Something that I didn’t disclose in public, that my research on Community Managers (that I published yesterday) serves two purposes, Forrester is seeking a Community Manager at our Cambridge Mass HQ.

I contributed the basics to this job description, which as modified by the hiring manager, our fabulous Web Strategist Michelle F. I know there’s a lot of community folks reading this blog, so I’m really hoping that you’ll come and submit your resume directly to me.

I’m not the final decision maker on this role, but I’m going to do my best to find someone from the community I support, so come work us!

Send me your resume
You can submit your resume directly to me by emailing me at jowyang@forrester.com, the subject line must say “Community Manager”. I promise to keep your identity secret, as I’m suspecting you work at an existing company now, my research indicated how hard it is to find these qualified folks.

Here’s the job description:

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Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent technology and market research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. For more than 24 years, Forrester has been making leaders successful every day through its proprietary research, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more information, visit www.forrester.com.

Forrester Online Community Manager
Cambridge, Mass.
FLSA status: Exempt

At Forrester Research, we believe a direct conversation between customers and employees is essential to helping our customers make the right decisions in their jobs. We are looking for someone who is passionate about helping customers on a daily basis and who can energize and breathe life into a gathering of minds.

The Forrester Online Community Manager�s mission is to develop a strategy and plan to launch, grow, and maintain customer communities at Forrester. As a passionate customer advocate, you are responsible for representing the best interests of the community. In this hybrid role, you are part support, coordinator, facilitator, yet always remaining customer-focused. You lead, guide, and moderate discussion topics between members and employees, as well as collect and represent the needs from the community. You will align the business and operational needs of the community programs and integrate it with various facets of the business.

Responsibilities:

* Develop strategy for the launch and growth of our customer communities
* Monitor internal and external Web sites and facilitate discussions
* Engage with the community through a series of online and offline events
* Provide real-time alerts and monthly reports to key internal stakeholders
* Coordinate, publish, and follow up on Forrester content as it serves the needs of our customers
* Identify and develop relationships with research analysts and key internal content developers
* Evangelize and train internal clients on the value of the online community, including research, client group marketing teams, and IT
* Prioritize incoming member requests and redirect to internal clients as needed

Requirements:

* Bachelor�s degree and experience in managing similar online business communities; experience in marketing preferred
* Well-versed in online communications and social media tools including forums, blogs, podcasts, wikis and social networks
* Strong sense of urgency and ability to respond quickly and timely
* Savvy online communication skills � presenting a welcoming and professional voice yet, able to manage online detractors in a discreet and tactful way
* Ability to multitask in several communities
* Proficiency in basic systems administration such as permissions, content publishing, and other �back-end� tools
* Good social and interpersonal skills that translate well into an online persona

Forrester Research is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer; M/F/D/V are especially encouraged to apply.

The same job description is on the website, and you should see our careers section, there are currently 123 jobs available.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I get a bonus for finding the right person, but I’m pretty sure they are in my network (or perhaps a node one off) so please spread the word.

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David Deal of Avenue A | Razorfish sent me a copy of the Digital Outlook report (you can register for it here), (update: it’s available without registration here) it contains many of their findings from the past year, future predictions, and even has some excerpts from Forrester Reports. The scope is on interactive marketing, so it includes elements of social media, search, mobile, verticals, media, etc. I found the digital PDF version difficult to read, so they sent me a print version.

No way is this an endorsement for their interactive firm (If you want to learn more about the connected agency go read colleague Peter Kim) but I find it interesting that they published their billings (revenues) and broke it down by category.

From 2006-2007 “Community” shot up 34 million to 55 million an increase of 61%. If you look at that trajectory it was the fastest growing billing for their firm in the last 4 years.

At one time in my career I considered working at a PR or Interactive agency, and I told them that I thought they should be increasing their billings on social media at 20% for nearly every account.

Take a look at the list of companies that came last night, there were quite a few that had dedicated roles focused on community and social media.

Although we defined Online Community as: An online community is an interactive group of people joined together by a common interest, many executives have a hard time understanding the fluffy term community (”conversations” is far worse btw). so here’s how I translate it: Companies care about their marketplace. Also, customers are important. Since a group of customers is a community, a community is actually another word for marketplace. If you care about customers or your marketplace, you’d ought to care about community.

Now only if my bank account looked like that chart.

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We shouldn’t be surprised that Social Media Strategists know how to share. Forrester was pleased to host the Online Community Roundtable, you can continue the discussion in the Facebook Group.

(Update: I uploaded this video with the Flip Camera, man it’s easy capture, edit and publish with this thing)

Bill Johnston is a community servant (Update: he posts his thoughts from his blog), and I mean that in the best possible way. He organizes events for the Social Media industry that serve those who are practicing, it’s really a very valuable service. Every other month, he organizes the Online Community Roundtable for anyone who’s struggling with the day to day job of reaching to customers using online tools, a different company hosts this event each time. Update: Chris Kenton provides his thoughts from the event, he was expands off the idea of Identity Escrow. Ken Kaplan gives context on his presentation on storytelling, I’d like to see Ken speak more often.

