Online Marketing in 2009 - Thought Leaders Make Their Predictions
Monday, January 5, 2009

Many readers here are interested in promoting their work online using new social media. Last month I put up a post on ReadWriteWeb titled Top Marketing Geeks Make Their Predictions for 2009 . I thought I'd post it here as well for readers who may have missed it. Check out the 25 comments on the original post as well for some interesting discussion. Some readers were very critical and I've tried to offer some critical thoughts as well, but it's clear that marking on the web is here to stay. Hopefully it will be based on a greater degree of authenticity, usefulness and innovation than marketing generally is known for. For more personal thoughts on new media marketing, check out two of my old posts here Social Media for Marketing and Thoughts on Product Launch Promotion . Both are a touch out of date but should be a good source of some still-valuable resources and advice. Speaking of resources, if you're interested in new media marketing you may appreciate this OPML file of Chris Brogan's favorite marketing bloggers to watch in 2009 . It's a special file of all their feeds filtered to deliver just their unusually popular posts (filtering performed by Postrank ). You can download that file, then import it into your RSS reader and you'll be kept super smart all year long. If you'd like a short, concentrated injection of smarts along similar lines, check out my consulting services , just like these happy people have. And now the blog post I promised… Will 2009 be the big year for corporate transparency, for a global conversation - perhaps for bargain basement online marketing tactics instead of old-school huge commercial campaigns? Peter Kim , a former Forrester analyst now working on stealth enterprise software company, recently polled 14 of the most high-profile thinkers about social media marketing and asked them what they expected to see 2009 bring. The end product was an attractive 23 page PDF that we've embedded below, but we thought we'd pull out some of the thoughts we found most interesting for all you skimmers out there. Social shopping “Now with connective technologies like Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect, and OpenID, consumers will now be able to see reviews, experiences, and critiques from people they actually know and trust.” - Jeremiah Owyang , Forrester Research Our take: Much as we are concerned about the proprietary nature of Facebook Connect in particular, the ease with which people are able to see feedback left by people they know, with confirmed identities, really could be a game changer. Access “Twitter will continue to achieve legitimacy. But more than any push-channel, Twitter will give customers, advocates and critics unprecedented access to corporate personnel and vice versa.” - Scott Monty , Ford Motor Company (Photo, right, by Wendy Piersall) Our take: This makes sense, and it's pretty funny to think about. Even the biggest cynics often have a dramatic turn around about Twitter once they start using it, and the intimacy that develops is remarkable. We agree with Monty that this will become increasingly difficult to resist. Measuring the success of social networks “Implement listening programs through social media to get real time authentic knowledge that is actionable… Measure with customer service metrics like retention/ satisfaction & social metrics like engagement.” - Rohit Bhargava , Ogilvy (Photo by Shashi Bellamkonda) “Slowly but surely, we're going to develop a set of better metrics to help guide, direct and validate ‘commitment'-based marketing and yes, Mr Kim….they will extend beyond the rather short term, blunt metric called ROI”. - Joseph Jaffe , Crayon Our take: Good luck with that, we're not optimistic. This is soft stuff and though clear success speaks for itself, all the gradations between success and failure are going to be very hard to quantify. Quality vs Quantity in Social Media “I believe we'll have more focused velvet-rope social networks in 2009 where the tools and the goals match verticals of interest instead of the general commons of Facebook.” - Chris Brogan , New Marketing Labs “Exclusivity trumps accessibility. Having thousands of friends becomes 'so 2008′ and defriending becomes the hot new trend, driven by overwhelming rivers of newsfeeds.” - Charlene Li , Altimeter Group (Photo by deneyterrio on Flickr) Our take: Maybe, for some people and in some circumstances this will be the case. We expect most people to find a middle ground between the whole sale slow-down that some seem to expect and an evolutionary adjustment to vastly increased data input. Making the most of limited budgets “Dwindling budgets suddenly make low-cost social media look like the pretty girl at the ball. ” - Ann Handley , Marketing Profs “Companies will struggle with how to control who says what — but will increasingly realize that in an economic downturn, they need all the marketing muscle and leverage they can get and actively encourage.” - Charlene Li Our take: This makes a lot of sense to us, but we expect that it will be tempered by the fear of totally blowing it. Getting into the social media space and doing it wrong is something that a lot of companies fear getting blown apart for. We expect that to change slowly and only for a limited number of companies. Here's the full document embedded below - what do you think of these predictions? Social Media 2009 Publish at Scribd or explore others: Management Business social media 2009 .. read more..

Adobe PDF Guide: How to Do Everything with PDF Files
Sunday, January 4, 2009

A great collection of Amit's best advice regarding PDF hacks. If you're not reading Digital Inspiration, you're missing out! .. read more..

