Live now! Leaderboards for deeper engagement

[Nick Barr]

I'm excited to introduce Leaderboards for your Ning Network. Leaderboards are ordered rankings of the top members and content on your Network, and they're powerful for two reasons:

• For Creators, Leaderboards make it easy to discover and promote the best of your Network.
• For members, Leaderboards spark friendly competition, establish reputation, and encourage deeper, more persistent engagement.

With today’s launch, you have the power to make use of Leaderboards in the perfect way for your Network. You can view the latest trends on your Network Dashboard, add Leaderboard pages to your top-level tabs, and even add a Leaderboard module to your Main Page.

Plus and Pro networks have full access to Leaderboards, and Mini networks have a limited Dashboard view. Details below!

Smart, Fresh, Flexible

As you explore the new Leaderboards feature, you'll find that it’s smart, fresh, and flexible.



Smart: On Ning, Leaderboards make use of a brand-new engagement system that's going to continually get smarter. To calculate the Top Members, we look at a combination of quantity and quality. Basically, the algorithm boils down to asking, "How much is this member contributing, and how valuable are her contributions?" You'll also notice that the Top Content Leaderboard takes in items across multiple features — photos, videos, blog posts, and events. Your members want to see the cool stuff now — they don't necessarily care what kind of stuff it is.

Fresh: If your Leaderboard looks the same every day, it's not going to encourage members to get involved. This was something we heard from many Network Creators who had used other Leaderboards in the past, and we wanted to make sure we built a feature that tells you what's hot right now. By default, members and content get ranked based on the last week of activity. As an NC, you can set this to a day (if your network is really active), or a month for a more long-term perspective.

Flexible: We have some ideas about how you can use Leaderboards on your Network, but we wanted to give you the freedom to use them however you want.

For example, you can customize the Leaderboards landing page (/leaderboards) to display the 5 Leaderboards that are most relevant to your Network.

Or you can hide the Leaderboards landing page altogether, and add the "Top Members" Leaderboard (/leaderboards/topmembers) as a sub-tab under your "Members" tab:



Or you can run a quick-and-dirty photo contest by loading up the Leaderboards module on the Main Page and seeing whose photo wins the day:



And naturally, you can use the Language Editor to rename just about anything you want. There are a ton of possibilities, and we're excited to hear about how you use the Leaderboards feature on your Network.

The Plan From Here

From here, we're looking to roll out more ways for your members to engage. That means releasing features including login with Facebook, Twitter, etc., as well as a Network "Like" feature. It also means continuing to improve your Leaderboards.

Here are a few next steps we have in mind for Leaderboards:

• Take your Leaderboards anywhere with RSS
• Customize your Leaderboards pages with text boxes
• Introduce the ability to drag-and-drop Leaderboards into place on your landing page
• Enrich the engagement system by rolling out a "Like" button
  

After you take your Leaderboards out for a spin, let us know if there are some improvements or new features you'd love to see added.

[Junaid Basir]

Hey Simon, For members the formula is also taking into account the more recent member activity since launch. Please give the formula some time to work itself out and stabilize. Thanks!

[Katie McKay]

OK, I just it up as a module on the main page. Looks really good, makes me want to click it! Thanks for the great feature! I look forward to the "plan from here" items, especially the like button!

[Thomas Hoey]

Not too excited, I am sad to say. It's not a BAD feature for some networks. And I will leave it up and see if the accuracy comes up a bit. Right now, I am getting a post from 2008 as top content for this week. What would be the value to drive customers to old content that has no bearing on now. Yes, the title is catchy and it might catch some traffic and I can see where on some networks, members might be driven to post more content with catchy titles, but not sure that is fair to other content providers that just did not come up with a catchy title. As it stands right now. I am not sure I would leave it up too long...as it will discourage many members from adding content if stuff from a few years ago is going to be featured. I will wait and watch and give my opinion or suggestions, later.

[Kris]

I'm not sure how active your site is but it might be that a few members have looked at this older content today which has brought it to the top.

[celina[D]]

My network is very active in spite of the fact that we have only 280 members
I started to make my own statistics to compare with the current leaderboard
The difference is gigantic

The leaderboard shows top members that haven't even logged in for months nor contributed more than 2-5 comments in the early stages of my network. Members who contribute every single day are not mentioned or on a low place in the list.

A lot of comments and discussions are in groups and these are not included in the leaderbord which also gives a distorted view of top members
The leaderbord focusses too much on new members who joined only in the past few days

Videos remains empty. Probably because there haven't been new videos for some time
Top Discussions mentions our most active discussion which is our coffee corner and good for about 2-300 comments a day on number 16 in the list whilst it should be number 1

I do love the idea of the leaderbord and think it could be a great feature.
For now I will not display it though due to the inaccuracy. Instead I'm producing a handmade leaderbord. It's a lot of work but I think worhtwile the effort untill the leaderbord is producing the right statistics

[Thomas Hoey]

Yes. We have a few hundred participants every day. I just checked today...about 24 hours later than the last time and although there have been active blog posts none are showing up on the leaderboard. And I have been watching and recording actions and no one has gone to the posts remaining on the top content.
I don't know about other networks, but we do not want folks to keep going back to old dated stuff that doesn't even apply to anything happening now. When we set the leaderboard for "this week" it should only show those topics, content etc. that was posted this week and has been active this week. The leaderboard should not be recording posts as top post just because one day two years ago, it was hot.

[celina[D]]

I don't mind if members return to older posts but it should be because they choose to do so. Not because a leaderboard messes up statistics. That's why I've made my own leaderboard and keep track of things myself.

[Andrew C. Liao]

How about a leaderboard module for top members with the most invitations which converted to new members?

[Chuck]

If I wanted to hold a "Hottest Body " photo contest, how would I place the contest photos onto the leaderboard? How does photos make it onto the leaderboard? The most views? The Most comments? How can you stop a contestant from gaming the system? (Like keep clicking back and forth on their specific content in other to make it to the top of the leaderboard.) Can Ning Creators Add certain content onto the leaderboard by 'Featuring' it? I would use this feature for photo/video contests. Allowing members to have only 1 "vote" will be important.

[Susan Thomas]

I defintitely would like the drag and drop feature for the landing page.

[Robin]

PLEASE TAKE THE ADMINS OUT OF THE ALGORITHM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I came up as the #1 top member.

[shawn]

Hi there, can leaderboards be seen by regular members, or is it just admins that can see it?