It’s nearly the season to make merry – but it seems that it’s already the season for people to start making predictions for the coming year. I’m going to start a collection of interesting ones, hanging off this post, in an attempt to revitalise my blogging instinct.

Here’s Verizon’s top 10 in which Enterprise Social Networking comes top. No surprises there then, and this is something that we’ve been discussing with clients for a couple of years now. Couple of barriers to takeup – the lack of any really good tools, and the reluctance of business to see the real value in social tools for collaboration and effective working. Clearly, many companies still see social interaction as a distraction from the important cut-and-thrust of work, and lock down their employees’ access to Facebook, Twitter, and the rest. Time to reconsider surely – we need to start seeing the ability to collaborate and communicate in a more natural way as a differentiator, and something that’s vital to success rather than an inhibitor.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time this year travelling backwards and forwards to the Middle East, and found myself wishing for better tools than we’re currently using – and on the back of this, to work with people that find it second nature to work remotely when required. We’re still not very good at it.

Interesting piece that positions traditional views of reputation against a sense of history. In a world where everything is increasingly recorded, it asks if this is more important than an ephemeral sense of someone’s worth. Facts versus ‘opinion’…

This is fabulous example of a global company reaching out to its customer base and giving them the opportunity to share their ideas on how to reinvigorate its customer experience. Of course, the idea is only as good as Starbucks’ willing to adopt any of the suggestions that are made – and from what I’ve seen, they’re taking steps to do just that.

I’d like to see more companies taking this kind of approach – and it ties into some thinking I’ve been doing recently around brands and how they become more porous… 

On April Fool’s Day, many friends of Chris Brogan were confused. They saw his facebook birthday as April 1 and wondered how it had crept up so quickly. Then some of us remembered the wonderful video done for his birthday last year. That memory helped us see that Chris, unintentionally, had fooled us all.

It also sparked a conversation between a couple of us to figure out what we could do for his birthday. One of the things about Chris is that he has a way of creeping into our conversations. Because he seems to be everywhere in social media, it feels like he is everywhere, period.

For example, last week I walked into our son’s room. He had Chris’s flickr album open. Though Andrew has met Chris, it seemed odd. It turns out that Andrew started at engadget, followed a link to SxSW, and read a couple of guys talking about Chris.

So we thought, Becky McCray and I, what if we invited people to show us where Chris shows up in their lives. What if we invited people to take Chris (at least flat Chris) out of the fishbowl and into real space? We created an account at flickr.com/photos/mayor2008 and sent out the link.

The challenge, of course, is that Chris is looking for himself. So only a part of the Brogan universe knows about this project. Now, at the beginning of his birthday, we’re inviting you to join us. Go here for the directions and then upload your pictures of where Chris shows up in your life. And please let other people know about the project.

This probably won’t be a surprise for Chris. That’s fine. If he wasn’t connected to everyone and everything and everywhere, this project wouldn’t make any sense anyway.

But Chris, the number of us that wouldn’t know each other, that wouldn’t be known at all, that wouldn’t be wasting investing huge amounts of time in social media, is bigger than you know or acknowledge. Some of us think it’s pretty cool. And some of us, the geekier ones of us anyway, think YOU are pretty cool.

Thanks for changing our lives, dear friend. Thanks for changing MY life.

The last conference on my schedule (for now, anyway) is the Community 2.0 conference, which takes place May 12 – 15 at the Red Rock Casino & Hotel in Las Vegas, NV. I was an attendee last year, and this year I am presenting a session on how community management is like herding cats. My session is on Tuesday, May 13th at 4:10 PM.

It was surprisingly easy to find a photo of 130 cats in a small room, by the way.

Chris Brogan is helping people figure out how to apply social media tools in particular contexts. I offered to do the church application. Of course, because Chris has been helping me explore the possibilities for the past couple years, he has been mentoring this post.

I’ll start with a couple of principles which I try to remember.

Church buildings are tools. So are social media.

When people think about church, they think location. They go to a building. But the building is a convenience, a place to gather and stay warm and dry. Although we want buildings that are useful, if we get stuck on making them too cool, too amazing, too vast, we use up resources that could go elsewhere. Not just money, but time and attention and energy. When we think about social media, we often get captured by the coolness.

I do. As a result for example, I have a pownce account that I never check, which has left one person thinking I left the internet. When I am at my best, however, I am looking at social media as a set of tools to be used for a variety of specific purposes…and I will choose carefully based on what I want to accomplish.

Church is by definition about community and relationships. So are social media.

If you take what Jesus said about what we know as church with some seriousness, it is a set of vertical and horizontal relationships. It is about the people. And so it is with social media. How are we building relationships? How are we developing connections and using the connections to help people grow?

The curtain is pretty transparent

For some reason, people who are exploring social media for proselytizing seem to think that no one will know what they are trying to do. For example, if you are creating strategies for saving people and you publish those strategies online, the “lost people” who are the “target” of the “assimilation strategies” can read them. And will understand that the appearance of authenticity is just a strategy. Maybe of the borg.

I understand this struggle. It is the struggle of every brand that is trying to create a social media strategy. However, at some level, church isn’t a brand. My solution is to just live and talk and explore as if my Invisible Friend is real. Just like Big Bird did.

What I’ve done:

1. Share work trips with flickr and audio blogging. I was part of a team that went to Gulfport as part of Katrina reconstruction. While we were there, we put pictures on flickr, we audioblogged with hipcast, and just blogged. People back home were able to look and listen and read. Even people who didn’t know what the technology was could follow the links that we emailed around and also put on the church website.

2. Share corporate gatherings with ustream. A year ago we started turning on a video camera and streaming our services. These weren’t services produced for broadcast, with great camera work, stellar audio, and TV timeouts. Quite the opposite. The service existed and we let people at home watch it through an unobtrusive camera. For the first couple months, we just used the mic on the camera. We just took what was happening inside outside. And people watched. A guy whose wife couldn’t get out because of early Alzheimer’s disease. People who are living on the other side of the world. And one day, people who couldn’t safely travel because of the ice. (Though I haven’t tried it, I’m guessing that you could use blog.tv and chat back)

3. Share your heart with blogging. I’ve been writing here for a couple years. My friend Rick sometimes tells people what he will be preaching about to get ideas and suggestions. The key, however, is to wrestle.

4. Share community development with a corporate blog. During Lent this year I was part of creating a small group. 7 people wrote once a week each about a lent-related theme. They talked with each other. They talked with commenters. They ended up having as much interaction as a face-to-face small group might have during its first 6 weeks of meeting. They want to keep going.

5. Share your life with twitter. I can’t ever figure out how to describe twitter. Even calling it microblogging doesn’t help. So I just send people here. Especially when I am traveling. And then they discover that they can find out what I’m doing and where I am. And then they understand.

6. Share your heart with youtube. I’ve created a number of pieces of video to use in services and other places. Some are citizen journalism, showing what people connected to church are doing in the community. Some are thought pieces. (Bonus: that video used audio that was captured by on a digital voicemail service. People could call in, leave a message, and then I was able to edit it in.) Some are, well, odd. But all of them are quickly produced and connect to particular people. The secret is to remember that an apology or a birthday greeting with only one intended audience member can be absolutely huge in impact.

