Thoughts on running your Local Guide local city community out of Connect

Google Maps contribution stories
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With the demise of support for independent Local Guides communities out in social networking land I asked my members of the old g+ community to move here to Connect. Many of the active ones did. One of the challenges of using Connect is finding each other. I’ve been thinking of the best ways to do this and am interested in your thoughts…

My thinking is that in each message destined for the local community it could be tagged with Melbourne and MelbourneCommunity then the people in and around Melbourne might find it easier to find local discussions.

You can target an announcement to up to 10 people by mentioning them, but personally I don’t like this as I’m a search kind of person. I find that sort of notification a bit annoying. For me they’d also be lost because I get 100+ notifications on Connect every day.

How do you think you can reach your local Local Guides?

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Hi @PaulPavlinovich

I think the best way is to enter the location and tag cities as you write.

Mentioning more than 10 peoples in one post is not a good way to promote community.

Have a nice day

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@PaulPavlinovich wrote:

With the demise of support for independent Local Guides communities out in social networking land I asked my members of the old g+ community to move here to Connect. Many of the active ones did. One of the challenges of using Connect is finding each other. I’ve been thinking of the best ways to do this and am interested in your thoughts…

My thinking is that in each message destined for the local community it could be tagged with Melbourne and MelbourneCommunity then the people in and around Melbourne might find it easier to find local discussions.

You can target an announcement to up to 10 people by mentioning them, but personally I don’t like this as I’m a search kind of person. I find that sort of notification a bit annoying. For me they’d also be lost because I get 100+ notifications on Connect every day.

How do you think you can reach your local Local Guides?

For Italian Local Guides community this is easy, because we can use the Italian language board; i think that the languages could be expanded to all the ex-supported communities almost.

But this is not a solution for all the english speaking countries…

Maybe an official tag could be a solution.

My tag could be #italialg

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Hi @PaulPavlinovich , tagging is an excellent tool (unless someone abuses the function and maybe even tags his/her post incidentally with something you figured would be good for your community).

The traffic of Hungarian guides is rather low in Connect and I understand why Google does not want to start a subforum for each language in the “conversation by Language” board so I got used to tag Hungary related discussions with the tag “magyar” (for Hungarian).

The same way posts can be organized by communities, I guess. Just find a good tag that would not be used incidentally for other reasons (and when it’s abused on purpose, you, as a moderator can remove it any time :wink:

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@PaulPavlinovich wrote:

With the demise of support for independent Local Guides communities out in social networking land I asked my members of the old g+ community to move here to Connect. Many of the active ones did. One of the challenges of using Connect is finding each other. I’ve been thinking of the best ways to do this and am interested in your thoughts…

My thinking is that in each message destined for the local community it could be tagged with Melbourne and MelbourneCommunity then the people in and around Melbourne might find it easier to find local discussions.

You can target an announcement to up to 10 people by mentioning them, but personally I don’t like this as I’m a search kind of person. I find that sort of notification a bit annoying. For me they’d also be lost because I get 100+ notifications on Connect every day.

How do you think you can reach your local Local Guides?

Yes good idea, the tagging would be best “Country, Province/Region, Town/City”

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Hi @PaulPavlinovich . Its quite unfortunate that the G+ and other fora are no longer supported. Those forums gave us room to communicate with other LGs around us in a more “LOCAL” and personal way and was a great way to introduce and guide new members to the programme. I believe Google has a good reason for this move as we only know very little. On those forums, an LG can easily locate another exchange mobile contacts, even make unofficial physical connections, and share local challenges and possible was of overcoming them. Some of these information many (myself inclusive) may not feel very comfortable sharing here on Local Guides Connect.

On those forums, ask questions they may not feel free to ask the “World” (some of which are religious, cultural, political etc.). I believe those communities served a different purpose from LGC and we may never achieve the same effect except with significant changes.

Tagging is fine but the communal effect will hardly be achieved.