To me, perhaps the most interesting topic was one around the “Future of Social Networks” and Chris Kenton’s historical look at marketing, and how technology has empowered and disabled marketers

This is actually a ‘user group’ or in Forrester terms, what we call a ’support community’ where friends, colleagues, peers (and competitors) come together to share and learn from each other. The size of the event is limited, around 35 yielded quality conversations, any more would have caused fragmentations. Bill is masterful in not letting anyone pitch, and anyone who wants to share puts their name up on the board, here’s the list of presentations.

One social network even got up and told the group that they were having challenges growing in a particular market and asked for opinions and help. A few questions from the crowd asked for demographic information, objectives, and clarification, then a barrage of suggestions from seasoned community folks came back to help, now that’s community.

There’s a “Soft NDA” in place, so if a member wanted something to stay confidential, then all will have to respect this, it leads to greater sharing and trust. Some of those who attended included those from Intel, Webex, CyWorld, Charles and Helen Schwab Organization, Cadence, YouTube, Lithium, Leverage, LiveWorld, Ringcube, Intuit, Symantec, VM Ware, Wyse, Babycenter, Tesla Motors, Joyent, SixApart, On24, ZapTXT and hosted by Forrester. (who did I miss?)

I think I can speak for Charlene, that for us this was a real treat, these are the folks we research for, these are the problems that we’re also trying to find out what works and what doesn’t for. I’d like to to thank Forrester’s Frans V.E. for funding the food and drink, Frank C. for helping drag the tables around, and Joan M, the Foster City office manager for all her work and preparation.

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Yesterday, David Churbuck dinged me for writing for novices, and also suggested I wasn’t near the trenches.

I could have fired back, but that would have been foolish, looking at his profile, I realized he knew what he was talking about. Instead, I left a comment on his blog, and offered for him to set the bar higher by being a guest poster.

He accepted.

David is digging in at Lenovo where he’s managing the web strategy, and is fighting the good fight day to day. He took my offer, and submitted via email I think he’s certainly set the bar higher for me.

Here’s what David submitted to me, (including a thoughtful email apology) the following relevant post is all his words:

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Corporate Blogging 201 – The Risks of NQA Blog Service
by David Charbuck, A Web Strategy Guest Poster

I just took Jeremiah Owyang to task for publishing thumbsucking advice on corporate blogging — “Ask for feedback!” “Admit it when you are wrong!” — and challenged the growing legions of social media pundits to kick it up a notch with some news I could use.

So, henceforth, with no book in the works on the next evolution in the Super Transparent Corporate Social Conversational Marketing Revolution, I can declare I have no commercial ax to grind and simply want to charitably share the wealth from someone who walks the walk of corporate blogging day in and day out.

If the books are publishing “101” level advice, let this be the first in a “201” series – the next level in the curriculum, the class you take your sophomore year.

In partly pedantic jest, I suggested the type of topic I’d like to discuss is: contravening corporate policy by privately resolving a blogged customer support issue and having the blogger publically state the solution and thereby set a precedent for all future complaints

Let’s look at the scenario in less pedantic terms. The risk of a no-questions-asked (NQA) blogger appeasement policy.

Let’s say you are the corporate blogger at Newco and among your responsibilities is monitoring the blogosphere for expressions of customer joy and unhappiness. You hire a service, or you do it yourself, but eventually you are going to find a person who writes something like this:

“I just bought a new widget from Newco and it has three dead dingbats. I am a graphic designer and I must have a flawless product to do my job. I called Newco and they said their policy is only to replace widgets with five contiguous dead dingbats. This is bullshit. I am going to write a letter to the Better Business Bureau and Jeff Jarvis.”

You, the corporate blog person, check on the corporate website, and yep, there is the dead dingbat policy plain as day. This policy is essentially the same one that everyone else in the industry follows. Do you:

Acknowledge the unhappy dingbat person with a comment (Thank you for writing about Newco. I’m sorry you aren’t happy. Have a nice day.)?

Debate the blogger and cite the fact that Newco is in line with the rest of the industry with its dead dingbat policy (Sorry; suck it up)?

Invite the blogger to talk about it privately (Hey, give me a call or drop me a line.)?

Ignore the blogger?

Do you let customer service know that you have found a complaint about the dead dingbat policy in the expectation they will communicate with the blogger? Do you let PR know?

Do you arrange to have a widget with a pristine display over-nighted to the blogger in the hope it will shut him up?

Do you propose a new strategy to the business unit where users can pay more for a zero-defect widget?

Let’s say the blogger gets really upset and continues to post about the dead dingbats. Let’s say the blogger takes the case to The Consumerist or the Ripoff Report and the forums, and tells people to join him in a campaign against your company’s dumb policy. The comments on the post begin to fill with other people who hate dead dingbats. The noise level is rising. Someone in PR notices it in a Google news alert. You get an email asking if you know about this. The blogger posts your CEO’s home phone number. And calls it.

As you look for a way to make the blogger happy, you discuss the policy internally and learn that dead dingbats are a fact of life, and that due to the vagaries of manufacturing there is no such thing as a flawless, dingbat-free widget, and to identify one means hours and hours of combing through thousands of widgets to find a clean one. The bottom line is this: making flawless widgets would destroy the bottom line which is why no one in the industry guarantees it.