GovTwit Directory « New Thinking
Monday, November 24, 2008

A directory of US Government types on Twitter. A great little resource. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: twitter , directories , toshare .. read more..

TaoSecurity: Don't Fight the Future
Monday, November 24, 2008

One security pro's predictions for 2009, though he says that's not what this list is. An interesting read. End of VPNs, clouds, centralized reporting for enterprise devices that are all on the open web, etc. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , security .. read more..

Making Subscription Options for the Grand Rounds Med-blog Carnival
Friday, November 21, 2008

In September I wrote a blog post about reading RSS feeds for, if not at, your work. (” Reading Blogs at Work: Why You Should Do It & How You Can Make it Worthwhile “) One of the things I discovered in writing that post was the fantastic weekly carnival of medical blogs called the Grand Rounds . This wonderful series has been running for more than 4 years now and many of its participants put great care into their hosting efforts. When it's their turn to play host the solicit, search for, organize and sometimes summarize an awesome selection of the best posts on medical blogs that week. Unfortunately, I haven't found any way to subscribe to an RSS or email list of those posts - and I've looked really hard! Tonight I'm preparing for a presentation I'm giving tomorrow to a medical tech and civil liberites organization and I really wanted to make such a subscription available for them. So I bit the bullet and made it myself. It was not as easy as I'd like and is going to take a few minutes each week for me to maintain - so if any participants are here reading this and would like to take it over, I'll show you below not just how I created the feed but how you can help too. Read on for RSS and email subscription options and step by step instructions describing how this was done. I hope the first commenter from the medical blogging community who stops by will break my heart by showing me an existing RSS subscription option that I just haven't found yet. Here's the feed, give it a click: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GrandRoundsFeed And if you'd like to subscribe by email - here's a form to do that with. Enter your email address: Delivered by FeedBurner I tried a lot of things that didn't work and this is the solution I came up with. It should be reusable in other contexts of course, not just with Grand Rounds. Step One Thankfully, there's already a starting place because Dr. Nicholas Genes, a resident in the Emergency Medicine program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, keeps a Google Calendar of all past and future hosts of the Grand Rounds embedded in a four year old post on his blog . I clicked the plus button in that embed to subscribe to the calendar in my Google Calendar so I'll see when and where future editions are being hosted. Unfortunately there's no permalinks to the particular posts available, it's just links to the home pages of the host blogs. Step Two What I'm going to do is click on each link that comes into my calendar each Tuesday morning, visit the host blog, find the permalink to the Grand Round post and tag it “grandroundsfeed” in my Delicious account . Step Three Delicious publishes an RSS feed for everything I as a user tag as “grandroundsfeed.” I took that RSS feed and put it through FeedBurner . Feedburner lets me keep track of how many subscribers there are, add a link to the end of every item that says please visit Marshallk.com and take over maintance of this feed from me please , offer subscription to the links by email, transfer control of the feed to another Feedburner account holder when someone capable volunteers and perhaps most importantly, it lets me switch out the source feed when the time comes to be instead the feed of someone else's delicious account items tagged “grandroundsfeed” (or any other tag of their choosing). That's it! It's as simple as that. If no one volunteers to tag the new link each week, I'll just keep doing it mself. It will only take 2 minutes and it's a great public service for an awesome round up of content. We could create a widget that displays these links each week, we could do all kinds of things with it. I'm fantasizing about a combination of Dapper.net , PostRank and maybe one other tool to create a “best of” Grand Rounds feed that would deliver only the most popular links from the entire collection each week. I probably won't take the time to try to figure that out, but I think it's doable. Subscription options are, again, up above these instructions. Obviously if you're interested in getting any help with projects like this for your organization, drop me a line, but hopefully these instructions are clear enough that you could do it yourself with one hand tied behind your back. In the mean time - enjoy the awesome medical blogosphere round ups. If you want to see some examples, recent ones include Dr. Deb's adorable iTunes playlist version and the wacky Grand Round in the form of medical blog posts re-interpreted as job advice for Barack Obama over at Musings of a Distractable Mind . See also the recent edition at the very nicely produced Nurse Ratched's Place . Next week is at Canadian Medicine . I just linked to particular recent posts of all of these blogs so they'd get a trackback notification about this post. Is that trackback spam? I don't think it is. Happy feed creation in whatever fields you're in! .. read more..

louisgray.com: 15 Secrets of FriendFeed's Power Users
Thursday, November 20, 2008

Guest poster Daniel P. offers some truly useful tips on building your rep on FriendFeed. Even more in comments. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , FriendFeed , marketing , promotion .. read more..

Add Rev3 to the Deadpool « Kent's Official Blog
Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Ask A Ninja dude tells it like it is in the video content world. Worth a read, whether he's correct or not we'll see but a very informed post. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , video .. read more..

