A few interesting things this week …

FeverBee: The Dos and Don’ts of Outreach

Tags: community, outreach, marketing

How Much Do Top Tier Bloggers and Social Media Consultants Get Paid? We Asked Them! - ReadWriteWeb

Tags: consulting, social media, blogger, salary, compensation, marshall kirkpatrick

Twitter Status - IM: Not coming soon

Tags: twitter, jabber, xmpp, instant messaging

WhereCamp PDX Reminder « Dyepot, Teapot

Tags: wherecamp, wherecamppdx, portland, audrey eschright

Memorandum Colors: X-Ray Glasses for Political Bias in Blogs - ReadWriteWeb

Tags: politics, blog

5 Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss - ReadWriteWeb

Tags: social media

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Here are a few of the highlights:

• It’s really reasonable to attend: $150 - $697 depending on which activities you select.
• Speakers include experts from across the U.S. and around the world.
• Sessions cover a wide range of topics from implementation and management of open technologies to using open source in the public health sector.
• Educational credits of up to 4.5 hours for Health IT professionals have been approved by HIMSS.

Anyone interested in open source and government should think about attending the event.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

• The Joy and Peril of Organizing Community Events
• A great time at Ignite Portland 3
• BarCamp Portland was Awesome

This SlideShare presentation is what I used last evening to lead the discussion:

I went to a few conferences this year that set up event-specific social networks for the conference. Some I joined and then neglected without contributing anything, and others I never bothered to join at all. I didn’t stay engaged with any of the services.

I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of social networking sites specifically for conferences. There are a couple of reasons:

• Most of us already belong to more social networks and communities than we can effectively manage. Joining one more social network and maintaining information and contacts in one more place is not something that most people will spend time doing.
• Conferences and events are bound by time; we attend them for a few hours or a few days a year. We learn new things and meet new people during the event, but few of us will spend time trying to extend this networking time online for any significant period of time before or after the event.
• There are so many better ways to keep up with people after an event that fit more easily into our everyday lives (Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc.)

I like the goal of making it easy for people to connect before, during and after an event, but there are better ways to do this:

• Engage with people on an existing social network that is already heavily used by your audience. Facebook groups, for example, are a good way for a conference to encourage information sharing and networking among 20-30 year olds or people working in technology.
• Provide a way for members to find each other with an online member directory linking to contact information, Twitter handles, blogs, etc.

Here are my questions for you:

• Have you ever found an event specific social network useful to you over any extended period of time?
• If so, how did you use it?
• If not, why do you think it wasn’t useful?

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

• The Joy and Peril of Organizing Community Events
• A great time at Ignite Portland 3
• BarCamp Portland was Awesome

We decided that at the next Ignite Portland that rather than giving our sponsors the microphone for 30 seconds, we would rather have them submit a 30 second video. Needless to say, we wanted to have an example to help encourage people to get creative with their videos. Todd came up with the concept and the lyrics for the Legion of Tech Brady Bunch video. The video is hilarious and you need to watch it.

A huge thank you to Jed Herzog of Outlier Solutions for filming and editing this for us and to our wonderful chorus of singers; Mia Burcham, Owen Burcham, Liam Burcham, Aodan Collins, Xander Collins, Soren Collins and Rainer Collins. A big thank you to Todd for coming up with the lyrics and herding the rest of us to get everything recorded.

If you want to put together a cool video and have it shown at Ignite Portland in front of ~500 people, you can visit the Ignite Portland site to learn more about sponsoring.

Quoted from @jowyang’s Twitter stream:

• Talking to a client, they are having troubles with one of the community mangers vendors in my wave, interesting.
• Getting an earful, they are frustrated with vendor…I’m almost a social media psychologist. I’ll help them find someone else.
• Fact: Many of the vendors in my community platform wave ironically do NOT offer a community to their own customers to support themselves.
• Sad Fact: I interviewed up to three clients of the vendors (customer references) some clients didn’t like the vendor –who didn’t even know
• Sad Fact Cont: Beyond all the dirt I learned about the vendor’s weaknesses, more importantly it told me they were not in touch with clients.

My advice to community platform vendors:

• If you don’t already have a public user community or support community for your customers running on the latest release of your platform, start planning one now.
• Get your product management and engineering teams involved in the community and spend time learning what your customers like and don’t like in addition to the features they want in future releases.
• Spend some time monitoring what your customers are saying about you online (Twitter, blogs, and other forums) to avoid being caught off guard by negative feedback.

My advice to anyone selecting a community platform vendor:

• If they are not running a public community for their customers and users that is built on their platform, run (not walk) away from that vendor.
• Spend a significant amount of time in that public community getting a feel for the issues that other customers are having with their software. Also take note of how long it takes for them to respond to questions or issues.
• Ask for some customer references. Call the references and chat about their experiences with the vendor. Ask them for specific examples of both positive and negative interactions and experiences.

While Jeremiah says that “Many of the vendors in my community platform wave ironically do NOT offer a community to their own customers to support themselves”, the best vendors do use their own software to build external communities for their customers.

