There are two conferences that I recommend you attend if you read my blog, the topics and presentations are closely aligned to what I’m interested in, and I know both of the organizers –they give good conferences with high value.

The first one is the Internet Strategy Forum Summit, July 17-18 in Portland, managed by my friend Steve Gehlen. He’s even offered a discount for readers of my blog (many web decision makers). Enter in WEBSTRAT as the discount code to get 10% off. I won’t be able to attend this year (I did last year) but Charlene Li will be one of the presenters. enjoy!

Graphing Social Patterns by Dave McClure, is a successful conference on the topic of Social Networks. I was a moderator at the last one in San Diego, and the upcoming one in Washington DC on June 9-11th will be a hit. I’m still trying to work out my schedule so I can attend.

But those are just two of my recommended conferences to attend (Web 2.0 expo, any Forrester Conferences, and SXSW are compulsory, of course) and if you’re in the bay area, there’s plenty of reocurring meetups (see large list).

Update: I attended last year’s community unconference (you control the agenda), and will do so again this year, It’s run by Bill Johnston, who I’ve interviewed for my research report on Online Communities, this is a great event I forgot to mention.

What upcoming conferences would you suggest?

25 comments

I had near polar experiences on my two panels yesterday, the first one I moderated called Community Building: Good, Bad, and Ugly, and the second as a panelist: Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia.

---

A “Boring” panel that shifted to audience questions
Now the first panel had very enterprise technology companies present: Jive Software (Dawn Foster), Intel (Bob Duffy), PC/Mac World (Kellie Parker) and Forrester. We were very pragmatic, informational, and provide best practices information. While the majority of people enjoyed the discussion, I noticed an increase of Fortune 5000 attendees who are craving ‘how to’ information, some found the panel “dry” or “boring”. I tend to agree, the content we provided had lots of nuggets if insight, practical examples.

I was watching twitter in real-time to gauge the audience reaction (a best practice I prescribe in how to moderate a panel) and saw two tweets, in particular this one:

“I agree with @nickionita…community building panel is a snooze”

Like any speaker, when you start to see audience feedback like this your heart flutters and your mind jumps forward to images of SXSW. Quick! what do you do?

I think of the audience members as customers (they’ve paid with time and money) so I acknowledged them in twitter, and let everyone know we would quickly shift to questions, so the audience could drive the agenda. We received over a dozen questions, and I hope the audience was satisfied, lots of good hard questions from many folks on the ground that are trying to solve these problems: getting management to agree, measuring roi, dealing with detractors, etc.

After which, I think we won him over:

“Questions made the panel: Love hearing viewpoints from people with boots on the ground”

Thank you Chrisainsworth and Nickionita for giving me the feedback. The summary of the whole session can be found from this love blog from Lasandra. Update: another summary from Manage to Change. A review came in, 3/5 stars.

---

Crowd Sourcing the Agenda to the Audience –Using Twitter
Now, the next panel (Greg Narain, Brian Solis, Stowe Boyd) wasn’t traditional by any sense, it was an experiment, where we crowd-sourced the agenda to the audience –they used Twitter. Greg Narain setup an application where members from the audience could message (@micromedia2) and their tweets (comments, questions, requests, answers, and sometimes jokes made at Scoble’s expense) were seen live on the screen. The focus was less on the panelists and the things we were to say, and more on the discussion between hundreds of people in the room –all from computers and mobile devices.

While certainly very, very entertaining, and very very interesting, the panel offered little insight or value. My colleague Josh Bernoff even tweeted that while it was entertaining, he was waiting for that breakthrough insight. Josh is a uber-analyst, and probably would have benefited from my first panel more than the second, although he enjoyed himself.

I asked for raise of hands at the end of the session, two thought it was ‘ok’, two thought it was a ‘bad’ session, and the majority, over 90% thought it was a good session. The people rule. Later, I talked to the gentleman who thought the session was negative, and his reason was because he was left out, and didn’t know how to get twitter started. I spent a few minutes with him, giving him the basic, and told him how to start an account at twitter, how to tweet, and how to add followers.

The session was far more ‘remarkable’ than the first (we can tell as people actually took the time to blog about it…yes that old thing) and you can read about Examples of how to use Twitter for Business Purposes. Micromedia and Microblogging session capture, and our new friend Shanti from Sun who didn’t get twittering before the panel, decided to give it a try (please welcome her if you’re on twitter). Update: Jacob highlights how the conversation in Twitter went downhill –as it spread around the globe.

---

So what does this all mean?
I need to improve my panel skills, make sure we’re entertain while providing value, and also know when letting the crowd control too much results in little value. While agenda setters and panelists certainly lead the presentation, for this audience of tech-minded folks, learning how to listen in real-time, make course corrections, and listen to the audience is key for today’s modern conference.

The audience is now more of participants, literally up on stage –well at least at my panels.

Update: I had my third and final panel (moderator) at Web 2.0 Expo today on Facebook Best Practices (plus I was an advisor to the event), and received the following tweet that made my day:

“Olsen should be monitoring Twitter like Owyang was for his sessions!“

29 comments

Designing For Engagement, Kerry Bodine, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Sitting in the front row from Forrester’s Marketing Forum 2008, the theme for today’s event with over 800 attendees being Marketing’s New Imperative For Success: Engagement

Voices from the Audience:

• UK’s Hayden, who was our virtual guest who’s question was asked and answered in the Ustream Channel enjoys participating.
• David Berkowitz watches the chat room from NYC
• Adam Cohen reveals that The Future Will Be Televised…With Social Media
• David Deal comments on George Colony’s keynote in Your employee, your blogger

Live Streaming the Morning Keynotes:
Harley Manning (Setting the Stage) and Kerry Bodine (Engagement), 52 Minutes

MicroBlogging: Twitter
Members are using their laptops and mobile devices to interact with each other using Twitter, a form of Microblogging.  Some of them are tagging their posts (called "tweets") with the event tag, you can view them all here.