Would You Like a Job as an Online Community Manager?
Saturday, October 18, 2008

One of the services that I provide for consulting clients is assistance in recruiting bloggers and social media experts for hire. In the past 2 months I've helped 3 companies find company bloggers or community managers. Right now I'm working on a list of 3 to 5 high-quality candidates for a community management position for a very innovative and cool startup. What would a job like that involve? If you're a startup company reading this post, should you hire a community manager? To explore this question in general, I've reposted below a post I wrote this Spring at ReadWriteWeb. It's titled Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers? I've posted it in full below for the benefit of casual readers, but the original post has been read by more than 10,000 people, 69 of whom left comments, many of which are also worth reading. I should also take this opportunity again to thank the 22 people who contributed their thoughts to my research on the article. If you'd like to learn more about the particular community manager role I'm trying to fill, email me at marshall@marshallk.com. This position in particular is best for someone on or willing to move to the East Coast, but that may not be 100% essential (and other companies will be looking to hire for similar positions in the future) so… if you'd like to do this kind of work now or later, drop me a line. Whether this kind of position is of interest to you or not, I hope you'll enjoy the following discussion. Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers? You know what little startup companies need these days? They need to hire more people! It may be a frightening thought, but in an increasingly social world - being social is becoming an important full time job. “Community Manager” is a position being hired for at a good number of large corporations (see Jeremiah Owyang's growing list of people with that kind of job) but what about smaller companies? We asked a number of people what they thought and the following discussion offers some great things to think about, pro and con. What Is a Community Manager? A community manager can do many things (see below) but the most succinct definition of the role that we can offer is this. A community manager is someone who communicates with a company's users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for. True believers can't emphasize the importance of the role enough. John Mark Walker, the Community Manager at CollabNet articulates this perspective well: “I firmly believe that the community manager should be one of the first hires - right after a solid engineering group and before you invest in corporate marketing people.” Not everyone sees it that way, something that causes substantial distress for people in the supply chain who are advocates for the CM role. “Start ups and all companies that exist online need to be looking at a community manager as a salaried position,” said Dylan Boyd of eROI . “We have been working with big brands and it kills me when they just give 'social media' to someone that already has 10 other roles…At Omma Social last month in NYC that topic came up asking all the people in the room from Big brands if they had a community manager. 90% of them did not and are still trying to find out how to spec out a job description in order to hire for it.” Dissenters: Community Management Does Not Need to Be a Full Time Job Others see community management as something that doesn't need to be a full time job. “Community management is essentially a public relationship issue, so whoever picks up that gauntlet is on point for representing their company to the rest of us,” consultant Peat Bakke told us. “It doesn't have to be a specific person or a full time job, but it is part of starting and running a business, almost by definition: if you're in business, you're doing community management whether you like it or not.” Some would go so far as to call an explicit community manager position a bad idea in the early days of a startup. Darius A Monsef IV, Executive Editor & Creator, COLOURlovers.com told us he thinks that in the early days founders need to be in the thick of managing their own communities. Jonas Anderson voiced concern about community managers being caught between loyalties to the company and its users, while being tripped up by employer nondisclosure agreements. (Others though, such as former BBC blog producer Robin Hamman, point out that having a community manager can greatly reduce legal risk when a company engages extensively with its users.) Startup founder Sachin Agarwal splits his time between community and other work. Though he wishes he had more time for this kind of work, a full timer isn't necessary, he says. “Our contact us page encourages people to ask each other and post on other sites before coming to us - we're happy to help, but I'd wager that other users know how to get the most out of our site better than even we do.” Similarly, Twine's Candice Nobles says after some consideration being given to the position, her company found that their users have been incredibly self-organized and regulating so far. While those thoughts might seem valid, consultant Dawn Foster emphasized that for some companies - making one person ultimately responsible for community work can be essential. “For startups where community is a critical element of the product or service,” she told us, “I think that a community manager should be an early hire. Without a community manager, the frantic pace of the startup environment can mean that the community gets neglected simply because no single person is tasked with being responsible for it. This neglect could result in failure for the startup if the community is critical.” Can Founders Manage Their Communities? We talk to a lot of CEOs on the phone here at ReadWriteWeb and we'll try to be polite in answering this question. Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta answers this question diplomatically. “The [community manager] role can be played by one of the founders early on, but as the project grows you need a person that knows how to listen,” he told us. “Founders have a vision and might be a bit stubborn about what their product represents and offers (that's why they are founders). Someone a bit more distanced might be much better community manager since he has a lot more empathy for users and their problems and can relay that to developers and managers. And vice versa.” Pete Burgeson, director of marketing for online marketplace crowdSPRING says that a good community manager can help raise the voice of the users themselves. “We want to be able to build a platform for our community to have a voice, showcase their talent and become as active in speaking for crowdSPRING as we are speaking for ourselves.” Still others believe that users may not want to talk to the founder or a community manager, but some one with tech chops and focus. “I think a startup should put a developer in the community as opposed to a ‘community manager'”, Rob Diana told us. “Even though the developer may not be as good of a communicator as a marketing guy, there is a different type of understanding of what people want.” What Does A Community Manager Do? There are many ways that a community manager can benefit a startup company and it often varies from company to company. Eva Schweber, co-founder of CubeSpace says “it depends on the community and what needs to be managed…the style and distractability of the folks in the startup, how they like to collaborate with peers and how they define their peers.” It's a complicated job, but one that can help bring cohesiveness to the life of a company. “Any opportunity to interact with the community forces one to think about the product/feature considerations and ramifications of one choice over another,” says Nagaraju Bandaru of SmartWebBlog . “In many ways, community manager is the evangelist for company's products and the voice of the customer in internal discussions. It's critical to react to online discussions with skill, consistency and aptitude; The role is hard to understand from outside but impossible to miss once a startup is in execution mode.” This coherent communication can have business development benefits as well. This seems to us to be one of the most important benefits of the position. Graeme Thickins, VP of Marketing at doapp explains: “Their world includes the online community that represents both prospective customers/users, as well as strategic partner companies, p.. .. read more..