7. Share attention with a note. Yep. You can actually handwrite a note to someone. Of course, if you take a picture with your cameraphone, order a print through walgreens or snapfish or other photo sites, and then glue it to cardstock before you write the note, you can personalize a moment or an event in a way that merges multiple media for maximum impact.

8.  Be human. Are people at facebook? Friend them. Building networks at Linkedin? Connect. Writing a book on conversation? Sign up. Raising money to fight cancer? Join in.

Chris has had a ton of other ideas I haven’t done. One of the best? Have kids interview old people on camera and produce videos together.

Oh, one other thing. I know people that I didn’t know a year ago because of all of these things above. I have cried and laughed with, prayed for, talked to, understood, taught, been taught by these people. There are real people behind these words and screens and cameras. Out here, outside the church building.

I wanted to look back at 2007. I really did. But somehow, finding the time to look back has been challenging. There were lots of trees and leaves.

Robert

Enter Robert Hruzek. Robert does a monthly (or so) writing challenge asking for posts on the theme, “what I learned from…” The “from” varies each month, but the challenge of writing to a theme is a helpful thing. (I’ve written a couple times in this series).

His end of year challenge was, “What I learned from 2007″ and the project was to pick one post from each month of the year that represented some significance. I finally settled down to write that post, and Robert has it up here What I learned from 2007. (He did this as a blogapalooza which means that all of the posts are put up on his blog, Middle Zone Musings, with links back to here.

It was a great exercise, realizing how much I’ve written, how much I’ve learned, how much you have meant to me. So head over there and see whether you agree with my choices.

In the process of compiling that list, I realized that I’ve been writing in other places as well.

Liz

A couple times this year, Liz Strauss let me guest post on her blog. This has been a privilege and a challenge. One of the things that marks Liz’s blog is that she comments on every comment. Every one. In almost real time.

And Liz gets a lot of comments.

When you write for Liz, you want to keep the conversation going, which means a significant commitment for the day or two following. Having done that twice, I have a deep appreciation for the commitment Liz has for her community. In her blog she talks often about relationship. In her comments, she lives that commitment.

Thanks, Liz for letting me stop by on December 5 (Are you blogging for as many or as much?) and August 15 (Shaping the world in little ways.)

Joanna

Through Liz this year, I met Joanna Young. She lives in Edinburgh and writes well about writing well. I mean really well.

One of the things she did this year was to try having guest writers. She opened up her sitting room in September and invited three of us to take the lead in conversation about authentic writing. (Robert wrote one, and Emma Bird wrote the other. Growing out of that collaboration, Emma and Joanna are hosting a writing holiday in Italy.)

So thanks, Joanna for letting me stop by September 13 (Sometimes I write hollow.)

Next Wave

Next-wave.org is an online journal about church and culture. Thanks to editor Bob Hyatt, I was able to write twice for them, once on Twitter (June) and once on the advent blog I wrote (December).

Related Blogs

In addition to writing here at Levite and at these other places, I wrote at two other blogs I created (deliberate disciple and advent2007) at various times this year.

Looking ahead.

There are several projects bouncing in my head, particularly as I begin understanding how social media is going to interact in my new position at Grabill Missionary Church.

In the works already, and unrelated to GMC, is lent2008.wordpress.com. This blog will start running within a week or so. Eight of us are working together to write this, attempting in community to reflect on the lenten season. The challenge is that only some of us know each other face to face. Most of the relationship has developed on-line. We are very excited about the interaction already happening. You’ll enjoy it, too.

Thanks

I’m thinking that I generated a lot of words in 2007. Thanks to each of you who reads and comments, whether face to face or in the comment section or through email or through a twitter reference or other link. I am grateful for the community that stops by here. I’m grateful for you.

Sometimes we find ourselves doing scary things. One of those things may be standing in the aisle of Hobby Lobby with a feather boa.

What would cause an associate pastor, ready to start working at a new church, to post a picture of such an experience?

Connie Reece.

Connie and I go way back, like 8 months or so. Although Nancy and I lived in Austin in the early 80s, our paths never crossed (however, I did acquire a taste for CFS).

Part of our relationship has been public. Connie was part of an incredible surprise birthday party for me last July. I was able to make her laugh in August. Somewhere in there, I was trying out Ustream.tv for a wedding and Connie joined us from Austin, providing Nancy and Hope and I play-by-tweet commentary as the wedding proceeded.

However, there has also been a back channel conversation going on this whole time, emailing interaction on topics of mutual interest. We have been able to encourage each other during some challenging moments.

Sometimes, the more you learn about someone, the more you wish you didn’t know. In Connie’s case, the more I get to know of her heart, the more I want to know.

From what I read from people who know her face-to-face, from business, from second life, from other conversations, I’m guessing that my experience is not unique.

However Connie is.

So, friend, happy birthday. Thanks for encouraging, challenging, inspiring, and giving us the gift of your vulnerability.

UPDATE: It was Joann Fabrics. Sorry.

I wanted to write a wonderful theoretical post about conversation and community.

The train of thinking started with a post by Joanna Young, talking about responding to comments on blogs. It’s a great post, suggesting that if we are going to write, we have to listen to the comments and respond to them because we are the social in social media, because these are conversations that, when continued, grow into relationship.

I commented that I like to email rather than respond on my blog to the comments. Joanna suggested that the former is nice and helpful and friendly, but if we don’t do the latter, we don’t help people to understand that this is a friendly place to be, that the writer of this blog is a listener, a dialoguer, a conversationalist.

It was a very good caution, a very well written, caring reproof.

I am, by nature, a one-on-one person. My counsel is private most often. I don’t like to talk to one person in front of others. In fact, when Nancy and I go out to eat, we are the quiet table. We talk, quietly, but if there are other tables close to ours, our conversation is limited. This is in marked contrast to the tables around us who seem more than ready to share every detail of their lives.

As a result, when I come to social media, I am far more comfortable with the email interaction than with responding to comments. I can speak more directly to heart needs that I sense. I can relate at a different level.

And, as I said, I was going to have this much more closely reasoned.

And then I spent the evening in conversations, with a long-time friend, with family, in the emergency room with someone injured in an accident (not seriously). And I realized that I am built to encourage best in one-on-one conversations. If there are four of us in the room, I’ll defer to those who seem to know better what they are doing. If there are two of us, I’ll defer to the one who seems to know better what they are doing.

We each work best when we work in ways that fit with us best. And at times that will cost us reach, and breadth, and audience. However, when I am most likely to change a life, it happens with personal time where I don’t have to worry about others listening in. I can better ask obnoxious questions. I can more comfortably share my particular struggles.

So yes, Joanna, I will do my best to respond publicly to comments. And I love what you and Liz do with specific direct comments to everyone who comments on your blogs. But I’m thinking that I have to know how my voice best works, and put my energy into that way of speaking.

Or that’s what I think way too late at night.

I was speaking with a close colleague yesterday and she is faced with an interesting situation in her organization. Her organization is a medium sized software company with about 5 online communities. There is a raging debate within her organization about who should own the online communities: IT/R&D or Marketing. Marketing has a clear path for growth of the communities in that they want to make them more issue based as well less branded (yea…go figure..a marketing person who wants to brand what they do less). She would not disclose with me what the goal/future plans are of the IT organization.

