Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy

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!

This interview is cross-posted from the Online Community Report.

This month’s Expert Interview is with Christine Perey, Analyst and freelance associate of Informa Telecoms & Media. Christine has a truly global view of the topic of mobile social networking as a former Bay Area resident who now resides in Switzerland. Christine was kind enough to spend time answering several questions about mobile-based social networking below and expands on some of the findings published in the new Informa Telecoms and Media report, Mobile Social Networking: Communities and Content on the Move.

Christine’s Bio:
Christine Perey is an analyst with over 15 years experience in new and emerging multimedia communications markets. She is a freelance associate of Informa Telecoms & Media and a regular contributor to Informa’s Mobile Media information service.

Christine was the publisher and editor of The QuickTime Forum from 1991-1993 and the founder of The QuickTime Movie Festival. Christine is an invited speaker at industry events and serves on boards, panels and committees dedicated to the advancement of rich media experiences in business and consumer markets. In 2008 Informa Telecoms & Media published Mobile Social Networking: Community and Content on the Move, the most comprehensive market research report on mobile communities, researched and written by Christine. Previously, she authored the Personal Mobile Video Communications market research report published by Wainhouse Research in 2006.
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Q: What are the key differences you see in the mobile market in the states vs. Europe and Asia? Specifically, what are the key barriers to innovation in the US?

A: As far as the general topic of mobile services for consumers and businesses is concerned, there are dramatic regional differences. For example, in the US, most (somewhere over 90%) subscribers are under contract, meaning that they receive a bill every month for the services they used in the prior 30 days. When a service provider has a guaranteed revenue stream, they are less likely to innovate than when people are changing operators every week or month. Also, until relatively recently, both in-bound and out-bound calls were charged and the consumer or business contracted for a flat rate monthly plan based on the “block” of minutes. This affects how people use the phone service (it lowers the tendency to give out the mobile number, for example). By contrast, in European and Asian markets, pre-paid services and dialing party pays are the rules, not the exceptions. People “top up” the phone cards in their phones and can change carriers any day of the week. Many have two phones (with two different carriers). There’s a good article on the US cellular market performance with some of Analysis Research’s recent report findings. Here’s a snippet:

Analysis Research predicts that total annual subscriber growth in the US nationwide could fall to 2 percent a year by 2012, compared with the 11 percent to 14 percent growth posted by the three wireless carriers, AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA. But add in Sprint Nextel, which posted two consecutive quarters of subscriber losses, and the total annual subscriber growth last year for the top four carriers dropped to 9 percent – the slowest growth in a decade.

Technologies for mobile networks are not the same around the world. In the US and most of Latin and South America, the technology is based primarily (with the exception of AT&T Wirless/Cingular network and T-Mobile which are GSM/UMTS) on CDMA2000 which is a different radio technology than what was adopted and deployed in Western (and most of the Eastern block) Europe and Japan. In Europe and in many other parts of the world where advanced mobile services are offered, the technology is GSM which is the predecessor of WCDMA and the step up (to UMTS-3G) is relatively easy. There are proponents of these different technologies in each camp, for sure, but the bottom line is that due to the fact that these differences exist today, some mobile services are easier to build or deploy and will advance/develop more rapidly in some regions than others. In Europe, the UK and Italy are very advanced markets for mobile but for different reasons.

In Japan and Korea, mobile network services are the most advanced in the world, although the UK is not far behind. The competition among carriers and the penetration is high (exceeding one handset per person). Let’s look at Japan to compare and contrast the drivers of innovation, getting to your question about possible barriers to innovation in the US market. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo had the foresight in the mid- or late1990s to create an environment where a rich ecosystem for application developers could develop. In addition to having developer APIs and other tools, they provided a strong financial incentive for developers who created new services on their network. The developers in the i-Mode ecosystem would receive 20-30% of the revenues charged by the mobile operator for the services. The economic reward system is an important driver of innovation but the mobile network operators in the US market have adopted a strong “walled garden” approach where they and only they choose the services offered and if the successful services are provided by a third party, even then the “cut” of the action (revenues) which returns to the application developer is much lower (5-10%).