But the blogger doesn’t care about that. The blogger is mad and nothing is going to make him happy other than a pristine system. So you find one. You arrange to have it hand delivered by your regional manager. Along with a Tickler Bouquet and a box of chocolates.

And you ask the blogger to please keep the new machine to himself, this is a one-time special exception, so please don’t blog about it. Okay?

Ha. The blogger declares victory, tells the world that his campaign has paid off, that Newco has caved and the Customers are in Control! Congratulations: you just insured that every person who Googles: “Newco Dead Dingbat Policy” is going to hear the story of how you made an exception. And they will all expect the same

The exception is now the rule, in public, for everyone to see.

So, fellow corporate bloggers and customer service professionals. This is a question of pure situational ethics. When do you make an extraordinary gesture of customer satisfaction and when do you stick to your guns?

Have you ever stuck to your guns and regretted it (if only we had given the customer their money back ….)?

Have you ever made a concession and kept it secret?

Have you ever made a concession and changed your organization’s policy in the process?

Is No Questions Asked customer service (the kind that LL Bean and Craftsmen Tools and Nordstrom practice) a figment of some marketing consultant’s imagination?

When do you tell a blogger to pound sand?

The integration of customer service into social media marketing programs is a logical imperative and usually will follow right on the heels of integrating corporate communications. The effects of the “new Better Business Bureau” are the ones that are going to strike your organization between the eyes first. How you invite your customer service teams into the medium can spell the difference between harmony and hatred.

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Jeremiah: Thanks David for starting Corporate Blogging 201, certainly a dilemma, I’ll leave my comment in the comments below, and I encourage everyone else to as well.

Update: Ugh, I’ve misspelled David’s name and gotten it wrong a few times. really sorry. updated the posts now.

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I’m talking to more and more clients who are starting to budget for social media programs, this also includes hiring the right kind of people.

As you know, I hail from Hitachi Data Systems (2003-2006) as the Online Community Manager, I know the role, and what it means to connect with customers using social media tools. While I don’t officially hold that title now, I have the rare pleasure to actually do some research on the role and what it means to customers and business.

Methodology
In the last few months, I’ve interviewed nearly a dozen community managers at many companies, and compiled 16 specific job descriptions to create these 4 Tenets of Community Managers. We also had many internal discussions to whittle down what’s important and what’s not.

Companies assemble Social Media Teams
The report, entitled How to Hire for Social Computing actually outlines there are TWO roles needed for a successful social computing program. It’s available for all clients to download at will, for non-clients, you can purchase it online, and if not satisfied, benefit from the money back guarantee.

The Social Computing Strategist
The Social Media Strategist, whose job is to lead the internal charge, develops the program, gains resources, convinces management, and measures success. In the report, I reference Ed Terpening, VP of Social Media at Wells Fargo as a Social Computing Strategist,

The Community Manager
Secondly, the Community Manager, who’s job is to primarily be a community advocate Lionel Menchaca as Dell’s Community Manager as examples of best practice (big shoes to fill eh?). There are thousands of other community managers who are pushing the membrane of the corporation to reach to customers, the list grows longer every day.

What you’ll learn
This report (which is one of our products, like consulting) outlines who these people are, what do they do, where to find them, how to manage them, and how to compensate them. If you’re trying to convince your management about the validity of these roles, this report will help you.

Also, I strive to walk the talk, if you’re a client, you can leave feedback on my blog, but also leave it on the Forrester site after you login. I promise to respond to any of your questions about the report. (we allow clients to rate and leave comments on every report).

Lastly, If you’re seeking to hire or get hired as one of these social media folks, start here, and read all my On The Move posts.

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Image: View a screenshot from my Facebook profile

At one time, I added many apps to experiment, but I’ll have to admit, very few I use on a regular basis. I often discuss in my presentations that our research indicates that many folks use social networks to check out others profiles.

Apparently, I need to do some housecleaning as, my kid sister wrote this on my Facebook Wall this morning: “hello big brother!! your facebook profile is a JUNKYARD!”. She’s also the little darling who told me that “I only use email to get a hold of old people like you“.

Sigh, kids. As my former boss Kevin Eves used to tell me, “so it goes”.

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Before you invest time and money in a widget strategy, you better know the challenges. This applies to VCs, Web Strategists, Developers, and even Social network companies

An Objective View
In this blog, I strive to provide a balanced viewpoint of both the benefits and challenges of a web strategy, it’s easy for us to become over-hyped and then fall right into the pit of over exuberance. (See other posts tagged Challenge)

I’m moderating quite a few panels with widget developers (last week at Stanford, next week at Graphing Social, and in a few weeks at Ad:Tech) so I’ll be using many of these challenges to hold the vendors to their claims.

First, a few parameters:
Update: This list of challenges mainly applies to widgets within Social Networks, although many of the challenges afflict mobile, desktop and blog widgets.

