PR Communications

How Many Community Managers Does It Take To Screw In A Light Bulb?

In preparation for my presentation at the PRSA's Digital Impact conference here in New York I asked the Twitter community the question: How many community managers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

I received several great answers, my personal favorite was this one from Singularity Design:

@SingularityDsgn  An infinite number. They don't screw in light bulbs. They try to create an environment that allows other people to screw in bulbs.

Online Community Management In Boston

I regret I am missing a really good show in Boston at the moment, "The Business of Community." I'd actually been invited to blog at the conference but because of my new job and the show here in New York at Search Engine Strategies I was not able to make it for the first three days. I will be going tomorrow for one or Boston Community.

Four Successful Factors To Building Online Community

Really enjoyed this video of an interview with Francois Gossieaux, a colleague in the Society for New Communications Research by O'Reilly TV, found on the connect.amaboston.org.

In the video Francois suggests companies need to find what customers and community are passionate about first, then work with the communities that exist or create one around that passion.  Four elements to a successful community include:

Content - the better the content, the more members you will have.

Members - the more members, the better content.

Member profile - ability to match member's profiles together.

Transactions - easier it is to do the transaction, the more involved members will become.

Online Community & Social Media Conferences In 2009

I thought I'd start thinking about potential social media and community conferences for 2009. Here's my crack at a list of events. With the downturn in the economy, it will be interesting to see how well these events are attended next year.

List of Online Community & Social Media related conferences for 2009.

1. Jan Social Media Conference, January 22 - 23, 2009, Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami, FL
2. Health 3.0: The Next Online Generation, January 26 - 28, 2009, Las Vegas, NV.
3. Feb Online Community Unconference: East, February 11, 2009, New York, NY.
4. 2009 Customer Reference Forum: 2009 Customer Reference Forum, February 17-19, Berkeley, CA.
5. Social Media Bootcamp, Feb 19, 2009, The Montclair Kimberley Academy, Montclair, New Jersey
6. FOWA Future of Web Apps, Miami, FL, 22-24 Feb 2009, Miami.
7. March DrupalCon 2009, March 4-7, 2009, Washington DC
8. O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2009, March 9-12, 2009, San Jose, CA
9. Social Media for Communicators, March 11-13, 2009 Encore at Wynn, Las Vegas, Nevada.
10. SXSW Interactive: March 13-17, 2009, Austin Texas
11. 2009 Media Summit, Date: March 18-19, 2009, McGraw-Hill Building, 49th St. & 6th Ave., New York City
12. The Business of Community Networking,  March 24th - 26th 2009 Boston, MA
13. Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco, Co-presented by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb, March 31-April 3, 2009, San Francisco, CA
14. April 6th International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations, ITNG 2009, April 27-29, 2009, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
15. May Community 2.0 Conference, May 11-13, 2009, The Palace Hotel in San Francisco, CA 
    
16. 3rd Int'l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, May 17 - 20, 2009, San Jose, California
17. Where 2.0 Conference 2009, May 19-21, 2009, San Jose, CA
18. June TTIX Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange, TTIX 2009 will be held June 3-5 2009 on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
19. 2009 Semantic Technology Conference, June 14-18 San Jose, CA
20. Enterprise 2.0 2009, June 22-25 2009, Boston, MA. Community site.
21. September Language in the (New) Media: Technologies and Ideologies International Conference, UW, September 3-6, 2009
22. October BlogWorld & New Media Expo, October 15-17, 2009, Las Vegas, Nevada.
23. November Defrag 2009, Hyatt Regency, Denver, CO, November 11-12 2009.

Let me know if I missed any conferences, and I will add them to the list.

Update: 11/21/08 - 

@Marc_Meyer Marc Meyer had asked me what conferences are the best conferences to attend next year. I was not sure, but I'd be interested in hearing from the community. If you are a potential attendee, write a blog post, trackback this post or tweet me at @johncass and I will add your post as a link to giving the community's evaluation of 2009 conferences.

12/13/08 @sarascheider's dream and realistic evaluation of 2009 conferences

 

 

Sticky On The Dell Small Business Forum

Having recently launched the new Forrester Discussions site for Interactive Marketing Professionals I’ve been looking at other forums for ideas for features and community building. I recently looked at the Dell Community Forums, which provide extensive support for Dell customers.

Looking at the Small Business Forum this morning, I noticed that posts were ordered in a linear fashion, and users had the option of views with replies or without replies.

The forum features a number of stickies, posts elevated to the top of the page by the editors, the small business forum had so many stickies that I initially did not see the general threads. Making sure the there is a distinction between general threads and a sticky is something to think about when selecting messages in your top threads.

Regarding communication and navigation: Each user can tag a post, and a list of top tags with top taggers was available at the bottom of the page. You can also use a search feature, searching either messages or user content.