Despite the regional differences in regulation, markets, technologies and revenue sharing strategies, mobile communities are rapidly expanding in all parts of the world! I don’t have hard statistics to provide about on-deck and off-deck community tendency, but my impression is that mobile communities are making themselves easy to find and people are looking for them on their mobiles. Subscribers are looking for community services on the mobile operator’s deck as well as on the Mobile Web.

One of the barriers to subscribers using mobile communities is the cost of the data traffic. We’ve all heard and many have experienced the sticker shock when you download large files to a mobile handset or do a lot of surfing. In countries, such as Japan, Korea, UK and a few other European markets, there are flat-rate, all-you-can-eat data tariffs offered, which really reduce the barrier to using the mobile data services such as mobile communities. These are catching on and where available, User-Generated Content and mobile community services are high on the list of compelling reasons to take a flat rate data plan with your contract.

In addition to the mobile operator related regional differences, it is clear that there are also economic and societal differences which influence the rate of mobile community adoption. I’ll just look at a few of these non-operator factors to make my point. In many (most) economically less well developed regions of the world (outside the Western and Japanese economies), the mobile handset will be people’s first and only access to the Internet. The number of mobile phones has already exceeded the number of Web connected PCs. Increasingly these mobile phones are capable of accessing data services such as mobile communities. It’s not a question of choice, there just aren’t broadband Internet services available at affordable prices, or the PC in the home or office is shared among an entire family or group of people and you don’t want to have your community experience to be shared by your parents or siblings! The mobile handset personal experience is private and personalized and for some services, dating, for example—a very popular mobile community service—it’s not the type of experience you want to be doing in a living room with people around.

Like in web communities, there are strong cultural drivers which influence the appeal of communities and the feature popularity. In Asian markets, digital gifting is very popular. In Japan, people love to view UGC on their mobile, but are more conservative than Americans when creating their own content. In the US market, more subscribers are exhibitionists with their camera phones.

Q: Why doesn’t having international players like T-Mobile help spur innovation and openness in the domestic US market?

A: T-Mobile has operated a very innovative service in the US market called MyFaves and after over a year of success it has expanded this service to Germany, the UK and elsewhere. Please read about this.
Mobile network operator groups, such as Hutchison Whampoa, Telefonica, Orange and Vodafone are very actively pursuing mobile community partnerships and view these services as important to their differentiation and competitive advantage both within a country and between geographies. Mobile communities, like their web cousins, need critical mass to continue growing. Having the ability to reach people on other networks in other regions is very valuable as some of the larger chat communities (e.g. Jumbuck and AirG) have shown.

One of the things we know that users are against is being in a walled garden in their community. Since mobile network operators can prevent the subscribers of other operator networks from joining a community, this can reduce the viral effect. If I’m an Orange customer and you are an O2 subscriber, we should still be able to be friends in the community. This is one of the great appeals to being off-deck or at the very least to join communities which are independently operated.

Q: What are the most interesting trends you are seeing in the mobile social networking space, and where (geographically) are they happening?

A: Mobile communities that offer people the ability to find others with like interests or to meet the numerous other human needs they have over the course of their days and lives, are blossoming. They are not copycats of web communities. Rather they are evolving in their own unique directions because people are taking risks and experimenting.

One of the things that we see increasingly is the desire on the part of community participants to take part in the mobile economy. In other words, those who are driving a lot of traffic for advertising or downloads want to get a fraction of the community host’s revenues. The systems which reward users with points or internal currencies are quickly going to link with recommendations. If I recommend that you go see or purchase something within our community and you trust me and follow that advice, then I should get a reward. Consumers will, over time, become the purveyors of micro-advertising campaigns. If I like a brand of hair product, computer or a sports team, and your transaction is influenced by my preferences, the community will track these social shopping patterns. This isn’t unique to the mobile communities. It is likely to be implemented and adopted well in mobile because the identity of the users is known to the platform provider based on a unique relationship they have with their phone and the mobile network operator.

