Dave Cayem

According to a Forbes blog post by Taylor Buley, Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal is declaring victory as his company moves from the “freemium” model to a pay-to-play strategy. Buley quotes Rosenthal as saying that 35,000 Ning networks have signed up for paid plans since they announced the end of free networks. More importantly, Rosenthal says it’s not a case of 35,000 people buying the low-end $3 per month package, and that many of those that signed up are purchasing higher-priced options.

Sounds like Ning’s decision to abandon the freemium model was the right choice.

Or was it?

In the short term, Ning’s decision has worked out well. But it’s the longterm that will tell the story.

Those 35,000 Ning users who ponied up the cash when faced with the prospect of losing the communities that’d built up over the years are very different than tomorrow’s Ning customer. The 35,000 had the opportunity to use Ning, see the value in it, and decide it was worth paying for without having to pull out a credit card on the front end.

Now consider the would-be Ning customer of tomorrow: What’s that person to do when he or she wants to test drive the product and see if it’s a good fit? Sure, there’s a 30-day free trial and a 60-day money-back guarantee. But what online community do you know if that developed in just 30 or 60 days? Plus, you need to enter your credit card info in order to take advantage of the free trial.

Do you usually pull out the plastic to try online community or social media tools?

Me neither.

I have a dog in this fight, so to speak. I run Delphi Forums (which is owned by Mzinga, although this blog post contains by own thoughts and may not represent the views of Mzinga and/or its management). We’ve used the freemium model since 2001 and it’s worked for us. We’ve considered the pay-to-play model and rejected it.

Maybe it will work for Ning. Maybe not.

The point is that the 35,000 signups they’ve had, while certainly a positive sign, do not mean that their change in strategy is now a sure-fire success. We won’t know that for several months, when we see whether the potential Ning customer of tomorrow is prepared to pull out the plastic for a test drive.

Last month, me and my brothers took a road trip out to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. We also made some other fun stops along the way. If you’re making the Boston-to-Cooperstown trip, you might want to make some of the stops we did.

Starting Point: My House

My brothers got a ride out to my house and we headed west at around 10 a.m. Saturday.

Stop #1: Lunch at Mr. Pio Pio

The Picada for two at Mr. Pio Pio in Albany

Given our schedule, I figured we’d end up in Albany around lunch time. I did a bit of research and found Mr. Pio Pio, a well-reviewed Colombian/Ecuadorian restaurant that serves big portions of authentic South American food at reasonable prices. When we got there, we found a very unassuming place in a very unassuming neighborhood. But it’s as authentic as they come. We were the only people in the restaurant speaking English. A large TV was tuned to the soccer game on ESPN Deportes.

The food was a little slow coming out, but when it came, there was lots of it. My brother and I split the Picada for two. It was a plate piled high with grilled beef (carne asada?), chicken, spare ribs, chicharon (fried pig skin), Colombian sausage, tostones and yuca. There was a little lettuce tucked under the meat (”for legal reasons” my brother remarked), but other than that, it was a vegetable-free meal (we did order rice and beans on the side for a little starch). The food was served with a nice pink hot sauce. The beef and Colombian sausage were the real winners, but everything was great. (OK, I wasn’t crazy about the fried pig skin.) Our other brother got some kind of shrimp dish he said was pretty good.

Picked up these two CDs at Last Vestige in Albany

The drink selections include fruit juices and imported South American sodas (Inka Kola, anyone?).

We couldn’t finish the Picada and packed it up for the ride.

Stop #2: Last Vestige Music Shop

Just down the street from Mr. Pio Pio is the Last Vestige Music Shop, so we waddled on over to take a look. It looks like a used record store is supposed to look: bin after bin of used CDs and vinyl, handbills for local bands and old posters on the walls, people thumbing through the merchandise looking for a bargain. There is lots of great music here. In fact, there is an amazing amount of music for a little out-of-the-way place in Albany, NY.

The only down side was the Yankees game on the radio.

We spent about an hour looking around. I picked up a couple of CDs and we got back in the car for the final leg of our drive.

