Bob Stanke

I stumbled across a cool online tool late last night that I wanted to make sure to share with my audience.  Many of us who have done content planning, whether that be within an organization or as a freelancer, are all too familiar with the nasty task of cost estimating.  The folks over at Eat Media have built a tool that can be a tremendous help in the process.

The Content Calculator, which is currently in beta, allows you to use simple sliders to build your own cost estimate of a content project.  The tool helps with the difficult balance of hard and soft costs to get a better understanding of the costs associated with everything from content creation, content management, strategy development and publishing.

This post is a little late, but last weekend was insanely crazy.  So in case you missed any of the stellar blog posts from last week, he is a round-up of the top five!

1. Why you should never Like-gate a Facebook Fan Page

2. What is Bikeshedding?

3. Life Time Fitness launches official Google+ page

4. What is Cookie Licking?

5. The Content Strategist Directory

I always enjoy seeing companies utilize social media sites in different ways to market their products and services, connect with customers, and facilitate conversations. So when I saw the National Basketball Association turn to Twitter on Sunday night to set the record straight about details of the current lockout, I was naturally intrigued.

The NBA went very public on Sunday, issuing a draft of the letter from David Stern directly to the players, and then inviting fans and players to ask questions about the lockout via Twitter.  I followed the entire thing, and I have to say that I was impressed with how the NBA handled the Twitter chat. They answered all the questions they could in the time period allowed, and mixed it up between questions submitted from players and fans.  That's right - even players were participating in the online chat.  The answers were not polished, but real and straight to the point. It seems genuine and legit.

You can view a copy of the transcript from the Twitter chat here. Question - if your company was in a situation like the NBA is, would you turn to Twitter to answer questions like the NBA did?

An often-observed pattern in user groups and community initiatives is that there is lots of good-will and ideas, which get discussed, but after all the discussion, nothing happens. The pros and cons are hashed out, and something approaching consensus occurs, and yet no action results. This is a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth - no one takes responsibility for making things happen.

One way to mitigate this phenomenon is to have someone who is responsible for delegating and tracking tasks (and ideally nothing else). In some cases, but not all, this is a task a community manager can take over.  At some point in the discussion, the move from abstract "we should do this..." to concrete "Can you take on this task and make sure it happens?" either provides a better chance that something will be accomplished, or indicates clearly to all concerned that while there is an interest in having something done, if no one steps up to the plate, it ain't gonna happen.

The polar opposite of this task might well be Cookie Licking - which occurs when someone takes on more responsibility than they can handle, which results in tasks dropping through the cracks.  This pattern is also often accompanied by excessive bikeshedding.

Currently I oversee about 150 Facebook Pages, and while each one has its own plan and content strategy, there is one tactic I avoid at all costs... Fan- or Like-gating.

The reason is simple, really. If you have to offer up a promotion or get someone to perform an action in a social media site like Facebook just to increase your "Likes", you are missing the point of what social is.  Social should be open. Social should be free for your audience.  While a "Like" doesn't cost them anything, it still is a transaction that I think shouldn't have to occur.

One of the things I am most proud of with the Facebook Pages I manage and helped build from the ground up is that I know each one of those likes were gathered authentically.  I didn't need to block content or offer a discount on anything to get those likes.  That's the way social should be.

Bikeshedding involves online discussions about relatively unimportant issues which result in extensive debate. It may be the result of individuals who wish to contribute feeling that they don't have the knowledge or expertise to contribute on more significant issues. Bikeshedding can result in discussions that, while on-topic, nevertheless effectively drown out other discussions on more significant issues. On the other hand, it also suggests that community leaders might need to consider how they can better assist and/or support those with less knowledge and expertise to contribute to the community in possibly more productive ways.

To many, diagnosis is the first step towards treatment. Simply by identifying a discussion as a "bike-shed", much of the energy that has been spent in the discussion can be dissipated. Problems arise when there is not agreement over whether something is a major consideration or a minor detail.

In general, the negative effects of bike-shedding can be mitigated by encouraging a community which rewards action. Two methods are suggested:

• Encourage the proposer to provide an implementation of his or her proposal, having taken into account the most significant remarks
• Propose a "bake-off" if there are competing philosophies. Often, only one implementation will follow.

Often times, bikeshed discussions result in decision paralysis.

As strange as it sounds, "Cookie Licking" is actually a real community management term. Cookie Licking refers to a common anti-pattern in online communities where someone (metaphorically) takes a cookie, licks it, and puts it back on the cookie tray, essentially preventing anyone else from having it, but also not eating it themselves.

An brief example of Cookie Licking

This can be often seen within volunteer communities, when discussing a certain issue or an improvement. Someone might say, "I've already done a draft on this topic," or even commits parts of the code (if it's a developer community). This prevents or defers others from working on the feature as there is suddenly someone who started working on it. If it's not followed up on by this person, it's essentially a licked cookie. Nobody else touches it, but nothing real gets done.

How to prevent Cookie Licking

You can partially prevent this by having clear roadmaps and not allowing people to volunteer for more than they can handle.

An alternative option is to create a policy that issues are not 'reserved' to anyone but instead that people may develop drafts / codebases in parallel, then let others in the community review their work and either validate both, select one, or combine the approaches.

Another approach which works well is to put time limits on tasks - if someone says "I'll send a draft by the end of next week", then Monday the week after the task is fair game again.

Today, Life Time Fitness, The Healthy Way of Life Company, launched it's official Google+ Page, just hours after the service became open for businesses to create a presence on the growing social network.  Life Time, which has been building a solid presence in the other popular social communities such as Facebook and Twitter, plans on using Google+ as a social community for sharing exclusive content to Google+ users who add Life Time to their circles.

Today Google officially opened up the ability for businesses large and small to launch their presence on their growing social network, Google+.  Since the official announcement earlier this morning, the service was closed most of the day, greeting visitors with a welcome page that said the new service, Pages, was not quite ready yet for everyone. But by early evening, the creation portal was open and brands were welcomed to get started.

The Google+ Pages service still has a lot of work to do before it can be a competitor to Facebook Pages, especially the need to continue growing users on the Google+ platform. Brands might find being on Google+ as a little boring, slow and pointless at this time, but I personally think you need to get on there as right away, for a couple of reasons.  First, why would you not get your brand represented on a social network that is owned and operated by the world's largest search engine?  Umm, SEO anyone?  You have to believe that Google will be indexing Google+ more and more each day, including Pages, so you need to get on there.  Secondly, Google has shown that it is committed to enhancing the Google+ platform, so you have to think that they will do the same for the highly anticipated Pages service.

Bottom line: It costs you nothing to get your business on Google+ Pages, so why would you not?