In parallel with the evolution of communities, community features will be integrated to many if not all digital experiences both mobile and online. In the future, a social networking service will struggle to survive and attract new users simply by providing a social networking functionality as a core service. Instead, the features and functions will be offered as part of other services helping to drive personalization (through the data gathered), drive loyalty and to drive sales. At least this will be possible when a set of universally accepted community user feature-centered standards are developed, ratified and integrated into all future platforms.

Q: What key trends should online community and social media professionals pay attention to?

A: There is a great deal of uncertainty in this market, but the dimensions of the opportunity and the number and types of companies participating in the industry indicate that Mobile Social Networking is going to improve quickly and the service themes at its core – meeting the needs of people to stay in touch and feel that they belong to a group, to be entertained, to increase their productivity, to make a difference or have an impact – will persist over time.

In the future, entertainment will be very different as a result of mobile devices that enable sharing of digital content. According to Nokia’s research entitled A Glimpse of the Next Episode, published in December 2007, approximately 25% of the entertainment consumed by people in 2012 will have been created, edited and shared within ‘peer circles’ rather than produced and distributed by professional firms and studios. As a result of the popularity of online and mobile services like Mobile Social Networking, people will be accustomed to sharing their ‘instant’ social media with people they know as well as with people they have just met. In parallel, they will be learning to use the new tools at their disposal and developing collaborative media skills that will prove more rewarding and engaging than passively watching, reading or hearing the entertainment media produced by the impersonal entertainment powerhouses.

Future mobile devices will have better microphones, perhaps even microphone arrays combining multiple mobile devices into ad hoc sensor networks, for superior capture of sound, such as music and speech. In addition to sound and video, the mobile device will detect other users in the vicinity and, if they are known and part of a user’s community, applications will automatically embed tags associating faces and voices with names.

In some high-end devices, continuous measuring and monitoring of a user’s surroundings will detect when to begin and end a capture sequence, automatically zooming and focusing on items of interest. Since social media is rarely visible from inside a pocket or purse, mobile devices for social media capture will more likely be wearable, mounted on the user’s glasses or hat.

Systems in the mobile handset will permit the manual or automatic annotation of social media with information such as the place, the date and time, the objects in a scene and possibly more ‘human factor’ data such as the emotion of the user. By associating metadata at the time of the capture, the social media blending tools will have the ability to identify whose media was used in an edited composition, as well as to remove or hide people who do not wish to be identified or heard.

Q: What are your recommendations to those hosting and operating online communities?

A: Providers of community services aimed at the broadband-connected PC users are already using three of the four strategies available to them to expand the reach and use of their platforms to include mobile devices. The first strategy is to build a WAP version of the online services. Many add some value to the user by offering the option of receiving alerts when the platform detects community-relevant events via MT SMS and permit message management and viewing using the handset. Orkut and Facebook have used this strategy to date. MySpace also offers a WAP portal interface among its other strategies.

The benefit of this strategy is that it gets a rudimentary level of service deployed, so that the early adopters can at least browse and check their communities when mobile. So far, few of the online community providers using this strategy have enabled the rich social media features which the users of mobile handsets would most like to see. This is because the level of investment necessary for re-architecting the service platform for correct display and formatting is high, given the online community operator’s lack of historical concern with device management, and difficult to justify based on their existing banner ad revenue models. In the future, this strategy should persist and improve as online communities acquire the expertise necessary to build robust mobile community platforms or gateways to their existing services.