Hire The Best People: 10 Easy Steps
Thursday, October 16, 2008

A smart little article on Vitamin from someone at Freshbooks about how to hire the best. Some good insights like: resumes from Joel on Software posts are good, resumes from 37Signals job board postings are not. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , hiring , jobs .. read more..

Google Code Blog: Usability Research on Federated Login
Monday, September 22, 2008

Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toread , toshare , data portability , login , usability .. read more..

» What the F$!K is Social Media Presentation Public Sector Marketing 2.0 - ..
Monday, September 15, 2008

Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , toread , social media , consulting .. read more..

Fidelity's Fresh Approach to Retirement Marketing
Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Great case studying showing the click through rates on advertising content focused on delivering value to readers. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , advertising , content .. read more..

What Is Newsmastering And What Are Newsradars? RSS News Aggregation And Re-Publi..
Friday, August 15, 2008

What Is Newsmastering And What Are Newsradars? RSS News Aggregation And Re-Publishing For Beginners Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , toread , RSS .. read more..

Rightmedia hurts sites.. « The Paradigm Shift
Thursday, August 14, 2008

Dating mega-site is critical of complex ad network's load time and its impact on pageviews. Short, interesting read. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , advertising .. read more..

Twelve best practices for online customer communities | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDN..
Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Also marked "to read," but anything Dion Hinchcliffe writes like this should be worth a look. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toread , toshare , communities , enterprise .. read more..

How to Keep Track of the Margins of Your Blogosphere
Monday, August 11, 2008

I contributed a tutorial session to the BlogOn Expo Summer 2008 last week that I thought could be of interest to readers here. It's titled “ Tracking the Margins of Your Blogosphere and it's all about a method I use to keep an eye on the most important news from sectors I am marginally interested in. The whole Expo should be worth some of your time, the last one was quite good. I feel conflicted about the decision I have learned that the Expo has made to do a publicity deal with Izea/PayPerPost, who are scumbags. I can understand why the Expo would do so and I can understand why armies of beginning bloggers would work with Izea. However, I do not like the idea of advertisers paying for blog coverage and I do not believe them when they say disclosure is required. See image below, click for full size. Why did I contribute to the BlogOnExpo? I didn't know about the Izea partnership until after I already had and I'm not sure how big a deal it is. I do want to be clear though that I am in no way in support of Izea. That said, I hope you like the content that I and a number of other bloggers contributed to the Expo. .. read more..

Changes: I’m Joining RWW Full Time & Getting Married!
Friday, August 1, 2008

I'm making two exciting announcements tonight. Personal Most important, I'm getting married to my partner Mikalina! Many of my work contacts here on the blog haven't met Mikalina but many of you have. She's wonderful and I love her very much. We've been together for more than 4 years already and she's studying to be an environmental engineer. Or a ceramicist - she's a rock star in both and hasn't decided what to do about it yet. We're looking to get married pretty darned soon, I proposed to her last weekend when we were vacationing on the Oregon Coast. Yay! Work Changes Readers here may or may not have known that I have only been working roughly half time at ReadWriteWeb since I came on board there in September . That's now going to change. The other 30 hours each week has been spent doing consulting, for more companies than I can count right now. I absolutely love consulting - but ReadWriteWeb is growing fast and site editor Richard MacManus has offered me a great full time position as his VP of Content Development . I'll be working there full time on a number of initiatives that we'll be rolling out in the coming months. For now we're saying that I'm going to be working on premium content, publishing systems and all-around magic, some of which will be behind the scenes. I'll also continue working in my capacity as lead writer there, so you can expect roughly the same output from me as well. I am really excited about getting to bring some of my other ideas to fruition with a team of good people and Richard's support, though. I'm very proud to have been part of the team at RWW that helped the site move from being the 27th most linked-to blog on the web up to #9 today . (Take that Mashable! And look out, ICanHasCheezburger , we're coming to get you next! I kid, kind of.) Consulting I'm really going to miss the rush of consulting, but in order to stay fresh and in touch with the market, I will continue offering one 1 hour consulting session per week. Those sessions are fast paced and a lot of fun, so let me know if you're interested in scheduling one. Feedback from past associates and clients can be found here . Did I Mention That I'm Getting Married? Thanks for all the interest and support that friends have offered here and privately. I'm very excited to be moving into new stages in the two most important parts of my life. I think many of you will really like what you see us come up with over at ReadWriteWeb. The joy that will come from the transition in my personal life will be much less public but I thought I'd let readers here know about it too. .. read more..