There have been numerous meetings with management of both sides and no decision has come as a result. I have done some preliminary research on this subject and have my own opinion, but curious as to what you have to say. Let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags:
online communities, software, IT, web 2.0, social networking, wikis, collaboration, community 2.0

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online communities, software, IT, web 2.0, social networking, wikis, collaboration, community 2.0

Andrew (our son) today asked me whether I had watched the KSU students. Somehow he had looked at Chris Brogan’s post about the video which follows. In this video, a group of students in a cultural anthropology class talk about the connection between living and how education is done in classrooms.

Here’s what is hard for me about this video: I understand completely.

I was involved in higher education from 1976 when I started as a student at Wheaton (IL) College until 2000 when I left the University of Saint Francis to start working in a church. Twenty-four years. Six schools, from a 435 student Bible College to the 50,000 students at UT-Austin (actually, that particular move went the other direction, from huge to tiny). Student to Associate Vice President. And throughout that process I had this nagging in the back of my head: does this really matter?

Formal education does help, of course. There are some things that I learned. Mostly I learned ways to think, some of which help. I learned how to help people think. I learned something about relationship. And I learned that making structures relevant and significant is really really hard.

Now, here’s the hard part. I am part of church right now. As I watch this video, which starts with handwriting on the wall of a classroom, I think of handwriting on the wall which happens in the Bible, writing which comes from God telling a king that his kingdom will disappear that night. And I think about writing on the walls of church buildings where people say, “How does this matter?”

People are staying away from church in droves. According to some research, if there are 100 kids in the class in this video, 97 of them find church irrelevant, judgmental, hypocritical. And I don’t always blame them.

Structures tend to alienate people, particularly people who don’t exactly fit into the structure. And these students, who have been taught that they are unique, are finding that academic structure and religious structure don’t fit them because they are unique.

So if learning matters, if God matters, if learning about God and talking with God matter, What do we need to understand about how people are?

Of course, there is an interesting story here. I’m off my RSS feeds for the week, so I would have missed this video. However, Andrew saw it at Chris’s blog. Andrew told me. I listen to my 20-year-old college-student son when he points me to stuff that makes him think. And so my internet friend captured my son’s interest and that connects back to me. Then common thread?

People.

Regardless of the medium, people matter. Educational structures are a pain, but you and I both know the couple of teachers who captured us. Religious structures and excesses make us cringe, but we do on occasion say, “but if that person is what Jesus is like, maybe I might be interested.”

We have generations of people who are incredibly insightful about what isn’t working. Some of them are actually interested in what might work.

So, who’s going to listen to them? And then talk with them?

Are you?

———
spirituality education irrelevance

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If you don’t know about twitter, that’s okay. Maybe you don’t need to.

But here’s what you are missing.

• Next-Wave is a monthly ezine which takes a fresh look at church.

  “Our magazine focuses its content on exploring the cross section between
  postmodern culture and the living Church. How does the church respond
  to the various complex cultural and societal trends that exist? We
  prefer writers who are engaging the culture around them, not merely
  complaining from the sidelines.”

  So I figured I would talk about part of my own explorations of that intersection and wrote about twitter in an article called “On (digital) sparrows.” You can check on the article and if you want, make a comment on it. I would be grateful.

• Because of twitter, I learned of a guy named Jim Long. Jim is a camera guy for NBC news and twitters throughout his day. Recently he spent a week traveling around the world. He is producing a two-part video travelogue which is wonderful. Part one is here. What is so compelling is that he gives a human side to the people who are doing the media work and the government work. It is about relationship.
• Leisa Reichelt spoke at a conference in June on the idea of twitter being part of creating Ambient Intimacy. At the link are her presentation slides and a summary of her presentation

  Here’s her definition:
  
  

  
  “Soooo… as you probably know, Ambient Intimacy is a term to describe
  that sense of connectedness that you get from participating in social
  tools online that allow you to feel as though you are maintaining and,
  perhaps in fact, increasing your closeness with people in your social
  network through the messages and content that you share online – be it
  photographs or text or information about upcoming travel..”

  I love the concept as a way of explaining not just what happens with twitter, but with blogging, IMing and our other ways of touch each other online. Particularly when they are accompanied by occasional face-to-face or voice-to-voice interaction which can add a dimension of accountability, these modes of interaction can be powerful. They create the on-line version of walking down the street in a small town and saying hello to a friend, the brief interaction that maintains contact.

  Thanks, of course, to Chris Brogan for pointing out the article.

• So you still need to know what twitter is? It’s like blogging with 140 characters at a time. It’s like sitting on a park bench on the main street of a really small town and having your friends walking by and letting you know what’s going on at that moment. It’s like prose and poetry and nonsense all mixed together. It’s like sitting on the deck with a cup of coffee and hearing all the birds…and then being able to find out what all those little chirps are. It’s like this (for me).
• If you don’t like metaphors, ask me and i’ll give you an example of how twitter was useful in a particular situation. Or you can just listen to my audioblog from last week.

technorati tags:twitter, ambient+intimacy

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Pastors are supposed to obey God. Everyone expects it, inside and outside of churches. Everyone expects it to not happen, inside and outside of churches. When we think of popular culture portrayals of pastors, they show people who are really autocratic and really hypocritical.

And I don’t blame anyone for that portrayal. No one can live up to false expectations. We (the big sweeping generic we inside ‘the church’) decide what obeying God means and we decide what perfection looks like and we decide that pastors have to meet that perfection (which no one can) and then in the debris that results from the explosion, we find fragments of a soul and we say, “see? hypocrisy.”

That’s not how it should be. And two things I read today are helpful.

One of them is a list of ways that pastors said that they refresh themselves. The list isn’t just for pastors; everyone should consider taking a walk, for example, or laugh. However, if we can’t make the time to have our souls be restored, how in the world can we teach anyone else? I have seen the value of some of these, and am learning about others.

The other helpful thing today is from Bob Hyatt. Bob writes a blog called Pastor Hacks which draws on David Allen and other places to help us spend “less time on tasks, more time on people.” However, he also writes a blog on life and ministry and today, on the challenges of living as a pastor, as a shepherd. On one hand, it feels funny to link to something this vulnerable. On the other hand, he posted it, and I read it as the authentic picture of a man who is wanting to have integrity in this thing called being a pastor.

In the old days, churches would have made life difficult for pastors who talked about slowing down, who shared their souls, who wanted to step off the pedestal (instead of falling off). In some places today, it is a little easier.

(full disclosure: the church I’m part of is one of the great churches, looking for honesty and authenticity. Not always getting there, but on the way. So I am a grateful shepherd.)

Technorati Tags: pastorhacks pastor authenticity prayer

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I’m curious. Why do we do this?

Okay, when I was in high school English, I got scolded for ‘indefinite pronoun reference”. And I haven’t stopped committing that sin. However, I will clear up the question of what do I mean by “this”.

Why do we find conversation via comment so compelling?

It hasn’t happened much here. However, there have been several conversations over at Rick Dugan’s blog which he has used to shape how he preaches.

For example, one day he put up his beginning thoughts on a passage of scripture which he would be using in two days and asked for comments. There were a dozen comments from five people in three countries and two continents.

This has happened several times.

