A Social Media Monitor Example
User: The moderator and sole developer of a web site that hosts a large community forum.
Monitoring Tasks:
Situation Description:
Monitoring Tasks:
- The moderator wants to maintain a welcoming environment for new and existing community members. As a result, he monitors the activity in the forum, but he wants to intervene as little as possible.
- The moderator is also the site's developer and has, on occasion, made errors in his code which has resulted in users being unable to access the site or participate, making for an unwelcome environment.
Situation Description:
- The moderator looks for situations in which conversation becomes unbalanced. To him, unbalanced conversation is when there is too much discussion which might make a new member feel like they can't join in, or when the forum is turned into an arena for advertising where in there are many posts without replies.
- To identify when something is interfering with user activity, he monitors for a significant reduction in the frequency of user logins, as well as a marked reduction in the numbers of both posts and replies.
Outcome: This subject utilized the monitoring tool as a learning aid. By frequently adjusting the display, he learned about his users' activities: when they posted, replied, logged in, and how often. He used to the tool to identify moments of significant activity and then explored the forum to learn what was going on. He ended up authoring his own situation descriptions beyond the two listed here to learn about many other aspects of how his users utilize his site.
