I’m in Austin for SxSWi (South by Southwest interactive) with several colleagues from Forum One and several thousand colleagues from around the world working in the digital and interactive fields. The “festival” is a nonstop series of keynotes and panel discussions during the day, and social events and meetups during the off hours (and in between sessions). What is the common thread tying everyone together? A strong interest in digital technology and a desire to connect with other like minded people.

As with any whirlwind experience, I will be processing the event for weeks to come, but I wanted to share some of the sessions that have been particularly thought-provoking or insightful.

Jaron Lanier’s Keynote
This has been, by far, the most thought provoking session I have attended at SxSW. Jaron Lanier started by inviting everyone to put away their laptops and smartphones, and to experience the session fully. It was a great idea, but also means there isn’t a good record of the session. Below are my notes and impressions:

• Wind instruments were the first computers, with the notes and silence being binary information. Flute-like instruments evolved into pipe organs, which evolved into self playing organs and pianos.
• Jaron referenced Project Xanadu as an idealized state for the Internet, where everyone would have 1 password (1 account) and there would only be one logical copy of a document. Infomediaries would disappear, every person would be a “first class citizen” and content creator, and content creators would be paid directly for their work.
• Real-time is the opposite of (human) dignity. Stated another way: machines are consumers and producers of real time streams, humans are not.
• People are “mean” online when they switch from an individual context to a pack context, where there is a natural pecking order, and a natural “loser” (person on the bottom of the totem pole”
• Jaron recommended reading: When the Machine Stops

See also:
The Monday Keynote SxSW Should Have Had

Danah Boyd’s on Privacy and Publicity
Danah Boyd gave an interesting talk on the current state of online privacy, and unpacked recent events concerning Facebook privacy issues as well as the privacy issues surrounding the Google Buzz launch.

See:
Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity (full text of presentation)
danah boyd’s Opening Remarks on Privacy and Publicity
Danah Boyd SXSW Keynote: Privacy is History

Chris Messina: ActivityStrea.ms: Is it Getting Streamy in Here?
Chris Messina from Google gave a solid review of the history of online streams, with his take being that we are essentially stuck in the RSS / late 90s portal mentality. He went on to articulate a vision for intelligent lifestreams, and more specifically, to give an overview of activitystrea.ms, an extension of the Atom feed format that supports social activity.

See:
ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here?
Chris Messina on ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? at SXSW

The next Online Community Research Network project is open for participation. In January, OCRN members discussed and prioritized a long list of topics, and the issue that made top of the list was “Developing Social a Strategy”.

The OCRN chose to study how social media strategy is developed, communicated and implemented because, frankly, so many organizations are actively struggling with the topic. We hope that by getting real-world feedback, advice and experiences from practitioners (read: the folks ACTUALLY doing the work), we can all gain insight in to this important topic.

If you are involved in the development of your organizations Social Media and Community strategy, I would encourage you to participate in a short survey here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ocr_socstrat

The topics we are exploring in this project include:

• The definition of social media strategy;
• The current scope of community and social media efforts;
• The current state of strategy development;
• The process organizations are using to develop strategy;
• Ownership and governance of social strategy;
• The biggest challenges that executives and teams are facing

I would ask that you please complete the survey by next Friday, 3/12. All participants will get a copy of the results.

The tag for this research project is: #socstrat

This post is part of an ongoing series about developing an online community strategy. As a reminder, all posts are being tagged #ocb2b.

In my last post, “Want to Know What Community Members Need? Just Ask” I discussed the importance of asking your members what they need from you as a community host, and what they need from other community members, as part of your extended community.

In this post, I will discuss the methodology for conducting a discovery exercise of the relevant parts of the social web to find out where your community (or potential community) is already working and playing. .

Most community strategies have traditionally focused on the hosted properties of the organization. The reality is that there is an ever expanding universe of online touchpoints that an organization’s community members are participating in off-domain. An ecosystem research exercise should be conducting as part of a strategy development (or strategy course correction) exercise in order to discover where the off domain centers or activity are, and who the most vocal and active participants are. The discovery exercise is essentially an audit of the current community ecosystem, including customer, prospect, partner and competitor touch points. This information will help establish a baseline of market-oriented sites and activity, which will be important to understand the opportunities for new community activity by your (or your client’s) brand.

What Should You Look For?
The purpose of this discovery exercise is to look for existing signs of life for your community “off domain”. Signs of life include conversations about your company, product, or issues related to your particular market or issue area. What should you specifically search for as part of your discovery process? The following list is a jumping off point for starting your discovery process:

• Mentions of company name
• Mentions of brand or product names
• Issues related to you market
• Topics related to your market
• Mentions of key employees
• Advocates or spokespeople
• Mentions of competitors

Where Should You Look?
Using tools like Google Blog Search, Twitter Search, Delicious, and Ice Rocket, conduct searches for brand mentions in news, the mass social media sphere (blogs, twitter) and on smaller niche communities. You will quickly come up a list of the communities hosting conversations about your organization, products or brand, and the members (often time bloggers) engaging in those conversations.

