Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy

We had a great group of social media and community strategists at the Online Community Roundtable at Forrester last night. A BIG thanks to Jeremiah Owyang and his colleagues at Forrester for hosting.

We had a range of organizations and perspectives represented, from non-profit, to startup to large commercial organizations. In attendance (cribbed from Jeremiah’s notes) were Intel, Webex, CyWorld, Charles and Helen Schwab Organization, Cadence, YouTube, Lithium, Leverage, LiveWorld, MotiveLab, Ringcube, Intuit, Symantec, VM Ware, Wyse, Babycenter, Tesla Motors, Joyent, SixApart, On24.

We start the evening with an hour of networking, which gives folks time to unwind and chat… and in this case de-stress from the horrible traffic. I generally start pestering folks to sign up for discussion lead slots about 30 minutes before the main session starts. We had six open slots last night, which led to 90 minutes of great discussion.

The sessions were:
1. Rich Reader: Netsquared Mashup Challenge
Rich gave an overview of the the N2Y3 Mashup Challenge. Form the Challenge FAQ it “is all about helping projects gain new insight into the data that applies to their mission-based activities. We believe that sharper insight leads to smarter decision-making about how best to spend limited resources and time.”
http://www.netsquared.org/mashup

2. Jenna Woodul and Mark Williams - LiveWorld- “Online Community Redevelopment”
Jenna and Mark walked us through a case study on reclaiming a community gone wild. The keys? Expressing and modeling the desired culture, refining the role of moderator, and, in some cases, giving the members who want to run wild a place to play that is away from the general community population.

3. Charlene Li - Forrester - “Future of Social Networks”
Charlene gave us a sneak peak at her Graphing Social Patterns presentation. I don’t think it would be fair to her to give a full brain dump of this before the conference, but one of the most interesting ideas she put forward was the coming shift from “activities happening on social networks” to “social networks happening on top of activities”

4. Ken Kaplan - Intel - “Storytelling”
Ken led a discussion on the importance of storytelling in marketing activities in general, but also the importance of allowing the community to participate in the narrative.

5. Angie Ryan - Cyworld - “Casual Gaming, Social Networks, 3D Space / VR”
Angie led a very interesting discussion on virtual worlds, and gave a comparison of Cyworld Korea with Cyworld US.

6. Chris Kenton - MotiveLab “Marketing Integration”
Chris gave an accelerated history of marketing session. The money quote? Today’s marketers are 2 generations removed from

Again, a big thanks to Jeremiah and the folks at Forrester for hosting. Want to get on the Roundtable invite list? Email me or join the Rountable Facebook group.

Update: 5:00pm
we are full! Awesome group of folks coming, including:
Autodesk, Intel, Joyen, WebEx, Cyworld, babycenter, Tesla Motors, Cisco, TechSoup and Symantec.

I’ll post a follow up tomorrow with details!
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The next Online Community Roundtable is tomorrow (Thursday, 2/2 in Foster City, from 5:30 - 8:30. Jeremiah Owyang and the folks at Forrester will host.If you are interested in attending, please drop me a note. I have a couple of seats open.

Organzations attending include: Cyworld, Cisco, VMWare, WebEx, Joyent, Intel, and Symantec.The Roundtables have been a regular, but intentionally “under the radar” gathering since July of 2005.

The intention of the events is to provide an open and safe environment for community practitioners to share experiences and best practices. It’s also an excellent excuse to have a cocktail and meet other interesting people in the space.

To get an idea of what happens at one of the Roundtables, check out this report back from a previous Roundtable at SAP.

Microsoft is hosting a Roundtable on 3/12 on campus in Redmond. Please drop me a note if you are interested in attending that one as well.

Hot on the heels of the Unconference East, we have the Mobile Communities Unconference coming up March 20th in Palo Alto.

The intention of the Mobile Communities Unconference is to explore the opportunities with building community via mobile devices. If you are developing social networking applications for mobile, or creating a strategy for extending your communities presence on to mobile devices you will likely find this event valuable.

Several factors are driving the importance and relevance of this topic, most notably the fact that the number of mobile handsets in use globally dwarfs the number of personal computers.

The shear number of mobile devices, combined with the increasing sophistication of mobile devices, increasing speed of data flowing on mobile networks, the increasingly robust web experiences available via mobiles, and the explosion in interest around social networking begs the questions:
- what impact will mobile have on pc-bound online community experiences?
- what are the unique opportunities for mobile-only experiences that transcend voice and leverage text and mobile internet access?
- when will the US catch up to the technology leaders in the mobile space, like Korea?

Mobile is such a juicy topic right now. Combine that with an Unconference format, and you have a very interesting day of discussion.

