Google Moderator

[Stefan]

How Moderator Works

What does Google Moderator do?

• Google Moderator allows you to create a series about anything that you are interested in discussing and open it up for people to submit questions, ideas, or suggestions. These are called submissions.
• Anyone can come to the site and submit a question, idea, or vote, and anyone can vote. Google Moderator shows you a question in the box with the blue background. This is called the Featured Question.
• A topic is a way to break up your series into smaller, more manageable topics of discussion. You can have one topic, or multiple topics. For example, if you create a series of 'Book clubs' for your organization, topics could be 'Fiction,' 'Non-fiction,' or 'Auto-biographies.'

To create a series, visit http://google.com/moderator and select "Create Series." (This requires signing in with a Google Account. Don't know what that is? Go here) This brings you to the series creation page.

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create a series about anything that you are interested in discussing and open it up for people to submit questions, ideas, or suggestions

Are we there? Can we just ask the customers what they want ...?

 

[Stefan]

Best Practices

In addition to reading our Partner Toolkit and Case Studies, this page is designed to give you general guidelines on how to maximize the value of your Google Moderator series.

The value of a Moderator series is in engaging large groups of people in conversation around their questions, ideas, and suggestions. To increase this engagement and maximize the value for you, we recommend the following:

1. Plan ahead - ensure that you and/or your organization can spend time monitoring the Moderator series, understanding the information, and responding to ideas. If you are part of a large organization, ensure that different groups such as Marketing, PR, etc. are on board. Think of any sensitive issues that may arise ahead of time and draft responses.
2. Understand the value of transparency - publicly asking for questions, ideas, and suggestions creates an expectation of transparency. In exchange, you can increase their commitment to your organization, product, or service.
3. Market your page across multiple channels to drive traffic - Putting links on websites, blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter will drive traffic to your series. Any other sources, such as TV shows, will help this as well.
4. Encourage sharing - the sharing button allows users to share their ideas on Facebook, Twitter, and over email. This will drive even more traffic to your series. You can highlight this feature in marketing channels, and share links to a sampling of ideas on your website, blog, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages.
5. Embed your series in your website or YouTube channel. - Embedding a Moderator series on your website immediately increases traffic, engagement, and visibility. You can use these instructions to do a simple embedding of your Google Moderator series on your site, or embed your series on your YouTube channel. For more advance uses, you can use the Google Moderator API.
6. Answer Ideas with an editorial eye and spread the responses - The value for users of your Moderator page lies in the answers they receive. In addition to answering ideas (instructions) within the page, consider creating a YouTube video (such as the one done by the White House) and posts on Facebook, Twitter, and your own website to answer users. In addition to answering the top submissions for a series, browse through the entire list to find good submissions, or groups of good submissions, as well (Ten similar ideas with 100 votes each is equivalent to 1 idea with 1000 votes).

#5 Embed your series in your website or YouTube channel ...