GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily

• Is Competition a Numbers Game?
• Embracing Information Overload
• How Well Do You Listen and Respond?
• How Will You Survive the Holiday?

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

How to Set Up Your Community Manager to Fail

Debunking Social Media Myths

A Closer Look at Facebook’s New Privacy Options

3 Steps to Success on Facebook

Five Myths of Community Management

Why marketers have trouble with full-duplex social technology

Where Should You Put Your Community Manager?

“The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”

The Value of Twitter Followers: Quality Over Quantity

In Defense of Social Media (At Least Some Of It)

You can find all of my links on Delicious.

This weekend is the Independence Day 4th of July holiday here in the U.S., which for many people means a three-day weekend. I’ll even be taking tomorrow off, and I almost never get days off, since my boss is a complete workaholic who thinks days off are for the weak. Oh wait, that workaholic tyrant is me, since I get to set my own freelance schedule. Some of us aren’t good at taking days off, so I have a few tips for making it through the holiday.

Photo by Flickr user kcphotos used under Creative Commons

A traditional 4th of July holiday celebration includes picnics or barbecues with family and friends, which can mean that you will most likely be faced with the dreaded question: “So, what do you do?” from your less technical friends and family. I always struggle with how to answer this question, so I encourage you to go back to my December post and browse the comments to get a few innovative suggestions for dealing with this question.

This is mostly a low-tech holiday, so some of us may start going through tech withdrawal. You might need to find creative ways to work your technology into the day. The easiest way is to pull out your fancy digital camera and experiment with some of the less well known settings while making it look like you are snapping a few pictures. You can also use your phone to look something up, while sneaking a peak at email or your favorite social networking site.

For those of you who really aren’t good at taking time off, you can fake it. Pretend to take a day off while really planning for a day of quiet holiday productivity. Since everyone thinks that you are off work, you might be able to get some real work done.

Don’t take this post too seriously. Take some time off this weekend and enjoy yourself!

What are your tips for surviving the holiday?

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Market research you can use: Keep informed about Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure. Learn more »

Listening has always been important, but now in the world of social media where conversations are amplified, repeated and spread at a much faster rate than ever before, listening has become even more critical. Many of us, particularly freelancers, don’t have teams of people responsible for customer service and support to help make sure that we are listening to our customers, potential customers and industry experts. We have to find the time to listen to what people are saying about us and react appropriately.

Photo by Flickr User Orange_Beard under Creative Commons

Josh Bernoff wrote about the modern listening problem and compares it to those speaker phones where you can’t talk and listen at the same time. On those not-full-duplex speaker phones, you are either talking or listening, but not doing both at the same time. In the social media age, we need to be both listening and talking, but many people are only doing one or the other. On Twitter and other social web sites, we talk about what we are doing and listen to other people talk, and we do it simultaneously.

Listening

I tend to automate as much of my listening as I can using various monitoring tools. These are two of my favorite ways to monitor and listen to what people are saying, and we’ve covered both of them in more depth in previous blog posts.

• TweetDeck: I have several different searches that are set up in TweetDeck, and I get real-time notifications when someone mentions my name or several of the projects that I’m involved in.
• Yahoo Pipes: More sophisticated monitoring with Yahoo Pipes looks for mentions of a list of keywords across many different social media sites, blogs, Twitter and more.

Responding

Now that you can find the conversations and have started listening, the hard part begins: finding the time to respond. Depending on the volume, this could be a small task or a huge effort. I do a pretty good job of finding and listening to feedback, but when I get busy, I sometimes find it difficult to carve out the time to respond. If I respond right away, I won’t forget to respond, but responding immediately can really disrupt my work flow. If I put the responses off and do them in batches, I am probably more productive, but I run the risk of missing opportunities or forgetting to respond. The key for me is finding the right balance to respond quickly, but without disrupting my ability to be productive and efficient in my other work.

How well do you listen and respond?

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Market research you can use: Keep informed about Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure. Learn more »

Kohl’s V.P. of Digital Marketing, Ed Gawronski, is the most recent example of this faux pas (described by Augie Ray):

Based on his activities in Kohl’s Facebook community, Ed Gawronski seems to be a big fan of Kohl’s. Two weeks ago he noted, “Less then 4 hours to get a great deal at Kohls.com. I just hit the jackpot and saved 30% on some ASICS sneaks. Cost me almost nothing.” And a couple days later he had another scoop for Kohl’s Facebook Fans: “make sure to give your email to kohls.com. I think they give you $5 when you give it in. The deals get even better too. I’ve seen special online promotions every week.”