What I would like to know is, why? Why do you contribute to comment conversations? What do you get out of giving? What has happened to your own thinking as you have been involved in thoughtful commenting?

Understand, I’m not talking about the “Nice job” comments. I’m talking about the kind of conversation that would happen, or could happen, if we were all sitting in the same geography drinking coffee?

What is happening to us?

{And Rick, if you are interested in pointing your commenters here, that would be interesting.}

technorati tags:comment, conversation

Blogged with Flock

I started this list as a comment to a previous post. I decided to make it a post of its own.

I’m trying to sort through some things about relationship as it relates to leadership, to spiritual direction, to helping people in ways that are consistent with the ways that Jesus helped (and helps) people.

Respond, argue,  clarify, ask for clarification.

1. It takes time to get to know other people in the helping community.

2. The more we know other people, the more we trust what they can do.

3. There are no agencies in the New Testament, only people and the church. (Thus, when Jesus sorts out the people who showed Him love from the people who didn’t in Matthew 25, He was holding individuals accountable)

4. The more time we invest in (as opposed to waste on) people, the more we are about what Jesus was about.

5. Investing in means providing the resources that are needed to accomplish the work. Tools, principles, truth, love.

6. Wasting on means giving up something of value for no gain.

7. It is possible to waste time on people. What that looks like is being with them and not putting into them what we know would be helpful. For example, listening to the same description of the same problem for the 17th time and not saying, “You know, this would help.”

8. I can’t always tell the difference between waste and invest.

9. I know that the difference ISN’T about productivity.

10. So as leaders we have to figure out how to be present with people, investing and not wasting.

Making sense?

80+ slide presentation I am making available online regarding the Community 2.0 conference.

You can find it here: http://boemiller.com/presentations/community2-0.html

This is my attempt to attach some closing remarks now that the Community 2.0 conference has adjourned. I really hope that over the next few days I can begin drawing cohesive relationships between my thoughts, because at the moment I am drowning in a pool of information. On that note, I related to what Richard McDermott eluded to earlier – we as people engage with more and more connections and share information, but in some ways, our emotional connection to others has weakened. In a new globalised society of information sharing, it is easy to drown in a pool of excess, and one must be careful not to become overwhelmed and bogged down by such. It was a real treat to get to interface with people within the conference community, and to get to know what makes them tick. We’re all in this together, and when you recognize the emotional bond, it makes facing the challenges seem a little less frightening.

I learned something big: communities don’t “grow on trees.” A community without purpose is like a meeting without an agenda. Meetings without an agenda can be wonderful if you want to kill time, get to know one another, and explore the fascinating dynamics of ‘group think’. In a meeting without an agenda, you will walk away with the ideas of a few – especially from those who like to express themselves verbally. Communities require an agenda, they need focus, and this is especially true if you wish to see results. If you work in a corporation, then your number one goal is to seek results, and measure the capacity by which that result feeds into your bottom line. A community with an agenda can do this, because one can measure the result of the outcome. John Hagel, the opening speaker at the Community 2.0 conference, opened up a new world for corporations to measure this type of return by introducing community ROI, ROA and ROS — return in information, return on audience, and return on skill.

I am the community developer for a gaming company based out of Seattle. Technology is my passion, and if I had my way prior to this conference, I’d have introduced blogs, wikis, social networks, and video chat a long time ago. The message from this conference rings clear, community is not about the tools. It takes much more to create a vibrant community that thrives and supports the organization. It takes goals, it takes passion and it takes time. To some degree, you *can* have a community without these components, but that community doesn’t necessarily benefit the organization, because the organization will have no idea how to reap the benefits from its contributors.

I walk away with a real respect for the organizers that make communities work. Without strong community managers, moderators and facilitators, a community is rarely productive. Think of it this way … what if you attended a conference that had a title, but no agenda. What do you think the outcome would be? Sure, it would be a wonderful test, and perhaps it would become the subject of an academic study somewhere. The fact is, companies need to see results, and they need to feel comfortable knowing that there will be a return on their investment. In the end, return on skill should translate into return on sales.

There were representatives here from companies all over the globe. A few that come to mind are, Expedia, Microsoft, PC Magazine, Hewlett Packard, and the Screen Actors Guild. We are now all tasked with taking this information back home (to work), and selling it to our marketing department, comforting our legal representatives, and empowering our communications officers. As always, the IT department will fight over whether Python or dotNet is better (and we all know the answer is Python), and CEOs will wonder how the hell this thing is going to increase revenue, and strengthen stock prices. I would encourage everyone in one of these large organizations to look at how Web 2.0 and Community 2.0 is really forcing the need for an Enterprise 2.0 organizational shift. I hate to use the phrase ‘paradigm shift’, because this is really more than a shift — this is a life or death situation.

The organization of the future will hunker down and involve itself with its admirers and its haters. It is this collective audience that drives – and in Enterprise 2.0, it is these individuals that will make or break your brands. Today we call it ‘viral marketing’, but tomorrow it will just be ‘marketing’. In enterprise 2.0 the company will set the tone by defining an agenda for the organization, but it will be the community that carries the message that needs to be heard.

I’m not a marketer, and I’m certainly not an authoritative voice in this area. However, I know what I am seeing, and I’ve seen the future of technology. The tools are coming, and guess what — the tools empower *people*. As a technologist, I am excited to work on these tools, and I am even excited to see the democratization of information.

Enjoy ~

I spent the last two days in Las Vegas at the Community2.0 conference, another paradox of in-person discusion about virtual community. What is it like to meet your avatar?

John Hagel continues to impress me with his ability to synthesize a great many things into a digestable format (or framework). He was the keynote speaker, and his insights are as relevant today as they were in Net Gain ten years ago (yes, Virginia, online community has been morphing into something more and more relevant for much longer than ten years). Alexandra Samuel has captured the essence of his presentation here:

http://www.socialsignal.com/blog/alexandra-samuel/john-hagel-on-expanding-markets-through-virtual-communities

My takeaways from the conference:

1. typical corporate measurements of return on investment fail to capture the real impact of online community, and the typical corporate approach to customers does not lend itself to real-time interaction at the grass roots level.
2. a lot of people are getting involved in online communities. Reminds me a little bit of 1998, when everyone had to “get a website”. I hope that the false promises being made today do not stain the reputation of virtual community, and that we all continue to learn together.
3. Technology has come a long way from threaded bulletin boards. Tools that are available for free (yes, sign up for WordPress!! I love it) or platforms that are available relatively cheap really deliver some great functionality
4. Sylvia Marino talked about motivation (why people contribute to online communities), and I’ll credit her with the first time I have heard the term “digital credibility” — which is that online version of what I know as “street cred” in the open source world, or a reputation you earn by delivering cool s__t almost anonymously. Craig Newmark is one of those people (and yes, he was at the conference too).

I had a really good time at the conference, met some cool people, got a free (good) book from Lois Kelly (Beyond Buzz), and even won at the blackjack table. Maybe I really am lucky? or is it karma?

George

Community 2.0 Conference

Notes by Boe Miller

http://www.community2-0con.com/

WARNING: This is a summary of the content presented at the Community 2.0 conference held in Las Vegas, and the information was filtered through my ears, into my brain, and then out through my fingers to my keyboard. I apologize if I have misrepresented anyones thoughts in any way. Sometimes we hear what we want to believe.