The second strategy is to port the online service features to a mobile operator’s proprietary service environment. This is essentially what MySpace did with Helio and, to a far lesser extent, with Vodafone. The service is offered on-deck and is easy for the user to log in, especially if an application or applet is installed. This strategy will also persist and involve pre-loaded applications on feature-rich handsets for mobile community services and social media.

The third strategy is partnering with a mobile community platform provider, such as InterCasting. Bebo and Piczo are among those choosing this strategy for their mobile service access. By using a mobile community platform and aggregation service, the online community reaches the largest number of potential registrants. As long as the community keeps its service brand and feature set, this is a sound strategy and significantly reduces the time-to-market. Other online communities are likely to follow this route when it is proven both from a technology integration and business model perspective.

The final strategy that has yet to be tested is for an online community provider to partner directly with a popular independent mobile community operator. The technologies for creating the gateway between the two will need to be proprietary but need not depend on a third party developer and could evolve at the speed that the two partners require. One of the reasons that this has not been properly explored yet is that mobile community service providers have not, to date, seen much advantage in this. However, as more broadband-connected PC users seek to access via mobile, the overlap between the two access types will drive the dialogue around potential partnerships.

To be successful with a mobile strategy, online communities will need to make a more significant investment to understand and meet the needs of mobile community participants than they have to date. Well-designed surveys, free trials such as that conducted by Sulake, the provider of Habbo Hotel, and the engagement with mobile community industry experts will all contribute to the education of the online community operator.

The most challenging domain for online community service providers to tackle will be in the area of revenue. As community participants have become accustomed to having access at no cost, they are reluctant to begin paying for equivalent or inferior services. As the mobile advertising market heats up and brands feel more comfortable with their community campaigns, this obstacle will gradually decline.

About PEREY Research & Consulting
PEREY Research & Consulting builds and leads senior management teams conducting and applying market research. Component and systems vendors, network operators and value added service providers rely on Perey Research to tap emerging multimedia technology trends, and to devise and implement new business development strategies in light of these trends.

Research is a large part of the activities that I and Forum One Networks engages in. The Online Community Research Network studies and publishes 6 times a year on topics that matter to those responsible for guiding online community and social media activities in their organization.

The Online Community ROI Models and Reporting research study was initiated in February of 2008. The study was created in order to investigate further into the ROI research that we conducted in the last half of 2007, and to gain insight into specifically how organizations were valuing and reporting on their online communities activities. Further, we wanted to gain insight into who the stakeholders were for ROI metrics, and how the reports were being received.

I will be blogging highlights of the report over the next few weeks. To obtain a full copy, as well as access to all of our other research, and the professional network of online community pros, please consider joining the Online Community Research Network.

We received approximately 150 completed surveys. Participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers and interactive marketing and advertising firms.

Q16: Which of the following quantitative and qualitative metrics are critical for communication ROI at your organization? (question 16 from the study)
The top-ranking metrics are: Traffic patterns & statistics; Community member engagement; Unique number of visitors; New Member Registrations; Member Satisfaction; and Product Feedback / R&D ideation.

The middle-ranking metrics are: Number of referrals to the community by members; WOM generated by community; transition of lurkers into active community members; impact of the community on revenue; organization or brand-mentions on other sites; and ratio of comments per post.

When looking at the data segmented by type of respondent organization, Traffic patterns, member engagement and unique community visitors scored consistently high.

Top-ranking Metrics

Middle-ranking Metrics

Lower-ranking Metrics

Q23: What were the 1-2 compelling sources of value from your community or social media efforts that you constantly communicate?

This question was intended to solicit the “elevator pitch” stats or metrics that community managers and strategists use internally to their organization to evangelize community and social media efforts. Answers ranged from the unique ability of online communities to create value to cost reduction of existing communication channels and corporate functions.

These were all write in answers. The main themes are as follows, with selected quotes inline below. (full report contains all write in data).

