Recent Links on Ma.gnolia

A few interesting things this week …

Announcing Emailtoid: mapping email addresses to OpenIDs | FactoryCity

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The Challenge of the Social Media Executive Recruiter

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rinzai – My $837.20 iPhone bill and how to avoid it

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Is Twitter Changing Real Life Social Interactions? | SheGeeks

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Social Media Strategy- The Planning Stage | chrisbrogan.com

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Lyza Danger Gardner » Blog Archive » How I Got a Word into the Oxford English Dictionary

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Marshall Kirkpatrick » Screen Shots: How I Use RSS to Track Thousands of News Sources Easily

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Transitions: Leaving Jive and Starting a Consulting Practice

I have decided to leave Jive Software to do something that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time … start my own consulting business focused on online communities and social media. Many of my friends know that I have been talking about going independent and moving into consulting for a while now. The timing just seemed right to me.

The background

I was hired at Jive a little more than a year ago to build a developer community around their new Clearspace product. When I joined Jive, there were less than 50 employees, and my role was very broad, which gave me the opportunity to do a variety of really interesting activities. I learned so much and had a great time building the developer community and getting participation from many of our customers. Over time, the role has changed, narrowed, and become more tactical. It started to feel less and less like I wanted to continue in the role, and I started to realize that I was no longer the person that Jive needed in this role. I recently had a heart to heart discussion on this topic with Matt Tucker, Jive co-founder and CTO; we talked about they type of person that Jive needed to have in the developer relations role and my desire to move on to something else. I did have the opportunity to look internally within Jive to see if I should continue in a different role, but I couldn’t find a role that appealed to me more than starting my own consulting practice.

Moving Forward

Today I announce the creation of Fast Wonder Consulting. This consulting practice seems like a natural extension of the Fast Wonder blog where I have been blogging about community and social media for several years.

Recently, I’ve seen a number of companies struggling with how to get more savvy about social media and interacting with online communities. My focus will be on providing consulting services to help guide companies in developing a comprehensive social media and community engagement strategy. I will help companies engage with their community both online and offline to help generate buzz around their products. I can also help companies find, monitor, and respond to what others are saying about them online. You can find more details about the services that I will provide on the consulting page.

I am also pleased to announce that Jive will be my first client. I will be continuing to manage the Jivespace developer community with a reduced time commitment and fewer responsibilities. This helps to ensure that the Jivespace developer community doesn’t suffer from my leaving while giving Jive some time to find a full-time replacement. It also frees up my time to start picking up additional clients.

Later this year, Jive will also be looking for someone with a Java development background and community management expertise to fill the developer relations role. This person would mentor partners and customers who are writing Clearspace plugins, and he or she will contribute technical content and expertise to Jivespace and other technical communities. Please feel free to ping me if you are interested along with submitting your resume to Jive’s online job site.

I still love Jive, the people, and the culture. I am sure that I will continue to engage with Jive as a part of my role in Legion of Tech, since Jive has been such a great supporter of the local Portland tech community through event sponsorship and participation. I also hope to have other opportunities to work with Jive in the future.

Recent Links on Ma.gnolia

A few interesting things this week …

louisgray.com: Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What’s Next

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/Message: Web Culture And The New Ethos Of Work [From Enterprise 2.0 June 2008]

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WebVisions Podcasts Released

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iWidgets

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A Chronology of Brands that Got Punk’d by Social Media

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Is that a gaming techie or a hungry werewolf?- OregonLive.com

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Wiki Providers Come Together to Offer Universal Edit Button – ReadWriteWeb

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The Twitter Hall of Shame: 50 Tweets That Will Echo in History – Inside CRM

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Email to ID: My OpenID is an email address » Silicon Florist

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Gary Vaynerchuk on New Media, Personal Branding and Promotion at Legion of Tech

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Legion of Talk Series: Gary Vaynerchuk

Legion of Tech is starting a series of events called Legion of Talk with interesting guest speakers:

We like to think of it as our attempt to bring the TED Conference to Portland- one speaker at a time. And as with all Legion of Tech events everyone is invited and admission is always free.

A lot of brilliant and interesting people pass through the Northwest and we hope to seize the opportunity to make them available to you. (quoted from Legion of Tech)

Our first speaker is Gary Vaynerchuk best known for Wine Library TV, but he will be talking to us about how he has used digital media with great success for his business. You can learn more about this event and about Gary by reading Todd Kenefsky’s post on the Legion of Tech blog.

Logistics:
July 1, 2008
Wieden+Kennedy
224 NW 13th Ave., Portland
7:00pm to 8:00pm
RSVP on Upcoming

Related Fast Wonder blog posts:

A great time at Ignite Portland 3

I had a fantastic evening at Ignite Portland 3 on Wednesday! The presentations were spectacular, as always, and we even had a great after party at Imbibe hosted by Strands and Polymer Studios. I thought that I would be too tired to enjoy the after party, but it was really nice to be able to kick back and enjoy talking to people where I didn’t have to worry about organizing anything.

There were so many great volunteers who helped make this event a success; Legion of Tech events, like Ignite Portland, are put together entirely by volunteers, and these events are not possible without a bunch of great people helping out. The sponsors also made this possible by providing the funds required to buy food, the use of the Bagdad Theater, insurance, etc. A huge thank you to everyone who helped, sponsored, took pictures / video, and more to make this event so much fun to attend.

