I'll be attending the Web Community Forum next week in Seattle.

I'm looking forward to Jeremiah Owyang's keynote, and to conversations about the perceived and actual value of Facebook.

Going to be there (or are you in Seattle?). Give me a shout: 415.299.9638 or send me a message on Facebook.

There is a fascinating conversation playing out on TechCrunch about "guerrilla" tactics for launching viral videos into the upper echelon of YouTube and other social media sites.

In his post "The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos", Dan Greenburg offers a glimpse at his PR companies' secret sauce for pushing video viral.

Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.

The techniques range from general social media best practices for format (length, title convention, etc), to the downright icky (faking conversations, BS personas, ratings manipulation, etc.).

The truth is that Dan is dishing techniques that many agencies have been using for months (if not years).

I would encourage you to read the article, as well as the follow up piece "Follow Up To The Viral Video Post: Dan Wants Another Word" by Michael Arrington.

A lot of the discussion in the comments centers on the ethical issues of brands and agencies engaging in these types of activities to push content and to shape public taste. No one seems to be asking questions about the responsibilities of the host community. Why is YouTube so easy to game? Shouldn't the site be able to monitor and ding patterns of behaviour that are obviously manipulative? If you can't trust ranking and ratings on these sites, why bother having them?

Position: Content and Web Strategy Manager #CC1007171
Location: San Francisco OR San Jose, CA
Department: Web Marketing
Contact: Amanda Arnett (aarnett@adobe.com)

Full job description can be found here (.pdf)

Position Summary:
Adobe is looking for a Content and Web Strategy Manager to help identify opportunities and drive implementation for Developer and Community oriented products and services. The Web Strategy team is responsible for defining user engagement and content strategies and success metrics for Adobe's products and solutions. The position reports to the Group Manager for Web Strategy. This person will partner with our Business Units, Corporate Marketing and Web Development teams to develop business requirements, set targets, develop marketing plans and measure results of site initiatives. This is a key position in helping meet business objectives and deliver on our vision of making Adobe.com the centerpiece of our marketing efforts, resulting in deep customer relationships that increase brand preference, purchase intent.

The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of defining requirements and delivering high-quality, innovative products, services, and solutions on the web. She or he will also bring experience in identifying business opportunities, devising strategies to capitalize on those opportunities, and defining and executing projects to deliver measurable business results.

We publicly released the Online Community ROI report last week. The research project was conducted as part of the Online Community Research Network agenda, and was initially released to OCRN members in May. The study had many interesting findings, including:

• Only 22% of respondents could clearly articulate ROI on community efforts
• The majority of respondents gave a high priority to establishing an ROI model in the near term
• 49% were reporting some dimensions of value back to management on a monthly basis
• "Value" of online community efforts are contextual to an organizations goals and objectives

Download the full report here, free of charge.

This month we are doing another live Online Community Expert interview, and we are taking your questions now!

Bob Blakley is the former chief scientist for Security and Privacy at IBM. Involved in cryptography and data security design work since 1979. Bob served as general chair of the 2003 IEEE Security and Privacy Conference and as General Chair of the New Security Paradigms Workshop. Bob also served on the National Academy of Science’s study group on Authentication Technologies and Their Privacy Implications. You can find some of Bob's recent writing on Identity topics here:
Recapping the Catalyst user-centric interop

In this OC Expert live interview, Bob will take your questions about user-centric identity, and in particular, platforms, trade-offs, and next steps Ask your questions now and then join us live on 11/20, 11am EST. http://interviews.forumone.com/content/interview/detail/635/

Please join us on 11/20 at 11am EST for our conversation with Bob.

I've just posted slides from John Bell's session at the Marketing & Online Communities conference.

John leads the 360 Digital Influence team for Ogilvy, and co-lead the "Anatomy of an Integrated Campaign" session with Jeremy Welt and Bree Ngyun of Warner Bros. Records.

Get John's slides here.

The Marketing & Online Communities conference was held last Thursday, November 8th, at the Tribeca Grand in NYC.

The venue exceeded all expectations. We were in the Grand Screening room at the Tribeca Grand for most of the day, which is a very posh 100+ person theater. The room was comfortable and intimate, and afforded the in-depth conversations among participants that our conferences have become known for.

