Leveraging Social Groups in vB

On my site a few Socail Groups have sprung up only to sit there and languish. Of the three created only one of them has more than one member and that group is not used very often at all.

Do you use the Social Groups feature?

How do you promote it's use?

What are some of the novel features Social Groups offers?

On another note with Social Groups we wrote a product, DTO Clubs, where the various clubs that may be associated with your site have a presence. For example since my site is in the MINI Cooper space we list all the various local clubs that request a listing. With that the product has the ability to offer the club their own forum space, calendar and classifieds. We've been mulling over the abilty to list a Social Group listing for the club as well.

I just don't get the whole social group thing myself. What does it offer that is not offered in the forum as a whole. Can I liken it to a Special Interest Group that a club within a club?

On another note, when I recently brought our local MINI club site from 3.0.2 to 3.8.3 the club officers requested that social groups be shut off as not to facilitate the cliques that have formed within the group as a whole.

In the end, what is your take on Social Groups and how to promote their use?

 

I don't even use the social groups options. But, I've never really thought about how it could help with the site's membership and/or participation levels. I'm interested to see other admin's ideas and possibly some success stories.

 

When someone ask for a new forum section - I tell them to create a social group for it.

 

How do others find this then?

BTW, you have a typo in the notices... membeship. Missing an "r"

 

Find what, the social groups? There is a link in the navbar to the social groups section. Its up to the members to explore the site. I can not tell them about every little feature.

Thank you for telling about the typo, its been fixed.

 

How do people turn off the social groups I am looking in options but don't know whether my tired eyes are just not seeing it is there an option in vboptions?

 

AdminCP -> vBulletin Options -> User Profile Options -> Enabled User Profile Features -> [_] Social Groups

 

Thanks nick - see that advice alone was worth my subscription fees

EDIT: Hey what do you know it works

 

Someone on vB.com was asking if 'Social Groups' could be renamed 'Teams'. So having the various Sports teams might be fun and everyone gets to be on 1 team.


Or maybe a debate team, or political party, or Bud vs Bud Lite (old super bowl commercial).

 

I am using them, but I hate them more each day.

It's a conundrum. You can't search them and you can't close threads.

I need to reevaluate how I am using them.

 

Social groups are probably only benefical to some of the largest vBulletin sites.

I'd honestly rather have the activity in my forums all in one place for everyone to see rather than what amounts to online cliques being privledged in getting some material/posts others can't

 

Yeah, what we mostly use it for now is controversial topics and to shuffle off our music groups as we are a fanclub and need to not have promotion and lots of discussion of other musicians on the main forum.

Putting the controversial topics there, i.e., abortion, politics, religion, fanwars, it takes the steam out of them.

 

Shuffling the controversial topics off to the social groups is an interesting idea, but knowing my members they would only go for it if they were completely hidden from search engines, non-members, and minors. Then they would really let loose...

 

Until social groups are integrated with the rest of the site, they are going to be handicapped and will hardly take off like they could be.

But there are two purposes for which social groups can be very useful:
Common projects, like the improvement of specific forums.
Discussion areas of interest, for which you do not want to create a dedicated forum for.

 

I am beta-testing using the Social Forums instead of Social Groups. Right now there is a bug in the hack, but as soon as I test it, I will let you know if that increases their value.

 

I would assume that the Social Forums hack makes the Social Groups more noticeable and therefore more widely used by members.

I look forward to reading your findings.

 

I tried it. I do not find the value of it, it confused me.

 

Social Groups can be quite useful but we need to think outside the box. Most people start a forum and forget the other benefits of a community in the real world. At the basic level you live in a town or city. That town is divided into neighborhoods, blocks, and groups. However you work together to make the town thrive. If you don't work together and rely on one thing for life, than the town fails. Social Groups can be seen as just another aspect of the online community.

First I would recommend installing these addons:

New Social Groups page layout - vBulletin.org Forum
Mass PM Social Group Members - vBulletin.org Forum
Social Group Calendars - vBulletin.org Forum
Automatic Calendar Reminders - vBulletin.org Forum
Social Group RSS - RSS Feeds for Social Groups - vBulletin.org Forum

You can find more here:
vBulletin 3.8 Add-ons - vBulletin.org Forum

I'll admit all of these should be part of the default functionality of social groups. However let's move on after these are installed. You're still missing file upload functionality but we'll get to that in a minute. So, now you have something approximating the group functionality of Yahoo Groups (minus file uploads).

So the basic layout and functionality is built. We have something to work with now. Now we have to promote the system to our users. By default the functionality is hidden on the Community Menu. While dropdowns have their purpose, they should not hide major features and prevent their discovery. Users probably never use the Community dropdown. We should put a link to Groups directly on the navbar. If you use the default navbar code than you simply need to add:

HTML:

<td class="vbmenu_control"><a href="groups.php$session[sessionurl_q]" rel="nofollow">$vbphrase[social_groups]</a></td>

If you're using a more modern navbar than whatever your menu system requires. Mine is simply an unordered list. I would suggest changing the social_groups phrase to simply read "Groups" as well.

Next, in the Admin CP, create some categories for your groups. These function similarly to tags. This allows you to control the type of groups created to an extent.

Now, create an "Group Manager" group. All new group owners should be encouraged to join this group. It really should be automated but I don't have the code for that at this specific moment. You might even create a couple of other groups around your site's topic. For example, if your site is focused on ice cream, you could create groups like "Ben & Jerry's Lovers", "Coldstone Fans", etc...

Now we need to advertise this new feature to our end users. There are many ways to do this including email, mass PM (if you have the addon), Sticky Threads, Announcements, and Notices. They all have their benefits but Notices are well most noticable and not subject to spam filters. This addon could help as well:
Social Group Creation Announcement Threads & Private Messages - vBulletin.org Forum

Going with Notices, create a new notice that advertises the feature and the benefits. Our features in groups are Event Scheduling, Photo Sharing, and Intimate (as in small, not romantic) Discussions. Of course this works best if the groups are organized around a cause or geographic region.

There are other addons that publicize new group discussions and show them on the home page. You can use the RSS feed addon above to show and format these anywhere there with a little coding. The main thing is advertising them. Using Groups allows your users to direct the growth of your site. As such they have more of a vested interest in the site's success. Of course for your benefit, they give you an entire new content type to monetize your sites. You can show advertising focused on the content of the group. You can create "subscription" only groups with little issue. All you need is ideas.

Oh, I forget about file uploads. I wish Social Groups had file attachment capabilities on the first post of the discussion. One way to work around this is to create a forum specifically for this purpose and give it a display order of zero. Users can create a new thread in this forum simply to host the files. Then you can link to that attachment directly in the Social Group discussion. It is a pretty messy work around though. I am hoping that the new asset manager can be tweaked to easily allow files besides images to be attached to social groups in 4.0. It will be one of the first things I look at.

Anyway, I hope this gives you a couple of ideas of how to implement social groups in a community. Would like to hear back from people.

 

Peacelily, what confused you about the Social Forums mod?

I was considering using it in conjunction with Wayne's wonderful suggestions on how to integrate and utilize the social groups in vBulletin.

 

Thanks for the post Wayne, I want to take advantage of the social groups feature and your post is going to help me out tremendously.

Thanks again