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.

[Nick Barr]

Hi Shawn, by default only Admins can see it, but if you go to Features Layout and drag the Leaderboards module onto your Main Page, your members will get to see a Leaderboards tab and a Leaderboards Main Page module, both of which you can customize (and hide).

[Faiz]

Hey My Leaderboard members ranking started quite well,but since last 24 hrs there is no change , though we had good bunch of activities from few members.

Bcz of that those who deserves to be in Top 10 Since the launch of leaderboard is not there.

Hope Ning Team will improve the leaderboards performance and its algorithem taking in to note suggetion from this forums like removing creator from member ranking , control to creator to demote ranking of a member if he violates any netwok rule and also allowing members to "vote" a member for 30 days and "like" his postings to count in algorithem.

Let me Vote this new feature of ning as one of the best in all
looking forward to utilise it at its best once ning stabilize its formula and make it efficient.

Pls let us know thru this forum once you you people are confident the "feature is on go!!" so that we can pass it to our members.

[Brian Floe]

I would love to be able to take myself out of the equation on the leaderboards and leaving it to put my members in the spotlight.

[Faiz]

I just observed few things
A member who makes comments & post replies is not getting ranked.
But when a members posting gets comment or when others post reply in his discussion , he gets promoted in to top ranks.

I suggest that the member who gives comment and post replies must also should get points to climb in to rankings.

[Rev. O.M. Bastet]

I'm doing a version of what John Malmo suggested. I put a textbox above the Leaderboard display on the Main page, explaining what the Leaderboard is. I specifically said the algorithm is a mixture of things not all of which I am aware of, and that people can just use the items displayed as a random appearance of content they might want to browse. I changed the name of the top-level tab to BrowseContent.

Only "content" is seen on the main page, and the rest is visible only by clicking the top tab, or "View All" on the main page's Leaderboard subsection.

I was in another social networking site which went ballistic over ranking of members. The downside equals the upside, and I am never going to use the Leaderboard for members, only for content, and am going to leave the criteria for "top" totally a mystery. That discourages attempts to get onto the list. (See what I say just below.)

It would be super to be able to custom-label the subheaders, to take out the word "Top" and use some more neutral word, like "Suggested" or something.

To me this new system is just another way of "Featuring" which the system chooses, rather than the Admins choosing. As such, it's experimental for me. It might not add much beyond what's stimulating activity from displaying Latest Activity on each page. Between that and the Featuring, I think those generate enough interest in clicking around on content. We'll see.

Anything which generates "competition" to be on the list, is a slippery slope indeed. People have mentioned potential "dirty tactics" by members to get onto the list. Not worth it, not worth stimulating that motive, IMO.

I did finally figure out how to access the darned Feature. The original post in this thread gives NO CLUE!!

[Thomas Hoey]

Sorry. Better take this one back to the drawing board. It just does not work, well. After a full day no blog posts are showing up although it is one of the busiest areas of the network. I will still leave it up for a couple of days to see if you can get it together, but I think it is simply badly designed. More work is needed.

[Andrew G Bell]

I second the idea of a test network - seems essential to me, rather than this "suck it and see" approach, which doesn't look very professional when things don't work as they should - as in this case.

[Chuck]

How did you get the contest photos to show up in the 'Top Photo' contest?

[Keith Davis]

Just one Question, why no leaderboard for the music player?

[Speed Racer]

GREAT idea!

[celina[D]]

Have you checked whether the algorithm is correct?
Mine definately is way of base, putting the number 1 member on nr. 16 for instance
If it is working good in your network your lucky and I wonder how this is possible because I would like it to work on my network properly as well

[Lyndsey Baigent]

At the risk of sounding dumb...are the top members, photos etc calculated automatically? If I was to run a competition for the person who is the Number One Member on our site how is that calculated? You know the story whenever there is a competition of some description people want to know HOW to win. If someone can give me the heads up I'd be very grateful.