You might think Ed is just a helpful guy and a big supporter of Kohl’s, except a visitor to the Facebook page outed Gawronski as a Kohl’s marketing executive. In a reply to one of Ed’s posts, the anonymous visitor notes, “Interesting. Ed Gawronski is the VP of marketing for Kohl’s. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ed-gawronski/8/b1b/875 Masquerade much?”

Quoted from Transparency (or Lack Thereof) on Kohl’s Facebook Fan Page in Experience: The Blog

Keep in mind that open, honest and transparent conversations are the norm for most social media sites. Spend some time thinking about your social media / digital strategy, and think about how your actions reflect on your company. When you are thinking about doing something questionable, ask yourself 2 questions:

• Would I want my mother to know that I did this?
• Would I be embarrassed if I read about it on the front page of the Wall Street Journal?

If your answers to either of these questions is anything other than yes, you should find another course of action.

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily

• Phone and Computer Etiquette
• Cisco’s Take on Telecommuting and Productivity

Shizzow

• Beer Signal iPhone App Integrates with Shizzow

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

Understanding retweeting on Twitter

Word of Mouth (offline) works better than online social media

Twidiots: The Fact and Fiction of Social Media Demographics

Social Media + You – Brand and Reputation Management = Disaster

Care about the Cloud? CloudCamp PDX is for you

My First Five Tips For Writing Better Blog Posts — What Are Yours?

Is Blogging Evolving Into Life Streams?

Three Essential Lessons to Teach Twitter to a 72-Year-Old

9 Ideas To Revive Your Stale Community

You can find all of my links on Delicious.

Ken Baer, Taplister’s iPhone App Guru, is a Portland native and long time Tech, Trek, and Beer Geek. He spent about 20 years writing 3D animation software (Hash Inc’s Animation:Master) on the Amiga, Mac, and PC, and worked on OMSI’s Star Trek Federation Science exhibit in the early 90’s. He is actively involved in the local animation scene through ASIFA-Portland, and spent some time doing scuba and fencing. Ken is an active Mac developer, and has jumped into iPhone development with both feet. He is excited about his work on iPhone apps for Taplister, and is committed to making very cool apps for craft beer fans everywhere.

Dawn: Can you start by telling us a little bit about Taplister and Beer Signal?

Ken: Taplister is a web site dedicated to providing up to date information about what craft beers are on tap around Portland. The site has a bot that gathers information via Twitter using our #ontappdx hash tag. So, the data is provided by not only the pubs around town, but also the patrons. Anyone that visits some of the websites for these pubs knows that if they list what beers they have on tap, that information is often out of date. That’s because pubs often don’t have time to update their web sites as often as would like. By getting patrons and beer fans into the act, we can have a database that is a lot more helpful.

So, on Taplister.com, you can search for a beer and see who’s serving it in Portland. You can also see what’s on tap at your favorite bar or pub. Pubs that sign up with us also have the option of having a “PubCam” installed, which shows a live image of their on tap board. It doesn’t get more up to date than that!

Beer Signal is an iPhone app that uses the Taplister engine. The app helps you find a pub, see what they have on tap, and invite your friends to join you. You start by selecting a pub from the Taplister database. You can see their active beer list, the live pubcam (if they have one), and information like their location (with a map), hours, happy hours, and how many taps they have. Then choose what friends you want to invite. You build a list of local, beer drinking friends and enter their Twitter names. The app keeps this list and allows you to select who you want to invite. If you are at the pub now, you can send the invite with Shizzow or Twitter. If you are planning a meetup, you can set the time and date, and send the invites out all once as Twitter direct messages. The app also allows you to tweet what beer you are drinking and if it is off tap. And finally, you have full access to the mobile Taplister site in the app, including searching for a specific beer.

Dawn: How did you get the idea to start this project?

Ken: I met Kerry Finsand at my first Beer and Blog. I literally walked into East Burn (coincidentally our first client), sat down in the last empty chair, introduced myself to the guy next to me, who was Kerry, and started talking about beer and the iPhone. Kerry and Scott Wray had been working on the idea for the web site for a couple months I think. They also hooked up with Kevin Scaldeferri who’s doing the web server and the bot. Scott worked with Joe Mendonca on designing the web site. Ezra Johnson-Greenough a.k.a Samurai Artist has been doing a series of interviews with brewers that’s on the site. And recently, we’ve been working with Derek Arent on logos and branding. All of us are big craft beer fans. This project is all about the beer. I wanted to make an iPhone app for it that really leveraged some of the power of the device. I thought it would be cool to make it easy to invite your friends out for beer.