We had an agenda loaded with great session leads and a really diverse group of attendees, ranging from technology companies like Autodesk, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, to financial services groups like Fidelity and American Express, to media and entertainment companies like Warner Bros and the Cartoon Network. Even the UN was there! I joked in my opening remarks that if things got out of hand between and the marketing and community sides of the house, we could always call in the United Nations.

I've included highlights from several sessions below.


Session 1: Marketing to Communities – The Brand “Us”
Marcien Jenckes - AOL

Key elements important to community:

1. Communities belong to their participants (not advertiser, publishers):
o biggest mistakes of marketers: go in and believe they are the ones to own the community
o all marketers do is facilitate interaction
o people get caught up in power of community and forget the hardwork involved in making community successful
o battleground of community

2. The concept of identity:
knowing who people are who are participating in community (don’t have to be real world people) , give them a forum for self expression, earn equity within community. Managing identity is important

3. Creating social graph:
building list of individuals important to the community. Most of interaction is with people you already know but can also be people you share interest with

4. Focus on creating facilitation platforms:
Communities are exchanges (NYSE facilitating liquidity on financial assets while we focus on facilitating liquidity among people. (chat room, email, message board, blogs) need to have right transactional elements.

Marcien's advice to marketers

1. Know what your business goals are (ie build new brand awareness, recruit folks). Tactics vary based on goals

2. Get over yourself and use community to get leverage, get consumer help to organize around your brand (ie tap into the rest of the world), facilitating community around your brand. Let people who enjoy your product talk about your product. Difficult is that you have to commit and can’t be half hearted. These are relationships with people. Need to make it a long term relationship. Be ready to commit a long period of time.

3. Organize people around a cause that the community and you (marketer) care about. Ie Baby Center- Johnson and Johnson Company. J&J decided to invest tools and info useful to parent community. They created a huge resource to first time parents. Also, created a huge asset to their brand. The first thing they did was to make a commitment around their cause. (people adding value)

4. Leverage the talkers. There is a real opportunity on leveraging viral effects of community. In every communities there are connectors…if you can tap into them you can get a leverage in any investment from a marketing perspective. This way you can also tap into their social graph

David Dunne - Edelman

Suggestions for Community Engagement:
o Listen
o Engage: bring something the audience really wants
o Co-create: give them opportunity to create with you

• “Any content can be turned into widgets that can be displayed anywhere. This is the future of distribution” Jarvis, Buzz Machines

o Let go at the same time
• Example: a car manufacturer invites industrial design students to submite designs. They turn out to be far better car design than the internal teams.
• Several blogs have been so good that they have turned into media company

o It is about how you will engage people to bring content.

Implications
o Watch, listen, and engage
o Need to become great storytellers
o Need to become great story gatherers
o Need to activate our evangelists
• Keep our fans informed about things that matter to them
• Give them the tools and the forum to talk with us and amongst themselves.

Measurement
o Traditional: impressions, awareness, video views, media impressions
o Today’s measurements: site traffic, time spent, pages viewed, repeat visits, open rates (email) click through rates registrations, search engine visibility, downloads
o Future: share of conversations, frequency of mentions, participation of brand in forums, ratings and reviews of products, sentiment, return on involvement


Session 2: Anatomy of an Integrated Campaign
Bree Nguyen – Warner Bros. Records
Jeremy Welt – Warner Bros. Records


Jeremy kicked off the session by describing the current challenges in the music industry, including:

o MTV and radio typically play less new music
o Traditional media has been less effective at driving sales
o Most music available for free in some form online (legal / illegal)
o Album and single cycles have a shorter life span

Creative challenges that Warner Bros. is facing include:

o Getting people to care about new music (hardest thing to do)
o Romancing the artist
o Artist career evolution: artists change their style
o Competition for attention
o Shifting music tastes
o Sub genre-fication

Jeremy and team @ Warner Bros. have a "Commitment to community" that focuses on:

o Building artist careers
o Changing internal company structure and resources (need to commit)
o in music- can convert stealers to buyers
o Driving new revenue
o Developing authentic artist community

The key reason WBR invests in community-building activities? The number one reason people buy music, as opposed to steal it, is if they feel connected to artist. If you can create the community between artist and fans.

