looking great, by the way, thanks being to Carmen, and Loan’s article on a traditional Vietnamese dish came out a treat!

I’ve been trying to develop some dialogues with people who have followed us on Twitter. One lady, a self-professed cheese lover, started following us and I noticed she had posted a link to an article about  making cheese at home. I got very excited and asked whether she had attempted it herself. No reply as yet, but I had hoped she might have been able to contribute pictures or something similar for another article. I have had great success with the cupcake duo however! (Well, I christened them the cupcake duo, their name is actually theBakingDuet). They replied to my tweet when I suggested the post some pictures to our Facebook wall of meals that mean something special to them, and they said they’d be sure to do so. If they remember, that’d be great, but if they don’t I guess I tried. I don’t want to spam them about it – there is that fine line between trying to start a conversation, and being incredibly annoying. I know that when I like pages on Facebook, I almost immediately hid them from my newsfeed because they post useless crap that I do’t want to see – I just like the name of your page because it was funny for goodness sake!

Just a very quick post – I’m not going to reveal what marks I gave myself, and what I gave my group members. I will say that I’m quite happy with my group, and I think Michael, Carmen and Loan are doing great jobs. I’m glad to be working with them.

As for myself, I think I’m travelling (*gasp* travelling – on the road!) okay at the moment. I personally feel that I need to put more effort into this blog and reflection. I think I’m working well with my group – hopefully I’m pulling weight as well.