Select Tweets include:

• MichelleBB : Working to get all FedEx Kinkos up to standards of brand. They welcome that feedback.  Only way they’ll get better.
• MichelleBB :  Ouch!  Kerry just called out Harley’s fanny pack
• melmcbride
  : Kerry Bodine’s talk about emotional connection is
  amazing. I want to blog it once the vid is available as an embed
• Rumford :  @worleygirl you give away the appetizers and sometimes the dinner. people love the knowledge sharing and become loyal
• nickhuhn :  forrester CEO George Colony re: his blogging: i can’t believe MSFT isn’t behind typepad or wordpress as bad as they are

Pictures:
Below are select images, but to see all public photos peruse this flickr tag ForrMarketing08,also see Jeremy Pepper’s set, and Forrester Research’s set.   Select photos, including those from Jeremy Pepper:

Cross posted on the Forrester Marketing blog

3 comments

Forrester has asked me to be on point for the social media efforts during tomorrow’s Marketing conference in L.A. (over 800 senior marketers are attending) we’re still in the evaluation process for hiring the community manager, so I’m just filling in.

So, starting tomorrow, I’ll be blogging at the Marketing Blog, and will be using the Forrester Twitter account.

Quite a few bloggers are attending, such as Jeremy Pepper, Rodney Rumford, Jennifer Jones (podcaster), and others. On the Forrester Marketing blog, I’ll link to all those that are doing live blogging of the sessions.

If I can get my gear to work correctly, Ill be live streaming the keynotes, I’ll announce it from the Forrester Twitter account.

Here’s the last event I went to, Day 1, and Day 2.

3 comments

I’m not going to be blogging the next few days while I’m here at SXSW, in fact, most have noticed that I’m not carrying my usual battle gear of digital camera, video camera, laptop, wireless gear. Instead, I’m just using a mobile device and will be tweeting most of the time.

I’ll point to anything that I think is interesting from Twitter, so you can follow me there, I mainly use it as a ‘link stream’ (I point to what I think is interesting) and secondly as a communication tool.

Not sure what Twitter is? It’s a social network that becomes a chat room, so you’ll need to find other folks to connect with. Use the “@” symbol to reply to someone. For example “@jowyang good morning” (minus the quotes) and I’ll see that in my reply feed.

Many business folks have a hard time understanding the value of twitter, (they don’t get it) but I talked to a reporter from NYT, and the Guardian, and they use it to find breaking news and stories.

In this case, what’s important is to focus on the content, not the toolset.

Yesterday, I was on the panel about mobile blogging, and in the spirit of it, we split up into different groups and roamed the hall using utterz, twitter, on board cameras. Here’s my interview with Jemima Kiss of the Guardian (her profile). You’ll have to understand the irony of this, I’m using my cell phone to interview a journalist on how she uses social media.

4 comments

I’m headed to SXSW Interactive Festival in a few hours, I’ve a red eye from Silicon Valley that’s going to give me time to sort through a few hundred emails, write a few blog posts, and pen the strawman for my upcoming report on OpenSocial: Challenges and Opportunities.

SXSW is a festival, not a conference. Its about parties, networking, conference then bbq, pretty much in that order (at least to me), what’s amazing is that most of the bay area tech scene picks up and transplants in artsy city of Austin, except for Dave Winer who said to me in twitter that it’s mostly for young folks (Ill be sure to find some “old” people and congratulate them for breaking the mold)

Check out my posts from last years events, (the awards, how twitter exploded on the scene day 2 and 3 coverage). If you’re headed to SXSW, I look forward to meeting you at the many parties, events, and at the conference itself, so please come up and say hi, I really love meeting folks. I’ll be at the following events:

Sunday: Panel: Scoop the Story on Your Blog We’re going to do something unique, that involves mobile and not just in the session room we’re intended to be, so please join this very interactive session.

Dinner at the famous Salt Lick outdoor BBQ restaurant with many bloggers.

Monday: Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing, the killer panel will include: Chris Heuer Partner, The Conversation Group, Tara Hunt Co-Founder, Citizen Agency, Deborah Schultz Founder/Chief Catalyst, deborahschultz.com, David Parmet Owner, Marketing Begins At Home, Hugh MacLeod Grand Pooh-Bah, gapingvoid.com

Monday Night Party: An Evening of Conversation Starters at Icon Cactus sponsored by Federated Media and Dell , along with Bulldog Solutions, The Conversation Group, and Social Media Club Austin

I’ll also be tweeting where I’m heading in real time, I hope to see you on twitter, my screen name is jowyang. (Ill add you back)

Or you too can choose from the dozens and dozens of panels (and this is just the interactive sessions, not even the film or music ones)

I’m purposly trying to avoid any set meetings (except for the ones listed above) but if you do want to meetup, let me know of which events you plan to attend in the comments, and Ill try to make it.

