The Subtle Influence

About Me

Geek extraordinaire with a flair for style.

Professional blog: http://www.thesubtleinfluence.com
Personal blog: http://chiah.posterous.com/

You should follow me on Twitter: @chiah

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Archive for

November 2009

 

Final Lunch For Good, I Argue for a Technology Based Solution

It's been a nice series of lunches put together by J.R. Johnson, Chris Heuer, Myles Weissleder and the team at Lunch.com to discuss three topics.

To start off, we discussed "Responsible Participation" (Full Video, I come on at 16:25) and how to encourage conversation. What does it mean to have communities with real names and social contexts. What does it mean to encourage responsible participation? I argue during lunch that participation is not a technology problem so technology can't solve it, that it is much more of a social/societal issue.

In the second installment the topic became, "Promoting Critical Thinking" I again argue that this is not a technology problem but one that is sociological. Our culture does not value critical thinking and the inner life, our constant business and distractions take us away from having enough quiet time to reflect. (Video excerpt)

The third installment was on "Finding Common Ground" and I go towards a technology solution. I think the more we expose the user created content to give context during a conversation, the more human we see "the other". We talk about how there's universal themes of "loving your family" to the mundane, "liking soccer". If we have that information on the sidebar as we are talking about a hot button topic, wouldn't that bring more humanity into the conversation? Would it be harder to objectify the "other" and hate them? If we had technology that could crunch through all of the information and expose the similarities between two people, would that change the conversational tone?

What does this have to do with Community Management? These are all very important- how do we promote conversation? How do we set the tone for the conversation? Having common ground encourages civility and healthy communities. It seems that the Lunch For Good conversations were getting at "How to build healthy thriving communities".

All in all, a great series of lunches. I'm glad that I had the chance to meet everyone and discuss these topics, even if we didn't all agree. Look forward to the next series!

Filed under  //  Chia speaking  
Posted
 

Building a Community is Like...

I've been talking to a lot of different people in the past few months in diverse industries, from healthcare to IT the word on everyone's lips is, "Community". I've started to ask the question, "So, what does that mean to you? What would be your goals to having a community?" and from those answers start articulating what the word "Community" means to the person sitting across the table from me.

I've been thinking a lot about the role that a community of people can play in an organization, particularly in the for-profit world since companies are what I come in contact with every day. The conclusion? Building a community is closer to a political campaign or managing a team of volunteers than anything else. In both cases reliance on the passionate converted to carry the message back to their network is the holy grail and the way is to use the passion and energy for the brand. At the heart of every successful viral marketing campaign are the people, period, end of story.

Anyone else have thoughts?

Posted
 

Chubby Brain Interview

 Old interview from March 2009 with Chubby Brain.

http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/2009/03/interview-with-chia-hwu-community-manager-at-23andme/

 

A little excerpt where I talk about Community Management:

Tell us a bit about yourself, your background... and what your job of community manager entails?

I primarily interface with members and people curious about the company. I primarily do that through social media – things like Twitter and Facebook and sometimes even LinkedIn. Also, other genealogy/genetic forums. There is actually a group of people very interested in learning about their deep genealogy which our service helps with. And they do their own research so I interface with those people as well.

We also have our forums on our site where people can come on and where people can look at what other people who are part of the service are talking about. For example, there are people who’ve started an adoption thread. A lot of people on the site are adopted and wanted to find out more about themselves. So this is one way for them to find out about their predispositions especially since they don’t have a family history.

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