Widgets are ‘mini-applications’ that can be embedded on other containers (such as social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, and whoever decides to join the movement) The thing is, desktop widgets have been around for some time, so this really isn’t anything new, but for the purpose of this post, I’m just going to keep those on social networks in scope.

In regards to terminology, I’m just going to use widgets as a blanket term to also include “applications” and “canvas pages” terms that developers user on Facebook’s F8 platform. I’ll clarify that on another post in the future.

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The Many Challenges of Widgets:
Each of the following hurdles can be overcome, but first, let’s identify them.

Difficult to Monetize
First and foremost, this has been the biggest challenge. For some widget developers, the money has come from investors or VCs on Sand Hill road. Secondly, I’m hearing that the CPI plague (see below) is becoming more common, and then lastly, advertising is not an effective way to monetize in social networks (read this for more).

Immature Market
Widget developers are mostly experimental, they are throwing gangly Spaghetti, Pasta, Rigatoni, and Jeremici (I just made that up) against the wall to see what will stick. In most cases, most of the half cooked pasta falls down from low users adoption, leaving a sticky residue of messy profile pages.

Overcrowding profile page
Have you seen my profile page on Facebook? It’s a mess, and with so much noise, who can compete? With there being thousands of widgets, only a few can survive on my profile page (I know there is tabbed segmentation) but really, how many do we need?

Low Barriers to Entry
A challenge for every web market, is that there are few ways to differentiate, and it’s easy for a young Russian developer or a Stanford student, or a team of Chinese engineers to quickly get in the game.

Metrics and Analytics Inconsistencies
Hardly anyone is measuring the success of their widgets in the same way, do we measure on install, activity, views, traffic, or clicks? As a result, other than Appsaholic, there’s very few industry ways to measure success.

Spammy
Sadly, I learned from a panel I managed that some of the most successful apps were the one that leaned on the social graph, no not the one that we all dream about, but in the context of email spam. Many containers are clamping down on this, as it’s best to preserve the user experience, but this could continue to be an issue.

Bastardization: Cost per Installation (CPI)
To me, this looks like one of the worst in our industry, to me, this is like ‘printing money’. Did you know some of the top developer companies sell to other developers the chance to let new widgets piggy back off successful ones by promoting them. The developer can then charge for cost per install.

Disposable and low value
Rodney Rumford first mentioned this term to me, he was describing that many widgets are simply not used more than once. These glamor widgets provide one time entertainment, or are used once and never reused –except for removing from ones profile page.

Recycled clones offer little uniqueness
Perhaps the worst plague is the “attack of the clones” in many cases, the code from widgets are created by one developer, stolen (I mean crowdsourced or collaborated) slightly modified or rebranded and then republished.

Low Utility
I’m trying to think of a widget that provides business utility, or one that improves my life other than casual communications or entertainment. Reminiscent of the web in the mid 90s, we’ve yet to see the business value.

Hard to build successfully
Specialized skill set are common among the developers, most traditional interactive firms, and most companies don’t have the skills or experience to create a widget. It’s a different game with a different mindset, the same strategies often don’t apply.

Multiple APIs strain developers
Most platforms or containers are offering their own API, although most are touting they are OpenSocial compliant (as I write this, OpenSocial is not public, it is but in beta but should be soon) yet we’ve got to wonder is it too late for there to be a common industry API if it’s already fragmented? I spoke to the Evangelist of MindKey last night and he suggested that each platform has unique APIs (like news feed APIs) that the other doesn’t share –it’s already fragmented.

Ever changing platform APIs requires attentive team
When I hosted the widget roundtable, it became very clear that the APIs on platforms are quickly changing, and sometimes without notice. For the agile developer company, they’ll be able to quickly morph with their full time resources, but for the Interactive Firm or corporate web team, they’ll likely be too slow.

Pricing may vary, lack of standards
I have the privilege of being one of the few people in the world that gets to talk to the widget developers and find out what they are charging. In many cases they don’t know what to charge (as they have strong technical skills, but are just ramping up on the business side, and they are undercharging) This will clean up this year, and we’ll start to see some benchmarks.

Poor User Experience
Dennis McDonald (via comments) suggests that the usability for widgets is often poor. With there being little standardization on the inteaction design, I’ll agree, he states: “It’s hard enough to keep track of multiple incoming data streams representing different people, sources, relationships, keywords, etc. When you try to cram too much though a widget you have a real usability problem because of the variety.”

Performance Issues
Pravda (via comments) suggests that some widgets have poor performance, and thereby causes a disrupted experience. Since widgets are hosted on third party servers, some laggards can hinder the rest of the social network experience, he states: “This is because they require additional HTTP request, and in some cases, this request delays the rest of the page. This is the reason that I am not using Meebo widget in my blog”

Lack of Brand Control
Len Kendall (via comments) suggests that some brands may be concerned where their sponsored widget may appear. In many traditional advertising deals, Coke will never want it’s advertisement near Pepsi, but with widgets, that’s unavoidable.

Add your own in comments
What other challenges of widgets did I miss? Please leave a comment and credit and link to you.

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Caveat: While I’m highlighting the challenges, it doesn’t mean they can’t be overcome, and it most cases, the value is higher than the challenge. I’m just suggesting, we shouldn’t only look at the beautiful side, but set yourself up for success by knowing what you’re in store for.