Dawn: Why did you decide to integrate with Shizzow?

Ken: It was such a natural connection. I’d heard about Shizzow at a Lunch 2.0 I went to early in the year, but didn’t really hear the details of what it was about. So, while I was writing code for Beer Signal, I took a break and did a quick search to satisfy my curiosity about what Shizzow was. It was exactly what I wanted to do. Beer Signal is about finding pubs, discovering great beer, and getting together with friends so you can enjoy it together. We want people to spend more time socializing in person, and not just online. We also want to support our local drinking spots, and bring them the business they need in this tough economy. It seems to me that Shizzow is all about that. It also didn’t hurt meeting the people behind Shizzow and being in the same city. If we can help them succeed in our own little way, all the better.

Dawn: Where can people go to learn more about Taplister and Beer Signal and what plans do you have for future improvements?

Ken: Taplister.com is the place to be for the latest on what’s pouring in Portland. There’s a search right on the front page to search for beers using our exclusive beer search engine. Also, the Taplister.com site will autodetect if are on a mobile device and bring up the mobile version of the site.

You can go to BeerSignal.com to learn more about the app, and read the documentation. Beer Signal is currently available on Apple’s iTunes App Store.

There’s a lot we want to do in the future. This is just phase 1. Down the road we want to incorporate beer descriptions, reviews, and user ratings. We also want to work more with brewers and distributors, and be able to collect valuable information for them about what people are drinking and what kinds of beers people are asking about. We also want to expand to other cities. Portland has an amazing craft beer culture. But, it seems to be spreading to other cities, and we want to be there too. One thing I’m interested in developing is more visual ways brewers and users can define a beer’s flavor profile, and then be able to search on that so users can discover new beers that they would likely enjoy.

But, this all begins with everyone using the #ontappdx hash tag, and helping us maintain the best beer list anywhere!

Earlier this week, I ran across a blog post by Jackie Huba about The Intern Trap where she says:

“Would you let a company intern:

• Man your customer service line?
• Be your receptionist?
• Be your spokesperson to the Wall Street Journal?
• Be the main contact for your most talkative customers?

If not, then why do companies put, or think of putting, interns in charge of their social media presence?”

Quoted from Church of the Customer Blog

This doesn’t just apply to interns, either. I often see companies put consultants, public relations firms, and other outsiders in these key positions. As a result, the face of the company is someone who isn’t even a company employee.

These conversations come up frequently with clients. In general, I encourage clients to put employees in these key positions rather than putting someone from the outside into a role that has so much visibility. This doesn’t mean that your interns, public relations firms, and consultants can’t be involved, but I prefer to see them helping out behind the scenes rather than being front and center. Have them work on your content roadmap for your social media efforts, find data or quotes for a blog post, or provide feedback and suggestions for making a blog post better. Consultants can provide advice and mentoring for your community manager rather than managing the community themselves.

I also think that there are a few exceptions to this rule, especially when you are dealing with very large companies. In those cases, having someone on a contract basis or as an intern step up to help with some minor community moderation can help during times where you need a little help, but not enough for a full-time employee. Likewise, big companies with dozens of bloggers can bring in someone to write a few posts in their area of expertise as a way to add some additional content under the direction of company employees. In these cases, you are bringing someone in as a supporting role, rather than putting them in a position where they become the face of the company.

I’d love to hear some examples if your company has tried this (successfully or unsuccessfully).

Shizzow

• Mapping Geekery This Weekend in Portland

Portland Data Plumbing User Group (pdpug)

• YQL and Gnip: June 23rd Meeting

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

Social Media ROI: Dell’s $3m on Twitter and Four Better Examples

Managing Werewolves

Update on Yahoo! Pipes

Dear Wanna-bes, Your Twitter Stardom is Coming to an End

Trends: Impacts Of The Era of Social Colonization –Every Webpage to be Social

The Key To Developing A Social Media Strategy

What Social Media Isn’t

Wrapping up community management

You can find all of my links on Delicious.

• Mapping party at Multnomah Central Library from 11am - 4pm on Saturday.
• Forest park trail mapping from 9am - 2pm on Sunday.

