Is There Money in Communities? Interest = Success
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
Time 30:49
There are only a few ways humans show they value something… give their time or give their money. Another, for argument’s sake, is to lend their name, but that isn’t a good example for this post so I’ll leave it as a side note.
This podcast with Bryan Person of Live World is about building communities, and the elements necessary to make them successful. It’s focused on how companies should evaluate whether they have what it takes in both culture and potential to establish a community. Live World is both a technology platform and provider of social media services.
In the last podcast with Steve Rubel, we talked about communities really being an ecosystem, not necessarily a destination. In this segment, we are focused on communities as a destination. One of my favorites is Campbell’s Kitchen – an address on the web and a place to get and give information about food. Hey, as a father of five and the maker of a few meals in my lifetime, soup is more than just opening a can, heat and eat. Enchiladas, anyone?
Community Manager Essentials
- 1) Write, talk, communicate and understand all formats (please don’t say duh, this may well be a new title in the profession of journalism.)
- 2) Personality, and the sense to understand how the individual’s personality aligns with the brand he or she is representing online (that’s not easy either!)
- 3) No egos allowed. This is about the community and its members, remember?(managers need to facilitate and fade into background. Here’s where I love talking about personal brands. It is an outright clash with a company’s objective of building community. Please do comment because I’d love to take this issue on. :>) )
- 4) Domain expertise in the area of the company or organization you are facilitating (you can’t talk the talk if you have a limp in your walk.)
Do communities sell more soup? Well, successful communities at their core get people engaged in each other and their topics. Without their interest, there is nothing. Companies that build two-way channels to listen as well as share are able to capture ideas. Acting on these ideas allows them to be more responsive, gain more credibility and the circle goes on.
Can companies with successful communities draw a straight line to sales? Probably, but more importantly they can connect the other value currency, time spent with your company. Time is a zero sum value currency, the time I’m able to capture from you is time not spent with something else. That’s the value successful companies treasure.
Bryan the Person
Bryan and I also get into his social baby, the Social Media Breakfast. Talk about community managing and stepping back… Person started the Social Media Breakfast a couple of years ago. He encouraged and gave wings to many others in cities across the country.
We recorded this conversation in late May when Bryan was in Minnesota to speak at the Social Media Breakfast of Minneapolis/St. Paul – It is regularly a very well attended monthly event sometimes dealing with advanced concepts or at other times highlighting the basics. Bryan’s vision to create the offline event for an online audience includes some of the elements of successful community building: sharing, personal connections, the dynamic created by some regular gathering that requires an investment of time and effort. Let’s face it, writing 140 characters is easy. Getting in your car, fighting traffic and meeting new people is hard.
Check the list of cities that have a Social Media Breakfast. If there isn’t one in your community, maybe you can be the spark to draw people together, and then step back and watch it grow. That’s what the organizer of the Minnesota chapter of the SMB, Rick Mahn,(pictured) did and now the online SMB Minnesota community has reached 830 members and the social media breakfast held on Friday, June 26 had more than 150 attendees, that’s a lot of bacon!
All politics is social
Thursday, January 31st, 2008I am paraphrasing a quote attributed to former House Speaker Tip O’Neill who said “All politics is local.” Given how technology has collapsed time and space, it is accurate to say then that all politics is social, as in the social communities that have common interests shared on the web in many forms. With a couple of keystrokes these interests can be inspired, appeased, and heard. Their message can spread around the world in the format that most powerfully communicates their message. So it is with this foundation and a decade in politics and more than a decade in the private sector world of communications I’ve come to the following key elements of social media.
- Social media is like grassroots organizations
- Little issues can spread like wildfire if ignored
- Political skills are required to understand the implications of social media on a corporation and its interested communities
- Corporations should develop their own communities of interest that are active in social media beyond that of their own corporate site
- Understanding social media requires openness within a corporate culture
- Corporate functions such as customer relations, call centers, sales and service departments, research, and product development can potentially benefit from and contribute to social media, so coordination is critical.
These characteristics and situations are part of what goes on in political and public policy campaigns. This is why I believe experience in those areas is especially helpful to corporations seeking to understand and participate in social media.
This also gets into the issue a bit of who owns social media and a thread of that conversation is at Mitch Joel’s blog Twist Image.
Paul Dunay of Buzz Marketing for Technology has a post on the political war room angle of social media.
Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang highlights 3 trends to watch in 2008, makes a jazzy connection to social media
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
Time 16:00
Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst for Forrester and author of the well-read Web Strategist blog, is our guest on the Marketing Edge. You know, as of this posting, he is at the top of the Tweeterboard, a ranking of influencers using the microblogging platform Twitter.
In this podcast, we touch upon his big three trends to look for in 2008 and the following items:
-Social media is like jazz: don’t ask, just listen. He explains it better than I can write about it.
-The corporate structure needs to become more flexible if social media is to gain greater status. Owyang believes 2008 will see a rise in the job function of community manager in large companies.
With more than 3,000 followers and friends on Twitter and Facebook, do you wonder how he juggles his day? First rule: Get up early.
We also get into one of my key themes about social media: It’s making companies incorporate some of the best practices of political and grassroots organizations. Listen, be responsive, be sensitive, seek consensus, build your base — those are just a few. Platforms like Twitter help facilitate the movement of people and opinions that give life to ideas. This is the essence of the political democratic process.
As corporations seek a greater understanding of social media, the social graph will play an important role. This is another Owyang prediction for 2008.
Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to invite all your friends to join you on some other social network? Owyang predicts the expansion of widget networks and with it the expansion of the use of social media in 2008.
Lastly, I promised Jeremiah I’d post a link to one of my favorite places in San Francisco, the Buena Vista, home of the Irish Coffee.
Share your comments on this post. For each comment posted, Provident Partners gives a food item to a St. Paul food shelter.
Last call for the drawing of the book “Join the Conversation” by Joseph Jaffe. Send an e-mail to marketingedge@providentpartners.net and we will include you in the drawing. The winner gets a copy of the book with my comments in the margins; it’s our way of continuing the conversation. Get your e-mail in by midnight on Dec. 19.
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