I could write a solution or a fix for all of these challenges, but that’s a post for another time, or one I’d be happy to answer for clients.

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I’m pretty confident that there is a wide range of social media sophistication of the Web Strategy Blog readers.

I get questions that are very novice, but those that are very advanced tell me they’re still learning something once in a while. The same is true on my interactions with clients, there’s a small group of the very sophisticated, but most are trying to answer the ‘how do we do it’. Very few are in the ‘what is it stage’ when it comes to social media.

David Churbuck from Lenovo is in the sophisticated camp and moans that I’m writing posts for the novice community “let’s step up the analysis and look at the hard questions, not the thumbsuckers”. He’s right ya know, but here’s an explanation:

Some of my posts are aimed at the novices but it’s because I refer people to these starter posts to save me time. The Social Media FAQ series and the 3 Impossible conversations (the one David complains about) is for that.

If you’re in the medium stage, and are convinced that you understand social media but need to jump forward quickly, read these posts.

Now if you’re on the more sophisticated side, you may benefit on all my posts tagged Web Strategy. If you want to dive in to measurement you’ll need to sift through my posts tagged Social Media Measurement.

I’m grateful for feedback from folks like David (check out his Bio, he’s very seasoned) and I even offered him the opportunity go guest post on this blog to set the bar higher. But if you’re still hungry for advanced content that solves all your business problems, you won’t find those here. While I share a great deal of information on this blog (I work really hard to try to earn your trust and respect) but I reserve 100% of my resource for my clients.

I know I’m never going to please everyone, but lemme tell ya, I walk a real fine line of trying to connect with the community, being mindful to my paying clients, and doing my day job. There really isn’t a lot of folks that have done this to this level, so bear with me while I walk on new ground.

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How could one person create 20% of work for the legal department? Watch or Listen this video to find out.

The Conversation Group recently hosted an event celebrating 10 years of the Cluetrain Manifesto. What’s interesting is that only in the last couple of years has the train really started to build up stream. Jake McKee former social media practitioner at Lego tells his story on how he challenged and changed the culture within the organization to build relationships with customers, share proprietary information, and how customers were in line with employees.

This video is easy to consume, just put it on play, and listen in while you do your work.

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I’m respecting your limited time by publishing this weekly summary, read the summary, then quickly scan headlines, read the bullet, then click to learn even more.

I’ve created a category called Digest (you can see archives) where you can start to track and access these going forward. Quickly scan the succinct and categorized headlines, read summary for analysis, and click link to dive in for more. You can subscribe to this digest tag only, which filters only these posts tagged digest.

Need to make decisions about your web strategy? I’m here to help: subscribe to my blog, sign up for emails (right nav), follow me on Twitter, I’ll add you back.

Web Strategy Summary
I was pleased to see that consolidation of the white label industry is already starting, this is needed as there are too many players in the space, expect more consolidations then some major acquisitions later this year. Continued scrutiny over social networking fatigue continues to pound away at Facebook and others, although the social networks are fighting back, and insisting that fatigue is only a temporary dip.

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Adoption: Helpful map shows adoption of SoNets on Earth
Worthy as the first story, this map shows how each social network has dominance in certain geographies, Out of all of those listed, I only did not know 4 of them, I’ll study up for next week. There’s an additional list here sorted by Alexa by country.

Downtime: Bebo has over 12 hours downtime in two months
This is downright embarrassing. 12 hours is barely acceptable in a whole year, let alone Jan-Feb of this year. Other culprits include Microsoft live spaces, Friendster then Hi5. Let’s hope downtime reduces for the rest of the year.

White Label: Acquisition of Social Platform by ONEsite
Expect more acquisitions to occur in this crowded market, Social Platform now mergers under ONEsite. I’m tracking this space closer on this post.

Mobile: Social Network for iPhone
Fon11 is a vendor planning on creating a social network for iPhone users. But why limit this to a particular phone type? Why not extend this to all mobile devices.

Innovation: Facebook allows 3rd parties to update newsfeed
Smart move here by Facebook, allowing it’s lifestyle social network to hook and display other areas of a members life right on it’s newspage. As long as this doesn’t get too spammish, expect this to be a success.

Fatigue: UK Facebook dips?
Facebook, the top social network in UK had a 5% reduction in usage in recent months, and reports from BBC, and techcrunch. Despite these claims, Facebook declares traffic is not dipping.

Fatigue: Piczo sees tough times
Once promising startup Piczo (aimed at teens, girls mainly) is seeing a slowdown in growth, and as a result has had some downsizing and layoffs. Maybe there are too many players in the space, or they didn’t differentiate.

Advertisements: Google to sell ads on YouTube
YouTube, a social network is a Google property that is going to monetize by selling ads, there’s a great opportunity to gain the TV advertising dollars if they can demonstrate success.

User Experience: Facebook ads Flash
With the added ability to add flash applications added to Facebook, an improved experience could result from members watching or interacting using rich media, games, or video.