We have a great group of folks coming already. A sample of the partcipating organizations include:

- SolutionSet
- YouTube
- 3jam
- SAP
- FunMobility
- Microsoft
- CollabNet
- Liveworld
- Google
- TechSoup
- VMWARE, INC.
- Gatheringpoint Digital LLC
- Omega Mobile, Inc.
- Yahoo! Inc
- Lithium
- Digital Chocolate
- itsmylife Labs
- Alta Partners
- MobileLife Inc.

Again, we just extended early bird pricing of $145 until the end of day on Friday, 2/29.
To register, go here: http://mcu2008.eventbrite.com/

(This is cross-posted from the Online Community Report)

We had a fantastic OC Unconference East in New York City last Thursday. Over one hundred online community and social media professionals were in attendance, and we had over 40 collaborative sessions. I’ve captured highlights below. I’ve also just opened up the Unconference wiki, so you can check out the session notes for yourself.

Organizations in attendance included:
AOL, MTV, Consumers Union (consumer reports), Cyworld, Business Week, Socialtext, IBM, Mzinga, Spinvox, Twing.com, Salon.com, Harvard Business, MediaBistro, KickApps, HP, TV Guide and Zagat.com.

Sessions ( a partial list)
- What is necessary to start a successful social network?
- Social Movements/Communities with a Cause:
- Enterprise And Large Organizations Meets Community
- User Managed Communities: where users make the rules
- Community Building: Resources and Considerations
- Virtual Goods 101
- Social Media Optimization
- Customer/Consumer Communities for Co-Innovation
- Twitter Strategies for the Enterprise
- Culture vs. Community: Intention-based content
- Community Analytics: measuring success & failure
- Social Networks: Likes/dislikes and what you want to know
- Virtual Goods and Virtual World Interactions
- Building Enterprise IT: Colloboration & interface to internal systems (using wikis)
- Open ID & other user-centric identity technologies (Higgins, Infocards, SAML)

You can see pictures from the Unconference here:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ocue2008&w=all&s=int

Wiki
Again, the wiki is now open to the public for reading. We do restrict the right to edit / post to Unconference attendees.
http://www.socialtext.net/ocue08/

Blog posts about the Unconference

Online Community Unconference East - KickApps Blog
Online Community Unconference 2008 - Updates - Modern Metrix Blog
Live Blogging at ForumOne’s Community Unconference 2/21 - Aaron Strout / Mzinga

Next Unconference:
Our next Unconference is the Mobile Communities Unconference March 20 in Palo Alto. If you are interested in exploring the opportunities with community building via mobile devices I would encourage you to come check it out.

Forum One friend Mark Finnern at SAP is hosting another F1 friend Sean O’Driscoll tomorrow for a conversation on Social Media and Online communities.

We are just 2 days away from the Online Community Unconference East in NYC. We still have about 5 open seats for those or you in the NYC area. You can register at: http://www.ocue.eventbrite.com

There is a really diverse mix of organizations coming, including: BlogHer Inc., Mediabistro, CMP, HP, Gartner, Autodesk, AOL, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Consumers Union, Zagat, TV Guide, allfacebook.com, Business Week, and Cyworld.

So, how does this work?
The premise of our Unconference series is that the best source of information on the topic of online communities is the community of folks building and managing online communities. The Unconference format provides a venue for folks to lead discussions about topics they are most passionate and knowledgeable about. At the end of the day, attendees walk away with new ideas, perspectives, and a long list of new professional connections.

One of the most amazing parts of the day at our Unconferences is the topic selection process. We are fortunate to have Kaliya Hamlin guiding us through the process again in New York.

The topic selection process starts the Unconference, when any attendee who wishes can come forward, announce a topic, and claim one of the 45-50 open slots on the grid.

Within 35-40 minutes the grid fills up with topics and the first session kicks off. It’s really inspiring to hear all of the topics that are suggested, and to see so many great ideas come together on the grid.

If you would like to see an example of the great content that comes out of an Unconference, please check out the Online Community Unconference 07 wiki. I would encourage you to spend some time looking through the session notes as there is a lot of great content.

Again - we have about 5 seats still available for the Unconference in NYC this Thursday, 2/21. If you would like a seat, register here.

Our Online Community Research Network (http://www.onlinecommunityresearch.com) initiated the The Marketing & Online Community research study in June of 2007. The study explored the current state of marketing to online communities, from the perspective of both the online community host, as well as from the perspective of the marketer.

The research participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers and interactive marketing and advertising firms.

We discovered early on in the research process that while community hosts and practitioners were willing to share their experiences, most marketers were not. At the beginning of the research I conducted several in-person interviews, it became clear that most marketing and advertising agencies have not met with great success in their community marketing efforts, and are unwilling to talk about their experiences. What limited success marketers have had is generally viewed as proprietary knowledge within the agency, and is closely guarded.

I’ve included excerpts from the report below. To download the full report, please go here (short registration required).

