On think I wanted to be a bit more mindful of for this year’s Unconference was to really be mindful of focusing the group’s energy on specific outcomes. Our theme for this year’s Unconference reflects this intention:

“Moving forward, together”

We will use the theme as a guiding principle for the sessions on Wednesday, and ask that participants think about what is needed to move forward personally, professionally, and to move community and social media forward as an industry. We will also explore what progress (moving forward) looks like.

Our notional topic list from the Unconference wiki (which will be open to the public after the Unconference) reflects the “moving forward” intention:

• Online Community & Social Media Metrics: Getting to Standards
• Monetizing industry communities (not related to a single brand or company)
• The Community Team: Roles, Responsibilities, Job Descriptions and Reporting Structures
• Using Community and Collaboration Tools Within the Enterprise
• Lessons Learned: Pitfalls and Best Practices in Community-Building
• How to hire community & Social Media staff
• Online Presence: Creating a social strategy on and beyond your domain
• “Social Shopping” Communities (focus on online brand advocacy, product reviews and ratings, “social” information search, etc.)
• Leaving (too many) online footprints in (too many) communities
• How to interest and keep volunteers in a commercial environment?
• Beyond “Listening” – Comprehensive Community & Social Media monitoring and engagement
• Community and Social Media reporting and insights
• Case Studies for the class of 2009: Successful community engagements and social media campaigns from 2009 (bring yours to share)
• Validation: Do verified accounts make a difference in communities for better engagement?

There are still tickets available for the Unconference. For more information (including attendee list), please go here:
http://ocue2010.eventbrite.com/

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That days is today. Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day!

Every fourth Monday in January will be Community Manager Appreciation Day.

Community Managers have a challenging and exciting role. One the one hand, they are called on to be the personification of their organization to the online communities that they manage. One the other hand, they are also charged with being the advocate for the community back to the organization. Sort of like a benevolent double agent. The role of the community manager is evolving quickly as well, and we are starting to see the “swiss army knife” aspects of the role mature in to distinct roles on the community team: community product manager, moderator, internal community manager, social media manager, social ux designer, and many more disciplines.

We should take time to celebrate the folks doing the hands on work of shaping, supporting and nurturing online communities.

Background about Community Manager Appreciation Day from Jeremiah’s blog:

Now, Recognize A Community Manager, Every 4th Monday of January
While we agree with common manners to always thank someone after they’ve helped you, just take a moment to pause.. and think. Why would someone willingly go through the above mentioned challenges? Because of their passion to improve the company, and help customers have a better relationship. In many cases, a genuine ‘thank you’ can mean more than a yearly customer satisfaction survey. Take the time to recognize and thank the community manager that may have helped you while you during your time of need.
If you’re a customer, and your problem was solved by a community manager be sure to thank them in the medium that helped you in. Use the hashtag #CMAD.
If you’re a colleague with community manager, take the time to understand their passion to improve the customer –and company experience. Copy their boss.
If you’re a community manager, stop and breathe for a second, and know that you’re appreciated. Hug your family.
This isn’t just about a single role, but a bigger trend of making product and services more efficient, and thereby our world a little bit more efficient and sustainable.

I happily endorsed this proposal along with the following community leaders Jeremiah pulled together over the weekend:

Connie Benson, Rachel Happe, Jake McKee, Sean O’Driscoll, Lane Becker, Dawn Foster, Thor Muller, Amy Muller and Jeremiah Owyang.

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Bill Johnston is currently attending WOMMA’s Summit 2009 in Las Vegas, NV. The Summit feature experts from a variety of industries, who will discuss best practices, emerging trends and offer insight into how to word of mouth marketing buzz that extends beyond social media. If you aren’t there this year, you can keep up on the buzz and conversations by following the Twitter stream #womma.

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Ken Fromm wrote the series of articles about the real-time web, and they can be found here:
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 1,
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 2,
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 3

In the articles, he describes the collection of activities that describe the emerging Real-Time Web:

As with other recent waves of innovation (Web 2.0 and cloud computing, for example) there is no single definition of what the term “real-time Web” means. As a result, it is used as a catch-all phrase for a number of developments underway. At this point, we can identify that the real-time Web…:
1. is a new form of communication,
2. creates a new body of content,
3. is real time,
4. is public and has an explicit social graph associated with it,
5. carries an implicit model of federation.