You can find many more details in the Silicon Florist post on the topic. Have fun!

Register and get 20% off with this discount code: fw20

This course will help you find out what people are saying about you and your industry across social media websites using Yahoo Pipes. Your customers are talking about you, and your competitors are revealing information that you want to know. Can you find these conversations quickly and efficiently now?

When: Thursday, June 25, 2009 from 5:00pm - 7:30pm
City: Portland, OR
Location: Big Pink Ground Floor Conference Room, 111 SW 5th Ave, Portland, OR (no remote attendance)
Learn more: Prerequisites, Course Outline and Information

Costs:

• Early Bird: $125 ($100 with 20% discount)
• Late registration: $200
• Students, freelancers, or unemployed can contact me to attend at a significant discount

Who Should Attend

• Public relations professionals
• Marketing managers
• Brand managers
• Social media managers
• Community managers
• Web Strategists
• Content managers / bloggers
• Customer care specialists

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily

• Workplace Trends: The End of Cubicle Dwelling?
• Measuring Success as a Freelancer
• MotionX-GPS iPhone App For Fitness Tracking

Shizzow

• Why Shizzow Doesn’t Automate Your Shouts

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

Brady also has an interesting take on this issue over on the O’Reilly Radar blog.

“I am personally looking forward to these services becoming ubiquitous so that I can track my location and aspects of my life, but as they currently stand these services are not poised for mainstream adoption. They need to do more to prevent people from embarrassing or endangering themselves.”

Quoted from XKCD on the Future Self.

Remember to shout responsibly, people. There are some things that I just don’t want to know about you!

Tuesday June 23, 2009 from 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Oracle 1211 SW 5th Avenue, Suite 800
RSVP on Upcoming

Agenda for June

• 6:00 - 6:15 Introductions
• 6:15 - 6:40 YQL (Yahoo Pipes on Steroids) by Uncle Nate DiNiro
• 6:40 - 7:00 Gnip by Ed Borasky
• 7:00 - 7:30 Other interesting discoveries and future agenda topics (all)
• We will also be talking about whether or not we want to skip the July / August meetings and pick back up in September.

Please use the tag #pdpug for Twitter, blog posts, pictures, etc.

About pdpug

The Portland Data Plumbing Group (aka pdpug) gives us a place to talk about RSS feed hacking, Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, and other related technologies. We have monthly meetings on the 4th Tuesday of every month at the Oracle office in downtown Portland from 6pm-7:30pm.

You can also join our discussions about Yahoo Pipes and other plumbing topics on our Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/portland-data-plumbing

• Donate! We’re a little short on money to feed people at Barcamp. By donating a few bucks, you can help us buy some food for the event.
• Sponsor! These events can’t be successful without our sponsors. Contact Todd Kenefsky (kenefsky on gmail) if you would like to sponsor a portion of the event.
• Volunteer to help. BarCampPortland is an event run entirely by volunteers. Contact klint at renegadefuturist.com if you can spare a few hours on Friday or Saturday to help.
• RSVP. Don’t forget to RSVP for the event on Upcoming.
• Follow us on Twitter: Up to the minute breaking updates about the event as @BarCampPortland

You can learn more about the event by visiting the BarCampPortland wiki.

Here are the details about the meeting - don’t forget to RSVP on Upcoming if you plan to attend.

When: Tuesday April 28, 2009 from 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Where: Oracle 1211 SW 5th Avenue, Suite 800

Agenda:

• 6:00 Introductions
• 6:15 Tarpipe discussion led by Uncle Nate DiNiro
• 6:45 Workshop: Have a problem? Want to talk about a specific tool? Break into small groups to help each other

As always, feel free to discuss various RSS feed hacking, Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, and other related technologies on the pdpug Google Group in between meetings.

