The following video found me on Facebook from an old high school buddy. The first time I watched it was on my phone.
Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? Welcome to the World of Socialnomics
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Neighborhood Watch and Social Networking
From TechNewsWorld: Neighborhood Watch 2.0:
City budgets are straining police forces in many cities, and in some cases citizens have seized upon social networking technologies to help guard against crime in their own neighborhoods. It’s unclear whether neighborhood watch efforts actually make people safer, but statistics indicate that neighborhoods with high levels of resident cohesion typically have less crime.
This is another example of how better communication (or cohesion) in a neighborhood can help make it safer.
eNeighbors Traffic Reports vs User Feedback
I monitor the traffic reports for our website (eNeighbors.com) at least once a day and get caught up in the upticks and downturns in traffic. The data that we can track is really helpful like pageviews and visits, which gives me a measure of the health of our site, but it lacks the intangible perspective that you get from user feedback.
In the case of South Village, they have 318 registered users on the website from 287 homes. This is good to know, but what does it mean? Can they communicate with these residents effectively? How can we test this?
One way to test this is to simply ask your users, which is exactly what a communications committee member in South Village did. He simply posted an article to see if “anyone was out there”. (An ingenious and completely tangible way to track usage and response.) I posted a screenshot of the article with the comment string below so you can see. In total, he received 86 comments, which is pretty impressive considering that there are only 318 registered users on the website. Anyone who blogs knows that this is a tremendous response rate.
I think the response was awesome and it gave me a great feeling that their website was so frequented. The comments help to give better insight into our user’s attitude and feelings about eNeighbors that you cannot get from traffic data. The comments also solidify our feelings that our automatic email newsletter and other notifications are working to promote traffic and usage.
Some of my favorite comments include:
- I try to log onto eNeighbors at least once a day when I can, because I want to know what my fellow homeowners are discussing. I don’t always respond to postings, as I am just one Board member and don’t represent the views of the Board as a whole. What I do is try to find out what topics are generating high levels of interest among homeowners so that, if necessary, we can include these topics in future meeting agendas.
- we read weekly and sometimes more! love this!
- We read it regularly. Thanks for taking the time to do it.
- Wouldn’t miss it for the world. 🙂
- Yup, we read them as soon as something is posted..
- We’re tuned in. Thanks.
- Hello – I look at this quite a bit – especially since I get the alerts regularly.
- I read this site whenever the email informs me of new posting. I set my account to receive email daily from EN.
- I look up eneighbors every day when I am home (I was out last two days).
I do read all the postings and the comments that follow and make notes on them, but usually do not make any comments. (Any comments I make are my own and do not represent the Board’s views). I do believe that all Board Members do read the postings on eneighbors. - I read when I see new things that I want to hear more about. (Get the reminder weekly.)
eNeighbors Blog 