Turning Active Community Leaders Into Dormant Leaders

I've been thinking more about this model of the life cycle of online communities, especially the progression through each of the roles within the community visitor, novice, regular to leader etc. I'd made the point in my previous post, "Creating Elders In A Counter-Community Of Bloggers," that Jeff Jarvis was a leader in the Dell customer community.

Jarvis actively evangelized and shined a light on poor Dell customer experiences. The community responded, and it became the wider perception that Dell customer service could be better.

Dell responded to the wider customer community, dealing with customer service structural issues and also using social media to communicate and find instances of customer service issues. By a process of focusing on the leaders, regulars and novices who discussed their customer service issues within the Dell customer community. Dell was able to solve problems, and even turn leaders into elders, people who were likely to leave the community on that issue because they no longer saw the reason to actively participate, the reasons for participation has lessoned or disappeared.

Do I think Jeff Jarvis is an elder in the Dell customer community, no, I think Jeff is still active, it is just that the customer service issue is not such a prominent concern for the Dell customer community. Jeff is still a leader in the community, and people will return to him for his opinions regarding customer service at Dell. Currently he is positive.

Could he become active again yes, that all depends upon the Dell customer community demands and Dell’s strategies for handling those concerns.

Creating Elders In A Counter-Community Of Bloggers

I've been reading more about forum management since working on the team that planned and started the new Forrester Discussions site in the last few months. As a consequence I returned to the writings of Amy Jo Kim, who has written about community management practices for a number of years. She published a book in 2000 about the life cycle of online communities.

In Amy's model community members move from visitor, to novices, through to leaders and community moderators can help encourage the process through active involvement, focusing on providing value to participants.

This model gave me some ideas for building a corporate blogging campaign:

• Focus on those people who are most engaged in your blogging community.
• Review and triage your blog's commentators. Rather than search for new people, connect and support the people who are already active in your community.
• Build a map of your blogging community, conduct a narrative analysis, and evaluate where each blogger is on your map of the community using the model suggested by Amy Jo Kim.

One other idea I had was to turn the model on its head for detractors. Perhaps calling the model, a counter community, or even anti community. Yes, well, probably need help with the name. What I am suggesting is that Amy Jo Kim's model can be used to map and evaluate your detractors in the community. Jeff Jarvis and the early days of the Dell social media turnaround comes to mind here, in that within the counter community model Jeff Jarvis would be considered a leader, someone who by their active participation recruits and builds the counter community, turning visitors into novices and regulars. The goal of any company in this situation is to actively connect with counter community leaders and turn them into elders, people who leave the counter community because of a change in perception.

The tips I suggested for building a corporate blogging campaign within a blogging community, equally apply to counter communities.

Joining Forrester Research As Online Community Manager

I am very happy to announce that I have joined Forrester Research as the company's first Online Community Manager at their Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters.

In my new role at Forrester Research I will be working to develop further the company's existing social media strategies for community building, dialogue and customer feedback.

I decided to join Forrester Research for four reasons:

Role: It's been my goal to work in social media strategy and community management for a major brand, Forrester & the job are an excellent fit.

Company: For me, Forrester combines two passions in my work life, technology and marketing.

Process: Having a problem and a template to fix a business problem is half the battle in business success. Forrester helps nineteen different technology and marketing roles to solve every day business problems, through methodologies, research reports, events, strategy, consulting and much more.

People: I was extremely impressed with the team of people I met during the interview process. Plus the team of analyst colleagues I know through reputation; Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff who recently co-authored the book Groundswell, Jeremiah Owyang and Peter Kim who I had the pleasure of meeting at a recent workshop on Social Computing.

For the folks at Forrester Research I thought a short bio would help to introduce me:

Although my blog PR Communications has PR on the masthead, most people probably don't know I started my business career in sales and business development. I've concentrated most of my career in technology companies, from IBM, to resellers, to software companies, to interactive agencies and an online printing company.

I moved into the online marketing and search engine optimization industry while working at Portent Interactive in Seattle, which led me to developing my personal blog, PR Communications, in 2003. Since then I've run three corporate blogs at two brands and one agency.

My agency blog at Backbone Media, Blog Survey, was in support of the Corporate Blogging Survey 2005. That Blog became the company's most active blog in support of the company's blogging service, SCOUT, which sought to combine SEO, PR and blogger relations to cut down on the time it takes to blog through monitoring, strategy, and supporting subject matter experts who blog.

The work I’ve done on my blog and Backbone Media led to a book contract with Elsevier, which I published in April 2007 called, “Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging,” a book about how to build effective corporate blogs.

I am looking forward to working with everyone at Forrester Research, their clients and the rest of the community in helping to develop further Forrester Research’s use of social media.

If you’d like to contact me at Forrester Research I can be reached at jcass@forrester.com or on my work telephone at 617-613-6408