A Small Study Of Big Blogs: Further Findings | How-To | Smashing Magazine
Thursday, July 31, 2008

A study of the Technorati top 50 for design. Pretty interesting. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , toread , blogs , design .. read more..

Linden Scripting For Noobs: MIT Media Lab Makes Intuitive LSL Script Builder
Thursday, July 31, 2008

A great example of programming made easy with the use of a Graphic User Interface, in this case for adding interactivity to SecondLife objects. This is the kind of thing we'll see more and more of on all kinds of platforms. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , gaming , SecondLife , programming , GUI .. read more..

Social Networks: To My Future Self...
Wednesday, July 30, 2008

An hour long video from the maker of The Machine is Using Us, about the anthropology of YouTube, presented to the Library of Congress. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toread , toshare , youtube , video .. read more..

Marshall Kirkpatrick
Thursday, July 24, 2008

Check out this fabulous blog. test test .. read more..

I’m Making Changes - Get Your Consulting Now If You Want It
Thursday, July 24, 2008

Late next week I'll be announcing a change to my work life. It's exciting stuff that I hope readers here will appreciate, but it will lead to a major reduction in the time I spend doing consulting work. I'll be finishing up projects that have already begun (if I haven't discussed this with you don't worry about it) but I won't be taking on new projects after next week. I honestly love consulting and will continue offering limited one hour sessions periodically, but I will no longer be spending half of my time on it. I've got another opportunity I can't pass up. In other words, if you've been thinking of getting in touch with me for a high-energy, rapid-fire one hour session about product usability, market positioning or launch planning - now's the time because the pipe is going to be far more narrow very soon. I've been doing three or four one hour sessions per month for the past year and people love them . Let me know if you want to do one next week by email at marshall@marshallk.com Otherwise, hang tight for some news next week. It's nothing earth shaking but it should be pretty exciting. Thanks as always for your ongoing support. .. read more..

Live Mesh Scenarios Directory (Tutorials)
Friday, July 18, 2008

Curious about what Live Mesh lets users do? Here are 4 tutorials to start off, more apparently on the way. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , mesh , microsoft , tutorials .. read more..

Globalizatoin at AboutUs: It's Cooler Than You Might Think
Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Interesting discussion of AboutUs and their office in Pakistan. AboutUs is a past consulting client of mine and this situation is one worth reading about. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , globalization , wikis .. read more..