Sensationalism: Fox blasts Facebook
Fox fires off a hot title to get readers, please friends, no website is going to rule over the other, there are no absolutes, no zero sum game.

User Experience: Design features keep Facebook organized
In an effort to constantly improve it’s clean looking user experience, Facebook is creating a tabbed based experience to organize a members wall, about, and photos section.

If I’ve missed anything, let me know, I’ll be happy to add it to the next digest.

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(Above Graphic: Sean’s suggests that word of mouth will travel through networks at different speeds, and with different accuracy depending on the network. He lists many attributes that will impact the speed of sharing)

Sean O’Driscoll, who did a fantastic job, who has extensive experience managing the Microsoft MVP program has struck out on his own and has launched his own consulting shop Community Group Therapy.

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SAP Salon: Social Media and Online Communities

Key highlights:

To be an effective community professional, you need to walk the talk and use the tools

Google is not a search engine, it’s a reputation tracker

Sean scored high on search engine results for Microsoft Support after a bad story was on Digg.com

Admits there are many buzzwords, yet many forget to look at the bigger picture

Rather than focusing on the Techcrunch/Scoble “Shiny Diamond” to develop a social media strategy

The 5 P’s of Social Media: People, Places, Process, Platform, Patterns

Process is potentially the most important P –but often overlooked

There are more smarter people about your product outside of your company

It’s good and horrible news that it’s easy to publish. Many fractures due to lack of strategy.

Google is the enemy of brand loyalty, if I can find the answer to a question not on your corporate property

Most advocates and influencers are not
helping to help a brand, they are helping other users.

“Pay it forward” a good model and metaphor how a community works

Participation:

Impacts to busienss: Customer Service and Support, Sales and Marketing, Innovation and Product Development

You can’t own the message and the audience is going to change it on their own

Word of Mouth has been a key driver why people buy what they buy, now with access to information through social tools greatly impacts this

Engagement is about brand inclusion, making sure people have their voiced involved

We’ve all seen ugly babies but never had one. We’ve strong attraction to our own products. Uses a MS open source as a case study

Beta is not early enough to get your community involved

If you want raving fans, get affinity, talks about Harley Davidson

Influencer Framework in Web 1.0: Envision and develop, test and release, and sell and support

Suggests that social aspect of employees were only in sell and support aspect, not other areas

Sean had an executive champion, Steve Ballmer

Social graph: as a business strategy we should think about it as

For some reason, webex auto-showed webcams (powerbook users?) which was a potential major hazard for those who did not know they were being streamed at their desk. This needs to be fixed, could be a major embarrassment for folks.

Also the chat room in the webex client was very active, I saw Kevin Marks, Marita, Pistachio and others chiming away. The organizer said this chat room was the one of the most active they’ve ever seen. Twitter was a big recruiter.

There are several graphics that I could not effectively blog to text, I’ll link to the slides if they are published.

When I live blog webinars or conferences (even doing screen grabs), not only does it help everyone else, but it helps me to get smarter. Writing really helps to cement knowledge to actionable work.

Thanks Sean and thanks SAP for hosting this!

Tagged SAP Salon

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New to reading me and want a hundred word summary? Sam Lawrence of Jive Software has compiled tag clouds of 10 bloggers he reads and has done a quick and dirty analysis of what we frequently talk about.

What’s a tag cloud? It’s a collection of terms or keywords found in content or vernacular. It looks like he’s using IBM’s many eyes software to compile the cloud, which shows the heavier weighted or frequent terms in larger font. The cloud is comprised of words that aren’t necessarily in my wordpress categories, so it appears to be crawling and analyzing text.

While tag clouds certainly are interesting, not everyone agrees they are helpful such as expert Thomas Vanderwal, Brian has the story.

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I’m starting a new series, called Social Media Frequently Asked Questions. It’s a collection of the top asked questions I hear over and over. I’m putting them here on my blog is a great place to help everyone quickly get educated, convince their boss, or be able to help their clients get over these hurdles, pass them around.

Social Media FAQ #3: How Do I Measure ROI?

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This question often creeps up at the end of a webinar or presentation that I give. While we often sing the goodness of social media tools, (and challenges) a web strategist will have to return to the workplace, and demonstrate to their management the value of any program –especially if it’s new.

Is it possible?
In 2005-2006 we debated if this was actually possible, the argument against the ROI of blogging was as difficult as measuring humans. In fact, until we can measure the impact of a conversation between an employee and a prospect at a coffee shop, it was difficult to measure social media. For me, that all changed when Charlene posted the ROI of GM’s Fastlane blog (this was long before I even thought about working with her).

What are you trying to accomplish?
Measuring “new” media isn’t as different as measuring “old” media, the trick is to figure out what your goal is first, is it to spread a message among a community? Is it to reduce support costs? Is it to learn from your community? In each of these cases you’ll have to then assign the right attributes to measure against.

New attributes for new tools
Next, you’ll need to realize that this new media actually has some new attributes (the limited page view attribute is no longer sufficient in this dimensional world), and there are some new attributes to think about (read the white paper I co-authored with Matt Toll of Dow Jones), such as authority, interaction, velocity, attention, sentiment, and actions. You’ll notice I left out the elusive engagement word, it’s used differently by everyone in the industry that it still hasn’t taken hold.