Conference information and details will be streamed to http://www.futureofcommunities.com. Conference participants are encouraged to blog, tag and links content materials. Please use the tag ‘community2.0′, and the content will be aggregated.

Conference Day 4

The CMMC Update

by

Rancois Gossieaux: Conference Chair

Talked about creating an industry organization for community. For more information, visit the CMMC website.

Communities as the DNA of the Customer-Centric Business Strategy

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Lois Kelly: Foghound
Andy Hessabi: Network Solutions
Lynne Kerger: Chicago Tribune
Tanya Maurer: Hewlett Packard

Each of these members uses communities.

Lois: All in super competitive industries. How do communities work, what is the advice? Why did you start a community, what’s the purpose?

Tanya: 300 digital consumer photographers. They are photography consumers. They launched a community pilot. Now HP has made the pilot community production. It is qualitative, not quantitative — use this information very careful. Just because a customer wants it, doesn’t mean it is a good idea. They brought to market in 6 months, what use to take more than a year.

Andy: Looking for tool to compliment research toolbox. Focus groups are expensive. They don’t provide as much value. New wave of tools for online surveys, etc… when introduced to online communities, Network Solutions felt it would be cool. They use community to test ideas. They have a challenge with language, and NS uses community to test the language of the organization. Are people understanding what they are trying to say? You are trying to communicate a high-tech product to a low-tech audience — so community testing is incredibly important. NS started the community 6 months ago. They are now recruiting more customers, because the project is going very well. Use community for product naming… they use it to gage website pages — and highlight what users don’t understand. Traditional research costs a lot more to do this sort of thing.

Lynne: Had community for 3 years now. When we started out, the newspaper industry was under fire. The challenges are there. Product is unique in the world — as a physical product it changes every day. Tribune wants to understand how people are reacting to these changes. Journalists are to focus on the objective. Tribune needs to get voice of consumer into the newspaper. Need to create product not out of sync with 21st century. They need to shape the product to keep older readers, but also appeal to younger readers. The idea is to focus on new products for the company.

Lois: Why would people want to be in community? What do they get out of it? How much is it you talking to them?

Lynne: People who love your product and understand value, love to give advice.

Andy: Audience … small business owners … all share challenges. Small businesses were talking to one another, and the challenges that they all face. Once members felt comfortable, there was a huge amount of interaction. NS asks a lot from its community members. Members want to learn about challenges — so that they can help one another.

Tanya: Have a very tight social network — it is how they document their lives. They want to document and achieve their end result. It is a supportive organization, and they love the information they get from one another. Giving information in weekly tips, and help them with what they struggle with is huge. They know everything about there lives, because the customers WANT to share the information. When we communicate how the information is helping the company, they can’t believe the corporation is listening to them.

? When you talk about community, what are you using?

Tanya: Private closed community by invitation. They are under non-disclosure. It is a web based access. Community Space is the company that they use.

? Do you find they want to comment on the news, or do you think they want to collaboration of the community?

Lynne: Both. Discussions start organically amongst one another. It is content related for them, but Tribune drives focused groups. Users just can’t believe that the tribune is listening to them. Tribune is trying to break the 3rd wall.

! All of the panel members use Communispace.

? Do you listen to avid readers most, or do you pull from a cross pollination?

Lynn: Panel made up of 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. High, moderate, soft…. this keeps the panel balanced.

? How did you select participants?

Tanya: We used an agency we’ve used in the past.

Andy: Used traditional research segmentation.

Lynn: Ours is life stage based. We used demographics as well.

? Do you have stats on lurkers vs. contributors?

Andy: Get about 1/3 participation rate. They have anywhere from 100-120 people participating on a weekly basis.

Tanya: Our employees can view what is going on in the community. Employees can be observers. They can talk, observe, but they cannot participate. A report is sent out to people in the company based on the results of the research.

Andy: We do a lot of tradition website usability studies. This is testing language, page, etc. They have to put context around the page, to determine what the user thinks. What do you understand about the page, what do you not understand? We test images to see if products are exciting and that they are being received well. Sometimes there is a place for more controlled research, but this has proved really valuable.

Tanya: The community is an awesome reality check. The community is really honest and frank. They can quickly learn the “truth” of how something is being perceived.

? Since you started doing this, how much traditional work has been supplanted?

Lynn: We haven’t really replaced anything. This opens up research, where we never stopped to consumers. People in the organization come to talk to the community manager to run these community efforts at the Tribune. This is a great feedback loop back to the editorial department.

Tanya: A lot of things are falling off the plate.

Andy: Hasn’t changed a lot, but has added a tremendous amount of value. It hasn’t replaced anything quantitative.

? Any problems with group think? How do you handle that?

Tanya: We haven’t really had problems with that. The vendor helps us a lot — they have trained moderators.

? Have you experienced chaos effect — where input makes development crazy?

Tanya: Use honesty when you are communicating back to the community about the progress of something. “We got your feedback, but it isn’t making the cut.”

Tanya: Sometimes you have to address issues. If it throws the schedule into chaos, then perhaps it should! Maybe the product just isn’t that well thought out!

Andy: It could make a big difference. Listen, communicate it to team, and make sure they have all the information.

Lynn: Projects are quick turn, so it doesn’t have that kind of effect.

Tanya: This is qualitative data — it should be accepted as such.

? Resistance from editor team — job ends when job posts — they don’t care about feedback…

Lynn: Keep trying (audience laughs)

Communities of Practice – Can They Really Work?

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Richard McDermott: McDermott Consulting Have written more than 30 articles available online.

Richard teaches a Master class on Community. Has published 30 articles on how to build communities in an organization. Today, two purposes: internal communities of practice. Secondly, ask a set of questions to think about: the implications of globalization for customer communities.

Most companies have started communities informally. Many communities started this way have fizzled out.

Examples:

Oil Company (not named) Case Study: Computerization has increased the complexity of knowledge. It has made the knowledge of information much more complex. Now there are different assumptions, because there is information overload. Work is more complex, and there is a hidden cost. There is a cost associated with connectivity. Meetings take longer, because there is so much information to aggregate. This company has active communities. They needed to globalize communities. Video conferences lead to presentations, and *not* discussions. 2nd cost: connectivity. 3rd: globalization has exploded costs. Now people can collaborate from anywhere. It is irresistible to look at all potentials, which aren’t all necessary appropriate.

Cost of complexity, connecting, and managing.

! Fountain of information has led to re-inventing the wheel over and over!

BPA: Business Process Acceleration

We are far more isolated now that we ever were in the past. We are connected to everyone, and yet connected to nothing. Now it is about information sharing, not necessarily thinking.

Knowledge Innovation Network: studies communities.

a) Many companies have shifted communities to heart of organization. Asked communities to take stewardship of organization. There is a goal setting process from the organization, but company knows communities are the experts.

b) Healthy communities take action: They do things. Neighborhood communities have protests — company communities create guidelines. All in all, progress should be made.

As communities have evolved, they have become another organizational structure.

Internal communities have much better numbers than the 1% contribution rate of external communities. He has found that 15% are active, 15% moderately active, and 70% kind of active. Lurkers are learners. They are incredibly valuable assets.

Leaders manage participation. Amount of time and training leaders have is key for high impact communities.