Other recommended reading:

Google vs. The Real-Time Web
O’Reilly: The Real-Time Web

Real-Time Web Summit
Forum One is working with ReadWriteWeb to promote the Real-Time Web Summit in Mountain View on October 15th. I’ll be there – will you? You can register here. Price is $195 until October 8th.

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I have been especially excited about the possibility of working with The Moderator Community since hearing about the concept from Maria Sipka, CEO of Linqia and founder of the site.

Our partnership includes the following:

*Linqia will be the European representation for the Online Community Research Network (OCRN) and will be promoting our library of online community and social media research, conducted through the OCRN, which focuses on specific issues and topics in the online community and social media space. Some of our reports include: Online Community Metrics, Online Community ROI: Models and Reports, Social Media Ecosystems, Online Communities: Surviving & Thriving in the Downturn and more.

*The Moderator Community will give their social media guide (valued at $29.99) to all of the OC Report readers who become new members of their community. The social media guide includes advice on engaging in social media, with an emphasis on using social media for listening. It also features a categorized recommended reading list, a list of social media case studies, and a list of social media listening tools with explanations on each one.

*The Moderator Community and Forum One will co-host a free public webcast in the fourth quarter that delves into the most important and pressing issues that community and social media pros are facing.

*Forum One Networks and the OCRN will be featured sponsors of the Moderator Community and the Moderator Community will be featured as a sponsor of the Online Community Report Newsletter and a media sponsor at our Unconference Events.

We’re really excited for the opportunity to work with the Moderator Community and look forward to building a more global representation of community and social media pros who will share ideas, challenges and solutions that represent the online communities around the world.

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The initial phase of our partnership includes:

*Promotion of ReadWriteWeb’s Guide to Online Community Management (and other reports), which is an essential resource for community professionals. The guide includes a collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community and a companion online aggregator.

*ReadWriteWeb will be promoting our library of online community and social media research, conducted through Online Community Research Network (OCRN), which focuses on specific issues and topics in the online community and social media space. Some of our reports include: Online Community Metrics, Online Community ROI: Models and Reports, Social Media Ecosystems, Online Communities: Surviving & Thriving in the Downturn and more.

*Cross promotion our current research study, Online Community and Social Media Compensation Survey 2009. With over 330 responses to date, we are well on our way to having over 350 participants, making this the most comprehensive salary survey in the space to date!

*ReadWriteWeb will share some of the key results of the Compensation study on their site. The full report will be available for purchase and is included in a membership to the OCRN.

We’ve always been big fans of ReadWriteWeb and we’re really honored to partner with other experts in the industry. We too hope that this is the beginning of a rewarding collaboration in providing best practices, metrics and other essential resources for online community and social media professionals.

If you are looking for online community management resources and guides, I would encourage you to check out ReadWriteWeb’s Guide to Online Community Management.

We will be posting more about our partnership with ReadWriteWeb, and the results of our initial collaboration around the Community & Social Media Compensation research in the coming weeks.

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ReadWriteWeb is also partnering with us on our Online Community & Social Media Compensation research study, which means that we will reach many more online community and social media pros, making this the largest and most comprehensive study of online community and social media compensation to date. Go here to participate in the study: http://bit.ly/occomp09

We’re ecstatic to be working with RWW (I’m a HUGE fan of their work), and look forward to the opportunities that this relationship holds.

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The Topic: Valuing Member Participation and Contribution in Online Communities
Admittedly, this topic is a bit of a double edged sword: Assigning financial value to online community member participation and contribution.

On one hand, a community manager could can paint a compelling portrait of value for internal stakeholders by determining a financial value to member participation (assistant moderate, guiding discussions, welcoming new members, etc.) and assigning value to member contributions (support forum posts, tutorials, reviews, feedback and ideas).

