Introduction and planned changes - Page 3

Anonymous · ‎26-06-2012

Hi everyone,

My name is Leonard and as part of the plans we’ve been discussing in the forum, I’m been brought on board to help further evolve the forums as an exciting and interesting place for anything around O2. I’ve recently moved from warm and sunny Gibraltar, where I was responsible for the world’s largest poker community, managed by 500 freelance and full time employees across 19 different languages.

While getting up to speed with everything within O2 in recent weeks, I’ve been looking from the sidelines and I must say, I’m very excited about getting to know everyone. It’s also been great fun working with Abs, Paul and the other guys from the social media team. Over the next few months, we’ve got some great stuff planned for you.

In the next few days, we’ll be making a couple of changes to further support discussions, learning and supporting one another. Nothing too dramatic, but I just wanted to give you a quick heads up about the changes we’re planning to make:

1. Naming of ranks

The current rank structure is focused quite heavily on the word newbie and once you’re past that, you’re not really able to gain any ranks anymore. Although the rank newbie is fine, we feel that quite quickly you are no longer a newbie so we’re planning to add some more interesting ranks.

We want to make participating in the community a lot more fun and we’ll therefore implement 50+ brand new ranks (the names of which will be revealed as people start to gain them) and completely rework how those are calculated. Basically, you’ll be rewarded for any form of participation in the community and you will even keep gaining ranks on the highest levels.

2. Board structure

To make sure the boards are as active as they can be, we have looked at where the activity takes place at the moment. Some of the current sections only have 1 post per month, so we feel it’s better to merge those inactive ones.

There are two main advantages to this:

It’ll be easier to decide where to post
For new users, it’ll be less ‘scary’ to post in an active board

After having analysed the different boards, this means we’ll move from 18 (or 22 if you’re a super user) to 9 boards.

The board structure will look as follows:

Welcome & News
Pay Monthly and Pay & Go
Mobile or Home Broadband and Home Phone
O2 Wallet
Other Services
Android Devices
Apple Devices
Other Devices
Off topic & community suggestions

We’ll keep all of the existing threads, but you might initially struggle to find a few, which is to be expected when something like this changes.

Other than that, we haven’t planned any major changes for the moment. However, as part of our service offering improvements, we’ll be hosting a Q&A session with our Sales & Service director who will be answering all your questions and taking your feedback and suggestions from this thread: http://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Latest-O2-Info/Ask-the-Director-How-can-we-make-your-life-even-better-c...

I’m really looking forward to working with you all and if you have any suggestions for the future, please let me know.

Hope to speak soon!

Leonard

Anonymous · ‎26-06-2012

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all the feedback - really appreciated!

I understand your concerns regarding board structure. Changes always hurt a little bit and when it comes to the organising information, having as many different boards as possible makes a lot of sense. However, unfortunately we currently don't have the activity to support such diversification. We're hoping to change that ASAP though

We have loads of plans for organising threads though. Just an example: so far we haven't really been using tags and sticky threads. Over the next few weeks I'll be looking into as many ways as possible to keep things nice and neat for all of us, so let's see how things develop.

@Junior:

My girlfriend just said I signed with O2s parent company ^^. Anyway, as the forum grows, we'll add several employees to the community team. Next to that, I'll be as active as I can and there are some really knowledgeable people on the forum that are helping out as well.

@JohnSReid:

The SSO process and move to Lithium were extremely important in our battle against spam, so I don't think I can help there. However, we really do see the importance of feedback and social engagement. An example of that was todays session with our Director of Sales & Service. It's also the reason why I'll be exclusively working on the forums.

@davews:

I'm not sure if it's actually possible to change that, but I'll have a look.

Cheers,

Leonard

Anonymous · ‎26-06-2012

Hello Leonard thanks for the post I read about the changes especially the new ranking system what I like to sergest that as well as moving up the ranks and keep people interested why do`not you introduce a insensitive off free minutes and text for more o2 community post that is done. Just an idea bob7

Anonymous · ‎26-06-2012

Hi bob7,

Keeping people active and interested is extremely important, especially since we want to make the community a more vibrant and exciting place. So thanks for sharing your thoughts and ideas on that, I really appreciate it!