1. Community helps problem solve faster and more efficiently than Customer Support, saving our company time and money:
• “Customers are able to get faster response and answers to their problem utilizing the community over contacting Customer Support.”
• “Knowledge share, and hence problem solving, is more efficient due to the community model.”
• “Using WebBoard is more efficient then email, telephones or fax. It saves us time and money and increases our ability to service the consumers in our sector.”
• “The ROI on employee time devoted to the forums far exceeds the returns on the usual support methods.” [Thus saving our organization time and money.]

2. Availability of information and content for specific areas of interest:
• “Expanded resources & knowledge for specific areas of interest and centralized resources.”
• “Niche communities, focused on specific areas of interest. Market leaders on-line and in print with high cross over traffic.”
• “You won’t find this content anywhere else - written by our members to raise best practice within vendors.”

3. Increases site traffic / more engaged relationship with us:
• “The more we invest into community, the more organic traffic we get.”
• “Our members consume 49% more average page views per session every month than non-members.”
• “Our community sites get more than 3 times the engagement for solutions, capabilities and use case content than our traditional sites.”
• “Our forum generates more page views than the site itself.”
• “Our community traffic by far exceeds traffic to all traditional product areas.”
• “Increasing site traffic proves that there is an interest and demand from our customers to have a more open and engaged in relationship with us.”
• “Our programs on average engage participants for 45 minutes each time they visit.”
• “Time spent on the site is higher on forums pages than anywhere else on the site, indicating that community members are more engaged.”
• “Views of photo albums remain the most popular area of the community. Members may not wish to participate in discussions, but they do want to see photos of their events.”
• “An online discussion moderated by subject matter experts that followed an in-person event with the same moderators achieved the most participation of any attempts to engage our users.”
• “Our social media content generates more content and discussions off site, increasing our reach.”
• “The ability of our blogs to drive customer engagement and PR activity.”

4. Idea Creation / What we learn from members of the community:
• “Ideas for our books.”
• “It’s all about what we learn from the developers through our community interactions.”
• “We will have the opportunity to get first hand feedback on products and ideas for improvements and enhancements.”
• “We discovered some problem areas in usage and service adoption that caused us to change our materials and strategy.”
• “We have been able to gather more than a thousand best practices/lessons learned in two years use.”

5. Lead Generation / Conversion:
• “Converting contacts, acquaintances, and other informal relationships into donor relationships.”
• “Converting contacts into activists and issue leaders.”
• “When we enlist our community members to represent us physically or virtually, our reach and conversion metrics dramatically increase.”

6. People are saving time / building skills by using our site:
• “In our Sourcing Professional Forum, procurement professionals are constantly sharing templates and best practices across organizations, bootstrapping their RFP effort, saving time and increasing value.”
• “People creating and building productive relationships with people that help them improve their practice or do their work better.”
• “The National Board of Certified Teachers can share best teaching practices with ease never before possible.”
• “In our premium areas, customers are using online training and certification to manage global implementations, knocking down traditional barriers to skill building in an online, social learning setting.”
• “Our users have access to every single college coach in the country. This is something no other site offers. Our site is always free to the users and they will never be charged. All of our competitors charge users to use their recruiting website.”
• “Our community members credit participation in our community with their increased skills in using our products.”

7. Build customer loyalty:
• “Anecdotal stories of knowledge sharing, connections made for business purposes and special access created through connecting members.”
• “Community members are more likely to volunteer their time, services, advice, and financial support than non-members.”
• “Employees who belong to the community almost never ‘turn over’. They are consistently the best performers out in the stores.”
• “Offering a community to your clients where they can speak to you and each other significantly increases customer loyalty.”
• “More connected members spread the word and come back frequently.”
• “If you want to understand your stakeholders and develop the relationships, you have to think in communities.”
• “Online dialogue creates a more open environment that deepens trust and team work throughout the organization.”
• “Our community has one of the highest net promoter scores for our brand of any corporate offering.”
• “Our members say that they like the site and related services - direct comprehension of value, esp. during account meetings.”
• “Research shows that customers in a community can have a sense of involvement with the company as long as we make sure they are heard and that involvement can lead to great loyalty.”
• “Our community members are actively engaged with the brand and don’t hesitate to tell us what they like, and don’t like. They feel a real sense of ownership of the brand.”
• “Our ability to personally communicate with future users of our product substantially influences their perception of our company.”
• “Increasing site traffic proves that there is an interest and demand from our customers to have a more open and engaged in relationship with us.”

