5 Ways Our Coworking Space Wins at Community Building
Swift Kick has the privilege of working out of a coworking space. Coworking is when a bunch of small companies, freelancers, and start ups work in an office together because it is way better than working from home. New Work City is an awesome place to be, not just because of the exposed brick, but […]
4 Tips To Impress Your Community Members With Handwritten Notes
Last week, the community manager of YEC sent me this letter (pictured below) via snail mail. The sad reality is that my first reaction was that it must be a computer generated note because the YEC has at least 1000 members and there’s no way one person would handwrite a note this long for every […]
Laying Tracks for Motivated Trains
Three quick stories, one important point. Story #1: Last week, before my soccer match, I watched a little league softball game on the field next to us. Surrounding the field was a collection of parents multitasking between the game, their blackberries, and babysitting their, even younger, offspring. One parent in particular was having a hard […]
New Red Rover Feature: Get Your Follow On
Earlier this month, Tom wrote about the difference between communities based on weak ties and those built on stronger, face-to-face interactions. The strong-tie groups have a longevity that comes from the real-world relationships between members, while groups that are based on weak ties can form easily, but dissolve just as quickly if the members don’t […]
Weak Ties vs Strong Ties
James Fowler’s keynote address at the #ACUI11 conference last week stirred up quite a discussion after he made the claim that online relationships had little influence over behavior. As expected, our friends in the #SAchat community quickly expressed concern for the statement through the Twitter backchannel and afterwards in the hotel lobby as they’ve experienced […]
Private Communities and Engagement – The 90-9-1 Rule
Online community ninja, Jakob Nielsen, is one of the original brains behind the 90-9-1 rule. Stated simply, the rule goes… In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. Wikipedia is a classic example. 99% of […]
Making Them WANT To Do It (Apathy vs Engagement)
If you have ever attended a conference with us, you know we enjoy mixing stuff up through the use of Flashmobs and Blender Events, both of which stem from our Dance Floor Theory Leadership Training. The goals are to: Have Fun Increase Engagement Build Relationships Create Pattern Interrupts Induce Positive Confusion (one reason why) While […]
The Value of Leveraging Network Nodes In The College Community
Last spring, I was traveling on a public bus from Laguardia Airport in New York to my hotel on the north side of Manhattan. When I got on the bus at the airport, the bus driver was in a heated argument with someone complaining about being charged twice for the ride. The bus driver was […]
Design Matters
Red Rover is about lowering the barriers to connection and engagement. We set out to make something simple that would help. Pushing this forward, we’re about to release Red Rover 1.2, with a new design. Important changes: + It looks better, which makes it feel better to use. + We’ve switched from “% Interest Match” match […]
How to Make Student Engagement Contagious
In 1969, famed psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a social experiment looking at the contagiousness of engagement. Wired magazine’s Jonah Lehrer accurately summarizes the experiment: In this study, Milgram had “confederates” stop on a busy city street and look upwards at the sky. He demonstrated that when one person was looking up, 40 percent of passerby […]