Lately, I feel so frustrated with a lot of things when it comes to work. Everything seems to be out of its proper place. Everyone seems to be more interested with personal gains over what's good for everyone. I am even questioning my mere existence and purpose. I'm confused if I should stay or move forward. I will not know the answer without taking a step.
Before writing this entry, I was just looking for trash files hiding in my computer. I was about to delete some old files when I saw a certain file named "Exam". Out of curiosity, I opened it and saw my old self. My idealist 21 year old self.
- How will you build the community if you become an Online Community Executive?
Change. A simple yet complicated word which serves as my guide when I entered this company.
When I become a part of Team Turner as Content Moderation Control Officer handling Cartoon Network Asia, it’s the time when CN Website is recovering from its recent revamp during that time. Contents are dropping down, users are becoming uninterested, no activities, stagnant community. As day goes by, I see that there’s a barrier serving as a hindrance from both ends; Trust and involvement.
For me, trust and involvement is really important in making an online community. It is essential that users trust the community, whether it be towards a fellow user, moderator or an online community executive. Why trust? Users must learn to trust us, in that way, they will keep on coming back because they believe that we can give them the satisfaction that they want.
How can we give them the satisfaction? Aside from promotions and latest events, people from across the globe like having activities. Activities which will make them feel involve and part of that certain community. We can give it to them through involvement from our end. They actually don’t need expensive prizes; all they need is the attention coming from us to make them feel that we value them. For instance, the CN Message Boards that we moderators are handling. Children used to go there just to chat with their friends, a reason which we can’t consider as community building. We thought of several ways on how we can make these kids come back with our without friends. We tried several tests until we came up in being involved. How? We used to conduct simple contests not just between the users but also with us. This simple involvement became a reason for the kids to go back. Going back not just to chat with friends or participate in their friendly competitions, but going back because they feel that we value them by giving our time to them.
With these two factors, we started change.
These changes break the barrier between the users and us moderators. We were able to build a simple yet a fruitful community which shows transparency to all people inside it.
If I will be an Online Community Executive, I will build a community having my experiences as Content Moderator as my foundation.
Trust will be the top of my priority. Gaining public trust is really important to all company. We can have it through listening and responding. If we will be dealing with kids, listening and responding is vital. When they are having problems with regards to our service, we need to make them feel that we’re listening. However, we can’t have trust by merely listening. We need to respond on what they say to make them feel that heard them loud and clear and we have plans to do action in relation to their concern.
Second, Respect. There are times that we think that we should ignore or not entertain negative feedback from our audiences. If we really want to have a solid community, respect to our members and to our fellowmen must be present. How can we show respect? In my point of view, we can have it my accepting feedback from our people. Whether good or bad, accept it. If it’s good, tell them that we are thankful because they appreciate our works. If it’s bad, tell them that we’re sorry and we’ll try our best to improve a certain part which they do not like. In that way, we can also achieve number one which is trust.
Third will be Acknowledgement. It is not enough that we have trust and respect in our community. We must also make them feel that we value them. We can give it to them by simply giving our own feedback on what they do for us. For instance, is our Toon Football Facebook page. A simple post of saying that we are thankful for their continued support is really a huge deal for them. We can get feedback that “you’re welcome sir, Toon Football is a great game” and the like. Also, a mini event/contest every now and then will surely help to make our members motivated. In this way, they will feel that staying with us is all worth it. Giving a small present for them with this motivation will surely make them valuable to us. It can also help us attract more possible users for our services.
With these three principles, I believe that this will help us in making a community. For building a community is like nurturing a baby, there are times that we need to invest but it will be all worth it in the long run.
- If you were given a chance to re-design the online portals for Cartoon Network specifically the site, what kind of approach are you planning to do and why?
If I will be given a chance to re-design the Cartoon Network site, I’ll probably do it similar to Yahoo’s Homepage with a little bit of Facebook effect.
At present, Cartoon Network site [www.cartoonnetworkasia.com] is full of advertisements and flash images all over the homepage which is for me, a BIG NO. Why? It is all because of the loading time. Users and possible visitors of our website will surely have a hard time loading all these images which are only used for advertising a brand. So, if we will be going to have a website similar to Yahoo’s format, it will be less images more texts and links.
A website that has more texts and links will cut all the question marks of users and guests on how to navigate our site. This will help them focus on what we have inside instead of showing what we have with a question on “how to get there?” We can still use images for this, but instead of using flash images, we will focus on thumbnail images. These thumbnails will enable faster loading time of our website. With regards to the texts and links, it will enable our visitors to browse our contents with the help of interconnected links which will be hassle free.
Since we are dealing with a network’s website; it’s best if we can have a search engine. Having this feature will make it easy for visitors to look the things that they want to see. For example, our CN games; we have a lot of pages for the list of games and we need to load every single page just to see our desired game. With a search engine, it will be easy to look around. Besides, visitors don’t like to wait that much for loading a certain page. Instead of waiting, they just cancel the page and proceed to a different one-worst is, a different website.
Videos are great for a website. However, having a video which looks like a compiled version of all advertisement is not good. It’s best if we can have videos which will serve as a “coming soon” so we can hype up the excitement of our visitors. If possible, having a different “coming soon” every week will be healthy because that will give users the reason to go back every now and then.
Aside from what I’ve mentioned, I also added the Facebook effect. Why? Having a website with no updates from its administrators/developers or even by users is really dull. So to have the feeling that our website is alive, it is really fun to have an update section on our front page. There, they can read updates on what is happening now in CN, what are our plans, and the like. We can also get there some updates on what do our users think with our services or even what they are thinking at the moment. With that, we can see the community side of CN by just merely visiting our homepage. I remember last year when we received a feedback that they felt alone when visiting our CN website, especially the forums because they don’t know if there is somebody else online aside from their self. So to avoid this feeling, we need to give them a venue to cure the aloneness in them.
In addition, if we can have a chatbox where users and visitors can talk with each other since children does love to talk. It’s all about sharing their ideas, interests, and opinions to the world.
Faster loading time and showing the community side is my view in improving the online portal of Cartoon Network website.
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