His study finds that leader spends 17% of time leading the community. Leaders do not run meetings, but they connect people, and get the appropriate people into the community. Leaders see the organization as a network of knowledge, and not just as departments. They manage engagement.

Face to face is key for communities to be effective. What makes it a community is the fact that people are facing one another. They need to learn from each others experiences. It has to be rich stuff, for community members to stay around. Community members need to feel that they are facing each other, and not just facing the company.

Questions for Customer Communities

Are they communities, or are they open networks? Are they market networks? What type of communities are they? Sometimes choosing the right metaphor for the community can really help.

Part of what happened to communities, is that they have been consumed by complexity.

Cost of complexity of knowledge will increase.

Conference Closing Insights…

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Conference Overview:

• Communities are more complex than some people are eluding to.  There is altruism, but we must get business value from the community.  You have to manage engagement for the community to be successful.
• You need to have a goal for the community, and why you want to engage with your audience.  Work around what you want to be doing, and set the parameters for your project.  Once you have a goal, configure the appropriate metrics.
• People are looking for a community cookbook.  At this point, you can’t build a cookbook for communities.  The opportunity is when there is *not* a cookbook.  Now is the time to move fast – and do some really cool cutting edge stuff.  Move quickly — there is a huge advantage to get your stuff on the Internet.  When you are convincing people to do this — show them how others aren’t doing it, and do it before others do it.
• You may have a community of 5000, but you really have 1000 conversations of 5 people.  What do I do next, what does my company do to be “cool” on the Internet?  Communities are not new — take a look backwards and learn from the accomplishments of other.
• Give lots of working examples, which were presented at the conference.  Talk about the evolution of it, and how it will tie with the existing communities that exist at your organization.  Continue doing good things in different ways.  There is no ten step list here for communities, but share — and learn!
• Observations: Most favorite: #1 the people.  #2 community spirit.  Least favorite: More free-form time.  More slides/Less slides.
• There is no toolbox, so why pay $300k for one?  Giving a collective goal to the community is important.
• Impressed with amount of interest amongst the people.  There is a lot of passion on this topic.  There is a tremendous amount of distribution amongst the participants.  (Company Size, Company Type, Profit/not, etc)  Sense of limit on the sense of expertise.  There is a huge potential to keep learning about this.  There is an emerging community amongst the participants.  We need to learn how to make this a more sustained community.  Encouraged about talk about metrics.  Community eco-systems — communities do not exist in isolation.  It is important to plug into the community eco-system. 

Thank You, and good night.

Ben took me on a guided tour of the Vegas Strip yesterday evening after the conference had cleared out for th day. I was going slightly stir crazy after being mostly indoors for the previous two days (one thing I’ve discovered about Vegas is that the Casinos are built to hide whether it’s day or night – to keep you at the tables…here is literally everything you need within the four huge walls) – so it was great to get out and about.My impression was one of scale and wonder. Whilst many of the casinos have a slightly decadent, seedy feel to them, the Bellagio is deeply impressive. From the flower gardens to the huge chocolate fountain to the Roman walkways, there was a lot to amaze…

The community 2.0 conference has been a real mind bending experience for me. I’ve been amazed at the level of participation, and the general notion that this was a kick-ass conference. This conference got off to the right start immediately when I got inside the Las Vegas airport looking for ground 0, attempting to find a shuttle to the Red Rock Resort. I met another co-conferencer that was walking around in circles, also looking for the shuttle. We immediately began chatting, and it didn’t take long to determine we both had a passion for the topic of communities. That’s been true of everyone at the conference – there is just a really great energy in the air, and people are excited about the potential of building strong communities. As humans, it is instinctual for us to collaborate, and the tools that technology is making available to us has introduced a plethora of new communication methods.

I was introduced to a new technology at this conference, and I’m almost embarrassed to admit it. You’d think that as a technologist, and as someone who considers himself tech savvy, that I would have already learned about tagging and tag clouds. The truth is, until now, I never really understood the potential for tags, and how they might change the Internet. Granted, tags are used everywhere – HTML is full of them. Specifically, I’m talking about the content classification and categorization tags that have been implemented on many web 2.0 websites. I fell off of the blogging bandwagon about 2 years ago, after I ran fresh out of ideas. Since then, I haven’t followed the progression of community technologies, and more importantly, I haven’t really taken the time to plug into new social networking sites like MySpace. During my absence from the Internet’s social community, tags were introduced, which allow you to create content, link it together by cross-referencing it with similar tags, and then create spiders that pull like-tagged information together from around the Internet (such as Technorati).

To exercise this new technology, I created this blog at the beginning of the Community2.0 conference to begin ramping up on community technologies. The sponsor of the conference said, “mark all of your uploaded content with ‘community2.0′, and we will aggregate it together, and display it in once place.” I thought to myself, what in the hell is this guy talking about? Tag it — aggregate — pull — consolidate — one place? IMPOSSIBLE. Certainly, the conference will need to run its own website with photo uploading, an editorial uploading capabilities, a linking system, etc. NOPE! TAGS.  Just use the tools on the Internet that already exist.  This need not be hard folks!

Over the coarse of two days, I finally figured out what the sponsor was talking about. It’s amazing what you can learn by visiting your friend — WikiPedia. If I tag my content, then I can create an RSS feed from various sources that pulls ALL of the information together from disconnected websites that are hosted across domains and continents.  I was so excited about this, I almost fell over.

This is exactly why you are seeing a listing of Community2.0 links on the right side of my blog, with links to content that is syndicated from sources all over the Internet. I used the technorati search engine to search the tag ‘community2.0′, and then I created a right-side navigation item that pulls in that feed. This is basically the same principal as reading Associated Press new articles on Google News and Yahoo News. It is generally the same news, it just happens to be syndicated from the same remote source. In this case, I can syndicate text, links, pictures, and anything else my heart desires.

I began documenting the entire conference using docs.google.com (the coolest technology ever), which allows me to publish directly to my blog using back end RPC web-service technology. If that sounds like a bunch of techno junk, and it is, basically it means I can push a document I create in Google docs directly to my blog with the click of a button. I tagged my google docs as ‘community2.0′, and therefore those documents ended up in the collective consciousness that is represented under the community2.0 tag. People, this is drop dead amazing.

This technology is HOT, and it has completely opened up my mind to a world of new ideas. For example … what if a person could create a “social profile” that was represented by the collective data that they have inputted into various systems across the Internet? How, you ask? Lets say that I start tagging my pictures, my ideas, my blogs, and my profiles and OpenIDs as “bmiller”. Then, I use an aggregator, like Technorati, to search on ‘bmiller’, and import that collection of data into a virtual profile page that dynamically adjusts as the data grows and changes from the remote data sources. Suddenly, I have a profile that can span the entire Internet — and collectively represent me, as a digital identity, it my totality.

Why on earth would anyone want to do this? This technology would allow each industry to focus on the tools that are key to that industry. It would allow the user to pick and choose the tools across the entire span of the Internet, and build an identity for themselves that represents a collection of tools and services from a large selection of disconnected data providers. At the same time, companies get free advertisement syndication, because as this data is aggregated and pulled onto sites around the Internet, you are effectively planting billboards, and getting free real-estate. How many times have you seen the fine print ‘flickr’ logo on someones profile page? Isn’t that effectively an online billboard?

