Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy

Please note: This is cross-posted from the Online Community Report.

The Marketing & Online Communities conference is coming up November 8 in NYC. We are holding it at the superfly Tribeca Grand hotel. Did I say superfly? Indeed.

Speaking of superfly, I started pinning down advisors and speakers this week. The ideal mix we are going for is approximately 40% innovative agency content, 40% community host content, and 20% corporate marketing / brand management content.

I’m pleased that I’ve been able to secure two of the people that I am paying attention to with regard to “marketing / pr 2.0″ practices:

Tim Manners - Cool News of the Day / Reveries
Steve Rubel - Micro Persuasion / Edelman

I have approximately 10 slots to fill, and lots of calls this week and next, so expect that list to grow fast. If you have speakers or session ideas you would like to pitch, please let me know ASAP.

I’ve posted a tentative session list for the conference on the M&OC details page here:
http://www.forumone.com/moc

I’ll also list it here, but be sure to check back on the events page, as that’s the one that will be kept up to date.

Tentative Schedule:
8:30 - 9:00 Registration

9:00 - 9:30 Introductions

9:30 - 10:30 Session 1: Marketing to Communities - The Brand “Us”

10:30 - 11:00 Break

11:00 - 12:15 Session 2: Anatomy of an Integrated Campaign

12:15 - 1:30 Lunch

1:30 - 2:30 Break out Sessions
- Creating successful campaigns targeted at established communities
- Hosting the premier community for your Brand
- Common Ground: Communities and Agencies working together

2:30 - 3:00 Break

3:00 - 3:30 Sponsor Demos

3:30 - 4:30 Session 4: The Future of Community-based Marketing

4:30 - 6:00 Reception

Again, feel free to contact me with any speaker or topic suggestions.

I have had my iphone since around lunch today, when FedEx dropped it off.

I have to say, I LOVE IT. I really haven’t even used it as a phone yet… I think I’ve made 2 calls all day. I seriously can’t stop picking it up. Ok, ok, I know I’m totally geeking out.

What do I love about it, out of the box?

• email setup: I have my work and personal account humming along, and it took less than 5 minutes. It took me an hour to set up just my work account on my bberry
• UX: this has been beaten to death, but the UX is just superb. It’s really a pleasure to use. The gesture control, like flicking and squeezing are totally natural
• ID: it’s a beautiful object. It just looks so hot.
• Media: photos, music and video… to me, these will likely be “nice to have’s”. Although, as I think about it, I watched about 30 minutes of you tube today. Haven’t done that in a while.
• Online: Apple really nailed this. IT’s not as great as sitting at my desk with my 27″ monitor and 8 gbps downstream, but it is light years away from any WAP-based web experience.

That’s all for now. I’m going to continue to play.

I’ve been subscribed to the Cool News of the Day newsletter (also available in convenient blog form) for several years. It’s the ONLY email newsletter that I read daily.

Cool News highlights innovation in marketing strategy and execution. A lot of the articles skew towards retail, but they  is always some gem of information in each of the articles.

As an aside, I’m pretty sure that Tim Manners, the editor, is going to join us on the Advisory Board for the Marketing & Online Communities conference.

Joi Podgorny had an excellent post yesterday… mostly about LinkedIn bashing, and general snarkiness of late in the debate about Facebook vs. (insert your favorite social network / social media tool here).

One point she makes in the post is that it is still *really* early in the game. Those of us using social networking and media tools are the early adopters. I tend to forget this, as I am on the periphery of the bay area tech hype bubble, which tends to be self-referential and self-absorbed.

The Numbers:

From http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

• Global Population: 6,574,666,417
• Global Internet Users: 1,154,358,778

Sourced from Wikipedia:

• My Space Members: 106,000,000
• Linked Members: 10,000,000
• Facebook Members: 30,000,000

So, assuming that these numbers are in the neighborhood of legit, the best of the best social network only has ~10% global penetration.

It’s easy to forget that it is still early.

Howdy all. I thought it was worth a quick update to explain my blog absence. I understand that this is sort of a rite of passage in some cultures

I’ve been offline for most of the last week because my Grandmother  Johnston passed away last Monday. I caught the redeye last Tuesday night from SFO to SDF (Louisville to those of you not familiar with KY airports), and then drove an hour south to my home town of Leitchfield, KY. It was a very sad experience, but it was also great to reconnect with friends and family. And, what a family. My Grandma Johnston had a full life, and I mean full… as in she had 14 kids. I’m not kidding. I have 14 aunts and uncles, and a bazillion 1st and 2nd cousins.