5 comments

The four panelists did a great job yesterday handling my barrage of questions in the Widget Strategies and Social Platforms session, Hooman Radfar (Clearspring Technologies, Inc.), Walker Fenton (NewsGator), Pam Webber (Widgetbox), Ben Pashman (Gigya) discussed widgets strategies. I asked each of them to suggest an image or icon that best represents their company (an idea to make the panel more memorable from Pam) and they each suggested the following:

Clearspring was like a cable, as they were a connector

Newsgator was like a kitchen where you come and create

Widgetbox was like a DIY Pottery store where you come in and make your own product

Gigya was like a like a spine, as they were the backbone or infrastructure

While there are many challenges to widgets (and every industry) the panelists did a great job refuting them, demonstrating their expertise in the area, and suggesting how to work around any bumps that we may see. If you want to refute the challenges, I certainly encourage you to leave comments on that post or leave a link demonstrating how you can overcome those. It’s all part of a healthy dialog.

The challenge questions? on the difficulties of measurement, lack of brand control, the hurdles of distribution, and how to monetize the space. I also asked them to share how they help clients develop strategies, and to provide clarity around the most common misconceptions. Each of them shined in their own right.

To hear what the rest of the panel said, Alex Nesbit did a great job live blogging the session. Beth Kanter (who did a great job presenting with passion yesterday) shares her notes from the session. And Peter Kaminski, CTO of SocialText writes on his wiki the high level notes. It makes sense if everyone updated the wiki, rather than having several blog posts it could centralize and make the effort more collaborative and efficient.

8 comments

(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.

---

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

12 comments

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!

4 comments

(Me, giving opening remarks, pic from Julio of Oracle)

The VLAB event last night was a success. What’s VLAB? A non-profit group that sponsors ongoing panels and talks around the subject of business and technology at Stanford and co-sponsored with MIT. I met many of the volunteers and organizers, a good group of folks. Thanks for joining the Shaking the Money Tree of Multi-Platform Social Networks hosted by VLAB.

I kicked off the event as the moderator last night, I gave a very short ‘industry level’ discussion about the social networking space and lead with these high level slides. It was followed by a presentation from RockYou, an applications developer network, then Social Media, a “meta” network for developers, then the panel which included, Sourabh Niyogi, Co-Founder & Vice President of Engineering, SocialMedia, Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate, OpenSocial, Jia Shen, Co-Founder & CTO, RockYou, Steve Cohen, Head of Platform, Bebo, and Ken Gullicksen, Managing Partner, Morgenthaler Ventures.

The topic of the evening? Finding monetization in the next phase of widgets being spread on multiple social networks. We were “shaking the money tree” the tree being the social networking space. At the end of the evening, I came to the conclusion the money tree is small, a sapling really, yet on this tree we’re seeing small buds of potential growth. In most cases, the successful applications are self-expression or entertainment, and we’re just starting to see some applications around utility spring forth.

One rule, the money in the social networking space can’t be from acquisitions, it needed to be long term revenues generated from creating value. The event was sold out, (over 350 registered) and folks came out despite the rainstorm and the heavy traffic from the Bill Gates speech next door. The event was video taped, so I’ll point to it once it’s live, hang tight.

In the meantime read what Kevin Marks from Google wrote, he observed that the key take away was to be Organic, not Viral. Shannon expands upon the conversation, and even discusses some of his upcoming projects. Ken Kaplan shares his notes.

For a detailed blow by blow on the event, Lawrence went out of his way (bus trip and all) to attend the event, read his detailed notes. Foldier blogged their thoughts about the event, and think their product will align nicely.

Despite this industry being young and green, spring is right around the corner, expect growth, innovation, and some real business utility to come out of this blossoming tree –we all hope to soon taste some fruit.

(Tagged vlabfeb08. If you blog about the event, leave a comment and I’ll include your link)

8 comments

Things are coming full circle. I first was introduced to the idea of joining Forrester by attending as a panelist run by Peter Kim in San Francisco, I guess that was my first date with Forrester. He and Charlene then asked me if I’d be interested in joining the firm, and well, I’m happily married to Forrester.

Peter and I will be running a few workshops with Peter, we hope you can attend:

Blogging Fundamentals, May 7th, in San Francisco
Social Computing workshop on June 5th in Cambridge Mass.

These workshops are interactive, and it’s expected the attendees will walk away with actionable next steps that are built on in class exercises, insight from research, and an open dialog to pick our brains.

These aren’t the only places to get trained on social media, there’s events and confernces being put on all over the globe, I recommend the Social Media Club (in multiple cities), New Comm Forum, Womma, Marketing Profs, or even try using Upcoming, or if you’re in the SF/Silicon Valley area, check out this list of ongoing events.

If I missed any other great social media workshops or conferences, please leave a comment below.

6 comments

Left: Bright and colorful Stanford Red umbrellas grace the campus.

OpenSocial, a promise made, but little has been seen.

Not sure what OpenSocial is? Here’s how I explain OpenSocial to Executives.

If you want to learn more, then join us as I’ll be moderating a panel at Stanford Business School in Palo Alto this coming Tuesday, Feb 19th on the topic of the distributed web.

---

Join us: Shaking the Money Tree of Multi-Platform Social Networks
Why Pursue a Multi-platform social network strategy? Find Out the Pros and Cons.

The panelists will be:

Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate, OpenSocial Google

Keith Rabois, Vice President Business Strategy, Slide

Steve Cohen, Head of Platform, Bebo

Ken Gullicksen, Managing Partner, Morgenthaler Ventures

Part of why I got this fantastic gig to speak was because of my recent post on How to Successfully moderate a panel, I’ll be following many of those best practices as I listed out. One of the suggestions I made is to get audience feedback to gauge what success would look like.