Okay, so there are huge holes in the technology as it exists today that would prevent this from happening just yet. Who is to prevent someone else from tagging their content as ‘bmiller’? Nothing — and that would lead to identity pollution. Instead of identity theft, we would have a new model of ‘identity hostile takeover’. There is a huge amount of potential here, and it is only a matter of time before this becomes a very real technology. In the meantime, we can still take away from this, because companies and organizations need to learn how to create tools for the web that will lend to the collective experience as a whole. More on this in another life … perhaps web 2.1

Enjoy ~

Community 2.0 Conference

Notes by Boe Miller

http://www.community2-0con.com/

The most up to date version of Day 1 notes are available onGoogle docs here.

WARNING: This is a summary of the content presented at the Community 2.0 conference held in Las Vegas, and the information was filtered through my ears, into my brain, and then out through my fingers to my keyboard.  I apologize if I have misrepresented anyones thoughts in any way.  Sometimes we hear what we want to believe.

Conference information and details will be streamed to http://www.futureofcommunities.com. Conference participants are encouraged to blog, tag and links content materials. Please use the tag ‘community2.0′, and the content will be aggregated.

Conference Day 2

General Overview: Another information packed day. This was the first official day of the conference, so there were about twice as many people attending. Craig Newmark was a guest speak today — and he’s hillarious. More on that later.

Conference Welcome

Open APIs – People in the community create products that their R&D departments could never create.

Some of the most powerful communities in the world started in Newgroups, Yahoo Groups, etc. You can’t just throw technology at the problem.

Book recommendation: Ambient Findability

Keynote: What’s Possible? – Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities

by: John Hagel, author & Consultant
Blog: http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/
Full slides from presentation: http://www.kingmonkey.com/ocmetrics_c20_final.pdf

Challenges:

Language: What is a virtual community?
It is establishing connections.
Complex weaving of physical and virtual space. Explore how physical and virtual spaces interact. Mindset: Set of assumptions for success. Move from vendor to participant mindset. Move to value creation focus. Long term financial $$$ reward.

How are we going measure this thing? How are we going to improve it?

Opportunities:

New long term business trends. ROA: Return on Attention: Scarce resource is the attention of people. How much effort requires & what value is gained. Who are the customers generating the revenue? How can I take less profitable customers & make them more profitable. How do I introduce participants to resources they don’t know about. ‘Serendipity’ 1 to 1 marketing – personalization. 1 vendor delivering to one customer. Virtual communities should connect 1 vendor to many personalities.

ROI: Return on information: Or the profiles of participants. How much info have I provided about myself? How easy was it to give information? What value did I gain? Virtual communities are not leveraging data they collect about customers. We need to make better recommendations to our customers. If customers see value in giving information … they will give.

ROS: Return on Skill: Given amount of effort – how am I able to return value? Am I able to attract and retain customers/talent? Skills in — value out.

As pressure intesifies to develop skills, people do things they are passionate about.

Customers gain more power in the development and release of products. Communities of interest and talkents coming together.

It is not just about find people – but deepening relationships. It is about deepening skillsets.

Keynote: Citizen Marketers – When the People are the Message!

by
Ben McConnel: Author & Church of the Customer

MTV: Must find a new home in a marketplace where content is driven by the community. Created a new pilot program called ATLAS. MTV is allowing others to create content from their archives. 48 million content users: Create blogs, videos, etc.

There is a democratization of tools. Anyone can create content, but how do we boil up the good content?

(Shows a viral video about McDonalds Chicken McNuggest that was a huge youtube success )

Throws out a buzz word: AMATEUR CULTURE – about creation and connection.

Citizen marketers: Who is creating marketing for you?

55% of kids age 12-17 use social networks. 1 million new broadband customers in the world per year.

VOICE — VOTE — VOCATION

Most influential media: Word of mouth.

People are the new message! (collectively)

4 F’s

• Firecrackers: Quick — poof — gone. ‘Control is out of control’ (see McNugget video above)
• Filters: Someone who gathers info and shares it. Ex. Starbucks Gossip. This is about what starbucks is doing right/wrong.
• Fanatics: LOVES what you do. Wants to be you. SaveSURGE.org an example. ‘Citizen Marketing’. VaultKick.org
• Facilitators: Move idea forward. Mini2.com

Productive Leisure: THIS IS FOR FUN! People don’t want to be laborers. Community members that create content don’t necessarily want to be paid. Again, THIS IS FOR FUN. This is not a job.

1% RULE: Total number of people in community that contribute content will be one percent of total population.

Channel9 website and wikipedia both follow 1% rule.

Inequality is the rule: Live on the edge of culture.

Products created by community –> DEMOCRATIZATION

Lessons Learned from Non-Business Environments

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Giovanni Rodriguez: Hubbub PR
Scott Meyer: About.com
Craig Newmark: Craigslist
Alexandra Samuel: Social Signal

INTRODUCTIONS

Craig: Ordinary people. Don’t define community. You don’t have to be a doctorate to build community (even though he is). Treating people like people. Treat people like you want to be treated.

Scott: about.com Acquired NYTimes – Create communities around topics. Aggregate audience. 600 sites. 60,000 sites.

Alex: Grassroots campaigns on the net. Created toolking to mobilize passion. Reflective Glory Marketing: create a community your fans are passionate about.

QUESTION/ANSWER

Craig: We maintain a flat structure. We use internal discussions, and we let ideas live. The lounge in our office is online. You need a way to collaborate in a company.

Alex: Spend the money on people — not technology. It is hard to let go of control! Get ready to do it, or prepare to fail.

Scott: Biggest mistake – trying to use traditional business metrics to measure success. THIS IS NOT A TECHNOLOGY PROBLEM! Do not over engineer a community soluction — IT WILL FAIL!

Alex: Encourage people to link to your site. Create incentives for people to write about your company.

Alex: Community drives direction of growth. Community needs to own the community. You cannot build it for them and expect them to just use it.

Scott: Authenticity rules. You will be found out if you are fake. Be better and people will find you. It is all about self improvement.

The New Technology Toolbox for Community Building

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Deborah Schultz: Social Media Strategist
Peter Friedman: LiveWord
Barry Libert: Shared Insights
Rajen Sheth: Google
Mike Walsh: Leverage Software

Deborah: If you are going to start a community tomorrow, what are the three most important things?

Mike: Well defined goals. Make sure good ownership/Make sure there is awareness.

Barry: Figure out what community you are targeting. Start w/ a pilot. Who will own it?

Rajen: What is purpose… who are your end users? … what tools do they use right now? ARE YOU TALKING TO YOUR USERS?

Peter: To generate revenue/profit? If so, figure out how this model is going to work for your org.

AUDIENCE QUESTIONS

20th centures moving as fast as possible. We bought a portal — the platform won’t scale — why would I want to go with a custom portal?

Mike: Use something really open. In fact, just use Open Source, that way you can ensure the product is following the trends. Start with a blog or a wiki. YOUR SOLUTION ABSOLUTELY MUST BE AN OPEN ARCHITECTURE.

Why use open source now?

Mike: If it provides benefit, then why not?

Deborah: We see a lot of clients using Drupal.