Top Shouters

• stephaniewagner: Stephanie Wagner - Graphics + Web Design + Marketing + Promotions and Music | Event Promoter. design graphic marketing promotions sxsw web
• donpdonp: Don Park - biker. hacker. bicycle burrito cafe
• gjlutz: G. Lutz
• wajiii: Bill Jackson - Meh. ajax apple baconsnob geek java linux mac unix

Top Places

• Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub: absinthe beer finetapselection
• CubeSpace: cubespace meetingrooms officeforrent
• SW DESIGNS

Trailblazers (People who go to new places)

• rich: Rich Vigorito
• stephaniewagner: Stephanie Wagner - Graphics + Web Design + Marketing + Promotions and Music | Event Promoter. design graphic marketing promotions sxsw web
• fred: Fred Sobotka - Another consultant who lurks around SE Portland when he’s not lurking elsewhere. db2 portland sql stumptown

People who tag places (and make Shizzow better)

• cedr: coffee croquet scooter secretagent
• stephaniewagner: Stephanie Wagner - Graphics + Web Design + Marketing + Promotions and Music | Event Promoter. design graphic marketing promotions sxsw web

How to use the Twitter friend import:

• Go to your preferences page
• Click the Twitter link in the sidebar
• Activate the service by allowing Shizzow to access your Twitter information
• Click the Import your Twitter friends link
• For friends who are already on Shizzow, you can choose which ones you want to listen to.
• For friends who aren’t on Shizzow, you can invite them, which sends them a Twitter direct message with a request from you to join Shizzow.

What we do or do not do with your Twitter account:

• You never need to give us your Twitter password, we use oAuth to give you control over whether we can access your account.
• Shizzow will not automatically tweet from your account.
• Shizzow will not import all of your Twitter friends; you will need to manually select individual Twitter friends.
• For your Twitter friends who do not already have Shizzow accounts, Shizzow will allow you to send a direct message through Twitter to individually selected friends that you would like to invite to join Shizzow.
• After the friend import process, your account will be setup to automatically tweet your shouts through Twitter, but you can disable this at anytime by visiting the Twitter Preferences page. If you never want us to post your shouts from Twitter, simply disable your Twitter access after importing your Twitter friends.

We’re hoping this makes it easier for you to find your friends and use Shizzow. We would love to hear more about your experiences using the Twitter import on Get Satisfaction.

We also made a few other cool improvements in this latest release:

• Added favorites as a drop down menu on our mobile version (m.shizzow.com) without an extra refresh, and we added the search box to the bottom of the mobile page to make it even easier to shout from your web enabled phone.
• We made some other improvements to the signup process for new users to make it easier to get started on Shizzow.

As always, please let us know what improvements you would like to see in Shizzow. Most of our new features and bug reports come from you, so keep posting them to Get Satisfaction!

Top Shouters

• easterbunny: The Easter Bunny - Bringing baskets filled with colored eggs, candy and toys to the homes of children on Easter.
• b3gl: Jerry
• stephaniewagner: Stephanie Wagner - Graphics + Web Design + Marketing + Promotions and Music | Event Promoter

Top Places

• Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub
• Urban Grind Coffeehouse NW
• CubeSpace

Trailblazers (People who go to new places)

• fred: Fred Sobotka - Another consultant who lurks around SE Portland when he’s not lurking elsewhere.
• rich: Rich Vigorito
• stephaniewagner: Stephanie Wagner - Graphics + Web Design + Marketing + Promotions and Music | Event Promoter

People who tag places (and make Shizzow better)

• dougie: Doug Coleman - A freak for the web
• dswiese: Sean Wiese
• sechrest: John Sechrest
• hollyblackman: Holly Blackman - getting into as much social networking as possible for work.

New and Improved Tagging

We changed our tagging system for places to show only the most popular tags on the place page, and when you click the link for more, you get a nice tag cloud with big text for the popular tags. This is one way to push obsolete tags down the page. If a place without wifi is tagged with wifi, you can push it down the list by tagging it with something like no-wifi, which would become more popular as more people begin to use the tag.

Add New Places and Edit Places via m.shizzow.com

Quite a few of us were frustrated that m.shizzow.com didn’t have a way to add a new place. We heard you loud and clear, and you can now add places from your mobile device using m.shizzow.com. As a bonus, you can also edit places to update an address or correct other information on the place page.

IM Notification - Now with More Links

We’ve improved the experience for those of us who get our notifications via XMPP instant messaging by adding links to the shout within the message. Gone are the days of wondering exactly which Stumptown my friend just shouted from and having to log into the web interface to find out. Now you can click on the link to go directly to the shout to find out more information.

Support for Mexico, Central America, South America and South Africa

We’re continuing to add support for new countries as time permits. Mexico, Central America, South America and South Africa were the latest additions, but you will continue to see support for more countries trickle out.

We also fixed a few other bugs. Remember, we are not skilled in mind-reading or ESP, so we can’t change things that we don’t know you want, so keep those bug reports and feature requests coming at us by posting them on Get Satisfaction!