Stop #3: Cooperstown Brewing

The beer selection at Cooperstown Brewing

There are two breweries in the Cooperstown area, and this is the smaller and less well known of the two. Cooperstown Brewing specializes in English-style ales. The small tasting room/gift shop was packed with people when we got there late Saturday afternoon. For $2, we got a sample of the brewery’s seven beers. All of them were terrific, with the exception of the Nine Man Ale, a golden ale that I didn’t care for. Beside the beer, the most interesting thing about this place was the guy serving the beer. I guess he worked as a brewer, because he wasn’t much of a bartender. In fact, he seemed to lack any social skills whatsoever.

Me: This one’s kind of like a dark Oktoberfest.

Mr. Personality: Not really. (followed by dead silence)

Other visitor: Are these souvenir  glasses?

Mr. Personality: No. (followed by dead silence)

Lack of friendly bartenders notwithstanding, the beers exceeded my expectations.

It seems this place really lives in the shadow of Brewery Ommegang. I asked the other guy working the room how far away Ommegang was. Without missing a beat, he deadpanned “never heard of it.” At least somebody working  there there had a sense of humor.

Stop #4: Brewery Ommegang

Brewery Ommegang

Brewery Ommegang is just minutes away from Cooperstown Brewing. After visiting the smaller brewery, the vast grounds and large building at Brewery Ommegang made quite an impression. The brewery building and large tanks sit on a large field on the side of a hill. Very picturesque.

Ommegang only makes authentic Belgian ales, and they’re pretty good at it. The guy that ran the tasting was very nice and very knowledgeable, but he told us he needed to rush us along because they needed to use the tent we were in for another event shortly. So we had to chug some of these beers.

I’m not a huge Belgian beer fan, so I wasn’t crazy about most of these beers. But the Ommegang Abbey Ale was fantastic.

After the tasting, we went over to the brewery store, which featured a large array of Ommegang merchandise. And beer, of course. We picked up a large bottle of the Ommegang Abbey Ale and waited in the world’s slowest line. Finally, we were able to pay for the beer and head to the hotel.

Stop #6: Hotel and Dinner

We got to the hotel around 6, checked in, unloaded our stuff, and went out to dinner in Cooperstown. The hotel and restaurant were both unremarkable, so I won’t waste any space here describing them. After dinner, we went back to the hotel, watched the only baseball game we could find on cable, and went to sleep.

Stop #7: The National Baseball Hall of Fame

From the 2004 World Series: The disputed Mientkiewicz ball, Schilling's famous bloody sock and his cleats with the message about ALS.

We got up Sunday morning, ate a crappy “continental breakfast” at the hotel, packed up and checked out. The we headed into Cooperstown and the Hall of Fame.

The Hall has no parking lot and on-street parking is limited to two hours. We learned from the guy at the hotel front desk that you can park for free at Doubleday Field, which is easy walking distance from the Hall.

The Hall of Fame is really two things: The Hall itself and the museum. The Hall is where all the plaques of the players are. But the really interesting stuff is in the museum. The two buildings are attached.

World Series rings. The 2004 and 2007 Red Sox rings are on the bottom row.

What can I say about the Hall of Fame museum? The collection is simply amazing. Everywhere you look, there are really interesting artifacts. Even the casual baseball fan will be impressed. Leave yourself at least three hours to take it all in.

As Red Sox fans, we were not disappointed. There is lots of Sox memorabilia here. But the museum really transcends teams. Walking around the exhibits really makes one remember what it’s like to be a baseball fan, not just a fan of your favorite team. One of my favorite parts of the museum was the large Hank Aaron exhibit.

The way the Hall and museum are laid out, you enter the museum first, go through the exhibits, and end up in the Hall itself. And that works well.

The Hall is, well, a hall. It’s a large, well-lit room with the familiar plaques along the walls. While it’s interesting to see all of the plaques from everybody in the Hall, it’s not really as interesting as the museum. It was great to see one of the Red Sox heroes from my childhood, Jim Rice, immortalized in the Hall.

Jim Ed Rice in the Hall

Heading Back to Boston

After we had our fill of the Hall of Fame, we grabbed some pizza for lunch, then hopped in the car and drove home. No stops on the way back east for us, we just did it in one straight shot. The trip from Cooperstown to Boston takes about four hours.

We got home in time for dinner Sunday evening.

It’s always tricky for community managers to remove or edit content from a message board. It’s not something to be done lightly, and you run the risk being accused of censorship (or worse). That’s why we don’t do it very often on Delphi Forums or Talk City.