So, if you were me, what questions would you ask the panel? Leave a comment below, I’m listening and will credit you if the question is asked.

12 comments

Silicon Valley: 3 tech events every day
I also talked to a colleague and I told her that there was about 3 tech events every weekday in Silicon Valley, you can hunt through Upcoming.org, or see this list of local user groups in Silicon Valley that regularly meet.

Example: 7 events tonight
And these are just those I know of:

1 Dataportability Meetup (Chris Saad)
2 Geek Dinner with Dr. Richard Clayton (with dotBen)
3 Bowlr US (with Scoble)
4 SF PHP: OOps! The PHP Fear and Loathing Guide to Basic Object-Oriented Design
5 Orkut OpenSocial Hackathons (at GooglePlex)
6 How to Effectively Use Social Media for Search Marketing Campaigns (Joey Wan)
7 And I’ll be speaking at the Deal Maker Media tonight

Join me at the Community Roundtable (hosted at Forrester)
Feb 28th | 530pm | Foster City, CA
I’ll be adding to the busy-ness of the valley. I’m pleased to be hosting my first real event at Forrester, on Feb 28th, we’ll have those who lead community efforts in Silicon Valley over for an open discussion at our Foster City branch. (HQ is in Cambridge) It’s a free event, many of the folks I know, and I really welcome them with open arms. As an analyst this works perfectly, as I’m researching and writing reports on online communities, social networks, and widgets, I’ll give the attendees a choice to get their hand on the report. Bill Johnston the organizer since 2005 has the details on how you can attend. A few rules, no vendor pitches, and there’s a ’soft NDA’ where much of the content shared from attendees will not be made public (although the concepts will be).

Here’s a few other events I’ll be speaking at in Feb-March
I’ve indicated which ones are public conferences, so I hope you consider attending.

Online Community Keynote, The Knight Journalism School | UC Berkeley, March 27, 2008

Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives | Mountain View, March 25th

SNAP Summit (Public Conference) | San Francisco, March 25th

SXSW (Public Conference) | Austin, March 7-11th

Graphing Social Patterns by O’Reilly (Public Conference)| San Diego, March 3-4

Internet Strategy Forum | San Francisco, Feb 27

Shaking the Money Tree of Multi-Platform Social Networks | Stanford, Feb 19

Web 2.0 Marketing: What’s Real and What’s Hype (Microsoft/MarketingProfs | Webinar, Feb 14

DealMaker Media, Social Networking ‘08 | San Francisco, Feb 7 (that’s tonight)

I really hope to see you out at these events, if you’ve any events in your area (and not in Silicon Valley) feel free to leave a comment or a link. Spread the word.

1 comment

[Above: I peered over the balcony to take a shot of the main hall]

I attended the Customer Service is the new Marketing Summit in San Francisco, really a tremendous view, weather, and vibe at the Presidio a converted military base with a great view. (Both my Grandfathers were officers and used to attend events there).

Think about that concept for a second, the new marketing is actually the customer experience. Absolutely, and with social media, friends will tell friends about their experience with a company, thus impacting how traditional marketing used to flow –now it will be direct from customer to prospect.

They handed this company customer pact document to all attendees, please take a look, I think it’s fantastic, and I’ll hold myself to making sure people I talk to in the industry upload this, and that I also follow these rules.

I was asked to give two sessions on Online Community Best Practices (my coverage area as an analyst) and we had a great sessions on contributors at each of the two meetings.

Although I’ll keep the specifics anonymous, we had startups, small companies, large companies from many different walks of life.

I structured the workshop where we’d identify key problems, then would get folks to share their different best practices, and I’d be sure to add my own. I promised to share all the content and here it is:

---

Findings from the Online Community Best Practices Workshop
Here’s what the attendees at my workshop said were important to them

The Many Objectives of Communities

Insight from customers, give them a voice

Better experience

A social experience, where common folks get to hang out

Get users to know that they are a human company, and support

Building communities around products, and to learn from customers

New users don’t know how to start. Or are unclear of what to do

50 million customers, get them to self support

For a low engagement product, how do you get them to be sticky so they are top of line next time it’s time to buy

Bringing service innovation to a higher level, getting constituents to collaborate

Issues: Raising awareness to get customers to use community, the value is low

Improve customer support issues

Collaborate and get customers to internal

The Many Benefits of having a community

Decreased Cost of Support

Increased Revenue

SEO

Improved Loyalty

Transparency: less time spent on marketing programs as they use

Consumer Trust and improve

The many costs of communities

Moderation costs

Negative discussions, or not dealing with them, lack of control

Difficulty monetizing social networks

Cost to take action on what customers ask for, closing the loops costs money

Development costs

Surveys and samples

Measurements

Different ways with Dealing with Detractors

Varies in every situation

1 to Many communications

They have a process is in place

Make them feel heard

Compensate them (depending on severity)

Creating a direct feedback place, rather than having in community forums

Good practice: Develop process for the different types of detractors

One company categorized members to put them into different buckets

Having a good tone, being consistent with all members

General Best Practices
In this final topic, I asked all attendees to participate and share what works for them

Trust is the foundation of every community

Great relationships with members that want to share

Make sure every question that is asked gets an appropriate answer

Create a year long plan, so it’s effective across the business, thinking strategic

Create valuable content

Recognize valuable contributors

Have knowledgeable moderators

Incorporate it into your products

Being Human: Make sure that people know that the community manager is a real person

Acknowledge people

Loyalty programs

Focus on experience

Quality Content

Ask permission: Ask the members if we can reach out and talk to them first

Start threads with questions to get the conversations going

Help users connect with other users, identify ‘super users’

You can never give too much information

Encouraging feedback from the community

Always have a direct email so it can encourage rapid response

Rewarding and recognizing members that have done good work

Embrace what the community is actually doing

Acknowledge when people are right –even if they are hostile

Bubbling up information, turning things into FAQs

Internal encouragement for employees (points)

Every question that someone else can answer, have it answered by the right person

Track Google Alerts, if someone tracks outside the community pull them in.