While I was home, I was reminded that:

• I loved my Grandma
• I appreciate growing up in a very small community
• Family is the original social network
• CA real estate is CRAZY
• I don’t miss people smoking in public places
• You can’t get good BBQ anywhere but the south
• It’s easy to take wifi for granted in the Bay Area

More or less in that order.

Nielsen/NetRatings is dropping page views as a key site ranking metric, PaidContent.com and the AP report:

Now, news that Nielsen/NetRatings is planning a major shift in web metrics, moving, according to the AP, from page views as the key metric to time spent on a site.

This new approach will likely shake up current rankings, for instance:

…under the current system, AOL ranked sixth in total page views for May but first in total minutes: 25 billion. Using total time, Google drops to fifth from third in page views. (The reason given is Google’s mission to send people off quickly for answers; that’s probably true but ignores Google’s other mission now, which is to keep people engaged on its own sites.)

In our Online Community Metrics 2007 study (to be released in August), we found that page views were far and away the most collected and reported metric. If general confidence in this metric starts to erode, what will take its place? Is “Time spent on site” the most meaningful metrics for communities?

The other big issue is with online advertising. Most sites are using page views to correlate “impressions”, similar to traditional marketing campaigns. If page views become meaningless, who do marketers communicate value back to clients?

Cross-posted from the Online Community Report.

A cry for revolution was heard over the July 4th holiday this week, for the era of the A list bloggers to come to an end.

It all started (i think) with Kent Newsome’s pretty hilarious spoof on the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Blogging Independence, where he takes aim squarely at the Technorati Top 100.

When in the Course of online events it becomes necessary for alienated and isolated bloggers to dissolve the existing blogging hierarchy and exclusionary behavior which have disconnected them from the A-List and made them feel even more nerdy, and to assume among the multitude of powers they wish they had, the equally unattainable station to which the Laws of It Ain’t Fair entitle them, a decent respect for The Onion and Al Gore requires that they should write yet another post no one will ever read to declare the many real and imagined causes which impel them to the third party affected and now ironically embraced separation.

Others quickly joined the revolution:

Joe Duck, from his The Blogging Revolution has begun! (?) post, says:

I’m tired of reading the same old people who in some cases are too busy chasing dollars to blog nearly as creatively as they did in the old days (ie a year ago). The more ominous case is the new trend in blogging that has “A listers” effectively (even if not literally) shilling for big corporations under the provocative guise called “conversational marketing”.

And in a subsequent post actually talks about removing Alisters from his feed list.

Hugh Macleod chimes in here.

In the past, say, from the late ‘nineties until the last six-twelve months or so, Bloggers’ readership grew IN PROPORTION to the social networks that were built up around them. Hence the phenomenon of the “A-List”.

But if we’re honest, looking back, it was always these circumventing social networks that were the really interesting part of the equation. The actual blogger in question, less so. Even if in our celebrity-worshiping culture, we sometimes forgot that.

It’s interesting that some of the backlash was based on the personal accessibility of the blogger, and sometimes the overexposure of a particular blogger, either via the media or at conferences. The reality is, one persons time and attention is only so scalable.

One a personal note, I do think my habits have changed a bit over the last 6 months in that I cast a wider net than just the A-List. For me, this is mostly a byproduct of meeting several hundred new people passionate about online communities and social media because of the Forum One evens I now help run. I am exposed, face to face, to a lot more “b &c” list bloggers that have interesting and insightful things to talk about. They are actually in the trenches doing the work (managing communities, building social networks, developing new marketing techniques), as opposed to just commenting on the industry.

A very specific example of a changed habit: I read Scoble’s shared links almost daily, but I almost never read his actual blog’s feed. I’m more interested in what he is reading and what he is paying attention to.

What do you think? Are your content consumption habits changing because of social networks?

As I’ve said before, I REALLY don’t get all the hype about facebook.

Jason Kottke nails it in two with his original and clarification post comparing Facebook to AOL.

It’s just that I, unlike many other people, don’t think that Facebook and Facebook Platform are the future of the web. The platform is great for Facebook, but it’s a step sideways or even backwards (towards an AOL-style service) for the web. …

Think of it this way. Facebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN. If you’re not a Facebook user, you can’t do anything with the site…nearly everything published by their users is private.

One of the main points of value that is lost to me is my network of former colleagues at Autodesk, TechRepublic, and my former classmates at WKU. Because I no longer have access to those email addresses, I can’t join the networks. I don’t feel comfortable enough with the application to dump all my contacts in en masse.

I will likely continue to spend a few minutes in facebook every wee, but I’m pretty sure its not going to become the hub of my online social world.

I have 6 pownce invites. Please send an email to request one: billdozer@gmail.com.