WBR Community philosophy: fans first!

o 10 years ago they really didn’t care what the fans thought
o But now they get 1000 new messages every day of fans telling company what they like
o Create demand: communities can open gatekeepers and lead to mass media exposure.


Bree Nguyen – Warner Bros. Records

Goal: was to establish Ashley Tisdale as a head strong artist
o She had existing community from her work in High School Musical
o Large High School Musical fan base
o Disconnected community

Challenges:
o Competing against millions of marketing impressions from Disney and high school musical portraying Ashley as Sharpay and Maddie
o Very young demo and established perception of Ashley’s TV characters
o Existing fan community around HSM, not Ashley
o Little traditional support for solo debut

Started by identifying existing behaviors:
o Participation- fans were posting sing-along to HSM songs
o Fan sites- key large fan sites posting news and content multiple times a day
o Mobile- the HSM demo were high text message users
o Fan hierarchy already in place. Leverage Social connections to form around new imaging
o Already moderators in place
o Went in to leverage social connections

Campaign
o Engagement: you tube and the pull-push philosophy: identify contributors. Wanted to use you tube as a conduit of Ashley’s personality.
o She personally acknowledged fans. example here
o What that led to was 34 million total video views. #4 most subscribed musician channel of all time. Response rate coming in like crazy. Takeaway: interaction is important.
o Cost effective: 0 cost (except Ashley's time), charts on U-tube (number 1 viewed of the day or discuss)

Marketing Channels:

Mobile + SMS
o Wanted to use phone to have kids personally connect. Text messaging is a personal way of communication
o Send text messages to kids saying “Ashley will be at mall” Met her
o Missed opportunity to get to more in depth conversation b/c kids were responding (follow-up)

Website
o Not competing against fan-sites (knew they couldn’t compete with existing sites)
o Focus on community features and encourage interaction)
o Providing a place for those fans to share their existing content and add their site to a network
Phases

The basic strategy template:
o ID behavior
o Listen first
o Reward and acknowledge
o Base plan on initial engagement
o Phase projects
o Plan for success and learn from mistake

We will be posting notes from the other sessions as they become available.

As you may have heard this week, both Facebook and MySpace launched their new ad networks.

MySpace is all about hypertargeting, and Facebook builds on hypertargeting with the addition of letting members "fan" (not friend) brand via their brand pages.

Jeremiah Owyang does an excellent job (as usual) of making sense of all of this:

"Both Facebook and MySpace have launched profile and network targeted advertising and marketing products. As they both use member interests and the communities which they are part of, trust continues to become key in adoption as information is passed along the network. The sheer size of MySpace’s member base, as well as the thriving local business membership will lead to success. Facebook, which brings a unique solution evolves advertisements to endorsements and encourages members to subscribe to a brand in what we are calling “Fan-Sumers” (an evolution of the consumer). As consumers share their affinities, brands can advertise using trusted social relationships."

Read Jeremiah's full post here:
MySpace and Facebook launch new Advertising products, why Hyper Targeting, Social Ads and rise of the “Fan-Sumer” matter to brands

This is sure to be a topic of discussion at the Marketing & Online Communities conference tomorrow.

The Marketing & Online Communities conference is this Thursday at the Tribeca Grand in NYC.

We have just finished up confirming session leads for the day, and I think we have put together a really strong lineup, with comprehensive points of view representing coprorate brand, agencies, and online communities.

We still have 3 seats open, and expect to sell out before Thursday. If you are interested in attendeing, please send me an email: bjohnston@forumone.com.

8:30 – 9:00: Registration / Continental Breakfast
9:00 – 9:30: Introductions

9:30 – 10:30 Session 1: Marketing to Communities – The Brand “Us”
Marcien Jenckes - AOL
David Dunne - Edelman
Description: An overview of opportunities, issues, and best practices when marketers engage with online communities. Followed by discussion.

10:30 – 11:00 Break

11:00 – 12:00 Session 2: Anatomy of an Integrated Campaign
Bree Nguyen – Warner Bros. Records
Jeremy Welt – Warner Bros. Records
John Bell - Ogilvy
Description: Case studies from a leading entertainment brand and best practice from a leading agency on reaching and engaging your community throughout their entire community ecosystem.