Bearing in mind that our forums are all user-created and user-managed, we only touch user-generated content in extreme cases. Those cases generally involve disclosure of personal information or violation of copyright law.

We define disclosure of personal information as personally-identifiable information that’s not generally available online. If one user manages to find out where another user works and then goes online to tell everybody to bother that user in his or her workplace, we would remove that kind of information as soon as we are alerted to it. Because of the safety and privacy issues involved, we generally act when somebody has posted any personally-identifiable information on another user beyond their first name. (It is rare for our members to use their real names as their usernames on the message boards.)
Copyright law violations are generally simpler. The Safe Harbor Provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forces organizations like ours to act if a copyright holder comes to us, tells us that one of our users has posted their material without permission, and asks us to remove it. It’s usually pretty clear whether a complaint of this nature is legitimate.

In both cases, there are a couple of things we always do. First, we leave a note in place of the removed content explaining what was done and why. Second, we email the person who posted the removed material with an explanation. Failing to do either of those things can leave you open to all kinds of accusations (if you’re an experienced community manager, I’m sure you’re nodding your head right now).

There’s another broad category of requests we get to remove content that we don’t act on. They generally boil down to he-said-she-said complaints. Some people like to throw the work “libel” around hoping that it will get us to act. They’re the complaints involving one member claiming that another member said untrue things about them and demanding that we remove the comments. The problem is that we simply aren’t in a position to judge the veracity of these kinds of complaints. If Member A says Member B ripped him off on eBay, we have no way to prove or disprove the claim. If Member B comes to us claiming that the charge isn’t true and asking us to remove it, we ask him to try to work it out with Member A or with the forum host. But we simply can’t judge the truth of these claims.

If you’re a community manager and have dealt with similar issues, I’d love to hear about your experiences.

As any community manager knows, there are lots of different types of people that participate in communities. It would be impossible to classify every single type of community participant. But in my experience, I’ve come to group people into one of five categories.

Lurkers

This one is easy to define and not terribly insightful on my part. Lurkers are those that read what others have to say, but don’t contribute to the conversation. I know some of my colleagues in the online community business feel it’s important to get lurkers to participate. I agree — but only to a point. If a lurker is there only to gather information and doesn’t feel inclined to add anything, that’s just fine with me. That person is getting value from the conversation, even if he or she doesn’t add to it. However, if somebody is a lurker because they don’t feel comfortable participating, it’s the community manager’s job to step in and make that person feel welcome.

Learners

Learners are those who come to a community seeking specific knowledge. These people are there to ask questions and get answers. Sometimes they come by to get one answer and never return. In other cases, they’ll be regulars that are always keen to pick up new information. Occasionally, they’ll share any expertise they may have.

Gabbers

Gabbers are people who participate a lot, but say little. They’re the ones that are always “off topic.” Gabbers can be good or bad, depending on the community. In communities where people are only there to exchange information about a specific topic and have no interest in other types of interactions, gabbers can be seen as a nuisance. But in less formal groups, gabbers can help build a spirit of friendship that can lead to a more connected community.

Experts

Experts are those who are eager to share what they know with others. There are many types of experts. There are the earnest members who actually know what they are talking about and are generous with their knowledge. There are know-it-alls who are also generous with their knowledge, but want to make sure everyone knows how smart they are. There are know-it-alls who think they know more than they do. And sadly, there are experts who make those with less knowledge feel inadequate and uncomfortable participating in the conversation.

Organizers

This type of community participant may be unique to places where communities are created by end-users as they are on Delphi Forums and Talk City, the community networks that I manage. Organizers are just that: those that make the plans and get people together. They create communities, bring in new members, organize chats, recruit assistant moderators, and do all the things that make places like Delphi Forums and Talk City work.

In fact, without organizers, I’d probably be out of a job!

I’d love to hear from other online community professionals. Has this been your experience, too? Please add your comments.

There have been a few developments since my last post on the affair involving Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the custody of online community registration information.

As outlined in my previous post about this, The Plain Dealer used registration information from its Cleveland.com message boards to link the judge to anonymous statements about some of her cases. They confronted the judge with their findings and published a story about it.