Thursday April 16, 2009 at 5:00pm
Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub
928 SE 9th Ave, Portland, Oregon

RSVP on Upcoming.

Top Shouters

• maestrojed: Jed Herzog - Livin in Portland OR. @betheoutlier’s my passionate venture | Most used Skillz: webDev & video prod. | Interests: music/Jazz, the web, art/street art/graffiti.
• donpdonp: Don Park - biker. hacker.
• mattg: Matthew Gifford - Really needs to add his bio to Shizzow

Top Locations

• Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub
• Urban Grind Coffeehouse NW
• OCP

Here’s a little more information from Reid’s blog post:

Soon after the launch of the Portland-based location tracking site, Shizzow, I put together client of sorts using a set of javascripts and CSS styles inside of a Fluid site-specific browser. I recently updated this code to work with the latest design revision of Shizzow and decided to take the opportunity to bundle them up for distribution.

Features

• Simplified site layout to work well in a compact window.
• Growl notifications for shouts.
• Automatically refreshes the homepage every minute, unless you’re typing a message.
• Automatically returns you to the homepage after a period of inactivity.

You can learn more and download the packaged version or the source code from Reid’s blog post.

Thursday April 2, 2009 at 5:00pm
Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub
928 SE 9th Ave
RSVP on Upcoming

Content Roadmap

Most companies should create and maintain some type of content roadmap. The content roadmap will usually map out the next 4 weeks of blog posts with an author identified for each post. This helps to ensure that the blog topics are strategically aligned with corporate goals, varied across topics and types of content, and frequent enough to keep the blog active. The person responsible for the blog can work with authors to help identify topics and then make sure that the author has access to everything needed to complete the post (data, technical assistance, etc.)

Spontaneous Posts

Now that you have a content roadmap, you should also diverge from it frequently to allow for serendipitous blogging on hot topics or new ideas that people are passionate enough about to want to talk about them immediately. Monitor popular blogs, news sources, and events in your industry and respond to what others are saying. Join the conversation without waiting for the topic to come up on the content roadmap.

Thought Leadership

The best blogs have content that focuses on thought leadership. Blog about the things in your industry where your employees have expertise that can be shared with the world. Don’t just talk about your products; focus on your entire industry. Get people to discuss a variety of topics and new ideas. Don’t get stuck in a rut where all of your posts have essentially the same or similar content. You are not a thought leader if all of your posts are simply variations on a single idea. Chime in with your thoughts on a variety of topics across your industry.

Conversations

Always monitor and respond to comments on your blog. People get frustrated with blogs where people ask questions or provide feedback in the comments without any response or acknowledgment. Even worse are those companies that moderate every comment and delete anything that they do not agree with. Let people comment and disagree with your ideas. Some of the most interesting conversations happen in the comments of a blog post. You should also monitor what people are saying about you on other blogs, forums, Twitter, etc. and respond where appropriate.

Blogs are Fun

Have fun with your blog, and don’t be so serious all of the time. You can include interesting things that are happening within your company that aren’t necessarily work related (photos from a company ski trip). Admit it; you would rather read a blog post with great content and some humor mixed in, instead of something with great content that drones on and on like an old, boring college lecture. Make the content interesting and fun enough that people will look forward to reading your posts.

Guiding Principles

At this point, I suggest reading my Social Media and Social Networking Best Practices for Business post. Specifically, I covered these guiding principles, which apply not just to blogging, but to other forms of social media as well:

• Be sincere
• Focus on the individuals
• Not all about you
• Be part of the community
• Everyone’s a peer

Each of these 5 guiding principles has already been described in detail in my other post, so I won’t spend much more time on them here, but they are important for corporate bloggers to keep in mind.

Strategy and Vision

Blogs are still just another piece of the corporate communications puzzle (although an increasingly important piece), so spending some quality time thinking about what you want to achieve with your overall communication strategy and how blogging fits into that strategy is a good place for companies to start. You don’t want to use your blog to just pimp your products or talk about press releases. A blog can be used for so much more. Think about the areas where you want to lead the industry and the topics that you want people to think about when they think of your company. Use your blog to become a thought leader in the industry by sharing your expertise on those broad topics that are important and relevant to your company.