On the other hand, if an organization were to make the valuations of member participation and contribution public, it would likely set off a firestorm of debate about member compensation, legal boundaries around “volunteer opportunities”, and ultimately, force the host organization to account for true cost and true value of the activities and content created in their online community.

It seems clear that it would be useful for organizations to have at least notional values for member contributions and participation. What is less clear is how (if at all) to talk about this value with the community, and how (if at all) social capital is exchanged for financial capital in online communities.

The questions I would like to explore in this #octribe series are (feel free to pick one, all or explore your own!):

• Do you currently assign an internal financial value to member contributions and participation?
• Do you use an assumed value as part of your communities ROI reporting?
• Do you account for social capital in your system of accounting for online communities?

Reading the following article from forbes (2001) spawned the “participation value” question for me. In the article, staff writers sketched the value of the cost savings AOL benefited from via their volunteer program.

http://www.forbes.com/asap/2001/0219/060s02.html

“How much has AOL saved by using volunteer labor during the past nine years? That’s not an easy question, and with AOL involved in litigation, the company is not eager to furnish the answer. But even with the most conservative numbers available, we estimate that by using volunteers AOL escaped nearly $973 million in expenses since going public in 1992. That poses the question: Would AOL have thrived-or even survived-on Wall Street without free help from volunteers during its first seven years as a public company? Not likely.

The many jobs that volunteers have performed for AOL would be compensated at a wide range of hourly rates in the labor market (see story). To be safe, we used a conservative figure of $15 per hour-about equal to that of a security guard-as the median salary for today’s AOL volunteers. We adjusted the hourly rate backward using an annual rate of inflation of 4% (historical note: Inflation hasn’t been as high as 4% since mid-1991). For the purpose of the model, each volunteer is assumed to have worked 10 hours per week, 50 weeks a year.”

Please note that I am including the article because it is *one* example of valuing member participation.

So, to wrap up:

• Please post your thoughts on valuing member participation on Tuesday, July 28th
• Tag the posts and any related tweets as #octribe
• I’ll compile a wrap up post that includes all tagged posts by the end of the week

If you have any questions, please email me.

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As you know, Hurricane Ivan, a mammoth storm, is heading toward the Texas coast. It’s due to strike Houston tonight. Two weeks ago, when Hurricane Gustav targeted Louisiana, a bunch of volunteers set up the "Gustav Information Center," an online community to help aggregate and disseminate storm-related information. Within a week, the community had grown to over 600 volunteers. The community’s software toolkit included Ning, MediaWiki, Google Maps, Flickr, Twitter, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

Since the storms just keep coming, the site was renamed and the scope was expanded. Here is my write-up on the Hurricane Information Center on Forum One’s Influence blog.

This powerful storm has already devastated our neighbors in Haiti and Cuba. I’d encourage you to sign up at www.hurricanes08.org where you can learn a lot about the current state of rapid-deployment social tools. More importantly, you will help make a difference in the lives of thousands of people.

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Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone

The prize, as these start-ups see it, is the 3.3 billion cellphone subscribers, a number that far surpasses the total of Internet users. The advantage over computer-based communities, they believe, is the ability to know where a cellphone is, thanks to global positioning satellites and related technologies.

I was chatting with the wicked-smart analyst Christine Perey earlier this week, who wrote a very thorough report on Mobile Social Networks. One of the most interesting things she shared with me was that by her estiamtes there were 100MM unique users of Mobile Social Networks today. Based on her predictive models, we could see grow to 200 to 300 million by 2009.

What is clear from speaking with Christine and from the NYT article:
- We are poised for explosive growth in this space
- The US is way behind Europe and Asia, and the domestic carriers are slow to upgrade, standardize and offer new services
- The US carriers are holding back potentially billions of dollars in unrealized market value by not allowing 3rd party data access, applications (natively) and not upgrading service (speed)

I will be blogging more about Christine’s report when I receive the executive summary.

We will be discussing Mobile Social Networks in great detail at the Mobile Communities Unconference 3/20 in Palo Alto. Early bird registration ends today (3/7/08).
http://mcu2008.eventbrite.com/

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