The biggest development is that Judge Saffold has sued the Plain Dealer for $50 million. The suit (available as a PDF file) alleges that the defendants, “allowed Plain Dealer reporters access to confidential private information solely in possession of” Cleveland.com and its parent company, Advance Internet. The suit goes on to say that the judge and her daughter (who admitted posting some of the messages in question) “reasonably expected, and did, in fact expect, Defendants to maintain the confidentiality and privacy of their personally identifiable information…”

Meantime, Advance Internet has blocked editorial staff from accessing user registration information. The Plain Dealer’s reader representative, Ted Diadiun, detailed the affair — and Advance Internet’s response — in a column a few days ago. Diadiun’s column makes clear that he’s not too happy that reporters will no longer have access to this information.

Amid these latest developments, a wider debate spurred by this story continues.

Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald argues that anonymous online commentary is harmful and should be ended altogether. “Make them leave their names,” Pitts writes. “Stop giving people a way to throw rocks and hide their hands. Any dropoff in the quantity of message board postings will surely be made up in the quality thereof.”

Pitts has a point. The problem is in the execution.

Show me a newspaper message board that demands posters use real names and I’ll show you a slew of messages from the likes of “Bud Weiser,” “Al Fresco,” and “Anita Mann.”

Shawn Moynihan, in a column for Editor & Publisher, says that once an account is used to violate a community’s terms and conditions (as the account in this case was arguably doing), “you open yourself to scrutiny, especially if you’re making insidious comments on such serious matters as death-penalty cases. And if a newspaper learns in the process that an anonymous poster who’s doing so may or may not be a local judge, then that paper has an inarguable responsibility to its readership to investigate, and — in this case — report its findings. “

I agree. But I think Mr. Moynihan misses the point.

As I argued in my last post on this: Reporters can’t be faulted for using information at their disposal pursue a story of interest to their readers. The problem is that reporters had access to the information in the first place. The traditional (and vital) wall between the business and editorial sides of the paper has to work both ways in order to be meaningful. The business side of the operation should have kept this information from the editorial side.

Advance Internet did the right thing by blocking reporters’ access to registration information. But that doesn’t mean that the Plain Dealer did anything wrong.

The good folks at Mzinga asked me to write a blog post about this. I’m cross-posting it here.

As a former journalist now in the online community business, I’m intrigued by the case of Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The Plain Dealer used registration information from its Cleveland.com message boards to link the judge to anonymous statements about some of her cases. In doing so, the paper has triggered a debate about the ethics of using information from the business side of the paper as a source for stories generated by the editorial side.

The business side of the paper — specifically, those with custody of the registration information – failed in their duty to protect users’ registration information. But I don’t think the editorial side of the paper did anything wrong.

First, a few facts:

The episode started out with an investigation into comments about a relative of a Plain Dealer reporter that were posted on Cleveland.com. That investigation found that a user that was commenting about some of Judge Saffold’s cases had registered using the judge’s own AOL email account. The paper later found that Judge Saffold’s court-issued computer had been used to access Cleveland.com at the times and dates that three of the comments in question were posted. Judge Saffold denies posting the comments. The judge’s 23-year-old daughter claims she authored them. The Plain Dealer published a story detailing all of this.

At the very least, Judge Saffold is guilty of poor judgment (pardon the unintentional pun) by letting her daughter use her court-issued computer. If it turns out she’s hiding something (and the circumstances suggest that may be the case), she could be guilty of misconduct. Because of this, this is absolutely a legitimate news story. No doubt about it.

So we’re left with the question of whether the Plain Dealer reporters were acting properly by using the registration information of a Cleveland.com user. I believe they did. My problem is with the Cleveland.com people that made the information available to the editorial side of the house.

Journalists are duty-bound to report on information of interest to the public. Granted, there are sensible caveats like suppressing the names of sexual assault victims. But this isn’t such a case. If the Plain Dealer had this information and failed to report on it, they would have been failing their readers.

The administrators of the Cleveland.com message board are under a different kind of obligation: An obligation to protect private information.

One could argue that Cleveland.com had the legal right to do what they did. Their User Agreement does have a passage that one could interpret as allowing this (”…you grant us…license to use…your identity and information about you…for any purpose…”). But a reasonable person registering for the Cleveland.com message boards would rightfully expect that their personal information be afforded a bit more protection than that.