8. Online community is growing our membership base:
• “In a climate where professional associations, and especially manufacturer associations, have struggled to maintain members, we have consistently and significantly increased in membership year-over-year for the past 5 years. This growth directly coincides with our implementation of online community services. Over 85% of our members find our member-only e-mail discussion groups alone to be worth the price of annual membership.”
• “95% of our members would recommend membership in our online community to other parents raising children with food allergies.”
• “Our blog has increased community participation by 80% over the past year.”
• “We boast membership in 125+ countries.”
• “We have 8000 registered members across 95% of local authorities.”
• “We have doubled the size of our community membership in the last 6 months. 2 years ago, only 34% of our Company’s upsells and renewals were also members of the Community. In 2007, 75% of our upsells and renewals were Community members.”
• “We have the largest active user community in the marketplace.”

Again, to get access to the full report, as well as other research and the professional online community network, please check out the OCRN site.

We still have a few seats available for the Mobile Communities Unconference, this Thursday, March 20th in Palo Alto.

Want to join the conversation? Register here:

http://mcu2008.eventbrite.com

Groups coming include:
3jam, Active Path Solutions, AdMob, AOL, Cisco,Digital Chocolate, FunMobility, Google, HP, Intel, Lithium, LiveWorld, Microsoft, Mixer Labs, MobiHand, MobileLife Inc., NextNow, Nokia, Omega Mobile, Inc., Quest Software, Ribbit, SAP, VMWare, Yahoo!, You Tube

Questions? Call me @ 415.299.9638

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.

Cross-posted from the OC Report.

OK, I have to admit, I’m a little tired of talking about Facebook after attending last week’s Web Community Forum in Seattle. The conference focused on community building with Facebook, and we spent two days exploring topics ranging from FAcebook usage basics to best practices in B to B marketing.

The event content is partially captured on the Web Community Forum site, which has a running blog and some twitter feeds. Most of the sessions were lecture-style presentations.

The key takeaway for me is: that, in spite of the hype, Facebook is something you should be paying attention to if you are charged with community management or strategy at your organization. I wasn’t convinced 6 months ago, but I am now. Why? Aside from my increased usage of the site:

• It’s the best online social experience available. Facebook has nailed the social networking experience, in part, because the system is structured to start your experience with your real world networks and contacts. Once you start using, it’s *addictive*.
• It has hit critical mass, and it’s growing (57 million members and growing)
• Though still very “V1″, social ads and fan pages will morph into something meaningful. We are seeing the initial, crude offerings to create a marketing and advertising presence on Facebook. This is a make or break issue for the company, and they will continue to experiment until they nail it. A vocal and visible community will keep them honest (see Zuckerberg’s apology about Beacon), and Microsoft’s investment (among what are sure to be other upcoming investments) will push the company to develop creative sources of revenue.

Some of the key highlights from the conference (and speakers) can be found here:

Jeremiah Owyang’s keynote
http://webcommunityforum.com/2007/12/slides-from-jeremiah-owyangs-presentation/

and Jeremiah’s key takeaways
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/12/07/8-key-learnings-from-the-web-community-forum-two-days-of-facebook/

Lee Lorenzen Says Facebook is Worth $100 Billion–uh huh prove it. - Tris Hussey / blognation
http://ca.blognation.com/2007/12/06/lee-lorenzen-says-facebook-is-worth-100-billion-uh-huh-prove-it/

Zuckerberg Apologizes for the Mess that was Beacon Rollout - Nick ONeill / All Facebook (recomended)
http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/12/breaking-zuckerberg-apologizes-for-the-mess-that-was-beacon-rollout/

B2B Marketing - Facebook Tips and Tricks - Mari Smith / Why Facebook
http://whyfacebook.com/2007/12/07/b2b-marketing-facebook-tips-and-tricks/

We are lining up the final speaker slots for the Marketing & Online Community conference.

