Forum One is really excited to announce that we’ve partnered with the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. WOMMA is a coalition comprised of hundreds of top marketers who are learning how to encourage and amplify the natural phenomenon or word of mouth marketing, while respecting and protecting its honesty and integrity. Forum One’s Online Community Research Network (OCRN) and WOMMA share common interests in that our goals are to build networks of professionals who collaborate on best practices, standards and metrics, and share knowledge among the professionals in our industries. In our partnership, we will promote each others professional groups, events, we will partner on industry research, and we’ll cohost a webinar on a social media marketing topic in 2010.

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.

A recent series of articles from ReadWriteWeb has spawned discussion here at Forum One of what impact the “real-time web” will have on online communities. Those conversations continue, but I wanted to share our short list of selected readings on the topic from the last 12 months.

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.

Last year, Forum One recognized that one of the key issues community and social media professionals face is that we (as an industry) are suffering from a lack of solid benchmarks, including compensation of online community and social media professionals. In July of 2008, as part of our ongoing research efforts with the Online Community Research Network, we conducted the first comprehensive study and gained valuable insight about online community and social media professional’s compensation, team structure, and current job satisfaction.

The second annual Online Community & Social Media Compensation Survey is underway. In the past couple of weeks, we’ve had over 340 people participate in the survey, making this the largest survey of Online Community & Social Media Compensation to date. The survey is set to close at the end of business on August 28th. If you work in social media or community groups and haven’t had a chance to participate yet, please do before the close of business on August 28th.

Go here to take the survey: http://bit.ly/1bwtuk

Things for participants to note:

*All participants will receive a copy of the final (aggregate) report – a $349 value.

*All data will be processed and compiled in aggregate. Data will not be reviewed or presented in a personally (or company) identifiable way.

*All participants are entered in to a drawing for 1 of 10 $25 Starbucks coffee cards.

Forum One is very pleased to announce that we’ve partnered with Linqia’s The Moderator Community. The Moderator Community is a gateway for community managers, group moderators and enthusiasts to connect with others and exchange knowledge, learn and ask questions. Our goal in partnering with the Moderator Community is to provide our readers with additional resources and a network of community professionals from around the world, in addition to our online community and social media research conducted through the Online Community Research Network (OCRN). This partnership will provide community professionals with an opportunity to connect, learn, and share best practices and community programs that are managed all over the world.

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.

In our post a couple of days ago, we announced our research partnership with ReadWriteWeb, a top ranked blog that provides Web Technology news, reviews and analysis. In addition to being an incredible source for technology information, ReadWriteWeb has also started a research series which currently includes two reports: Guide to Online Community Management and Q2 2009 VC Funding Report. Their research is complimentary to the online community and social media research we’ve been conducting for the past three years through our Online Community Research Network (OCRN). The OCRN is a community of social media and online community professionals who collaborate to better understand the principal challenges of building and managing online communities and social media programs. Our partnership was forged from our shared interest in community best practices and from our mutual respect for each other’s work and expertise in the industry.

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.

Forum One Networks is thrilled to announce our partnership with ReadWriteWeb, a leading blog that provides Web Technology news, reviews and analysis (and is one of our favorite sites). This partnership allows us to collaborate with another organization that we highly respect, who is actively involved in the analysis and creation of online community resources. We particularly like (and recommend) ReadWriteWeb’s Guide to Online Community Management, which is a collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community and a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web.

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.

I’m pleased to be kicking off the 2nd topic in the #octribe discussion, following the kickoff topic of “Influencers” by Gail Williams two weeks ago.

How OCTribe works
Write something tomorrow (Tuesday, July 28), tag it #octribe or tweet it as #octribe, and your post will be linked from the recap page. Moving forward, each 2nd Tuesday and 4th Tuesday of the month, the call and the recap will be hosted on the site of another one of the bloggers in the loosely defined OCTribe group. This conversational project is just starting, so please join in!

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.

The New York Times had a great story today on the state of mobile social networks. The bad news for the US? Most of the fun is currently happening overseas.

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/

TechCrunch has news that Facebook and Google have joined the DataPortability Workgroup.

The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.

It is an important step that Facebook has entered the conversation, but until there is an “export” tab in my Facebook profile, I’ll remain a bit skeptical.

On the other hand, if the major social network and online media / search sites adopt a common social graph standard, the fun really starts. Porting profile and friends from network to network is a problem with limited scope… frankly, not very exciting. What I find *really* exciting is the possibility of being able to port and mashup content, reputation and recommendations from multiple sources.

Regardless, this is an important first step to the “majors” at the table.

What do you think? Especially the folks who host communities for their organizations: How does this impact you?

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?