I know that the separation between editorial and business functions I call for are more theoretical than practical. The fact is that the editorial people that manage Cleveland.com most likely have access to users’ registration information, so there was no business-side person in a position to allow or disallow the editorial side’s request to see this information. But that doesn’t excuse Cleveland.com from their responsibility to protect user information.

Reporters are insistent (and rightly so) that the business side of the house keep its hands off the editorial side. The case of Judge Saffold and the Plain Dealer shows that there are cases where it’s a two-way street.

Update:

It turns out that Advance Internet, which operates Cleveland.com, has blocked editors from reviewing the email addresses of message board posters. Good for them.

More in this column from Plain Dealer reader representative Ted Diadiun. (Note that Diadiun maintains there was nothing wrong with how Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer handled themselves.)

Saw this Bing ad via Google AdSense on Delphi Forums. Does this mean Bing is advertising with Google?!?

The realm of social media experts tends to be an echo chamber. (Note that social media experts universally hate the term “social media expert.” They prefer “rock star.”) Everybody’s on the same page. Everybody says everybody else’s work is “awesome” or “valuable.” The conventional wisdom is, well, conventional.

In hopes that I’ll spur some discussion, I’ve compiled a list of things I disagree with most social media types about:

It’s not about the numbers

Many social media types have thousands of connections on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Large numbers of connections seem to be the way one is validated as a social media star. I say that having thousands of connections is antithetical to the spirit of social media. Social media is supposed to be about starting conversations. Can you really have a conversation with thousands? Perhaps those with thousands of connections are more interested in creating an audience than creating a conversation.

Twitter is not mainstream

I really like Twitter. I find that I use it a lot more than any other social medium. But Facebook is a lot easier for most people to understand. Things like hashtags, retweets and @replies are simply too geeky for most people. Photo and video sharing via Twitter is also difficult. I rely on Twitter for news about technology, social media and online marketing. And nothing beats Twitter for getting a read on what people are talking about right now. But Twitter will never become mainstream in its current form.

Coffee tweets are evil

Coffee, like bacon, is big among the social media elite.

I like my coffee. But I don’t care about yours.

You provide no value or entertainment to your friends and followers by telling everybody how your coffee tastes, how much you’ve had, how much you need, where you’re purchasing it, how you’d like to receive it intravenously, etc. (Unfortunately, my idea for a #nomoredamntweetsaboutcoffee Twitter hashtag went nowhere.)

Location sharing is boring

OK, I admit it: I’ve never used Foursquare. I simply don’t get the attraction of making your location public. But even if you are into letting the world know where you are, that doesn’t mean that the world cares. Unless most of your Twitter followers are in your metropolitan area and might want to connect if you’re in the same neighborhood, they really don’t have much use for this information. And they really don’t care if you’re the “mayor” of your local supermarket. So why clutter your Twitter stream with this stuff?

To be honest, I’d be a little worried if lots of people expressed an interest in my whereabouts. We used to call that “stalking.”

There’s nothing wrong with email

I’ll never understand why some people prefer to handle private messaging through Twitter or Facebook. What’s wrong with email? Everybody already uses email and checks it regularly. I don’t have to be a connection or friend for us to exchange email. Most importantly, email won’t restrict me to 140 characters.

Stop repeating your tweets

Lots of social media types update their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other services at once. There are lots of tools that let you do this. But just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should. First, those that you’re connected with on multiple services will see the same thing multiple times. Second, your Twitter updates with @replies and hashtags make no sense to your Facebook friends. Unless they’re on Twitter. But then, they already saw your update on Twitter. Get it?

Message boards are the purest form of social media

I believe that the decidedly unhip message board is the most social form of social media out there. Message boards create content through social interactions among peers. You really can’t say that about many other forms of social media other than Twitter (which is essentially a giant chat room). On a blog or social profile like a Facebook page, one person is speaking to many. Others may be able to comment, but they’re commenting on another person’s turf. It’s not peer-to-peer.

By the way, podcasting is not a form of social media. It’s a one-to-many form of communication. There’s nothing social about it. Don’t get me wrong, I think podcasting is very important and I’m a huge fan of the Adam Carolla podcast. But it’s not social media.

So that’s my take on the state of social media. Please add your two cents. After all, it’s the social thing to do.