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Indeed. Tagging our communities should work well @AkmalB like your use of Malaysia Local Guides I could simple use Melbourne Local Guides on posts where it is relevant (lots of my posts are general because of my moderator role).

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Yes the language boards when the majority language spoken is one country and its territories and that LG community spans the whole country like yours does @LucioV but it doesn’t work so well for English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, etc. which could be in many many countries and hundreds if not thousands of cities. You’ve got it lucky mate :).

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Good thoughts @Csaba - if anyone starts to abuse the tags it would be a little problematic. While Connect Moderators can manage tags on a wholesale basis (we can delete them across an entire forum) we can’t limit that action to just one post, only the Googlers can do that. We can get rid of spam tags but we can’t help if someone is trolling a tag. Could be a good discussion for our next monthly hangout. I know why we can’t do it, but maybe some changes could be made.

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Yes good idea, the tagging would be best “Country, Province/Region, Town/City”

Yes you could do that @colinchaffers that would help with Melbourne, FL, USA and Melbourne, Vic, AU :). Or more locally for me Emerald, Vic as distinct from Emerald, QLD.

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You’re still allowed to have local communities @MrLens they’re not forbidden, they’re just not supported. The preferred outcome is to have everyone here on Connect and the local communities can be an addition where they make sense. You can definitely share private contacts here, but you have to do it via private message. It would be nice if there was some way people could sign up to groups where that group could communicate here more easily. Google take these actions IMHO to protect us the Local Guides from fraudsters/scammers that pop up in every movement once it starts to grow. I see some of that content pop up here, but fortunately the moderators (either the Connect Moderators or the Google Moderators) jump on it pretty quickly. In other forums incorrect, misleading or fraudulent information can’t be dealt with.

I do understand that people want to talk about things that are not connected with Local Guides or Maps like politics, religion etc as you mentioned and those things are best left up to social networks.

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@PaulPavlinovich my thoughts are that with the end of official support from Google to the unofficial G+ communities and non-support Google support for other social media channels, Connect is the main place for official communication of Local Guides.

However, there’s no reason we cannot continue to use other social media channels. Other social media channels are meant to complement LG Connect. And LG Connect should not be meant to replace every other social media channel used by Local Guides. The previous G+ unofficial community page becomes another social media channel to complement Connect.

For example, when we arrange a meet up through LG Connect, it’s not easy to broadcast to every relevant persons in our respective community via Connect alone, so we use our previous G+, FB, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Twitter, Instagram, etc etc community channels. but still ties back to Connect event, so all the registration, recap etc happens on LG Connect.

Users in Connect usually do not search for posts, they see what is presented in front of them. And because posts are listed by activity, I would say most would go through a few pages of the latest activity and stop there. So in most instance, if I check LG connect once a day, I would probably miss most of the post of the day. If I am proactive enough, I will search. Many users, probably wont.

One idea is, if we could set up a “container” for each local community, ie maybe via the side menu, and people can subscribe and participate in different local communities, that would help tremendously. And each “container” will mirror what’s being used in each previous G+ community and will only show posts and discussion for that particular container. And the main page will continue to show all posts as always. Then we could have sub-communities in Connect within the whole world community…

And having a LG Connect app will help tremendously as well.

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We’ve talked about communities (you’ve called them containers) but making that work in a practical way might be challenging. At the height of supported communities there were about a thousand of them. That’s a deep menu structure even if you went country/city @StephenAbraham . People do tend to fall into two main camps, those who search and those who use menus. It’s difficult to please both with an application.

I agree we can still use other social channels, I still have a Melbourne Local Guides brand page on g+ and a Melbourne Local Guides insta account and post plenty as me but I did get rid of the Melbourne Local Guides community on g+ in consultation with the members who voted to kill it and move here. It is challenging to reach them here which is what I’m seeking ideas for. Thanks for your thoughts.

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Thank you so much @PaulPavlinovich . I always and still do believe that Google had very tangible reasons for their actions and I have no issues with that; not at all.

