Here is this week’s summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs:
GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily
Shizzow
If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.
Here are a few interesting things from this week that I wanted to share …
You can find my links on Delicious.
I just wanted to remind everyone that Innotech Oregon is in two weeks! I will be moderating a panel in the eMarketing Summit on the topic of Companies and Communities: Participating Without Being Sleazy on Thursday, April 23rd at 10:00 AM in Portland Ballroom 256. I’ll be joined on the panel by Kelly Feller, Social Media Strategist at Intel; Jake Kuramoto, Product Strategy Director at Oracle; and Dan Divens, Website and Community Manager at Tripwire.
Keep in mind that you have to register for the eMarketing Summit, since it is not part of the general conference fee. Other presenters in the eMarketing summit include: Rahaf Harfoush, New Media Strategist, Member of Obama’s Social Media Team; Carrie Bugbee, Kent Lewis, Ben Lloyd, and more. Speakers in other tracks include Jason Grigsby, Deborah Bryant, Brian Jamison, James Keller, Raven Zachary and many more.
Don’t forget about the SoMe Awards: Your Social Media Awards brought to you by the Social Media Club of Portland, SEMpdx, the Software Association of Oregon (SAO), and InnoTech.
According to the SoMe website,
The Portland chapter of Social Media Club, SEMpdx and Software Association of Oregon are pleased to announce the first annual SoMē Awards to recognize outstanding Social Media projects and the people who created them.
Awards will be given in 7 categories based on factors such as originality, effectiveness and creativity. At least one member of the team who created the project must reside in Oregon or Southwest Washington to be eligible.
Award submissions must be received no later than 11:59 pm on Saturday, April 11, 2009 to be considered. The awards ceremony will take place on Thursday, April 23, following the eMarketing Summit & InnoTech conference.
It’s not too late! You have until this Saturday (4/11) to nominate your favorite social media project.
I hope to see you at Innotech.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:
I’ve been spending a significant amount of time thinking about the difference between traditional, static websites and online communities as more companies start to make the leap into online communities. In the past, when you created a traditional web site, only your employees could tell how many people visited and interacted with your site. You could hide the dirty little secret that only 10 people per day visited your website, since only the employees with access to your analytics would ever know the truth. In other words, websites fail privately.
Online communities, on the other hand, fail publicly. When you launch an online community and nobody participates, you fail very publicly. Anyone visiting the community can see that people aren’t participating, and it can be damaging to your brand.
Because communities fail publicly, it is important never to launch a community that is empty or nearly empty of content. You need to provide some content and set the tone for the community. It’s like attending a party with a dance floor. If no one is already dancing, it can be hard to get people started, but once you get a few people on the dance floor, others will take their lead and join in a similar fashion.
Here are a few quick tips to help make sure that your new community succeeds:
Spend the time during the planning phases of the community to make sure that you have a plan for the content and the resources to execute your plans over the long term. If you can’t get the resources or don’t have enough time to devote to the community, it might not be the right time to launch a community, and a static website might be a better choice for now.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:
In October, I put together a Google Custom Search Engine to search the blogs of several online community thought leaders. Custom search engines are a great way to control where you search while restricting the search to a specified list of experts. I wanted to share another custom search engine for Industry Analysts. This is a way to find quick quotes and research on a specific topic just from the industry analyst sites specified below:
Now, the question for you. Who did I miss? What other industry analysts cover online communities and social media?
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:
An earlier Fast Wonder blog post with an introduction to Facebook for companies and organizations has been getting quite a bit of traffic lately, so I wanted to do a follow-up post with a few more details and updated information about Facebook. One of the reasons that I find Facebook so interesting is because it has a variety of features that are focused on community building and sharing information with friends and contacts. It is especially useful for smaller, lightweight community efforts.
While we tend to think of Facebook as something for college students, recent college graduates, and technology early adopters, the reality is that Facebook users in the 35 and older category are growing at a very fast rate. According to Inside Facebook, as of the end of March, 30% of Facebook users are over 35.
There are several primary ways to participate on Facebook: personal profiles (private), pages (public), groups, and applications. Each one of these is used differently, so I’ll cover each one of them individually. If you haven’t already read my guiding principles post, you might want to read it first, since it talks more about acceptable behavior in social media.
Personal Profiles (Private)
This is where you should start on Facebook, whether you are participating for fun or on behalf of a company. Facebook profiles are private by default – only the people that you add as contacts can view your personal profile, and they are designed to be used by individuals. You will use this as your account to log into Facebook, so you should work on building your personal profile before starting any other efforts on Facebook. This also gives you an opportunity to experiment with Facebook to learn what works for you and what doesn’t while participating as an individual, rather than jeopardizing your corporate brand image with costly mistakes and gaffes.
