Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy

Sounds like a lawfirm, eh?

The latest Biz 2.0 has an excellent article about Wikipedia, Wales new , for profit venture Wikia, and provides a good bit of insight into Wales himself.

One of the articles best quotes comes from Gil Penchia, CEO of Wikia, commenting on the company’s mission:

“We are a for-profit company, but our investors and employees are equally focused on the social mission,” Penchina says. “We hope to prove that you can build a sustainable business without copyrights, to serve our communities, and to enable advocacy on important topics like politics.”

The article also has a great sidebar called “The Wales Rules for Web 2.0″. There are 5:

1. Be Proactive

“I find the term ‘crowdsourcing’ incredibly irritating,” Wales says. “Any company that thinks it’s going to build a site by outsourcing all the work to its users not only disrespects the users but completely misunderstands what it should be doing. Your job is to provide a structure for your users to collaborate, and that takes a lot of work.”

2. Be Transparent

“When you build a social network, you’re asking people to use your facilities to build a community,” Wales says. “If you have a lot of secret mechanisms that regulate your site, people aren’t going to feel comfortable. It’s about building trust.”

3. Be Frugal

“You don’t build a community by just pouring money into it. It takes time. You have to grow it in a healthy way,” he (Wales) says.

4. Be True to Your Brand

“Really successful businesses and organizations build something so that people immediately know what they’re about,” Wales says. “You’re building a level of trust so that people know what they’re getting.”

5. Be Trusting

“Some sites have a lot of controls to prevent bad behavior,” Wales says. “But they end up preventing spontaneous good behavior.”

It’s official, the community 2.0 conference agenda has been confirmed.
http://community2-0con.com/?page_id=4

My sessions are:

Monday, March 12, 2007 ~ 1:45 – 2:30pm (I. THEORY & STRATEGY)
Understanding the Basic Strategies for Business Communities
Speakers: Bill Johnston, Forum One
Anders Nancke-Kroch, Nokia
Sonali Shah, Univ. of Illinois
In this session we will review the basic strategies for integrating business communities into specific business processes. Why should you do it? What are the investments required to setting up communities? When are you better off playing in someone else’s sandbox instead of creating your own community?

Tuesday, March 13, 2007 ~ 11:00 – 11:45am (III. APPLICATIONS & BEST PRACTICES)
Community ROI - Return on Information
Speakers: Matthew Lees, Patricia Seybold Group
Anders Nancke-Kroch, Nokia
Bill Johnston, Forum One Communications (formerly of Autodesk)
John Winsor, Radar Communications
This session will explore how to measure success in business communities. Is the new ROI “return on information”? Do you measure success by looking at how much content gets created and consumed? Who are the metrics providers? Can you audit you business communities to measure how well they are performing?

—
Are you going? If so, drop me a note and let’s connect!

bjohnston at forumone.com

Everyone loves a mystery, including Trent Reznor, apparently.

A few weeks ago I read about a new NIN song being leaked by being left in a bathroom on a flash drive. I had no idea it was part of an elaborate backstory to the new Nine Inch Nail’s concept album “Year Zero”

From RS’s “Rock and Roll Daily”:

“It all started with a NIN tour T-shirt. An overeager fan realized that the bolded letters on the back formed a phrase: iamtryingtobelieve, which if you add a .com to the end of it, takes us to the first piece of the puzzle. Here, we learn about the drug Parepin, which has been added to the water supplies of Orlando as protection against similar acts of bio-terrorism against Los Angeles and Anaheim in 2009 (or -13 BA…try to keep up).”

The Echoing the sound site appears to be the nexus of the community springing up around the experience.

As someone who used to devour the liner notes of every cd I bought, and spend hours listening to music with my friends, I find this fascinating. Trent Reznor & co. have created a mythology and a community for the upcoming album, well before the release date.

Cross-posted from the Online Community Report blog:

One of the topics of most interest to me is the concept of a universal online identity, and the supporting set of preferences that would follow me throughout my digital day, tailoring my content and experiences. With compelling new sites popping up every week, and a lack of a widely adopted identity standard, most of us are left with millions of little digital pieces of ourselves scattered all over the web, and as many disparate experiences.

As an individual, the value of having a more complete digital picture of our online activities would be the improvement of content selection and presentation (amazon, google, tivo). There is also some value in the convenience of centrally managing a login and profile for multiple sites. Site owners would benefit from easier information collection and more robust reputation management. Site owners and marketers would benefit from a more complete and accurate picture of members and their preferences (which is also a little scary).

There are some seriously large issues with a centralized identity and profile system, most notably privacy. There are tremendous technical challenges as well, not to mention the fact that there is little financial incentive for most online communities and profile-driven sites to adopt a common identity standard.

Still, interesting things are happening as some sites start to provide APIs to their services and content. Frank Gruber’s blog has a decent overview of some of the leading profile aggregation services:
http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2007/02/the_web_profile.html

And AOL is experimenting with OpenID:
http://dev.aol.com/aol-and-63-million-openids

And Microsoft has weighed in (Thanks Kurt):

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/302830_msftopenid08.html

I’ve have had the best last 24 hours…

Yesterday at 11am I participated with Matthew Lee and Patricia Seybold in a web conference about measuring value in online communities. You can see the event details and view an archive here.