It’s also important to research activity on the “walled garden” communities, and larger social media sites that some times don’t surface in search results. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, Get Satisfaction, etc. In particular, look for ad-hoc groups that have sprung up around your brand, or content tagged with your brand and/or products.

Key Sites:

Outputs of the Ecosystem Audit
Insights that will likely emerge from your ecosystem audit include:

• Key news sites
• List of most active members (potential community members)
• List of influential users (potential community members)
• Thought leaders (personalities shaping your industry)
• List of active groups (potential partner communities)
• Independent community sites (potential partner communities)
• Key blogs (Niche bloggers and group blogs)
• In-person meetups and events (you might consider participating)
• A list of spaces where your community *isn’t* (helpful in prioritizing where to participate)

One helpful by-product of conducting an ecosystem audit is the set of fundamental elements for an ongoing listening strategy: search terms, topics and relevant online sources. The ecosystem audit process forces a team to experiment with and refine search terms and topics in order to discover content sources. Many of the tools mentioned above support RSS feeds with near real-time results. So, wether you use a simple tool, like google reader for your listening strategy, or something more industrial strength like a Radian6 or Scoutlabs, you have completed a lot of the prerequisite work for ongoing listening and monitoring.

In the next two upcoming posts “Designing an Online Presence Architecture” and “Engagement Planning” I will describe how to take the inputs of goal definition, member research and the ecosystem audit to create an Online Presence Architecture and to develop an engagement plan.

Recommended Reading:
Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem

This month’s Online Community Expert interview is with Jordan Williams, Manager of Digital Engagement at REI. In this role, Jordan is responsible for creating deeper customer engagement through the creation of content and community touch points on REI.com and throughout the social web.

Though firmly planted in the digital world, Jordan is a believer in well-roundedness and previously led REI’s national advertising and marketing strategic planning programs. Prior to REI he was Director of Collegiate Marketing at Red Bull North America and worked on the agency side creating experiential marketing programs for clients such as Sony Music, Mercedes Benz, Wells Fargo and American Express. Finally as a holder of a fine arts degree from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts he’d like to offer the perspective that marketing is pretty much just theater with better analytics.

Q: What excites you most about your role at REI?

What excites me most about my role at REI is two-fold:

First and foremost it’s the delight and challenge organizationally of helping to move a venerable 70-year old co-op forward in the digital age, especially into increasingly social spaces online. I find that we, like most large brands outside the tech world, are experiencing the strategic and operational challenges of transforming from a push-marketing organization to one embracing a truly customer-centric, two-way marketing and communication model – as many of us have surely experienced: it’s one thing to sign off on the concepts or strategies that drive social media success, but another thing to embrace them at their fundamental core on a day-to-day basis.

Secondly, as a mission driven retail co-op focused on getting people outside it’s exciting to be working on online community because it’s such a natural fit. We’ve been a member-based organization from the day we were founded, we have retail locations around the country where members gather and connect, and we have an extensive outreach program connecting with hundreds of local non-profits, etc. Indeed our troubles are rarely about building a sustainable social media strategy from the ground up, but rather building one that can connect the multitude of connection points, interactions, and content pools we already have in place in the real world.

Q: As a Co-Op, REI already has a passionate and active offline member community. How has the existing community factored in to your online community and social media strategy?

Well you’ve hit the nail on the head as for us it’s really about how we build on the community we already have in place. We want to honor what’s already there while at the same time enable online and mobile connections that will allow it to grow organically and for us that means being able to take a more long term approach. As we’re already supporting our members desire to connect via all of our traditional retail events, classes, outings, etc, on the digital side of things we’re in the enviable place of being able to work on building lasting and meaningful online interactions rather than feeling pressured simply to launch something quickly because of it’s the hot trend right now.

Q. What is the most valuable external (off domain) online community or social media touch point for REI that provides clear and compelling value to both your customer and REI?

We’ve been finding that Facebook is our most valuable external social touch point. The nature of how we want to connect and share with our fans/followers, and they with one another, largely means being more interactive and multimedia that say Twitter might allow. That said we certainly see the opportunity for crafting increasingly platform specific interactions, for example as a retailer we’re certainly aware of the success that Dell has had with their Twitter specific sales strategy.

Q: What advice would you have for a beginning community manager?

For me I see how easy it is to get caught up in the exciting side of the business, e.g. the technology, the platform, the shiny, bleeding edge new feature. But from my experience the way to make an impact is absolutely on the strategic planning and organizational development side of things. It’s not sexy and it’s certainly not easy, but ultimately the real impact if you work on the brand side is found through fundamental organizational transformation.