Be transparent, let the community monitor and police itself (rather than the company taking too much control)

Reward and thank users that participate

Plan and integrate internal knowledge bases

At Forrester, I’m publishing a handful of reports on this topic, they will be available to clients, or you can purchase them on the site, they are very, very succint and tell you what to do do have a successful community.

Didn’t attend the event? Andy took notes Ideas from Customer Service is the New Marketing #3, Christine has captured why Zappos Shares Secrets of 75% Repeat Business Ross Mayfield shares his insight Geek Squad on Marketing is a Tax You Pay for Being Unremarkable, and a few others according to Technorati.

11 comments

I like Lena, she writes an insightful post suggesting that the same ol’ speakers at conferences is getting boring, I agree. She makes a call that we need diversity in our speakers and asks where all the social media female speakers are at.

I left four comments on her blog of different speakers that are female and focus on the social media industry, please swing by and leave some other examples, hopefully conference organizers will see this, and attract new talent. I listed out:

Tara Hunt (social media/anti-marketing marketing)

Connie Benson (community)

KD Paine (Social Media Measurement)

Jennifer Jones (Marketing Voices Podcast)

Any of the blogher founders

Deb Schultz -Social Media Marketing

Heather Champ –Flickr

Teresa Valdez Klein, she’s really fantastic.

Charlene Li, my colleague at Forrester

Know of other female speakers who rock at social media? Leave a comment here or over at Lena’s blog

Some conferences are pretty balanced, for example today, I’ll be at the Customer Service is the New Marketing conference at the presidio in SF, it’s being put on by the Get Satisfaction team (a website that is a disruption to your corporate website) I’ll be running a workshop on online community best practices (and area of coverage as an analyst) and will be leading the attendees to share their best practices. I’ll be capturing the top attendee responses and will share via this blog. Many of the speakers are female, it appears to be a mixed crowd.

A few years ago I bitched about the lack of asian speakers, and ended up creating this list. I guess if I’m over-exposed now, then things have certainly shifted.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if our speakers are pink or purple, transgender or androgynous, what matters is 1) they’re experts at their field 2) great presenters 3) the audience walks away with more than they did before the session.

Update: Lena has suggested that making lists isn’t enough. I’ve send this post to an upcoming conference organizer whose having a hard time getting speakers, I hope it makes a difference. Susan Getgood says to vote with your feet, a practical approach that hits conference organizers in the wallet.

42 comments

People are still craving knowledge about social media
I just finished the social media measurement seminar with Glenn Fannick of Dow Jones (Update: He’s since posted some poll results). It was a free seminar, so there were a lot of registrants (over 1100) the actual attendee roster was over 600, but what was most impressive was the engagement of the audience, there were lots of responses to the three polls we queried and over 190 questions. Justin Flowers said he learned a lot from the webinar (his expectations were low since it was free), and there are dozens of responses within Twitter. The webinar will be available for anyone, and the slides, so stay tuned for that.

Yet, many organizations have not adopted
One of the questions from the crowd was “how do I convince my management to embrace this new social media world?” It was interesting to hear that many folks are having a hard time convincing their management to join in this scary new online world, where customers are talking directly to prospects and your employees are no where to be seen. Convincing management (often digital immigrants) to join the online world (where digital natives live) can be challenging.

Look at the coming generation
I suggested that a conversation start with executives about the changes in communication, and if they have pictures of kids of their desk, that’s a good way to start the conversation. Ask you senior leaders how their kids communicate, if they don’t (perhaps they’re too busy running the company) ask them to take a closer look, and get back to you. My former CEO analyzed that his kids were using IM on PC, surfing the web, Text messaging on phone, school work on the couch next to them and the TV on in the background…and that was considered studying!

Immigrants vs Natives, guess who wins?
This next generation of digital immigrants are using the the web and other digital channels to communicate, update each other, and talk (Forrester’s 2007 stats indicates nearly two-thirds of teens access a social network at least once a month) and nearly 1/3 of adults access social networks a month. This doesn’t include other tools, just social networks. The truth is, this next generation of natives will enter the workforce with connections to employees, customers, prospects, partners, and even competitors, firms must be ready.

Getting started
So, for those guides that are leading the immigrants, start by education, focus on the opportunities and risks, and come forth to executives with a plan. More on that in the future.

---

Update: Brij has some analysis on our webinar and posted the poll results.. If you review our webinar and blog it, (even if you don’t agree with us) let me know and I’ll link to it.

Missed the webinar and want to read the highlights? Heather Havenstein of Computer World has a great write up: Companies must listen to the Web 2.0 world. Those that ignore social media critics risk being blindsided by negative comments, experts say. More thoughts from direct news.