Benchmark
Lastly, you’ll benchmark your programs based upon your goals and those attributes, and you’ll come to some specifics. I’m actually leaving many, many steps out, but those are the high level tasks. You’ll likely need an expert, new tools, and probably a vendor (see my full list), doing it manually is very tedious.

More resources, posts, white papers, videos
Actually, nothing I’ve said here is new, I’ve written about it time (here’s a similar post with more detail) and time over, read all my posts tagged social media measurement.

Update: A few hours later I see this timely article from Computerworld on Life after page views: Web analytics 2.0

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The job of a Marketer is to connect products with customers.

While it’s often native for marketers to know their products, they often fail at truly understanding their customers. Today, customers are much more than just recipients of messages, they create their own messages, share with their peers, and in some cases, are working very hard to keep marketers out of the picture.

Demographics
In business school, I learned about understanding your customer, we learned about the concepts of Demographics (people’s lifestyles, habits, population movements, spending, age, social grade, employment). The goal was to create a model to understand who these people were, where they live, and what they do.

Psychographics
We also learned that beyond understanding the who, we needed to understand the why, therefore understanding the psyhcographics (lifestyles and behaviors, what interests them, what they hold valuable and how they behave) became of importance.

Technographics
I first learned of Technographics from Steve Rubel’s blog, he was reviewing a report from colleague Charlene Li, who describes it as “Social Technographics is consumer data that looks at how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies”. It’s important that before a company use a social media tool, they understand which tools their customers are using. Update: Julie Katz of Forrester has left a comment showing how the scope of Technographics is used beyond Social Media, and also see a brief history on Wikipedia

Sure, some of the really savvy marketers out there already know your audience, you’re involved in conversations with them all the time, or at one point you were a customer, but for many, that’s not enough.

How about me? How well do I know my community on this blog? Judging by the analytics, I know I have a lot of readers in North American and then in UK. I can tell who some of the readers are by the comments that they leave, but that’s only a small amount. When I announced that I’ll add anyone who ads me back in Facebook, I ended up really getting to know my community, it really brought a depth that I didn’t have before.

Some of you are saying, “that’s a lot of marketing mumbo jumbo”, but if you can’t define who your customers are, then how can you possible connect your products to people who you don’t know.

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Edward Sussman, the President of Mansueto Digital and built the new FastCompany.com has responded to my analysis. He’s done a great job addressing the many points I made, and has responded both on my blog and on his site, where I cross posted.

He’s shared some numbers of growth including activity: “We are approaching 1,000 reader posts a day about business topics raised by our journalists” and member involvement: “Members have set up more than 500 blogs about business.”

I’m going to continue to watch Fast Company as a media company who is embracing the social computing aspect of the future and I encourage you to also watch.

Thank you Ed for being so forthcoming, I will watch with great interest.

Update: How timely, Jemina Kiss asks if UGC is viable for news sites.

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I advise some of the top brands in the world about how to use social media tools to connect with customers. While many are getting it right, many will get it wrong –with great embarrassment to their brand, and personal careers.

Shel Israel write a very compelling piece on why many corporations are going to get social media wrong. The best possible use case of social media is customers talking with employees of a company in an open and transparent way. Not hiring Mr. T in a “Viral Video” to show how you think you can relate to CIOs.

I’ve told several executives that the most important –yet most difficult –conversations they can have are the following:

The 3 Impossible Conversations for Corporations

#1: Asking for Feedback
It’s so hard for companies to ask for feedback. Take a look around, how many ‘corporate’ blogs ask for raw, unfiltered product feedback. It’s scary for a few reasons: 1) Most companies want to talk about how great they are, not expose themselves to weaknesses. 2) Most companies don’t have the appetite to listen to the feedback, then do anything with it. 3) Most companies don’t know how to respond to the feedback, they don’t want to promise it will happen, nor acknowledge a weakness.

#2: Saying positive things about your competitors
Customers aren’t stupid. In fact, they know who your competition is, and they talk about amongst each other. Yet, for some reason, this is very, very difficult for companies to swallow. There’s some unwritten law that companies shouldn’t talk about their competition (unless you’re criticizing them), it’s welded deeply into nearly every corporate culture. The thing is, customers and prospects talk about your competition, and they will often be analyzing you, and them, and not everything said will be negatives. Companies that recognize that their worthy competition has some strengths have the hardest time admitting it in public –yet those that do, become more relevant, trusted, and authentic than ever before.

#3: Admitting you were wrong
Corporations should always show their happiest face to the market –at least that’s what corporate communications team tells us. Yet in reality, no company, (none, nil, zilch) are perfect. Why pretend to be the absolute best in everything that you do when the rest of the market (including those who are buying and deciding on services) know better. Companies have a hard time admitting they’re wrong, instead, choose to spin, redirect, or ignore what most are saying.

Sure these conversations are difficult to have, but they are the same conversations your customer are having with your prospects –so why the veil? Here’s a few ways to think about these challenging conversations because in reality, these aren’t that “impossible”.