As an added bonus, I was able to spend a few minutes with Jordan at the Online Community Summit in Sonoma last fall. The video below is from our conversation.

Forum One hosted the Online Community Unconference East last Wednesday, February 10th in NYC at the Digital Sandbox. Most of the attendees were able to make it despite the snowy conditions.

Moving Forward, Together
Although it was cold and snowy outside, we had a warm and cheery group to kick off the morning. I ordered extra hot chocolate to further brighten the mood. We felt like this event was particularly well-timed. Boosted by recovery from the great recession, interest in online communities and social media is at an all time high. Most organizations are actively developing or refining community and social media strategies, and are trying to figure out what to build and where to engage. For many organizations, the goal is to develop a holistic social web strategy that refines based on learning from previous years of experimentation and many experiments strewn across the social web. The real question for me coming in to this Unconference: How do we move forward? This question framed the Unconference, and played out in our theme “Moving forward, together”.

I asked the participants to use the theme as a lens for their discussions. Specifically, I encouraged participants to think about this: what do you need to move forward personally, professionally, at your organization, and as an industry?

Setting the Agenda
Heidi Nobantu Saul was our facilitator for the Unconference, and she did a masterful job of explaining the concepts of Open Space and guiding the group through the agenda setting process. The essence of Open Space is that participants are free to suggest a session topic, and those who host a topic are responsible for hosting the conversation. Participants are responsible for placing themselves in sessions that they are learning from and / or contributing to the most. In short: if you are in a session that you are not contributing to or getting value from, then go find another one.

Session Topics
The final agenda had approximately 30 sessions on topics including:

Are we creating community really?
Douglas Atkin hosted a session that asked the simple question: are we REALLY creating “community” online? The group was somewhat divided over the topic, but most eventually agreed that online communities do foster a certain level of connectedness that qualifies as community.
Notes for the session can be found here.

Integrating Social into the Enterprise
Pauline Ores of IBM convened this session to explore the integration of the social web into the Enterprise. Two key theme from the session: 1. Organizational transformation is needed to get real value out of social/community initiatives and 2. The results/benefits of social/community initiatives are useless if not tied directly to clear business objectives and integrated back into the enterprise.

Online Community & SEO
David Flores of Everyday Health hosted a session to discuss taking advantage of the SEO value of online communities and social media. The group discussed the implications of tailoring social content like blog posts to be more SEO friendly, like formatting blog post titles similar to how members might construct a search query. The key takaway: Job #1 is to write good content – and it will be found.

Does Validation / Verification Help Grow/Engage Communities?
Mike Mostransky hosted a session to explore the role of verification, identity and reputation in online communities. One key question was verifying purchase / use of a product in product-based communities.

Other sessions included:

• Getting Past “No” – Social Media in Non-Social
• Structuring Incentives: What Works Best? (Points, Cash, Stuff, Status)
• Defending Value of Your Online Community: Competing with Other SM Platforms
• B2B Subscription Based $ Models / (Low Hanging) Revenge for B2B Networks
• Node XL Online Community (Twitter!)
• Members & Advertisers Product Testing / Advocacy Programs
• Dichotomy Between Control & Awareness in Social Media
• Best Practices / Tips for Creating Viral Marketing
• Legal Issues with Overzealous Critical Content from Members

Key Takeaways:

Moving Forward – while we didn’t get to the tangible outcomes I had hoped for, particularly a community metrics standard, we did make some progress. An initial conversation was had about the challenges with creating a set of generally agreed upon community metrics (GACM), and we will continue to push this forward over the spring, with plans to have a solid draft by the Online Community Unconference West on June 10th.

Social Infusion – one key theme was that social media is invading every department, not just marketing, products or support. With growing awareness and interest, there is also a genreal lack of leadership and strategy at most organizations. As I said in my opening remarks to the attendees – most organizations need to think more holistically about their social strategy, and the group of internal stakeholders required for ongoing management and governance. Which leads to…

Holistic Online Presence – most organizations are struggling with how to prioritize off-domain (think Facebook) engagement, and how to combine off-domain with on-domain activities.

Increasing Rays of Sunlight – Even with the sustained interest in social media during the recession, many folks were affected by layoffs and downsizing. It was encouraging to see old friends with new jobs, as well as the number of companies at the OCU seeking new employees.

Twitter Stream
The twitter stream was going strong with lots of good tidbits, ideas, and discussions from the event.
#OCUE10 Twitter Stream

Flick Stream From #OCUE10

Blog Reactions
Notes from the Online Community Unconference East 2010 – Matthew Lees / Impact Interactions
Takeaways from Online Community Unconference East 2010 – Marshall Sponder / Web Metrics Guru

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