Communities 2021: Mid-year Update
As we finish the first half of the year and enter the second, let’s review where we are and also take a sneak peek into some exciting things on the anvil. With new ways to drive user engagement, more efficient ways of community management, advanced analytics and a completely re-imagined community experience, this is an exciting time for Khoros Communities. Let's dive in!Community vs. Social Network
Since 2008, “social media” has become a heavily-used buzz word in the corporate world. The question is “what is social media?” Many seem to equate social media toFacebook-likedsocial networking sites; others seem to think that they areblogs, theTwitterfamily of applications for micro-blogging,Flickr,YouTube, or similar type of content sharingWeb 2.0applications. Yet, answers to this question may still range fromsocial collaborationsites (likeWikipedia,Delicious, orDigg) toonline communities(like those we host for our enterprise clients orYahoo! Answer). Well, they are all correct to some extent, and these are functional classifications of social media. Author and bloggerBrian Solis, introduced another classification of social media, based on the types of conversation. He called itthe conversation prism. However, if you want to understand social media from a relational andsocial anthropologicalperspective, you will find that there are really only two major types of social media:Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Rewards (and Their Differences from Motivations)
Last time I discussed motivation and the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Now we can go one step further to talk about rewards and the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Although motivation and rewards are both very critical to the design and implementation of gamification strategies, few gamification practitioners can articulate the subtle differences between intrinsic motivations vs. intrinsic rewards. Some even treat these distinctive concepts synonymously, which is ridiculously wrong. Since this post builds on the concepts introduced in my last post, if you haven’t read it yet, please take a few minutes to do so. It is critical to understand the fundamental concepts around motivation before jumping into today’s discussion. Review it here:Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation.Community Syndication in the Developer Documentation Portal
As I was working on the documentation for Khoros's Community Syndication Message List component, I kept thinking about different ways I wanted to use Community Syndication in our Developer Documentation Portal. So I tried it out. Here's my story.Gamification 101: The Psychology of Motivation
Game mechanics and game dynamics are able to positively influence human behavior because they are designed to drive the players above the activation threshold (i.e. the upper right of the ability-motivation axis), and then trigger them into specific actions. In other words, successful gamification is all about making these three factors occur at the same time. As I mentioned last time, the temporal convergence is the key. Today, I will talk about the first factor in FBM: the science of motivation.What Drives Us—Are You Intrinsically Motivated?
A common question I get when talking about gamification is “how can you tell if people are intrinsically motivated?” Since we can’t really measure people’s motivation, it’s not easy to tell if someone is truly motivated, let alone intrinsically motivated. Yet, understanding people’s intrinsic motivation is crucially important, whether you are trying to motivate your customers or employees to do something great. This is because extrinsic motivation is not only unsustainable in the long-term; it often leads to abacklash due to overjustification. For this blog, I am going to use some real life examples to make this abstract concept of intrinsic motivation more vivid and realistic.