What are the biggest challenges you face working with third-party marketers?
It is clear from the survey responses that most online community hosts are still negotiating the relationship with third-party marketers, their messages, and their methodologies.

The main challenges in working with third-party marketers included:

• Third-party marketers want to control content/context in which their ad will be shown.
• Difficulty matching ads with content
• Overhead associated with helping marketer understand community culture
• The lack of a pre-screened third-party ad network
• Marketers seem to have no affinity with community / company brand
• Advertiser push invasive or unusual advertising to get results
• Difficult to determine fair rate and cost basis

What general advice would you give a colleague that was considering incorporating marketing and advertising into their community?

Respondents shared valuable advice about incorporating marketing and advertising activities into communities, from their direct experiences.

Recommendations included:

• When introducing marketing messages into your community, be very cautious and attentive to your member reactions, and open to their feedback
• Understand your audiences needs and sensitivities to advertising messages
• Establishing a good relationship with the agency account manager is key
• Establish creative and messaging guidelines for marketing to ensure appropriateness
• Make sure ads are appropriate and add value to community
• Be clear about policies and ensure that policies are available to and understood by community
• Involve the audience. Surveying members to determine which brands / types of messages they would
• Ensuring the right mix of content to ads
• Test and refine based on marketing effectiveness and feedback

Again, to download the full report, please go here (short registration required).

We are about a week away from the The Online Community Unconference East. There are a fantastic group of organizations coming, including:

• allfacebook.com
• Alliance to Save Energy
• AOL
• Business Week Digital
• Changing The Present
• Consumers Union
• Cyworld
• EchoDitto
• Family Justice
• Gartner
• Grandparents.com
• IBM
• Mercy Corps
• Patricia Seybold Group
• Showtime Networks Inc
• Socialtext
• Texas Instruments
• TV Guide Online
• Zagat.com

We have about 15 tickets remaining, and we expect to sell out this week. To register, go to http://ocueast.eventbrite.com.

We are holding a handful of “scholarship” tickets for those that are still in school, or those whose budgets are tight. Please email me directly to inquire about one of these tickets.

I was a late participant in the One Laptop Per Child “Give One, Get One” program that ran for several weeks leading up to 12/31/07.

I was initially miffed at the complete lack of follow up and service coming from the program… the main thing being that it took almost a month to acknowledge my order. But then I stopped myself (checked myself?). The OLPC folks aren’t in the business of satisfying US consumer expectations… they are trying to get these devices to the developing world.

I’ve been really surprised at the number of folks asking $300-$400  for an OLPC on Ebay. I’ve also been surprised at the number of snarky blog posts gripoing about the programs delivery issues. Is it a pain for the US donors? Yeah… but the priority is to ship the devices to the developing world. I’m actually ok waiting 2 more months if it means 1 extra machine is going overseas… I did a quick inventory, and counting my 2 macbooks, Sharon’s Thinkpad, and the two PCs that are sitting unplugged in my garage, we have plenty of computing power in the Johnston household. To be honest, I will very likely donate the XO a couple of weeks after I get it.

Bottom line: as a donor, you generally can’t have the same expectations as a consumer. Especially a US consumer.

As an aside, I (along with everyone else that is waiting for their XO) got a note from Nicholas Negroponte  over the weekend. I thought the gesture, and the content were spot on.

Dear Bill,

Please accept my apologies for the delay in receiving your XO laptop.  Give One Get One was such a phenomenal success that we over-taxed our order processing and payment systems.  Demand exceeded supply.
Additional XO laptops are being built now and will be delivered in 45 to 60 days.  If you wish to reconsider your contribution in the face of this delay, we will issue a refund to you.  We have set up a dedicated phone line for these requests.  The number is 1-800-883-8102.

In the meanwhile, please know that laptops are in the process of going to Mongolia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Haiti as part of the “give one” side of the equation.  Fortunately, OLPC’s mission of getting laptops to the children in these countries has not been delayed.  In Mongolia , the children are already enjoying themselves and learning new things with their XO laptops. Please see: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ulaanbaatar.
Eliminating poverty through learning is gaining wider acceptance thanks to support like yours.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Negroponte
Chairman
OLPC Foundation

I would love to know how many folks ask for their money back.

The next Online Community Roundtable will be held Thursday, 2/28 in Foster City. Jeremiah Owyang and the folks at Forrester will host.

If you are interested in attending, please drop me a note.

Also, please note that capacity for this event is 25, so first come, first served. I expect this to fill up.

The Roundtables have been a regular, but intentionally “under the radar” gathering since July of 2005. The intention of the events is to provide an open and safe environment for community practitioners to share experiences and best practices. It’s also an excellent excuse to have a cocktail and meet other interesting people in the space.

To get an idea of what happens at one of the Roundtables, check out this report back from a previous Roundtable at SAP.