We’ve added three folks this week that I am particularly excited about (ok, I’m also excited by the whole lineup).

David Dunne - Edelman
I’ve been a fan of Edelman since a former Autodesk colleague introduced me to their Trust Barometer a couple of years ago. I’m glad to have their perspective a part of the conference.

Thor Muller - Satisfaction
Satisfaction intends to turn customer support, and by extension, brand ownership on it’s ear. If you aren’t familiar with the site, check it out. It turns out our CEO Chris blogged about them several weeks ago.

Richard Weil - Cartoon Network
Richard is working on a very interesting virtual world project. I’m not sure how much I am free to say at this point… so we will just leave it as that.

It is interesting to watch traditional marketing and advertising agencies confront the power of the connected consumer. I’m very excited to get to New York and to explore this topic with the brands, agencies and communities that are coming.

Cross-posted from the OC Report: Following closely on the heels of the Online Community Summit, The Marketing & Online Communities conference is less than a month away.

The Marketing & Online Communities conference is intended to be an in-depth discussion on the current issues and opportunities in marketing to communities. Marketers and brand managers seem to be struggling with effective and appropriate techniques when marketing to the connected consumer. For instance, Edelman, the renowned PR firm that publishes it’s annual Trust Barometer, has had a couple of recent campaigns for Wal-Mart that clearly violate consumer trust. Conversely, online communities seem to be very reluctant to experiment with new and appropriate marketing techniques, and seem to fall back on crude tools like banner ads. Personally, I’m stunned every day at the crass and off-target ads I’m served in Facebook. We can all collectively do better.

In short: the point of the conference is to bring marketing agencies, brand managers and community hosts to the table to talk about how to market more effectively and respectfully.

Our topic list includes:
• Marketing to Communities – The Brand “Us”
• Anatomy of an Integrated Campaign
• Creating Successful Campaigns With Established Communities
• Hosting the premier community for your Brand
• Using Social Media in Your Campaigns
• Measuring The Success of Your Community Campaign
• Children & Tween Communities: Engaging the Future
• Boomer Networks
• The Future of Community-based Marketing

Our session lead list includes:
• Dave Bottoms - Yahoo!
• Betsy Burroughs - Future Catalyst
• Andy Chambers - Digit
• Mary Furlong - Mary Furlong & Associates
• Marcien Jenckes - AOL
• Michael Leifer - guerilla PR, Inc.
• Tim Manners - THE HUB Magazine / Cool News of the Day
• Bree Nguyen - Warner Bros Records
• Jeremy Welt - Warner Bros Records

A partial list of the organizations attending includes:
• AOL
• APC
• David X. Manners Company
• Digit London
• Eastman Kodak
• Fidelity Investments
• Guardian Investment Management
• guerilla PR, Inc.
• Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.
• Lightworks New Media, Inc.
• LiveWorld
• Marketmaker Interactive
• Microsoft
• Omidyar Network
• Strategic Marketing
• The Luxury Institute
• United Nations
• WebEx
• Yahoo

Last but not least, we have added a reception following the event in the ultra hip Sanctum lounge. This is the prefect place for both sides of the community and marketing debate to sip a cocktail, relax, and network after what promises to be a full day of heated discussion.

If you would like to request an invitation to the event, please fill out this short form.

A few speaking and sponsorship opportunities are still available. Please let me know if you would like to discuss. bjohnston@forumone.com.