This morning I sent out the NEW Online Community Report newsletter. I’m really proud of the format and the content, especially of the interview with my former collegue at TechRepublic, Shawn Morton.

Cross-posted from the Online Community Report blog:

I attended the CommunityNext conference at Stanford yesterday, hosted by the kinetic Noah Kagan. My only disappointment was that I never found out if Noah actually does still live with his Mother. And the fact that there was no wifi.

You can see a copy of the day’s agenda here, http://www.communitynext.com/schedule/

With 1 day conferences I usually expect to take away 2-3 interesting ideas, and if I walk away with anything beyond that I am pleasantly surprised. I got (at least) 7, and I will be mulling over the content and interactions for the next few days.

My Observations:
1. Online Community = Lot’s of buzz. We are quickly reaching the fever-pitch interest and attention level with “online community”. The term “community” is hitting buzzword status (again). The usual debates on definition, value, ethics and legitimacy have begun among the “community” of practitioners and proponents. That is a good thing (i think) as we all try to make sense of what it really means this time around.
2. Brand Utopia - Josh Spear and Aaron Dignan presented the “brand utopia”, a mystical state where companies engage and delight customers, have purpose beyond commerce, and generally make the world a better place.
3. Advertising & Community- Heather Luttrell of 3jane and indieclick showed how Advertisers and Communities are (sorta) living in harmony. The key is tailoring messages and ad products to the community, and community hosts working with advertisers and agencies to educate on the idiosyncracies of their communities.
4. skinnyCorp - Do what you love / love what you do. Awesomely. I was really prepared to tune these guys out before their presentation even started. I have to say, Jeffrey and Jake won me over quickly with their un-powerpoint approach. It’s obvious that these guys are serious about creating a killer product (never good enough), nurturing their community, and most importantly, having fun. And saying awesome.
5. Mobile is coming. I saw several m-community solutions demoed, the most impressive being Loopt.
6. Kiva is just incredible. This microlending service is an awesome example of the possible social good that can come from online community.
7. James Hong and Drew Curtis , of Hot or Not and Fark fame, are as funny as you would expect them to be.

Overall, the event was very fun. I ran in to several friends and acquaintances from the Online Community Roundtable, as well as a few folks that I haven’t seen for years. The sessions were fairly short (usually 45 minutes), so there wasn’t a lot of time for deep dives on topics, or for Q&A in most sessions. All in all, well worth the drive down to Palo Alto.

A lot of the attendees blogged or are blogging about their experiences. I found Rohit’s summary to be particularly good”
http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2007/02/10_secrets_of_s.html

You can find other entries by searching Technorati with the tag communitynext.

Pics:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/communitynext/

Mukund at the Best engaging Communities blog called this morning with news that Cisco has acquired is in the process of aquiring Five Apart.

I guess they are serious about this “Human network thing.

More here.

And the official cisco press release.

From the Brand Summit.

Jeff Cole’s presentation on tracking online community participation.

A few interesting slides, especially the 3 labeled “life of a 12-24″,” 25 - 54″, and” 55+”. Nothing really shocking here… all the kidee-loos (12-24) will be connected to and use the net exclusively on their mobiles, and won’t read newspapers (still don’t buy it). The 25-54 y/o set use RSS and aggregate content online, and create content to “share reviews… but not intimacies” (somebody should tell Dooce). The 55+ set will only go online to see the grandkids and to email… ok, this I buy. Actually, I don’t buy this one either. It occured to me this morning that I know tons of folks over 55 who are very technically savvy.

Some potentially interesting slides are unreadable, because the labels on the x axis are obscured.

With 6 years of data from the “Surveying the Digital Future” project, I’m sure Dr Cole is sitting on tons of interesting Community participation data. I’m not sure it was presented here.

I’m part of the following webinar discussion. Please check it out:

Webinar: Measuring the Success of Online Communities
February 13, 2007 - 11am (PT) / 2pm (ET)

How do you know if your existing community is adding value and being successful? How do you build a business case for launching a new community?Some success measures of online communities can be tougher to observe and quantify than others. People working in the online community space tend to feel at a gut level that building and fostering such communities provides many benefits to the organizations that sponsor them, as well as to the community’s members. But not every business person shares this innate understanding. Companies typically need more than anecdotal information to justify the resources required –dollars, personnel, and advocacy – that communities need.

Is it over already?

In a recent post on AO, Tony P. says that “Pretty soon, I predict we’ll see one of the well-known, over-funded brands like Technorati, PodTech, or Brightcove outed by a site like TechDirt or Valleywag for having had a major layoff or down investment round. We’ve already seen early high-flyers like Friendster and Odeo stumble and fall, and many more will certainly follow.”

While I agree that the tech sector, and especially the web 2.0 set is due for a bit of consolidation (how many video sharing sites do we need?), I think that a full on, late 90s meltdown is a little far-fetched.

Some of these startups may be over funded… but just think about those big piles of money the VCs were sitting on while the remnants of Bubble 1.0 blew over