Little Story:

I once had a challenge while taking photos in a university campus I visited in a region where it wasn’t a crime but it wasn’t a well accepted move for you to just pull out you phone and snap around. I was then questioned by security persons who had no Idea of what it was to be a Local Guide (more trouble). While waiting, i posted the challenge I was encountering and I got an amazingly helpful tip from someone who graduated from that university; all he did was to give me a name and that got me out of there in minutes that became a point of conversation for a while and a lesson to many of us.

Now, that ended on a positive note and also reflected a good positive use of the community. However, I couldn’t post something like that here. Even if i did its difficult for those affected to see it as there aren’t adequate notification systems except you are tagged or a response to a conversation.

I’m glad that the groups still exist (only not supported).

My point is this; it is difficult to get the effect/help in “Little Story” from connect as that is quite more localized. Tagging may help but hardly this much.

Great Work Google!

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@PaulPavlinovich wrote:

Could be a good discussion for our next monthly hangout. I know why we can’t do it, but maybe some changes could be made.

Can we try to ask something to be discussed in CM hangouts?

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Hi Paul,

I got confused for only a second by your title. I thought you meant outside connect :wink:
Yes, I totally agree that running regional LG communities is still a valuable thing to do for many of us and still does help (marketing) the Local Guides Program. Personally, I am currently building a website with a domain in WordPress for our regional community, as G+ nor Connect would be the right fit for what we are trying to achieve.

In answer to your question/ topic of this thread, the ideal situation would be to have a facebook - page -like-scenario for each organized regional community. This page could be like a filter index page for all posts that have the correct tag. A bit like how Twitter creates timelines related to @GoogleMaps for example. The index page (tag filter page) Could have its own pinned posts and it’s own header banner to emphasize our regional identity. Better still, if people use the reserved tag of a regional community incorrectly, the community moderators of the COMMUNITY PAGE should perhaps be able to remove those posts. They could end up in the person’s Private post-bin as if they did not get through the spam filters. Like with Facebook, you can subscribe to a page, but there is no menu button unless you are already subscribed.

Instead of the page focus, there is the group solution. A general page with forums, and groups that one subscribes to (sounds a bit like re-inventing G+ and Google Circles.

The solutions discussed here, are of course not taking into account the limitations of the software that is being used to run Connect. I don’t know much about Lithium and its API for customization. I know it can all be easily done in WordPress.

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@PaulPavlinovich wrote:

Yes good idea, the tagging would be best “Country, Province/Region, Town/City”

Yes you could do that @colinchaffers that would help with Melbourne, FL, USA and Melbourne, Vic, AU :). Or more locally for me Emerald, Vic as distinct from Emerald, QLD.

Just a thought, why not integrate a community into “connect”, the user could use choose Country, Region, City as part of their profile and you could create post like we do for “mapping the world” etc, you could add an additional button “My community”, the community would probably need some owners, perhaps higher levels LGs and or moderators. This is low hanging fruit for me.

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Yes, @PaulPavlinovich , as you say, being mentioned on Connect can be annoying. Can you choose to ignore annoying Connect users? There’s an ignore option on everyone’s profile.

This year we’ve experimented with inviting Local Guides to meet-ups using 10 at a time mentions. We found out about 1 in 10 will RSVP, 1 in 10 will reply they received invitation too late. Nearly all who reply are openly thankful for the invitation. So far, very few have expressed annoyance, yourself, plus two others are the only annoyed mentioned we recall. When non moderator LGs expressed annoyance we encouraged them to report us here on Connect. To minimise annoyance, we made a huge effort to send LGs only a single invitation per meet-up they were closely located to. We found out Local Guides will sometimes travel very far for a meet-up. We believe meet-up invitations encourage LGs to join in. It seems like LGs also RSVP for an awesome meet-up picture. :slight_smile:

As for unsupported communities and the future of Connect, it’ll be nice to see what all the Local Guides want to make of it.

