A presentation for Social Media Club Gold Coast on making a website social. Looks at some general principles and an example of WordPress Multiuser with BuddyPress, which was used to run a course site in Semester Two, 2010.

1. Socialise your website
Kate Davis
Information Systems
Queensland University of Technology

2. Outline
• General principles
• WordPress Multisite + BuddyPress
• Evaluating effectiveness

3. GENERAL PRINCIPLES
Socialise your website

4. Change the way you think about your
website
• Destination web presence
• Outposts
• Distributed content
• The online branch library – David Lee King
– Building
– Staff
– Collection
– Customers

5. Share the love
• Write content that people will want to share
• Make it easy for them to share it

6. Positioning
• Got distributed content? Pull it
all together with your
‘destination web presence’
• Promote your social media
presence on your website

9. Integrate
• Feed your social content into your site to
entice people to follow you elsewhere
• Be daring: feed mentions of you, your brand,
or your site into your site
• Feed your site content into your social
presences

10. Facilitate conversation
• Allow unmoderated comments – everywhere
• Never ignore a comment
• Respond to @mentions

11. Inject personality
• Develop a style
• Show your face
• Link people to content
• Let people be themselves – individuals, not a
corporate voice

12. Optimise your site for mobile devices
• Device agnosticism

13. WORDPRESS MULTISITE +
BUDDYPRESS
Building a social site from scratch

14. cc image courtesy Risager at http://www.flickr.com/photos/risager/2792323005/

25. cc image courtesy Jkonig at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkonig/904404446/

26. Configure multisite

27. Install BuddyPress

28. Plug-ins

29. Essential plug-ins
• Akismet
• BP-NotificationWidget
• BP Group Management
• BP System Report
• BuddyPress Auto Group
Join
• BuddyPress Community
Stats
• Buddypress Sitewide
activity widget
• BuddyPress Usernames
Only
• Group Activity
Subscription
• Limit Blogs per User
• Login With Ajax
• TDD Recent Posts
• Welcome Pack
• WordPress Database
Backup
• Youtuber

30. Customise

33. What I’d change
• Technology:
– Integrate LinkedIn group into site
– No forums
– Issues with embeds – more plug-ins required!
– Issues with display of avatar on user site
comments – doesn’t seem to be a fix
• Learning design:
– No PLNs

34. cc image courtesy Julia Roy at

35. EVALUATING SOCIAL MEDIA
IMPLEMENTATIONS

36. To evaluate or not…
• Discuss!

37. Metrics to consider
• Posts
– Number of posts
– Frequency of posts
– Number of posts authored by customers

38. Metrics to consider
• Usage
– Number of views and derivative statistics
– Most active posts
– Time spent on the site
– Subscribers – RSS and email
– Links clicked
– Referring URLs and search terms (source of traffic)

39. Metrics to consider
• Conversational intensity
– Comments and derivative statistics, including
measure of conversational intensity

40. Metrics to consider
• Impact on staff / yourself
– Time spent writing posts
– Enjoyment derived from blogging
– Impact on branch library staffing
– Stress on staff

41. Metrics to consider
• Visibility and reach
– Media placements
– Visibility factor

42. Metrics to consider
• Return on investment
– Cost per post
– Cost per site view
– Cost per minute customer spends on site
– Site views per minute of staff time invested

43. cc image courtesy Calaveracafe at http://www.flickr.com/photos/calavera/65098350/

44. Contact Kate
k3.davis@qut.edu.au | email
@katiedavis | twitter
davis.kate | skype
virtuallyalibrarian.com | blog
diigo.com/user/katiedavis | bookmarks
www.slideshare.net/katiedavis| slides
@qutisg | information studies group twitter
coming soon
katedavis.info | publications and research