16 comments

Yesterday, I moderated another panel, (here’s a review) and I’m told by the conference organizers it went well. I’ve managed panels of dueling CEOs in the same industry, and even one of the most popular panels at the Web 2.0 Expo between the very outgoing Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo and Thomas Hawk.

Sadly, the value of most panels are really poor, and this is mostly due to the lack of moderation. Just yesterday, I heard that one nervous moderator asked the panelists to introduce themselves, then went directly to Q&A, providing little structured value to the audience. On the complete opposite end, I’ve seen one self-important moderator answer questions from the crowd, when it was his job to field questions to the panelists.

How to Successfully Moderate a Conference Panel:

---

Objectives and Ideology

Think of the audience as your customers
Treat the audience like your customers, they’ve paid with money and time to come to your panel. Your job is to give them the information they need, or to entertain them, and often both. You’ve one of the most difficult jobs as you’ll have to set the pace, maintain some control, but know when to back off. Remember that you’re here to serve the audience first and panelists second.

Picking the right panel members
Often, a moderator is asked to select the panel, this isn’t always the case, but you are likely going to be involved. Find folks that don’t always agree, and look for experts in the field. I find that 3-4 panelists is great, any less becomes difficult to flesh out all the points of view, and anymore becomes unwieldy. One time, I was 1 of 5 panelists, and I think I spoke a total of 5 minutes, a real waste of time.

Find out what success looks like
Look at the context of the conference, what is it about? who is attending? what are the other panels? Ask the conference organizers what success would look like, what questions does the audience want answered and what is their level of sophistication?

---

Preparation

Get to know the panelists
This is often difficult as many panels never meet in advance, but in our social world many folks are online and can be found. Do Google searches on their name and the topic at hand, and you may be surprised what you find online.

Research the topic
The most entertaining panels have a dash of debate, look at an issue from many angels, practical steps to get started, and tell a few jokes. Find where the points of contention are and be sure to bring it up, this is how you’ll bill the panel. Use a blog post, Twitter or other feedback tool to glean questions from the community.

Properly market the panel
Successful panels will often have a title that is catchy, in tune for the conference, and has a detailed summary of what the audience will get out of it. You should blog about the upcoming panel, and the panelists should too.

Develop agenda bulletpoints
I try to establish some general high level bullets, 3-5 is good, so it helps the panelists to prepare and research. Don’t get into overly detailed questions, you never want them to be overly rehereased. I always have some secondary questions if no one asks questions, and it’s best to throw some curve balls to panelists after they warm up.

Have prepared notes
Print out the research you did of their bios, points of contention, the high level agenda, and follow up questions you may want to do. I’m known for requiring the panelists to bring a case study or example with measurable results.

Before you use powerpoints, really think it through
In most cases, panels should focus on the discussion and interaction between the panelists. Presentations should only be used in these situations: They add value by visualizing a conceptual concept, you’ve some industry stats that preface the event, or there’s a funny video that gets the crowd warmed up. Have a mental checklist: Is this going to add value? Does this give each panelist an equal response? Is this truly necessary?

Have a pre-briefing meeting
It’s really hard to get panelists to all get on the phone together, I can only think of a few times when this has worked. Instead, have a quick meeting in person before the panel actually happens, it will only take 15 minutes. This is good bonding time, be sure to remind them of the general structure, but make sure they’re relaxed and going to have fun. Listen carefully to the conversation, as you’ll pick up interest points that will help you setup questions while on stage.

Housekeeping
Prepare all your notes, laptops, make sure everyone has water before you get on stage, in some cases, plan out where folks will sit. Remind the panelists, yourself, and the audience to turn off cell phones. Smile a lot, and have fun…ok, now we get on stage.

---

On Stage

Be a leader and know the impact of body language
I’ve studied this a few times, when I moderate, the body language I give off will be echoed by the panelists. If I sit up straight, or if you fidget, they will follow, the same happens when you speak. Look at the panelist when you ask a question, then look at the audience, If you look at the panelists after you’ve asked a question, they will instinctively look back at you, it can be odd. Unless responding to another panelists, the panelist should be addressing the audience so keep your attention on the audience.

Set the stage by providing context
As the first speaker the moderator should set the stage by quickly give an overview of why this panel was accepted, and what you’re going to cover. I tend to avoid the usual banter about ‘how this panel is going to be great’ or make length introductions about panelists, that usual pretty-talk is often low value.

The first question should be a warm up
You should tee-up the crowd, and the panelists by asking a broad, easy question. Ask for a definition, or talk about the history of the topic, or why this topic is so interesting to the panelists.

Ask about benefits and opportunities
Some moderators let them conversation dive into the weeds too fast, focusing on ratty details, nuts and bolts before prefacing ‘why’ these things are important in the first place. Guide the panelists to discuss the benefits, and why these things are great in the first place.

Ask about risks, challenge the panel
The audience is tired of industry zealots. We all know the panelists are passionate experts in their field, but you need to ensure a balanced viewpoint is given. Give an example of how it’s not worked, and then ask the panelists to explore the risks. Give them the opportunity to talk about overcoming pitfalls, your audience won’t want to make the same mistakes.

Monitor the back channel
Monitor the “backchannel” which are conversations in IRC, Meebo, or Twitter about your panel. After the very disruptive revolt at SXSW 2008, moderators and speakers need to pay attention to how the audience (customers) are responding to what’s happening on stage. (added March 2008)

---

When to Assert Control

Never let panelists pitch
This one really irritates the audience, as they’ve spent time and money investing in a panel, they don’t want to hear vendor pitches. Typically, when one vendor talks about how great his company is, the next panelists will need to one-up, and it never ends. The moderator needs to pre-warn panelists that won’t tolerate this vile deed, and will cut them off in public, and that’s embarrassing for everyone. BTW: If you’re in the audience and you see this happen, you have a right as a customer to demand them to stop.

