What's Inside:
Greetings Online Community Enthusiasts!
If you haven't been to the Online Community Report blog, this may be the first time you have heard from me. I am the new Director of Community and Research at Forum One, and I will be editing the new, monthly Online Community Report newsletter. I hope you enjoy.
Bill Johnston bjohnston@forumone.com
A Message From Our Sponsors:
SolutionSet
SolutionSet helps businesses, non-profits, and political campaigns build and maintain custom, cost-effective, thriving online communities.
http://www.solutionset.com
Leverage Software
Give your audience a voice and enable peer participation. Fortune, The New York Times, InfoWorld, Microsoft, Salesforce.com benefit from community.
Learn how.
Online Community Highlights:
Online Community Metrics
How are you measuring the performance and health of your community? View this post and join the discussion on what online community metrics matter, and why.
CommunityNext: A Report Back
The CommunityNext Conferences was held Feb 10 at Stanford, with over 200 online community professionals in attendance. Read highights from the conference.
Wikipedia: On the brink? Or crying wolf?
Florence Devouard, chairwoman of the Wikimedia Foundation says that it is possible that Wikipedia could run out of cash in 3-4 months.
More Highlights:
Ebay / HBR Study on ROI of Online Community
The full HBR / Ebay study of the effects of commnuity particpation and sales with Ebay Germany.
Social Networks and Political Campaigns: A Web 2.0 Manifesto
Fred Stutzman, Social Networiking expert and co-founder of claimID reviews the effects of social networks on political campaigns
Living and learning in a virtual world
Cnet interview Smart Mobs author Howard Rheingold about online communities.
Toyota launches new Scion models in Second Life
Toyota launches new Scion models in the virtual world to "connect with trendsetters".
Farmers trade tips, shoot the breeze online
Farmers eschew "web 2.0" and find value in basic discussion boards.
Universal turns DRM thunder on Bolt
Blogging community up in arms over Unviersals DRM deal with online community Bolt.
Online Community Events:
Community 2.0
Our collegues at Shared Insights are putting on the Community 2.0 conference in Las Vegas, March 12-14. Bill and Jim will be attending, and Bill will be speaking on ROI and Best Practices panels. We have been given a special Forum One discount code which saves you $500 on registration.
Discount Code: FWTTL55
http://www.community2con.com
The Online Community Business Forum
The Online Community Business Forum will be held May 3 and 4, 2007 in Sonoma, California. The Business Forum is an invitation-based event solely focused online community business models and tactics: subscriptions, advertising, marketing issues, support communities, defining ROI, and other important topics.
http://www.forumone.com/ocbf07
The Online Community Camp 2007
The 2007 Online Community Camp will be held June 6, 2007 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. The Online Community Camp is a gathering of online community practitioners to discuss the development and growth of online communities. The Online Community Camp provides a venue for practitioners to share knowledge, discuss best practices, problem solve, and to establish a network of peers to connect with after the conference.The Camp format involves multiple attendee-driven sessions, which will be presented by attendees and organized at the start of the day.
http://www.forumone.com/occ07
OC Expert Interview:
Shawn Morton, CNET Networks
This month our Online Community Expert interview focuses on Shawn Morton. Shawn currently manages all of the product development functions for TechRepublic.com. Shawn has been with CNET since 1999, and has been working on the web professionally since 1997.
Shawn has written over a dozen articles on web development for CNET's Builder.com and has appeared on NPR’s "State of Affairs" to discuss blogging.
Q: You've been working in the online community space for a number of years. What major online community and collaboration trends have you seen at your company?
A: Wow, I think I’ve seen just about all of trends at some point over the past 8 years - from collaborative desktop apps, to discussion boards, to blogs, to wikis to social news.
In fact, a couple of years ago, TechRepublic pushed out a lot of new features like social bookmarking, member blogs and wikis with the goal of driving increased usage within the community.
In the end, we found that what our members really wanted was for us to focus on improving the features they used the most – discussion and technical Q&A. The big lesson from that exercise was to follow the needs of the community first, not the latest new thing that analysts, journalists or bloggers are raving about… unless your community is geared toward analysts, journalists or bloggers.
Read the full interview here
Online Community Jobs
A current list of Online Community job opportunities. If you would like to include an open position in the next issue of the newsletter, please email with the title and link.
Leverage Software
Marketing Manager - tactical & strategic
LiveWorld
Business Analyst
SocialText
Director of Product Marketing
SolutionSet
.NET Developer for Community sites
PHP Developer for Community sites
XHTML/CSS Developer for Community sites
Note: You can also post jobs directly to our job category on the Online Community Report blog by using the following steps:
1) Go to Del.icio.us
2) Register an account if you don't have one.
3) Submit a URL for an online community job, being sure to use the tags "onlinecommunity" and "job". (Be sure to also fill in the "notes" field with a brief description of the job.)
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