Thank you, Paul, for an awesome 2017, it’s been great meeting you this year on Connect and seeing you brilliantly represent Local Guides with your beautiful Australian way.

Kind regards from Osaka78

@PaulPavlinovich wrote:

With the demise of support for independent Local Guides communities out in social networking land I asked my members of the old g+ community to move here to Connect. Many of the active ones did. One of the challenges of using Connect is finding each other. I’ve been thinking of the best ways to do this and am interested in your thoughts…

My thinking is that in each message destined for the local community it could be tagged with Melbourne and MelbourneCommunity then the people in and around Melbourne might find it easier to find local discussions.

You can target an announcement to up to 10 people by mentioning them, but personally I don’t like this as I’m a search kind of person. I find that sort of notification a bit annoying. For me they’d also be lost because I get 100+ notifications on Connect every day.

How do you think you can reach your local Local Guides?

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Hi @Osaka78forTRUMP ,

Although your response might appear a little off topic, I think you are raising a very import aspect of the challenge.

In Europe, laws get tighter and tighter when it comes to privacy and SPAM. It all comes down to people opting in, to a mailing list or an alert system. The current problem with Connect, however, is that there is no clear system/ way to opt-in to subjects, regions, etc. It comes down to search, which (A) doesn’t work very well on Lithium and (B) requires initiative and the whole point is to opt-in and be alerted.

Of course, we can subscribe (opt-in) to a post-thread. So an easy solution would be to create Index pages, where people subscribe. The function of the index page could simply to use it to post a 2 line summary of the subject/content of a related post with a link to the post. So if I am interested to be informed about things like your Pizza Hang-out initiative, there could be an allocated index page where you can post a link to your invitation and I can choose to subscribe to that index page.

In reality, this is already happening to some degree. For example, a person posted about Gran Canaria (one of the seven Canary Islands) and we now all seem to continue on that thread if we try to post something to the group of subscribers of that thread. Recent posts are unrelated to the original post at the start of the thread.

It would be great if there were a tool like Hootsuite, where we could enter our keywords or tags that we like to follow and simply look at the filter results with ease.

Best, Jeroen

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Yes, @JeroenM , we’re always off topic. Sign up is opt in, as in agreeing to Program Rules. Nothing’s perfect, Connect is very beautiful, very interactive, has very awesome moderation, it’s up to each Local Guide what they’d like to make of it, or as you say, initiative. The truly beautiful thing about Connect isn’t any mechanism, it’s all the Local Guides themselves, everyone contributing to help improve Maps. Maps is more fun with Connect. Thanks for a wonderful 2017, JeroenM, it’s been great to meet you on Connect this year. Merry Christmas to you, happy New Year and kind regards from Osaka78 PS we always love your angle on how stuff works. :slight_smile:

@JeroenM wrote:

Hi @Osaka78forTRUMP ,

Although your response might appear a little off topic, I think you are raising a very import aspect of the challenge.

In Europe, laws get tighter and tighter when it comes to privacy and SPAM. It all comes down to people opting in, to a mailing list or an alert system. The current problem with Connect, however, is that there is no clear system/ way to opt-in to subjects, regions, etc. It comes down to search, which (A) doesn’t work very well on Lithium and (B) requires initiative and the whole point is to opt-in and be alerted.

Of course, we can subscribe (opt-in) to a post-thread. So an easy solution would be to create Index pages, where people subscribe. The function of the index page could simply to use it to post a 2 line summary of the subject/content of a related post with a link to the post. So if I am interested to be informed about things like your Pizza Hang-out initiative, there could be an allocated index page where you can post a link to your invitation and I can choose to subscribe to that index page.

In reality, this is already happening to some degree. For example, a person posted about Gran Canaria (one of the seven Canary Islands) and we now all seem to continue on that thread if we try to post something to the group of subscribers of that thread. Recent posts are unrelated to the original post at the start of the thread.

It would be great if there were a tool like Hootsuite, where we could enter our keywords or tags that we like to follow and simply look at the filter results with ease.

Best, Jeroen