Here are a few things that you can do to get started:
Please do not create a personal profile for your company. These look weird and artificial, and they are designed to be private, which makes it difficult for people to interact with your company. We’ll talk about better ways to have a company presence on Facebook in the next section.
Pages (Public)
Facebook pages are publicly viewable, which makes them much better for a corporate presence, since anyone can become a fan of your company without any additional interaction or approvals. People are effectively using pages for companies, products, bands, shows, special interest groups, and much more. Facebook pages have many of the same features as profile pages, but with information that is geared toward companies rather than individuals. While profile pages have education / work information and interests, public pages have location, hours of operation, company overview, mission, date founded, and more. Some features include: wall with messages, events, video, pictures, notes, and more. Powell’s Books has a pretty good example of a company page.
Facebook also has a step-by-step guide and more information about creating a page for you company or product.
Groups
Groups are usually used to share information, collaborate or organize around a specific topic, and they can be public or private depending on what you want to achieve from the group. Groups can be a way to create a very simple, lightweight community around an effort, especially if most of your audience is already on Facebook. People can become members by joining the group, and then they can post information to the group. The features are similar to the profiles and pages described above with information, wall / discussions, events, photos, links, video and more. Corvallis Beer and Blog is an example of how you can use a Facebook group to organize a weekly event.
Applications
You might consider creating an application for your organization as a way for people to interact with your products. For example, companies like Nike and Intel have created Facebook applications.
Be cautious when using applications. Some applications have been linked to viruses and others spam all of your contacts in order to use the application. However, there are some great uses of applications. I use the Twitter application to feed my Twitter status to Facebook, and I use the Upcoming application to display a list of events that I’m attending. As I mentioned earlier, go easy on your friends – save the applications used for poking, zombie requests, etc. for close personal friends, not business acquaintences.
There are certainly other ways to use Facebook, but this covers the basic ways that most people use it. In general, remember to participate as a person first and a company second, and remember that the guiding principles that I have talked about so many times before on this blog still apply to using Facebook.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:
Here is this week’s summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs:
If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.
Here are a few interesting things from this week that I wanted to share …
You can find my links on Delicious.
I’ve decided to start doing a few training classes in addition to my consulting for companies. Right now these would be in person training sessions in a classroom setting.
I thought it would be a good idea to gather a little data before I start. I created a quick survey with 4 questions about the classes I should offer, pricing, and location (city). I would love to get your feedback on my training programs with this quick survey.
If you want to be notified about future training classes, you can sign up for the Fast Wonder newsletter or subscribe to this blog for announcements.
Here are a few notes about some cool apps from Portland Web Innovator’s Demolicious tonight.
Designed to solve the problem of having too many tabs open in Firefox with links opened to interesting things that you don’t have time to read right now. It doesn’t make sense as a bookmark and isn’t really a todo list. You get the pages out of tabs and into I Need to Read This to read them later. The site is designed to be simple and straightforward. You save stuff up there with a bookmarklet and then read it later using the read bookmarklet or get it as a feed. Voting is much more complex than it looks at first glance.
The idea is to help small businesses organize among themselves and connect with their customers online. Most consultants and small businesses have a bunch of subscriptions to systems for collaboration, project management, CRM, invoices, etc. MioWorks is a contact management system that went into beta last week, and they are actively looking for feedback to flesh out the rest of the functionality. It starts with contacts, their information, and conversations. They add notes, tasks, files, support / issues, and more along with the contact information. It brings all of this information together all in one place to create accountability and collaboration with clients for small businesses
The last component is the Negotiation tool. You can create a survey (survey, election, poll) and let people vote on a topic. You can use it for meeting times or any other votes requiring more than 2 choices. Because it allows people to vote for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choices, which can provide more accurate results than a single select vote.
A new mac application that allows you to upload your avatar to many sites at the same time. Right now it only works for Twitter and FriendFeed, and he’s adding new ones if the API provides this functionality. The app is very simple. You drag an image into the app, and it changes your avatar for any accounts that you select in Avatari. It was just announced and made available tonight during Demolicious.
This is a better way to present information to a client. You control the pace of the presentation, which doesn’t allow the client to jump ahead and keeps everyone in the same place without skipping around. This is great for creatives who want to tell the story and a narrative with reasoning behind the decisions. Presentation becomes a slide show that people can watch it again along with version tracking. You can upload photos and add notes.
If you want to demo your app in 3 months at the next demolicious, you can contact Adam DuVander.