…but let them tell a case study
I prefer that panelists demonstrate their expertise by showing their experts in the field, or provide a case study how their customers have been successful. There is a very thin division between this and a vendor pitch, so it’s best to remember that a panel is more like a white paper, not a brochure.

Keep on track
Panels will often get off-track to new discussions, while that’s certainly normal, your job is to gently bring it back into context. You’ll have to re frame a question or ask for further explanation on the topic.

Redirect panel hogs
Although rare, some panelists will overstep themselves and overpower the other panelists. It’s your duty to find an appropriate time (watch for when they breathe) and interject in a nice way. Compliment their opinion, and be sure to pass a question to the deserving panelist. (Insights from a concall with Warren Pickett of Ad:Tech)

---

Interaction gives life to a panel

Listen in
Watch the body language of the panelists, the one who wants to get a word in will be giving you non-verbal indicators, the audience will give off vibes of attention, boredom, or even disagreement. You’ll find little disagreements between panelists, be sure to pick up on those to segue to the next panelists, ask them for a contradictory point of view. This can be difficult.

Let the panelists talk to each other
Don’t over structure your panel by leading into a moderator question and response pattern alone, allow for some healthy banter between the panelists, and let them chatter, jab, and joke among each other.

Know when to pass the mic
Don’t let any particular panelists dominate the session over others, you can interject between their breathes and quickly pose the same question to the other panelists. I realize this seems rude, but this is your job, you represent the audiences time

Know when to shut up
I’ve been a panelist many times, and have certainly been annoyed when some moderators go too far, they may try to make it more of a game show, insert too much humor, or answer the questions from the audience. Don’t be that guy. Success happens when good conversation starts to take place on it’s own, and you only need to gently guide.

Field questions from the audience
Always repeat the question from the audience, so everyone can hear and it’ll get on any recordings. Summarize long winded questions from the audience. Don’t let an over active commentator steal the show by asking too many questions, suggest that some discussion can be followed-up after the event. If there are no mics in the audience, you may need to walk down and bring the mic to them. Ensure that the questions are spread from different folks, and only let a single person ask a second question once everyone has had a chance.

---

Wrapping things up

Ending the panel
Finally, at the end, let the members talk about where they can be found online, or where others can learn more about them. It’s best if you start, in order to set an example. “I work at company X in Y role, I can be found online at Z”. Thank the panel and audience, then prepare for the audience to come up to the stage and have 1:1 discussions.

Encourage the discussion to move online
Often the conversation between the panelists and members was so engaging that the never want to stop discussing it. Create a wiki, forum, or Facebook group to continue the conversation. Also assign tags at the session so that anyone who is blogging about it will be found. If you’re a blogger you may want to write up a wrap-up and link to anyone who took pictures. Thanks to Zena in the comments for this suggestion.

Final touches
Later, send a thank you email to all the panelists, keep in touch with them, and always cherish how well this has gone for you. Congrats, you’ve just moderated a successful panel!

---

This is just my perspective, be sure to read what others have written on this topic:

eHow: How to Moderate a Panel

Derek Powazek: How to Moderate a panel

Guy Kawasaki: How To Be a Great Moderator

Paul Kedrosky: 10 Rules for Being a Great Panel Moderator

If this post helped you moderate a panel, or you’ve further suggestions, please leave a comment.

Update: April 2008
This post has now become recommended reading for moderators at Ad:Tech and Web 2.0 Expo.

44 comments

Marketing Profs, a great resource for Marketers, has hired me as a Forrester Analyst to present this webinar on Facebook this Thursday, it’s 90 minutes and just over a hundred bucks “Strategy First on Facebook: Opportunities of a Ready-Made Marketing Platform“. If your boss is asking you to develop a plan to think about Facebook, this will be a great primer to move you forward. It’s based on the keynote I gave at the Web Community Forum, but with some updated content as the website has since changed. Hope to see you there.

A few things you should know about Facebook: It’s the second largest social network, second to MySpace in North America, many of the registered are college educated the growth segment if folks over 30, it’s not just for students. It was the first to let third party developers create mini applications called “widgets”, and has recently been in the press for it’s innovative yet controversial privacy concerns over user data and the Beacon/social ads feature.

If you’ve other Facebook trivia you want to share, leave a comment below.

6 comments

I just spent the last two days exploring nearly all aspects of Facebook with 100 brands, marketers, widget companies, and developers at Seattle’s Web Community Forum (with a focus on Facebook). Some have had success (some were strategic…others were in the right place at the right time), but many are trying to make sense of what to do.

But what does it all mean, what’s the big takeaway? A few high-level themes that I observed:

1. Hard to keep up: Facebook platform is constantly changing
Nearly every developer who presented mentioned that the Facebooks developer platform F8 is constantly changing, and sometimes without notice, it’s difficult to keep up. New features are released (such as the ability to read messages in external email) without warning, and major changes are made that can impact privacy (Newsfeed and Beacon) with little warning to the community. On the brand side, some expressed they were still trying to understand all the different features and tools. Facebook is like an evolving operating system.

