Not familiar with Google Alerts? Simply choose a term that you’re interested in (such as your name, your company’s name, or a topic you want to follow) and Google will alert you whenever they index a page containing that term.

The Twitterverse is a while different beast. It is all about real-time conversation, not so much archived pages. But still, you want to know if somebody is talking about you or your company. How do you do this? You can’t follow everyone, can you? Enter Summize.

Like Google Alerts, just enter a term (in the example above, it’s my company’s name—”batchblue”). The search results page will show you all the latest tweets containing that term. What I really like is the “Feed for this query” link. That way, instead of heading back to Summize all the time, you can just subscribe to the feed in your feedreader. So, when I open up Google Reader, I see something like:

What terms am I following in Summize?

• batchblue
• batchbook
• adarowski
• Darowski
• Adam Darowski

So there’s corporate branding along with the personal branding there.

What else am I monitoring in my “batchblue” Google Reader tag?

• anything tagged “batchbook” on del.icio.us
• anything tagged “batchblue” on del.icio.us<
• BatchBlue’s forum posts
• BatchBlue blog posts and press updates (for testing purposes, making sure it comes through correctly)
• Personal blogs of Michelle’s (Social Media for Social Change) and Pamela (busiLIFEness)

So, let me ask you—what terms are you monitoring and how are you doing it?

Whenever there’s Jeremiah and Brian in one place, you know I’m sure to cover it.

Brian touches on (among other topics):

• Developing web apps outside of The Valley (see my notes on his SXSW panel)
• How companies can use blogs as outreach to become thought leaders, getting their name out there. Then, they can provide services to those interested (37signals model).
• Don’t use social media as spam. Use it as a focus group.
• Marketers are dinner party hosts. Link people and companies that can help each other.
• Marketing is moving towards “small good things” and away from blasting out big ad campaigns.

These are two great guys that were huge in getting me started on my path away from the traditional ignorant design approach. They helped teach me that design is more than just making something functional to fill a need. There are ways you can engage the user base and collaborate with them to make something really special. This approach has been career-changing for me.

You see, I was already in a great situation. Aptima was a great gig. I was a Team Lead. I worked on some cool projects. I kicked off our blog. In this job hunt, I was looking for a gig that was special. Specifically, I looked for a job that filled quite a few criteria:

• A small company
  Aptima is a small business. But they are over 100 people now. That’s just not small enough for me. I’m looking for small. Like, less than 10 or 15 people. Why? I like to have my hand in everything. I love the responsibility. I love having your voice not only heard, but actually be a driving force in a company. At Aptima, I was certainly heard, but with a company that size there is inevitably red tape.
• A local company
  For the past seven years, I’ve commuted ridiculous lengths to work at exciting tech jobs. Moving is not an option. I live in an idea situation—small children and very close to family support. So, at Aptima, I commuted 70 miles each way, all by car on the brutal MA Rt. 128. Mazer was also about 2:15 each way, time wise. That one was a conglomeration of drive to commuter rail, commuter rail to Boston, walk to Red Line, Red Line to Orange Line, walk through death-wish-of-a-rotary to get to building…
• A product company
  I’ve done the agency thing. Time to work on something where I don’t have to worry about securing work, filling out timesheets, or coordinating labor plans. I want to bust my ass on a product of our OWN. Something that won’t leave my hands and die.
• A flexible schedule
  I have absolutely no problem putting in tons of hours doing the work I love. I just want the ability to pick and choose what these hours are. I want to be home to play with Ella before bed. I have no problem pulling out the laptop after that, though. Chances are, I’ve got it open anyway.
• A forward-thinking company
  It was important to me to work for a company that embraces open source technologies, open standards, and a open communication through corporate blogging and other means.

Not too much to ask, huh?

So, what is this calculated informality thing? A few things.

1. Appearance

Part “forward-thinking”, part “flexible”, I looked for companies that didn’t care about—shall we say—appearance. Let’s just say, I’m not a groomer. I’m a t-shirt and jeans kind of guy… and preferably a shave-every-few-days and wait-way-too-long-to-get-a-haircut kind of guy. I made a point of making sure some of this was “on display” when I interviewed. Why would I do that? Wouldn’t that hurt my chances of getting a job?

I made the conscious decision that if a place was going to hold wearing sneakers to an interview or meeting with them sporting some stubble against me, it probably was not going to be a place I would be comfortable working.

2. Software & Skills

I also made a conscious effort to leave the proverbial software and skills list off my resume. This means that I didn’t include a list that says I know XHTML, CSS, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc., etc. Instead, I wrote about how I do “interface design” and develop with “web standards”. Those should convey that I know how to get the task done and that the tool is irrelevant.

A colleague asked me, “but that’s not a good idea because a lot of companies’ HR departments won’t accept a resume if it doesn’t have Photoshop.” Again, my response was—I don’t want to work there, then.

3. Don’t Be Generic

Every company that I took the time to pursue got their own cover letter… not of this “swap out the name” crap. I would take a good amount of time looking them up, looking them up on Technorati, seeing if they blog (if so, reading that), and seeing what types of projects they’ve done. Then I could find tidbits of why I honestly, truly wanted to work for them.

If I didn’t find those tidbits, I didn’t bother sending them anything.

Every single word of the “cover letter” (just an email, for me) was customized to that company. Every once in a while I found a few paragraphs I wrote that I could reuse (my background, for example). But other than that, I was talking directly to them and not the field as a whole—and they seemed to appreciate that.

4. Let Your Passions Be Known

I made a point to let potential employers know exactly what is important to me. By the end, I was using this paragraph fairly often:

I am completely obsessed with XHTML/CSS, semantic markup, Microformats, “designing for data”, “bulletproof web design”, “letting go of pixel precision”, cross-browser/platform/device development, simplicity, cleanliness, transparency (in information sharing, not so much the reflective Web 2.0-logo-type), social media, usability, user experience, and my two-year old daughter.