Think about who should be blogging on your corporate blog. It is easy to pick your top 5 executives, and give them access to the blog. In some cases, they might be the perfect people, but they aren’t always the best choice when it comes to accomplishing your goals for the blog. Go back to your discussion about your strategy for the blog and the topics that you want people to think about when they think of your company or your products. Who in your company has expertise in those areas? Do you have someone with great ideas? Are there any evangelists or other employees passionate about those topics? If so, recruit those people to contribute to your blogs. Someone passionate and smart, but outside of the senior management ranks probably has more time to spend on the blog and might just come up with some innovative and interesting ideas.

You should also branch out a little into the realm of unofficial / personal blogs. Encourage your employees to have their own blogs where they talk about their areas of expertise. I have blogged on various corporate blogs for companies and non-profit organizations that I am associated with, but I also continue to blog at Fast Wonder on various topics related to social media, online communities, and other technology topics. Having a personal blog has a number of benefits, including giving us an excuse to learn and research new ideas. Quite a few employees have similar blogs, and I like to believe that some people think that we have interesting things to say, and our companies benefit from having smart people discussing their expertise outside of official work channels. There is also a caution to go along with this. You don’t want to create a personal blog that is too focused on your company. If all you talk about is your company and you cover all of the same topics as your official blog, it just looks forced and insincere. You need to branch out and cover additional topics; show that you are a real person and not just a corporate shill.

Making it Happen

After the initial excitement wears off, it is easy for companies to neglect the corporate blog. We just forget to blog, and before long, no one has posted in a month (or two or three …) In some companies this isn’t a problem. If you already have a bunch of prolific bloggers neglect may not be an issue, but for the rest of you, and you know who you are, it really helps to have someone “in charge” of the blog. This person isn’t responsible for writing all of the content, but they can responsible for herding and nagging in addition to making sure that some specific strategic topics are being addressed on the blog. The role is part strategist and part mother hen (it isn’t all that different from managing communities), so you have to find someone who can think strategically about your industry and the right topics while they follow up obsessively to make sure people are actually posting to the blog.

Corporate blogging is a complex topic, and there will never be one magic formula that applies to all companies. Hopefully, these tips will help a few people make their corporate blogs even better. Keep in mind that you will make mistakes along the way. Learn from them, keep writing, and continue to make incremental improvements.

Thursday February 26, 2009 at 5:30pm
Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub
928 SE 9th Ave, Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP on Upcoming

These meetups are for people currently developing applications using the Shizzow beta API or for people interested in starting to use the API. This is an opportunity for you to show off your apps, ask questions, get feedback, or just kick back and listen over a beer. We hope you will come out and join us!

The official videos from the live stream thanks to Blaze Streaming Media.

The presentations are all available on SlideShare.

We also have some beautiful official photos from Mark Coleman.

As always, the attendees are amazing, so we have plenty of amazing fan contributions with the videos from Linux Aid, and plenty of other photos on Flickr if you need just a little more Ignite Portland goodness.

BarCampPortland Volunteer Meeting
Monday February 23, 2009 from 5:30pm - 6:30pm
CubeSpace 622 SE Grand Ave
RSVP on Upcoming if you plan to attend

Volunteering isn’t the only way to help us out:

• RSVP for the actual event on May 1 and 2 on Upcoming.
• Sponsor! These events can’t be successful without our sponsors. Contact Todd Kenefsky (kenefsky on gmail) if you would like to sponsor a portion of the event.
• Join our Mailing List: Sign up for our Google Group to get email announcements about future meetups and events.
• Follow us on Twitter: Up to the minute breaking updates about the event as @BarCampPortland
• Tell your friends: Don’t forget to use the BarCampPortland tag when blogging, posting pictures, etc.

We hope to see you at our volunteer meeting and at the BarCampPortland event!

Portland Data Plumbing User Group (pdpug)
Tuesday February 24, 2009 from 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Oracle 1211 SW 5th Avenue, Suite 800
Please RSVP on Upcoming if you plan to attend

Agenda:

• 6:00 Intros
• 6:15 Jerry (aka @b3gl) leading a discussion about open source alternatives to Pipes.
• 6:50 Work session. Bring your issues with Yahoo Pipes or other RSS feed hackery & we’ll pair up to help each other.

As always, feel free to discuss topics between our meetings on the pdpug Google Group.

Marshall also did a post with more information about his talk on his blog. He was also gracious enough to include a link to the slide show of links that he covered. If you don’t want to watch the video and would prefer a quick intro, he’s written extensively on this topic in this post, this post and this one.