Here are three examples of vendors who eat their own dogfood:

• Jive Software (my previous employer) has a bunch of communities built on Clearspace for developers, support, partners, business users, and open source products.
• Lithium has the Lithosphere where customers can discuss the software, find tips and best practices, get support, and more.
• Community Server by telligent has a community with a heavy developer focus.

There are plenty of others who run vibrant communities for users of their platform; however, I was surprised by how many do not. While I was working at Jive, we learned so much about our software by using it to host our own communities. We found bugs early, felt the pain points along with our customers, and celebrated when new features were introduced in the product. Any vendor who isn’t eating their own dogfood is using you, their customer, as a testing bed. I’ll take my chances with vendors who use their software over ones that do not any day.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

• Why Companies Should Have Online Communities
• Custom Corporate Communities: Planning and Getting Started
• Maintaining a Successful Corporate Community
• Online Community Thought Leader Search

Too many companies automatically put the community function under marketing, which works well for certain types of communities, but can be disastrous for other types of communities. For example, developer communities or customer support communities should rarely, if ever, report to marketing. However, I do think that marketing should manage the communities for certain types of customer communities or communities that support a specific marketing campaign. Communities focused on a product line could be driven out of a product marketing group.

Developer communities and open source communities should be driven out of a technology or engineering group, since developer and open source communities tend to work best when they are created by developers for developers. Developers in general have very little tolerance for marketing and anyone who lacks technical credibility.

Support communities should be driven as part of the broader support organization to ensure that the customers in the community are getting an appropriate level of support. The support staff deals with support questions all day and are the most appropriate group to be answering the questions in the support forums and making sure that support customers have what they need from the company.

In some cases, the community should report to the senior management of the organization. Some communities cover multiple functions including developers, support, customers, and product information. In those cases, the community team should be placed high enough in the organization to be able to effectively interface with all of the other teams in the organization. If the community is a critical part of the the products or services offered by the company, it might need to be it’s own function within the organization.

It is worth spending some extra time deciding where the community function should be placed within the organization. You need to take a careful look at the audience for your community and place the community in the appropriate organization.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

• Hiring a Community Manager
• Musings on Community Ownership
• Promoting Your Community Efforts the Right Way
• Why Companies Should Have Online Communities

WhereCampPDX needs your help!

• Attending. If you plan to attend, please RSVP on Upcoming so we can plan accordingly.
• Sponsoring. We still need a few more sponsors to help cover the costs of the event.
• Marketing. Blog, Tweet, and let your friends know about the event.

You can expect to see people from a variety of places talk about various location-based technologies related to projects like Shizzow, Platial, WeoGeo, Trimet, and much, much more. You can find out more about the event on the WhereCamp PDX blog.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

• Elections for the Legion of Tech Board
• A great time at Ignite Portland 3
• BarCampPortland 2008 Recap aka Geeks, Bubble tea, and Werewolf

A few interesting things this week …

Cone Finds That Americans Expect Companies to Have a Presence in Social Media

Tags: social media, research, cone

Web Slideshow on: Farm Blogs and RSS - Agglom

Tags: rss, marshall kirkpatrick, wordcampdx

Obama ‘08 for iPhone | raven.me

Tags: obama, iphone, portland, raven zachary

OSCON moves to San Jose - O’Reilly Radar

Tags: oscon, open source, sad, san jose, portland, oreilly

Justin Kistner - The next Holy Grail of collaboration is to kill the 28% of our day spent on distractions

Tags: collaboration, email, justin kistner

Online Communities: Surviving and Thriving in a Downturn (Part 1)

Tags: online community, community manager, community, forumone, billjohnston

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Google does a great job of finding everything for a keyword, but it doesn’t really know how to filter for posts matching less measurable criteria. For example, a standard Google search can’t filter for the blogs of people that I think are really smart and interesting. The idea behind the custom search engine is that I can tell Google which sites I want it to search, and then Google does its magic to find the best posts within the limits that I provide. Marshall uses his custom search engines as a starting place for research to get quotes for blog posts or learn more about a topic he’s researching.

I have plans for a few others, but I wanted to start with a custom search engine for online community thought leaders. I’m hoping it will help me when I’m doing research for blog posts or consulting clients. In order to keep the results relevant, I’m limiting the number of sites searched to a very small number of blogs from people that I think are thought leaders in the online community space. While I have a huge respect for many people who work at companies that make community platform software, I’m deliberately not including blogs from vendors to attempt to keep the search vendor neutral.

Here are the first blogs to make the cut:

• Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang
• Online Community Report by Bill Johnston
• Web Community Forum
• Connie Benson
• CommunityGuy by Jake McKee
• Horse Pig Cow by Tara Hunt
• Factory City by Chris Messina
• Vanity alert: Yes, I also included Fast Wonder in the search

You can try the Online Community Thought Leader search for yourself and let me know what you think:

Now the big question for you:

Who did I miss? Did I leave someone amazing off of the list? If so, you can leave suggestions in the comments.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

• Monitoring Dashboards: Why every company should have one
• Why Companies Should Have Online Communities
• Custom Corporate Communities: Planning and Getting Started