Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy

At the Online Community Unconference a couple of weeks ago, it became clear to me that we are at an inflection point with the “industry” of Online Community. On of the key issues community professionals face is that we (as an industry) are suffering from a lack of solid benchmarks, including compensation of online community professionals. The key purpose of the Online Community Research Network is to work in a collaborative way to research current practice and help establish these benchmarks.

We have put together a short survey about online community professionals compensation, team structure, and current job satisfaction.

The survey can be found here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=dmkh9tZ6vZHyheMFqv2mcg_3d_3d

If you are charged with community management, strategy or design at your organization, I would encourage you to respond to the survey. We are seeking input from all types of organizations, and all levels of seniority.

If you decide to participate, there are few things to note:
• All participants will receive a copy of the final (aggregate) report.
• All data will be processed and compiled in aggregate. Data will not be reviewed or presented in a personally (or company) identifiable way.
• All participants are entered in to a drawing for 1 of 10 $25 Starbucks coffee cards.

If you have any questions about the study, please feel free to contact me. We hope to close the survey by July 17th.

Cross-posted from the Online Community Report.

The Online Community Unconference was held this Wednesday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

How was it? In a word? AWESOME.

We had 250 participants from a diverse range of organizations, including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Linden Lab, SeeqPod, Flickr, LinkedIn, Cisco, Sun and Current TV.

We had a jam packed day (started @ 8:30 and ran until 5:30). The energy was palpable. Check out the short video I shot below of folks reviewing the session grid shortly before session 1.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_embed.gne?id=2593476294&context=set-72157605703221824

Over the course of the day, participants held over 50 sessions about community strategy, UX, management, member engagement and technology.

Session topics included:

• How do we motivate empowered users to participate positively
• Worst Case Scenerios - What to do when things go terribly wrong
• The Numbers Behind Trust - The hidden numbers that govern group dynamics
• Internationalizing content & community
• Meet them where they are vs. If you build it they will come
• Building the Collaboration Ecosystem - All components for community building success
• Cross Networking Madness - How are niche communities using data portability
• Community Management 101: How to get started in this big wide world
• Web 2.0 Components to build B2B Collaborative Communities
• Community Year One - Phases, Activities, Successes
• Community Management 2.0 - Success & Failures
• The platforms for community are SH*T. Discuss
• Effective Ambassador programs
• Pulling the plug - how/when/why?

My observations:

It’s 2 days later, and I have to admit my head is still spinning. The quality of content and conversation was high, and there is still a lo of processing I need to do. My genreal impressions were:

This was the “Community Community” coming together. This was not an event where a few talking heads lectured the masses. This was a gathering of the tribes for those who manage communities and set community strategy on a daily basis.

The conversation has matured. There were far fewer folks that wanted to talk about community 101 this year as compared with last year’s Unconference. Topics were fairly sophisticated and most of the direct feedback I got was that participants were pleased to discover the level of experience represented by the other participants.

The lack of standards is REALLY starting to hurt. Focus is (finally) beginning to shift from islands of communities to the larger community ecosystem. A general lack of standards around nomenclature, metrics, data schemas (including profile structure), profile accessibility and community UX (to raise just a few issues) is starting to come up as a real issue more often. I think we are finally mature enough as an industry to have the discussions as a body of practice (and contribute to and help direct discussions on tactical problems, like Data Portability).

The best resource about online communities is the community of practice. This statement is actually a common thread in all of Forum One Network’s activities. We believe the best and most valuable source of information about building and growing healthy online communities is the body of practitioners.

We will be opening up the Unconference wiki in about a week, and will post highlights of the session notes. In the meantime, lot’s of folks were twittering and blogging. I’ve posted highlights below.

Other Unconference highlights:
http://twemes.com/ocu2008
http://summize.com/search?q=ocu2008
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ocu2008
http://www.grimwell.com/?p=211
http://talk.lithium.com/lithium/blog/article?blog.id=lithium&message.id=139#M139

PS: Tasty Snacks = Accomplished!

Are you a community manager or are you in charge of online community at your organization? Are you in the Bay Area?

If so, you might find the Online Community Roundtable of interest. This is a small netowrking group / event that meets regularly to discuss issues, opportunities and trends with online communities, and represents leading organizations (large and small).

Our next meeting is Tuesday, June 10 at Cyworld in SF. The session will last from 5:30 to 8:30. Please email me if you are interested.

We have had an unbelievable response to the upcoming Online Community Unconference to be held June 18th. Registration numbers are just shy of 200 people, and we expect to hit 250. We think this will be the biggest event, this year, focused on online communities.

We have a wide range of organizations, industries and personalities coming, including: Adobe, Autodesk, BabyCenter, CafePress, Cisco, Civic Ventures, Comcast, Digg, eBay Research Labs, EdgiLabs, Flickr, Forrester Research, Google, Intuit, Jive Software, Link TV, LinkedIn, NetApp, Omidyar Network, O’Reilly Media, Six Apart, Social Edge, Sony Online Entertainment, SRI International, Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation, Sun, VMWare and YouTube.

To see the full list of folks coming, check out the registration page:
http://ocu2008.eventbrite.com

If you are charged with managing online communities or community strategy for your organization, this will be a fantastic event for you. The agenda is participant driven, the networking is fantastic, and the content will be fantastic.

The video from yesterday’s Business Social Software Jeopardy session is up: https://admin.acrobat.com/_a773188684/p54581379/

It was a lot of fun. Sam was an excellent Trebec, and Jeremiah Owyang and Laura Ramos of Forrester proved worthy adversaries.

Sam has an excellent write up here:
Juicy tidbits from yesterday’s Jeopardy!

I’ll be in Vegas next Monday, 5/12 thru Wednesday 5/14 at the Community 2.0 conference.

I’m on a panel with Chris Messina and Dawn Foster (Jive) discussing online reputation.

Will you be there? If so, give me a shout out: bjohnston@forumone.com

Viva!

Experimenting with video Utterz. What do you think? I’d love to do more video…

Cross-posted from the Online Community Report.

First, apologies for the radio silence on the blog, folks. The Online Community Business Forum was a huge success, but also a massive undertaking, and I took a couple of days to unplug from the socialmediosphere.

The good news? There is a ton of great content about the event online. I’ll be posting highlights over the next few days, but I wanted to point folks to several great summaries of our opening sessions.

Two of the highlights of the conference for me were Alan Webber’s opening remarks, and Rohit Barghava’s session on “Thinking beyond your community site”. I’ve been a huge fan of Alan’s since becoming an avid reader of Fast Company in the late 90’s. Alan did a great job of setting the tone for the Business Forum with his inspirational remarks about founding Fast Company with Bill Taylor in the early 90s. Alan was followed by Rohit Bhargava, who provided perspective on thinking beyond “your” community site, and gave case studies of community building using an ecosystem approach, including one that covered the launch of his new book “Personality Not Included.”

Thomas Kriese of Omidyar Network did a fantastic job of capturing both sessions:

Alan Webber at Online Community Business Forum

Rohit Bhargava speaks at Online Community Business Forum

This was an exceptional two days of content, conversations and networking. Look for more content to follow as we get the presentations and notes added to the wiki. And I haven’t even mentioned all the Gorbie sightings!