It really isn’t that hard to ask for feedback, say nice things about the competition, or to admit your wrong. #1 will come even if you don’t try, that’s life. #2 Will happen at every conference, online chatroom, or social network in your industry. And hey, #3, well if you’ve ever been married, you should already be an expert at admitting you’re wrong. Being married to the most wonderful person in the world is the same as loving your customers. So learn how to say “Sorry honey, will you please forgive me?” I do, just about every day.

Some folks are more advanced than most I deal with, such as David who says this post is stating the obvious. He provides some good analysis, be sure to read him.

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Etsy created this “electronic press release” to show how hand made products are created, shared, sold, and discussed on their community site.

All of the products are hand made and are unique, unlike the mass produced commercial products are sold. Think back a few years, this wasn’t possible, hand made items would be generally limited in distribution to local stores, craft shows, or maybe some type of catalog.

How is Esty different? While Craigslist is more impersonal, Etsy focuses on building community, relationships and even online events (like a virtual craft show). Ebay, which certainly has similar features, doesn’t cater to only these unique handmade items.

Now, the web provides access for anyone to share unique items, and benefit from a global storefront. Expect more of smaller, individual, and customized goods to be created, traded, and sold due to the web.

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With the success of the Twitterbowl experiment (read the premise or view results) a few weeks ago, the Twitter community is self-organizing to make TV a participatory sport.

How? Those on Twitter can comment, discuss, praise or criticize the stars, their outfits, and their self-important speeches. It’s pretty easy to do, on twitter you can type in Twitter Comment the phrase “#aa08″

To see what others have said:

Watch this blog aa08.wordpress.com
Or this mashup tool Eventrack
Twemes has a tool to gauge AA08

Thanks to Ike Pigott (Twitter, blog), and Shannon Whitley (Twitter, Blog) for first alerting me to this little project. Craig Cmehil (Twitter, Blog)created the eventrack

You can find me at Twitter with the screen name jowyang, add me, and I’ll add you back.

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Fedora and Data Portability Logos, too similar for comfort. (image via Techcrunch)

Turning over the logo creation to your community
For a few years now, we’ve been saying that the brand is really owned by your customers, not your MarCom brand police team. Today, we’re seeing this actually play out in a very interesting twist.

The Data Portability Workgroup launches
The Data Portability group is a workgroup focused on building industry-wide standards for information to safely and freely pass from one site to another –all at the control of an individual user. Yes, I know we’re all sick of seeing yet another working group with little or no results, but this group appears to be making progress, I’m reviewing their status reports, and will probably be briefed by Chris at major milestones.

Logo infringement a cause for redesign
Recently, they launched and announced themselves, including the easy to remember figure 8/infinity sign. Apparently, this was too similar to the logo of Fedora, While copyright infringement is never a fun thing, what’s interesting is that the DataPortability group is crowd sourcing their logo design to the community.

The community designs, votes, and is rewarded
There are hundreds of dollar worth of prizes, ad exposure on Techcrunch and CenterNetworks, and iPhone and other goodies, read the full guidelines on Chris’s site.

The logos will be submitted on spec to the team and a ‘representative election’ will occur:

“The co-founders of the DataPortability project, along with the steering group, will make a short list. We will then provide a web-based voting system for the community to make the final choice.”

Letting go to gain more
This is really an interesting way to let the community create, decide, and take ownership over your own brand and logo. Let’s see how this turns up. To add to the reward, I’ll point to the winning designer, granting even additional exposure. Great job Chris and team, turning a potential lawsuit into a community involving event, I look forward to seeing the results.

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Seems like everything is picking up, there are more conferences, workshops, and webinars appearing at –the space is booming. Everyone has questions about social networks, and there’s a lot of interest around widgets and the promise of OpenSocial.

Here’s where you can find me in the month of March

Online Community Keynote, The Knight Journalism School | UC Berkeley, March 27, 2008 Last time I visited the journalism school, we had a great roundtable, looking to expand on this

Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives | Mountain View, March 25th To date, I’m really proud to be invited, I’m the only male speaker at this point.

SNAP Summit | San Francisco, March 25th If you’re in the social networking space, you should be here.

Webinar with Awareness Networks (client) on Online Community Best Pracftices| 11:00 AM US/Eastern, March 13th (update the details are here)

SXSW | Austin, March 7-11th I’m really looking forward to this event, lots of parties. Dell and the Conversation Group are hosting a lounge on Monday night, and I’m looking forward to seeing my Singapore friends

Supernova 2008| San Francisco, March 6 Kevin Warbach just asked me to moderate a panel on opensocial, interop, and I’ll post more details when I get them.

Graphing Social Patterns by O’Reilly | San Diego, March 3-4 That’s just next week, I can’t wait to get some San Diego sun!

I’ll be at various other local events, stay tuned.

I considered creating a public calendar, like Scoble does, but I decided to just centralize on this blog for now. I also keep a tally of all my future and past speaking gigs on my profile page.

If you’re going to be at any of these events, leave a comment below, and let the community know of any get together, blogger dinners, or if you just want to meet. Looking forward to meeting you!

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