Although I do like the idea of giving people even more incentives, the big risk with simply paying for posts is that people will start spamming. The other challenge is that there we have many non-mobile customers browsing the forums as well.

However, I'd love to hear any additional thoughts that you might have on it, so keep 'em coming!

Cheers,
Leonard

Anonymous · ‎26-06-2012

@asteellrule:

I see your point and it definitely makes sense if there would be enough traffic to support such a split. Unfortunately, there currently isn't. As a result, we have less people posting their questions than with a merger. As it's all about helping as many people as we can, we decided to merge those boards for now. However, if it doesn't work out or if it grows big enough, we will split the boards again.

I don't understand the logic of merging boards just to make them look more active. Besides, if the merger doesn't work and the merged boards are running for some time, how will you know which posts (or thread I suppose) to place back in the split boards, short of going through each manually.

On a positive note, I like the new ranking system!

Anonymous · ‎26-06-2012

Thanks for giving it some more thought, asteellrule. You're right - I'm not looking to merge the boards, just to make them seem more active. I'm trying to find ways in which we can better engage with new users.

As a general rule, any forum section should have at least 10 posts per day. That's a crucial barrier for new users in any community .

So, what I did was:
a) Look at the average activity and the trend in growth per board
b) Identify boards with less than 10 posts/day
c) Try to find similar boards to merge them with

As a result, we arrived at the mentioned forum structure.

For example, Pay and Go has an average of 4 posts per day. Mobile broadband, only 1 post per day. Rather than adding them to the Other Services board, we thought they'd be a better fit to the Pay Monthly and Home Broadband & Home Phone boards.

How do you feel about that?
Leonard

Junior · ‎26-06-2012

@Anonymous wrote:
@Junior:
My girlfriend just said I signed with O2s parent company ^^. Anyway, as the forum grows, we'll add several employees to the community team. Next to that, I'll be as active as I can and there are some really knowledgeable people on the forum that are helping out as well.

Cheers,
Leonard

Hi

Thanks for the reply... I would like to see that when O2 employees are private messaged on here that they respond please!

Thanks

Anonymous · ‎26-06-2012

Hi Junior,

Is it anything I can sort out for you? If so, please send me a private message. I'll happily help out

Cheers,

Leonard

Anonymous · ‎26-06-2012

So, what I did was:
a) Look at the average activity and the trend in growth per board
b) Identify boards with less than 10 posts/day
c) Try to find similar boards to merge them with

As a result, we arrived at the mentioned forum structure.

For example, Pay and Go has an average of 4 posts per day. Mobile broadband, only 1 post per day. Rather than adding them to the Other Services board, we thought they'd be a better fit to the Pay Monthly and Home Broadband & Home Phone boards.

How do you feel about that?
Leonard

Using those criteria and examples, I can better understand the motives. As long as the topics contain which service is being referred to then OK.

Anonymous · ‎26-06-2012

Merging "mobile internet" with "home broadband and phone" is not something I look forward to. 😞
The technical issue of mobile have little relation to those of BB.

IMO we need technical help from O2 in this forum, at present we get none. After today's activities I get the impression O2 are trying to turn this into a social / PR forum not a technical help one.

I also have a similar strong view about making the "superuser" section part of the public forum. 😞

( Yes, still decorating )

Anonymous · ‎26-06-2012

@Anonymous wrote:

So, what I did was:
a) Look at the average activity and the trend in growth per board
b) Identify boards with less than 10 posts/day
c) Try to find similar boards to merge them with

As a result, we arrived at the mentioned forum structure.

For example, Pay and Go has an average of 4 posts per day. Mobile broadband, only 1 post per day. Rather than adding them to the Other Services board, we thought they'd be a better fit to the Pay Monthly and Home Broadband & Home Phone boards.

How do you feel about that?
Leonard

Using those criteria and examples, I can better understand the motives. As long as the topics contain which service is being referred to then OK.

Great. But please don't hesitate to PM me or make another post if you have any concerns or questions.

To keep things organised, we'll start working a bit more with tagging and sticky threads, so any input on that would be very helpful as well.

Cheers,

Leonard