Do Startups Need Community Managers?
Tuesday, July 15, 2008

One of the things I've been advising clients to do a lot lately is consider hiring a full or part-time community manager to communicate closely with their users online. I thought I'd write a post about why community managers are good to have, but then I thought that instead I'd ask it as a question. Do startups need community managers? If not, I'll stop suggesting that so many of them make that type of hire! That's how I phrased a deliberately vague question on Twitter , and it got some great replies by email and on FriendFeed ! Twenty people replied, many of whom are community managers, others of whom have hired community managers and a couple of others are cautionary or cynical. It's a great discussion! Most of these thoughts are unique and very worth considering - even if they don't all agree. I'm going to turn these replies into a coherent (and weighty) post on ReadWriteWeb in the morning but I thought I would post them online first and let people knock them around a bit more first. Would you like to respond to any of these arguments in the finished post? If so, please leave a comment here and make sure you tell me where to link your name to. The final post has been put up here , thanks to all who participated. I was planning on putting these up on a wiki first and encouraging people to go over there and make edits for replies - I've done that before - but then I thought that sounded like a missed opportunity. So here's a discussion that will turn into a blog post - your thoughts are formally requested…big thanks to the people who have already joined in. I'll include my own thoughts in the final post. PS. Big congrats to Drew Olanoff, who was just named Community Manager and Evangelist for Strands.com today! . . . I do think that startups need community managers, but that being said it depends on the community and what needs to be managed. A lot of what I do at CubeSpace is function as a startup community management, but that is very different than the work that Dawn does. I think it depends on the style and distractability of the folks in the startup and how they like to collaborate with peers as well as how they define their peers. I am not trying to be cryptic, I have just worked with a range of startups who need different kind of support and community management. I would be happy to have a longer conversation with you about this if you are interested. It might also be a good session for http://www.sideprojecttostartup.com/. -Eva Eva Sari Schweber Chief Cat Herder CubeSpace, Your WorkSpace Community Read on for the rest of the discussion Hutch Carpenter points to a blog post about how a good community manager saves money on PR and has other benefits. http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008/06/12/smart-social-media-marketing-caleb-elston-and-toluu/ interacting with bloggers saves money on PR I firmly believe that the community manager should be one of the first hires - right after a solid engineering group and before you invest in corp. marketing people. I have my reasons and am happy to get into details. – John Mark Walker Community Manager, CollabNet http://www.collab.net/ Just saw your Twitter post about community managers. Pandora just created this position about 4 months ago and it’s been INVALUABLE to our company, in such a short time! We are very active on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr etc. I’d be happy to have you speak to our Community Manager if you’d like. It’s opened a whole new world of communications for us! Lucia Willow—she’s great and has a great, fun online voice. With the iPhone/Pandora launch on Friday, the Twitter network and followers were making tons of buzz! It was very exicitng.. that we even posted a haiku contest for some free Pandora swag to the Twitters! Kim Bardakian Sr. Communications Manager Pandora Someone else sent in a link to a slide deck regarding The Costs of community managers http://www.cybersoc.com/2008/06/my-slideshow-fr.html Community management is essentially a public relationship issue, so whoever picks up that gauntlet is on point for representing their company to the rest of us. It doesn't have to be a specific person or a full time job , but it is part of starting and running a business, almost by definition: if you're in business, you're doing community management whether you like it or not. Peat Bakke peat.org If by “community managers” you mean someone that keeps track of what is happening in a certain community, then yes, startups need a community manager. Especially if that company pays attention to social media. Social media is so important for many companies these days, but the sheer volume of information that is shared can be a problem for them. I think it takes at least one person in a startup to “keep an ear to the ground”. That person should be reading feeds all day and paying attention for appropriate information and content. That person should be writing a blog and listening to their other networks. A social network community manager should learn about what is happening in that company's field every day and report it to their team. Doug Coleman I think it's an important *function* to be filled, but it's not necessary to have a position dedicated to it. I think it's a matter of resources - I know some firms that have a full time head very early and some keep it to an intern after they're 100+ people. But it is important to *do*. I fill it in between the other things I do - vendor relationships, inbound inquiries, sales calls, balancing the books, etc. I do wish I had more time/resources to it, however - I'm much more reactive than I am proactive. dawdledotcom is our username on a variety of sites, from Twitter to CheapAssGamer to all sorts of sites in between. I use Summize and Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying, and we have a board on GetSatisfaction (empty for now, but ready to be used). Our contact us page encourages people to ask each other and post on other sites before coming to us - we're happy to help, but I'd wager that other users know how to get the most out of our site better than even we do. Hope that helps! Cheers, Sachin – Sachin Agarwal I put down a lot of thoughts about community building last week on Rick’s blog: http://siliconflorist.com/2008/07/08/community-the-secret-sauce-of-a-successful-internet-startup/ My opinion on community managers is that they are OK when you’ve established a community. Not for just launched startups. You need to be in the thick of it managing your own community in the early days. Cheers, -D Darius A Monsef IV Executive Editor & Creator www.COLOURlovers.com It depends on the startup. For startups where community is a critical element of the product or service (Twitter, open source product, etc.), I think that a community manager should be an early hire. Having someone in place and responsible for managing the community helps make sure that the company is responding to the needs of the community. Without a community manager, the frantic pace of the startup environment can mean that the community gets neglected simply because no single person is tasked with being responsible for it. This neglect could result in failure for the startup if the community is critical. In many startups, the community manager can wear another hat, too. I worked at one startup where I was the Director of Community and Partner Programs, since partners were a big part of the community. Other logical combinations include some marketing roles, social media (blogging / podcasting), developer relations (for developer communities) or website development depending on the skills of the person in the role. I think that each startup needs to decide exactly how critical the community is to their particular business and use that information to decide when to hire a community manager. My 2 cents. Take care, Dawn – Visit my blog at http://fastwonderblog.com —————————————————————————– Marshall, that's a story I'd like to read! Great benefits could be gained by establishing links between a startup and it's followers, early. However, the community voice needs to be free The community manager would need the suport of the community. There is a danger that a community voice in management would have split loyalties. Maybe even tied by NDA's. This would make him/her more of a hostage (worse case). If these fears, as well as the benefits, can be voiced and talked about there is great merit to your idea. Best wishes Jonas Anderson Start ups and all companies that exist online need to be looking at a community manager as a salaried position. We have been working with big brands and it kills me when they just give “social media” to someone that already has 10 other roles. As a “start up” ourselves, or at least always in our mi.. .. read more..