Details:
Jan 27th
6:00pm - 7:30pm
Oracle: 1211 SW 5th Avenue, Suite 800
RSVP on Upcoming

We hope to see you there!

• Chair: Todd Kenefsky
• Treasurer: Adam DuVander
• Secretary: Dawn Foster

Last years officers were Chair: Dawn Foster, Treasurer: Todd Kenefsky, and Secretary: Raven Zachary. A big thank you to Todd and Adam for stepping into new roles, and we’re looking forward to many more events in 2009!

The 2009 Advisory Committee for Legion of Tech (in random order):

• Scott Kveton
• Jed Herzog
• Bram Pitoyo
• Amber Case
• Jason Mauer
• Don Park
• Nate Angell
• Betsy Richter
• Nate DiNiro
• Jake Kuramoto
• Rick Turoczy
• Igal Koshevoy

You’ll notice that there are 12 people, instead of 10. We had a tie for the final seat on the advisory committee, and we decided to expand the committee rather than have a tie-breaker vote.

If you weren’t selected, we would still love to have you volunteer and get involved in the various Legion of Tech events. There are plenty of ways to be involved!

Thank you again to everyone.

The new Legion of Tech board for 2009 is as follows (in alphabetical order):

• Josh Bancroft
• Adam DuVander
• Amy Farrell
• Craig Fisk
• Dawn Foster
• Todd Kenefsky
• Chris O’Rourke
• Chris Pitzer
• Raven Zachary

For those who ran, but were not elected, thank you again for running. The competition was stiff, and all of the people running were strong candidates. We will move the names of those who were not elected to the board of advisors nomination list. We’ll be voting for advisors in the January board meeting.

Thursday October 23, 2008 from 5:30pm - 7:30pm
Jace Gace 2045 SE Belmont

Please RSVP for this event on Upcoming.

These are super informal meetups where we hang out, talk about geeky stuff (wikis, open source, new technologies, openid, …), and wind down with like-minded people over beverages.

Since this is the last meetup of the year (it doesn’t make sense to have a 4th Thursday meetup in Nov/Dev to conflict with the holidays), we wanted to do something a little different …

Thanks to a sponsor who wishes to remain anonymous we will be having the meetup at Jace Gace. Our sponsor will cover the fee to rent the space for the evening, but you will be on your own to pay for drinks / waffles. Have you ever been to Jace Gace? They have the most amazing waffles, art and they have beer / wine! Mmmm, waffles, art, geeky fun, and alcohol. Heaven.

The Election Process

• Nominations are due November 1.
• Anyone not currently on the board who wishes to run for a board seat must be nominated by an existing director and seconded by another existing director.
• Current board members may automatically run for re-election.
• Elections will be held at the December board meeting with the current board voting on the new board.
• The new board will begin serving their terms on January 1, 2009.

Board Member Roles and Responsibilities
Board members are elected to 2-year terms and are responsible for upholding the bylaws of the organization. They are also required to attend monthly board meetings.

The day to day responsibilities of the board may include any or all of the following:

• Organize events like BarCampPortland, Ignite Portland, etc. by leading the team or participating as a volunteer.
• Attend Legion of Tech events.
• Attend board meetings the second Thursday of the month, in person or by phone.
• Come up with ideas for new events or ways to improve existing events.
• Collaborate with community members and make/maintain connections with other organizations.
• Participate in organizational maintenance activities including maintaining the technology, revising the bylaws, finance, taxes, accounting, etc.
• Chair or participate on committees like the Finance Committee and the Technology Committee.
• Board members may also be elected to serve on the executive committee as Chair, Treasurer or Secretary.

Advisory Committee

If you want to get more involved, but do not want to serve on the board of directors, Legion of Tech will also be forming an advisory committee made up of 5-10 people from the community (non-board members).

Purpose of the committee:

• Provide feedback on Legion of Tech activities
• Act as a few more eyes and ears in the community
• Get more people involved in Legion of Tech

How it works:

• Nominations are due on December 1.
• This would be an informal group (not specified in the bylaws) and with no voting rights.
• A current board member must nominate a person for the committee.
• Voting would occur at the January board meeting (new board votes on committee membership).
• Informal committee meetings will be held approximately monthly.

What you need to do

If you are interested in running for the Legion of Tech board or the Advisory Committee, please contact your favorite member of the existing board to request a nomination. Keep in mind that the nominations are due on November 1 for the board of directors and on December 1 for the Advisory Committee.