From an organizer perspective, this Ignite went very smoothly, especially compared to the chaos of Ignite Portland 2. The ticketing system helped us get people in quickly, and the Bagdad was better prepared for the onslaught of beer and pizza orders, so even the lines for food and drinks stayed fairly short. The best part was that we had a bunch of people (I’m guessing around 500), but everyone had a seat, and we didn’t have to turn anyone away.

Silicon Florist (as always) did a really great write-up on his site with links to other reviews of the event, so I encourage you to read his post for more information about the event. If you missed it, you can watch the videos and view the presentations.

If you attended Ignite Portland 3, we would love to hear your feedback about the event – what did you like or what can we do to improve for the next one?

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

BarCamp Meetups are Now the Legion of Tech Happy Hour 6/26

Please RSVP on Upcoming to help us get a count for the event:

We have a new name and new location, but it is the same great event at the same time as our regularly scheduled BarCamp Meetup (4th Thursday of every month). We recently realized that we’ve outgrown the Jive breakroom, and we’ve evolved away from the BarCamp Meetup name. So, we’ve renamed this monthly event to the Legion of Tech Happy Hour, and the event will now be held outside on the back patio of Plan B.

Thursday, June 26, 2008
5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Plan B
1305 SE 8th

The intent is to get a group of cool people interested in technology together to chat over drinks on the fourth Thursday of every month. Anyone working in high-tech is welcome to attend. Conversations usually range from wikis to open source to blogs to who knows what!

Other Important Events!

Hiring a Community Manager

Hiring a community manager can be tricky for companies, especially ones filling this position for the first time. Last week, someone told me they wanted to hire a community manager and asked me if I could put together a few resources to help get them started. I thought it would be more useful if I turned my email to him into a blog post so others could benefit from it.

The community manager job itself can be a bit vague, like most leadership positions. The role changes from hour to hour depending on what happens in the community, and the person you hire will play a big part in shaping how your company engages with the outside world. It is important to start by carefully defining your goals for the community along with what you want the new community manager to accomplish.

I’ve written a few blog posts on the topic of community managers including information on what community managers do, the skills required to manage communities, and the various roles that fall under the broad umbrella of community manager:

Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester) and Jake McKee (Community Consultant) also have quite a bit of info about community manager roles & hiring:

The community research being done by ForumOne can also be a very valuable resource for anyone involved in communities. There are also a number of Facebook groups focused on community management, but this one seems to be the most active.

There are also a couple of job boards that focus on hiring community managers and related jobs, the Community Guy job board and the Web Strategy board. These should give you a feel for job descriptions, and they might also be good places to post your job description.

The big question is “how much should I expect to pay this person?” In my experience, salary ranges for community managers vary widely. I’ve seen numbers ranging from $50,000 to $150,000 a year. Community managers for technical communities (developers, etc.) make more than end user, social communities. Salary also changes significantly depending on whether the role is really more low-end, tactical moderation or something more strategic, like building a new community or revitalizing a troubled community site. Job experience, location and how well known the person is can also make a big difference in the salary range.

For more information, you can read blog posts from some great community bloggers. Mukund Mohan has a good list on his Best Engaging Communities site.

I would be curious if any of you have other tips? If so, please drop them here in the comments!

Recent Links on Ma.gnolia

A few interesting things this week …

Adding richness to activity streams | FactoryCity

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DiSo as explained by @kveton and @mtrichardson – Sponsored by Vidoop at Beer and Blog

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Commuting & Telecommuting – Web Workers Arise!

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10 Survival Tips for the Modern Wageslave

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Vidoop Troop #1: Portland by way of Tulsa » Silicon Florist

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List of Communities, Virtual Worlds, and Social Networks for Youth, Boomers, Retired, and Beyond

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Recent Links on Ma.gnolia

A few interesting things this week …

Plurk.com

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New Seasons Moving into old Daily Grind Space

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David Recordon’s Blog – “We support the Open Web”

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Factory Joe / OpenID4Kids

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Instant Messaging Proves Useful In Reducing Workplace Interruption

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Unit Structures: Searching Twitter Better

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Make OpenID go away. | nathanpbell.com

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Ignite Portland Tickets Available Now

Wow! We opened up the ticketing system for Ignite Portland just a couple of hours ago, and we’ve already sent 172 tickets with only 295 remaining. If you want to attend Ignite Portland on June 18th 20th, I highly recommend getting a ticket. And you do want to attend. It’s a great time!

Ignite Portland (as always) is a free event with costs covered by our lovely sponsors (including my employer, Jive Software). The ticketing system merely gives you earlier admission, shorter lines and the ability to reserve a spot in advance. Doors open at 5:30pm and your ticket is good until the general admission starts (6:15pm), then all remaining seats will be given on a first-come-first-serve basis to those in line.

If you don’t get a ticket, we’ll also have general admission for people who just want to show up at the event.

What is Ignite Portland? A bunch of fast-paced, interesting presentations – 20 slides for 15 seconds each. Our mantra is “share burning ideas” – just about any topic will do, as long as it’s interesting. From tech to crafts to business to just plain fun! There will be time to chat with other attendees after each series of presentations. Ignite Portland is brought to you by Legion of Tech.

Updated at 4:21. Oops, I was so excited about the number of tickets that I mangled the date 🙂 Thanks Josh!

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Open source, Linux kernel research, online communities and other stuff I'm interested in posting.