NPR cancel Bryant Park Project - Can a hybrid work?: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News,..
Monday, July 14, 2008

A good discussion of the now late NPR show that mixed radio and social media. I was a guest on this show once. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , radio , social media , mixed models .. read more..

5 Minute Intro to Yahoo Pipes
Monday, July 14, 2008

I'm in the San Francisco airport flying back from a wonderful Foo Camp where I lead a discussion about RSS power user tips. It was a lot of fun. Several of the attendees had never used Yahoo! Pipes , one of the most powerful tools in the RSS toolbox. I told them that I too didn't really learn to use Pipes for a long, long time after I first discovered it because it seemed too complicated for my poor little non-developer's head. Once I was shown just two buttons to push in the service, though, I found out that some great results are actually very easy to achieve using Pipes. Just seeing some one do the simplest things there makes it a lot less scary. In that same spirit, I offer the following 5 minute screencast demonstrating 3 simple things you can do with Pipes. I hope it emboldens you to learn how to do even more with the service, but even if you only feel comfortable doing this much - I believe it will still prove very, very useful. Plus it will keep your toes safe (you'll know what I mean after watching the video below. Update: Give it a try, this video may or may not play for you. It was recorded using Jing Project, an application that's simple to record with but maddening to use once a video is loaded. I get several emails a day saying I'm approaching the bandwidth limits of my free account. I have no idea how many times it's been viewed or how close I am to that bandwidth requirement though. I can't resize the file itself to fit into a smaller player, no one has answered my email requesting information despite previous requests from the company for me to try it out again and apparently the only solution to my problems will be to give them a $160 for a year's subscription. I think I'll be trying out ScreenFlow instead. But give it a click below, maybe you can watch this video! .. read more..

Female CEOs at top Silicon Valley tech firms down to zero - San Jose Mercury New..
Friday, July 11, 2008

Just one more data point concerning gender and tech. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , gender , tech , women .. read more..

NxE's Fifty Most Influential ‘Female' Bloggers
Friday, July 11, 2008

Interesting list of women power-bloggers. Do you know these writers? You should. There were several here that I had never heard of or didn't know much about. Worth a look. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: toshare , women , bloggers , blogher .. read more..

“Blogging Is Easy, Anyone Can Do It” Actually, It’s Not So Simple
Thursday, July 10, 2008

If you're looking to engage in online conversations with a wide variety of people in different circumstances, it's important to recognize that the playing field is not level. Though blogging software lowered the technical barriers to participation, there remain substantial political and cultural issues that complicate adoption of these kinds of technologies by people with particular life experiences. Two important opportunities to learn about these issues are in the news right now. Please check out this article on Silicon Alley Insider (and follow the links) and check out the Blogher conference, which will kick off a week from Friday. Racism and sexism are two of the issues that many people face online. On a strategic level, to draw the lowest kind of analogy, failure to recognize the race and gender realities different people face on and offline is like trying to design a web page without recognizing that different browsers render HTML differently. (Forgive me for the clumsy analogy.) Though users may have free choice between browsers, and people have some choice about their response to race and gender politics, people who are not white and male don't have much choice about those circumstances. And being “other” than white and male is not “a problem” like using Internet Explorer instead of Firefox - it's a hell of a lot more complicated than that. Enough with that analogy then. I bring this up just to say that no matter what your political views may be, trying humbly to understand where other people are coming from will make you a more effective communicator. There are millions of people on the web with millions of different experiences, but the types of experiences we can learn about by paying attention to this conversation and this conference are ones that a large number of people have had. Even if you don't think it's a matter of justice, fairness and human goodness (I do), consider learning respectfully how people in different circumstances understand their own lives so that you can be more effective in communicating with them. That will make you more effective at working online. .. read more..

Mobile 2.0 Tagcloud at mTrends - mobile media lifestyle trends - m-trends.org
Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Interesting visual representation of the concepts in the mobile 2.0 space. Saved By: Marshall Kirkpatrick | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: mobile , toshare .. read more..