2. There are so many features or products –overwhelming for brands We had several sessions showing the many features of Facebook, the 80/20 rule of feature adoption probably holds true. Most of us just use a small portion of features for most of the time. I learned a few new things: I didn’t realize that applications could be put on top of Facebook pages (fan pages), there’s an interesting dynamic there, except for the fact that most applications won’t serve a large brand. With so many features and combinations, it’s difficult for brands to keep up.

3. Advertising effectiveness questioned, although hasn’t been fully explored A few times, the click through rates were challenged for ads, banners, and contextual or social ads. In only one case did I hear that one advertiser created a very focused ad campaign (towards college-bound high school students) received low click through rates, but once the users made it over to her site, the conversion was at 40%, that’s very high. With that said, I’ve yet to hear of a large brand use a balanced advertising campaign on Facebook, a combination of Facebook pages, ads, social ads, banner ads, and applications in an integrated way.

4. Despite privacy issues, majority of users will continue on
The majority of Facebook users (and internet users at large) are unaware or don’t care about how their information is being used online. Proof? I’ve lectured my kid-sisters in college on what’s appropriate, I’m not sure if she understood. Despite the major concerns for user privacy, a majority of users will continue to live life online as normal, they will only become concerned once it impacts them. I still think the majority of internet users are sheep, they follow the behind of the sheep in front of them.

5. Many widget creators are planning for other networks
Some of the widget networks I’ve been talking to (I’m starting to get briefed by others) are looking NOT just at Facebook as the sole place to deploy, but on other networks. It makes sense, yet there are two major challenges: 1) Each community is different, so expecting widgets to work universally across all social networks is unwise. 2) APIs and platforms for each social network are radically different, so many applications have to be rebuilt.

6. A mini eco-system has emerged
Building off the previous bullet, a new service industry has appeared. I made at least two introductions for my clients that were present (at their request) to widget developers for Facebook (which are very hard to find now a days). We should also expect a new service provider to emerge that will help widget developers quickly port applciations to many social networks –sort of a ‘widget/container integration specialist’. Lastly, the conference itself was a nod to this future industry, I mentioned to the press over a call that 12 months ago, no one had even expected that a conference on Facebook would emerge, yet there are at least 4 this year.

7. The “Distributed Web Strategy” starts to take hold
In more than one presentation did the theme of “Fish where the fish are” resonate. Brands, companies, and marketers, need to stop focusing so hard on ‘driving traffic to my irrelevant corporate website (translated into 8 languages now)‘ and now start thinking about joining communities where they exist, where the trust is highest, and being part of the communities that are naturally forming online. This also means that any brand who is focused on a Facebook strategy alone is missing the picture, the scope should be to wherever online communities are forming in their marketplace.

My upcoming research reports are focused on Online Communities and Social Networks, I was able to formerly interview many of the community strategists or community managers that are living in the day to day, they’ve shared quite a bit with me. Many of those who I interviewed for my research I also did some mini-video interviews, you’ll see them published over the next few days.

For some research that is available from Bill Johnston check out this report Online Community ROI Best Practices Survey (PDF) from Forum One. On question 9 on budgets for online communities, is that monthly or yearly? Also, in the metrics that are reported back to management, how come ‘attention’ isn’t listed? (Update: Bill responded in the comments below, budget is annual, and attention wasn’t considered important) Great report overall, if you’re in the space, you should read that, and attend their events –I’ve been to a few, and will attend future ones.

Ok, now back to you, what other large themes and trends are you seeing? Care to dispute any of these observations?

15 comments

See you in Seattle
I’ll be in Seattle at the Web Community Forum (a focus on Facebook) and will be delivering the opening keynote, Justin has the highlights. If you check out the schedule you’ll see there’s a really interesting mix of discussions, both pro and con. I’ll be pretty objective in my keynote, demonstrating the opportunities, but also highlighting the risks of brands doing it wrong.

Brands need a strategy
The crux of my presentation will advise that brands need to first develop a strategy: Identify who’s in Facebook (is that even your market?), figure out what is it that you’re trying to accomplish (to learn, to talk, viral spread, to build better products, etc) develop a plan, then lastly, figure out which of the different tools are available. So many brands have inverted this and are doing it completely backwards. This is the same methodology that Charlene and Josh perscribe at Forrester. You may have read my previous rants that brands first need a strategy.

Is Facebook really worth $100,000,000,000.00?
On the second day, I’m really curious to hear Lee Lorenzen’s opener, he thinks that Facebook is worth $100 Billion. I’ll be tweeting (from Twitter) that morning all the key nuggets on why he says that, so add me as friend to tune in, even if remote. If you’re going, I’m looking forward to seeing you, I think there’s a group of folks that are getting together for dinner on Tuesday night.

With social networks comes nearly unlimited business opportunities
I rarely request people to be my friend on Facebook, I have an open policy that if you add me, I’ll add you back. People often ask me are those your real friends? Some yes, but most are not. This has become a rolodex for me, and unlike some business social networks, I have a better understanding of who these people are, what they like, and their interests. In many ways, my network is nearly unlimited now, and with that comes nearly unlimited opportunities and possibilities.

From web to print to web
A few weeks ago, Leah Jones and myself (and the Blue Monster) were featured on the front page of the Business section of the Chicago Tribune, including a screenshot of my Facebook profile. It’s a bit sureal, as my real life pictures was put online on a social network, which was then put on print, which I now share online.

Thanks to Leah Jones, and Jay Rudman, for sending me the paper clippings.

6 comments