Define what the various tools are … what is cool — what does the community really want? Features/tools

Barry: Think about what the community wants to accomplish. Fit the task to the result you want to see. We know for a fact that a wiki is a terrible book publishing tool.

Rajen: Seperate requirements from tools. Wiki gravitates torwards tech savy … is that what you want?

Peter: STOP — SLOW DOWN — EXPERIMENT — DO TRIALS: Use technorati to determine what other people are doing in your area.

Peter: Don’t home grow your own community tools if they already exist. LEVERAGE WHAT IS ALREADY OUT THERE! Companies cannot stay current with web trends… it just isn’t possible. Focus on what you do best — your product. If you want to be a software company, then sure — reinvent the wheel, but be willing to throw everything including the kitchen sink into the process.

How do you make sense of what people are into?

Deborah: Don’t be afraid of your customers. TALK TO THEM! See what your customers want.

Peter: Browse around and see what people are saying. Have a moderator team that reports on what is going on. Use buzzmetrics to measure the ‘buzz’ around your business,

We have everything — all the tools — how do you take the tools and use them together?

Deborah: Create a landing page that ties it all together.

Barry: Single Sign On (SSO) is imperative. If you have 12 different logins, don’t expect people to use your site. How is your company going to offer single sign on? Are you looking at OpenID?

Where do I even start?

Deborah: If you want to get started, then start playing around. Ask your community what they want! Find out where they are going, and what they are using.

Peter: If you want a strong community — you better offer Single Sign On (SSO). No one wants to use your website with a dozen logins.

Rajen: Search is really key. Must be able to find content quickly.

Community-Based Innovation

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Gwen Ishmael: Decision Analyst
Sean Belka: Fidelity Investments
Richard Gotham: Boston Celtics
Jake McKee: Lead Samurai (Lego Corp)

Jake: Had users sitting next to product designers during developement. People were excited to have their name associated with the product when it was done. It was their claim to fame. We announced a beta of the product for 100 people, and got 10,000+ people who registered.

Richard: COO of Boston Celtics – w/ Lycos orginally. We have people who say they “bleed green”. We have trusted relationships w/ our clients. People want to hand over information.
Challenge: Info not in organized places/databases. We built analytics capabilities. User info = target marketing. We can now market to families going to the game versus business clients entertaining guests. These are different markets. WE STARTED USING THE INFORMATION!

Sometimes community can tell you a lot. What do you listen to, and what do you gather?

Richard: Get feedback from everywhere. Public opinion can’t run a business, but it should guide it. This is an emotional business, and you have to be ready to absorb the pain. Be a listner, but use the information wisely.

Sean: We developed an online comment system internally so that our employees could comment on developments. This information is aggregated and made available to R&D.

Jake: Who here is in a relationship? (Most people raise hands) What is the most difficult part of a relationship? COMMUNICATION! When you interact w/ a community, you are engaging in a relationship. Who are the 1% of contributors? Are the strong voice representative of the entire community, or do you need to do outreach?

How do you measure success?

Richard: Ticket sales/Tv Ratings

Sean: People want to get something done. How good of a job are we doing at helping our customers reach their goals? This is how we do it.

Jake: Lego has a strong system of beliefs. Everyone believes in what they are doing. They would measure vibe internally through questionaires.

How do you reward your community?

Sean: Pay attention to them as people. Don’t buy them a diamond when they just want you to clean the kitchen.

Jake: We didn’t make changes to corporate site — instead, we fueled passion out on the internet.

Sean: 60 year old company: Online made it easier for us to gather feedback.

Reframing Community – How Customers Perceive Different Forms of Community & What’s Missing

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John Winsor: Radar Communications
Michael Perman: Levi Strauss

What’s the difference from physical and virtual communities?

You have to be able to ask yourself, “what’s happening in the future.”

Content Mirotacracy: Ideas win

Michael: Embark upon what is the best of the virtual space.

John: 8 Things my presentation is based on.

1) Loging to belong: ‘Community is an extended family’
Community is often a substitute for family. Community is ‘roots’.

2) Reframing Community: Thinking of community in new ways.
Going w/ emotional flow.
Concious flow of events.
Virtual communities not a substitute for physical.

3) The martini Effect: Life Support Mindscape
Living is active, we need each other.
Life support: Exploring universe

4) Recontextualizing Language: Virtual metaphores – It is a place. It isn’t firm.
Meritocracy built on nodes. Hubs and links. The evolution of metaphores —– conencting deeper ——— spanning communities. Connecting w/ each other ——– it doesn’t matter about car/shoes/clothes — meeting of the minds.

5) Leadership = Catalyst: A leader sets the scene (director)
Someone has to get everyone in room.
Must have ‘fresh’
Democracy of ananymity: There is no true leadership. Structure disolves everyday in community. Every day is a new day.
It is about having a provacative idea.

6) Grounded Transformation: You can ‘edit’ yourself and your presentation to others. People rallying around a common cause.
Costs little to have deep relations online.
It’s easy to quit.

7) Temporal Schizophrenia: Contradictory existance.
Being in multiple places at once.
Virtual community something you choose.

Collective Conscience: An awareness to do the right thing.
Book Recommendation: The World is Flat.
Passion and compasion 4 what u are doing.
The power of a million voices.
Community = Common identity.

Levi Stauss Notes:

1) Best of both worlds: blend the physical and the digital.
2) Provide the ride: enable consumers a ride on your brand authentic assets w/ constant entertainment. “Mindscape” fashion.
3) Let go on the steering wheel. Enable customers the opportunity to shape, express, voice, contribute to something real.
4) Enable leadership: Find the emerging citizens of greatness & connect.
5) Break the third wall: Pierce the veil of anonymity that is prevalent in digital communities.

YOU ARE THE ONE — YOU’VE BEEN PICKED

I’ve just posted some takeaways from day one of the conference on LBi’s blog Stream.

I’m not sure I’ve done the day justice, but you can download all of my notes from yesteday by clicking through. If you want to follow the day, check out my Twitter page (also appearing down here on the Barbd sidebar)…or check out my Delicious links.

This conference has been interesting for another reason too – the ways in which I’ve been connected to the guys back in the UK! I’m still feeling part of my home community despite being thousands of miles away. So far, I’ve used Twitter, IM, video conferencing. I’ve used Skype to push audio from one of the sessions at Warren and he’s responded by waving Cookiemonster back at me and making me laff…I’ve used Delicious to store interesting links from the day, and ‘ve used Flickr to post pictures from the event too…

I arrived in Las Vegas yesterday evening, and I’m blown away by the place. I’ve been to the US before, so I was kind of prepared for the wholle ‘it’s big’ thing, but it really is. Big. The hotel I’m staying at is basically a gigantic casino (well duh, this is Vegas after all)…but it goes on for ever. I have a great view of the mountains, so I watched the sun come up and light them up this morning…I was, after all, awake from 4am thanks to my body being on UK time.

The conference has been great so far…it seems that all of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves about community at LBi are all being asked equally here. “There are no answers” was one comment this morning. Some insight will appear on the LBi blog, Stream when I have a chance to gather everything together…

I think I’ll post in both places – hmm there’s a question – how far can I use my own personal blog to write about something that’s paid for by the company I work for? If we were able to syndicate inwards and outwards from our company blog that would be a moot point…