Extracting Data From Otherwise Unused Applications: The Case of the Facebook Bir..
Tuesday, July 8, 2008

I hardly ever log in to Facebook but each time I do, I find that there are friends whose birthdays I'm glad to find out about. In order not to miss them, I've extracted that information from my Facebook account in to an RSS feed that I can subscribe to elsewhere. I used the wonderful tool Dapper.net to do it. Below are screenshots demonstrating how to do the same thing yourself. Of course this is just one example of a general principle. I hope you can imagine all kinds of other applications that you would like to get limited access to without visiting them, but from inside your RSS reader. You have a Facebook (or other) account that you never log in to. But it does a remarkable job of notifying you when it's someone's birthday! Dapper Will Extract The Data in That Field For You Select the "create a new Dapp" link. I love Dapper. Just Enter The URL of the Page You Want to Extract From Copy and paste in the URL, select RSS feed, then click the "next step" button. Go Ahead and Log In Through Dapper Then click on the login button on Facebook, or whatever app you want to enable access to. Voila, You Are Logged In. Now click the "add to basket" button and then "next step". You will be warned that Dapper works best with more than one URL in the basket, but you can just say that's ok and move on with your life. Now click to define the field you want to extract data from. 1. I clicked on my friends' names whose birthdays are today. 2. You can see in the preview field below that Dapper properly understood which field I was trying to define and didn't capture any extra data. 3. Save that field. Update: After a day of using this feed live it looks like I may need to grab a different field on the page as Dapper is bringing me back header info instead of birthdays. I'm going to try repeating this process with the “view all” page instead. Two days later, with two birthday entries instead of one, the feed is working great again. Facebook formatting and wiggling is one thing that needs to be taken into consideration and if this was a more serious matter, a more flexible tool than Dapper might be needed given the circumstances. Double Update - after using this feed for a week or so, it turns out it's actually pretty good. Not perfect but a heck of a lot better than I thought it was. Trial and error! Now tell Dapper what that field you selected is and where in an RSS feed you want it to live. In some cases you might make this the item text, but in this case the title is what we're looking for. If you wanted to define another field, you will be given that opportunity once you save this one - but in this case we'll just say "next step." Preview that baby… Looks good! Click "next step." Now you've got some fields to fill out… I probably didn't need to mark this as private, but I did. Then hit save. Now tell Dapper what your username and password are so it can login for you. Hit "fix dates" if there's no date field already determined (this is a mystery but it works) . Finally, copy and paste that orange RSS link into your favorite feed reader! It may need to be one that supports authentication (log in) and in those cases if it's high enough priority these days I add it to Netvibes.com Ta da! That's all there is to it. Making the feed took me about 3 minutes, much less than making this tutorial did. Again, Facebook is just one use case here - now go knock yourself out coming up with others! .. read more..

Top Spots in Organic & Paid Search = Branding
Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Great write up of an interesting study on the perceptual impact of good search placement. This one's a keeper. .. read more..

A hunger for books | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
Monday, December 10, 2007

Dorris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech where she brings up critiques of the web's cultural impacts, among other things. An important read. .. read more..

The significance of Google's Android
Friday, December 7, 2007

Looks like a good article on Android, 33 comments, consultancy blog. Marked toread. .. read more..

Massive Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) Video Recap
Friday, December 7, 2007

Can't wait to spend some time with this one. .. read more..

Thoughts on Seth Godin's keynote at SES [SearchEngineWatch]
Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Seth Godin is probably someone I should read a lot more of. He's a marketer, but interesting. .. read more..

Media Bullseye
Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Interesting new site for PR and marketing news regarding social media. Chris Brogan an early contributor. .. read more..

The Identity Corner " The problem(s) with OpenID
Monday, December 3, 2007

A long collection of links to critiques of OpenID. Looks real good. .. read more..

AOL, Netflix and the end of open access to research data | Surveillance State - ..
Friday, November 30, 2007

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Nick Carr on Google as Anomaly
Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Paul Miller excerpts and links to what's being talked about as one of Nick Carr's most interesting writings in a long time. That's saying a lot, because the iconoclast Carr is very, very smart. .. read more..

Who is afraid of the GGG?
Monday, November 26, 2007

Giant Global Graph? This ZDNet post is a great overview of the recent discussion kicked off by Tim Berners Lee. .. read more..

Help needed: A review of Google-funded 23andMe
Friday, November 23, 2007

Google-backed genetics startup; this blog seeks donations to pay for the $1k fee for the product. Sounds like a great idea to me, I'm real curious about this company. .. read more..

Teaching Online Journalism " Connecting people to people
Thursday, November 22, 2007

A good post about the value of identity on websites. Quotes my post about social network functionality but a plainly valuable collection of thoughts regardless. .. read more..

dotBen on dataportability.org
Thursday, November 22, 2007

A video about a site I am itching to write up. You can learn about it here before I do, gotta find the time. Lucky you. .. read more..

1. Individual videos I've found to share
Friday, July 6, 2007

1. Individual videos I've found to share by marshallkirkpatrick ( watch show ) 1. Video: Dramatic Chipmunk (marshallkirkpatrick) 2. Video: google final (beth) 3. Video: Video: RSS in Plain English (marshallkirkpatrick) .. read more..