12:00 – 1:15 Lunch
1:15 – 1:30 Break-out Session Introductions (Grand Screening Room)

1:30 – 2:30 Session 3: Break-out Sessions
- Boomer Networks
Mary Furlong - Mary Furlong & Associates (+panel)
More 50+ adults are coming online (and spending money online) every day. Most want to do more than just see pictures of their grandkids. Learn about their networking needs and the market opportunity.

- Social Media Currency
Michael Leifer – guerilla PR, Inc.
A case study presentation highlighting how leading brands used the right channels to reach the right segments with the right social currency to create a social movement and relationships with consumers.

- Creating Successful Campaigns With Established Communities
Anne Marie Edwards - Yahoo
Experts will provide insight in to how to construct appropriate and effective campaigns to community members of large affinity communities.

2:30 – 3:00 Break

3:00 – 4:00 Session 4: Breakouts #2
- How to Manage Your Brand When Customers Control the Message
Thor Muller - Satisfaction
This session will focus on practical strategies for cultivating brand equity in a world where candid customer feedback and conversations increasingly dominate news and search results around products. Specifically, we'll focus on the surprising ways that innovative companies are "going to the customer" and becoming active participants in the conversation.

- Children & Tween Communities: Engaging the Future
Richard Weil – Cartoon Network
Children and tweens represent the leading edge of consumer behavior. They also require even greater care and respect than the adult Internet population when engaging online.

4:00 – 5:00 Session 5: The Future of Community-based Marketing
Tim Manners, Moderator – David X. Manners Company
Peter Friedman – LiveWorld
Barry Libert – Shared Insights
Charlie Tarzian – CoActive Marketing Group
Panel discussion on the most significant trends in community-based marketing and community business models as we look ahead 24 months.

5:00 – 6:00 Reception in the Sanctum Lounge

Google announced OpenSocial this week, which, as my ForumOne colleague Kurt describes is:

a set of web API's that will let developers write applications that plug into any participating social network (launch partners include Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Flixter, Friendster, Orkut, and others).

This announcement effectively does for the web what FaceBook's API platform did for their single social network, allowing developers to tap into:
Profile Information (user data)
Friends Information (social graph)
* Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

This is going to shake things up a bit, I imagine. Facebook has been getting a lot o attention lately, and should be given kudos for creating the best social experience to date (within their walled garden), and a rich API (that works within their walled garden), but to me, Facebook has always felt like I was looking at the Internet through a keyhole. OpenSocial acknowledges that there is a much larger space to play in, and many playgrounds.

Anil Dash sums facebook up this way:

...Facebook is part of the web. Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.

Marc Andresen has done a lot of writing over the last few days about the implications of OpenSocial, and how this will affect social networking experiences and apps longer term. This is highly recommended reading:

Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web
Report from the front: Tonight's launch of Open Social

I haven't got my head around exactly what this all means... but it's big. Big, as in, I'm up at 4am on a Saturday morning, and I can't sleep because I keep thinking about the promise of a future Social Network made up of the smaller, disconnected pieces we have today.

For those of you attending ad:tech New York, we just opened up a very few discounted seats to the Marketing & Online Communties conference.

Please email me for details.

I'm pleased to announce that we have just confirmed John Bell of Ogilvy as a session lead at the Marketing & Online Communities conference.

Our session lead list includes:

• John Bell - Ogilvy
• Andy Chambers - Digit
• David Dunne - Edelman
• Anne Marie Edwards - Yahoo!
• Mary Furlong - Mary Furlong & Associates
• Marcien Jenckes - AOL
• Michael Leifer - guerilla PR, Inc.
• Tim Manners - THE HUB Magazine / Cool News of the Day
• Thor Muller - Satisfaction
• Bree Nguyen - Warner Bros Records
• Charlie Tarzian - CoActive Marketing Group
• Richard Weil - Cartoon Network
• Jeremy Welt - Warner Bros Records

This is a really great list of folks representing a range of perspectives from marketing, to media, to community.

We still have a very few tickets left for the conference, which is next Thursday, 11/8, in NYC. Please email me if you are interested.