I thought this paragraph summed up pretty well what I’m all about and what I’d really need to be doing day to day in order to be happy. Plus, I got to throw the “two-year old daughter” in there to let them know that work/life balance is very important, too. Once in an interview, I could elaborate. But I at least got it on the radar.

5. Be Honest

Many people embellish on resumes and in interviews. I can’t stand that. I don’t want to lie to a potential employer and then end up screwing up. I don’t like to disappoint people. So, I set the expectations in advance, say what I do… say what I don’t, and then kick ass at those things.

Here’s an example from the very first CSS-based position I went for. I hadn’t been developing in CSS very long, but I was offered the job (I didn’t take it, though). This job was 100% CSS, and the first thing I did was say I’m not a CSS expert.

I’m not going to lie and say that I’ve been developing in web standards for years. The standards movement is a relatively new passion for me, but that’s what it is—a passion. I have been developing validated sites with CSS formatting for years, but using CSS for layout, writing semantic markup, implementing and contributing to Microformats, and studying community marketing are more recent extensions of that—and I can’t get enough of them.

Hell, I even said “I’m not going to lie.” I think they appreciate that.

6. Cutting Out the First Step

There’s no sense in wasting anybody’s time. So, I put as much about myself as I could on my blog. As I’ve written about before, The Blog is the New Resume. And I really ate my own dog food on this one.

I hate portfolios that are just screen shots. So, on my Featured Work samples, I wrote a page-long description to explain what the heck my role was. That way, potential employers know what I did. How often do you have people say that they had this huge customer… and you wonder what exactly they did? For me, quite a bit.

I directed potential employers to blog posts they may be interested in (or categories). I told them about the projects they may want to check out. If they didn’t see a match, cool. I would rather have that out of the way now than later.

Did it Work?

Absolutely. Let’s go back to the five criteria I set out and see how BatchBlue matched up.

• A small company
  Check. There’s only five more BatchBlue folks. A small good thing.
• A local company
  BatchBlue is located in Rhode Island, with the founders ranging from eight to ten miles from me. To top it off, there is no central office yet, so I’ll be working from home.
• A product company
  BatchBlue is working on developing BatchBook, their first product. More will follow.
• A flexible schedule
  There’s something in the water at BatchBlue. Everyone has little ones. They work around their family schedules. In my opinion, that’s the way it should be. Like I said—I have no problem working long hours. I just want to pick the hours.
• A forward-thinking company
  BatchBlue is a Rails shop that develops using web standards. The Blue By You User Group program really attracted me. They work hand-in-hand with users WHILE developing the software, not after development. Plus, they’re blogging and want me to be a big part of that as well.

Five out of five ain’t bad.

I’ve only even been a member of LinkedIn since December. I admit that I failed to see the value of something that just lets you “link” to people, without having any metadata involved. Yeah… I’m linked to Chris Messina. So what? Does that mean I’m a fan of Chris? Am I a friend of Chris? Does Chris really know who I am? It’s really tough to tell.

I think I had a grand total of one connection until the news broke of Steve Ganz implementing hResume throughout the site. Brian interviewed him about it. I suddenly got a lot more interested in a networking site that showed an obvious appreciate of advanced Microformats. So, lately I’ve been keeping up with LinkedIn, actively updating a profile and sending/accepting requests for linkage goodness.

Back to Mario and the LinkedIn blog. Corporate blogs are interesting… there are some rules about corporate blogging that discourage talking about your products and becoming too much like brochureware. Like everything, I give this a big fat “depends”.

If Adobe blogged about its products, there may not be much benefit for the user. How often are updates being made to their software? Not really often enough. If you’re just going to blog about how wonderful your products are, then you could be doing more harm than good.

However, if you give someone on the development team at Adobe free reign to blog about the development process, why decisions are being made, tradeoffs, progress updates, etc., you could be onto something. That type of person is a “Community Manager”. A community manager is someone within the company that represents not only the company but the users of the company’s products. The community manager is a customer advocate who listens to customer wishes and demands—and makes good on them. The community manger focuses more on providing a successful product in the eyes of the users than a successful product based on the bottom line.

(Disclaimer: Adobe could even nave one of these… I really haven’t checked.)

A Community Manager could help a large software company, but how much I’m not sure. One guy or gal giving a view into the inner workings of a company is not going to trigger millions of dollars in sales—the type of blip that really gets noticed in these very large companies. But take a service like LinkedIn or any of the many other web apps out there. If a community manager helps bring in a fraction of that revenue, it could mean a huge increase for a smaller company.

Jeremiah has an excellent list of some of his favorite community managers. Jeremiah himself was a community manager at Hitachi Data Systems before becoming a PodTech rock star. The list includes folks such as Guy Kawasaki (one of the first and most well known tech evangelists) and Tara Hunt.

The point of this rambling post is that I’m going to have a chance to take part in community management soon. This has really been a dream of mine. I love designing and developing for the web. But there’s a reason my feed reader “must read” subcategory includes Brian, Tara, Jeremiah, and Chris, and not more traditional design blogs. It’s all about the user—you have to start with the user. How you’re going to pull off CSS rounded corners are just details once your strategy is in place.

Speaker: Jason Schwartz, Robber Baron Music

Joining the Conversation: Campari Case Study

• Source: 11/28/06 Richard McManus at Read/Write Web
• 170,000 page views
  • 13.5% from social media sites
• 3000 friends
• 2500 comments across sites
• 92,000 views across sites
• Created a a community of people that we can further talk to about Red Passion

Problems with the Campari campaign

• Fake profiles can be dangerous
• Transparency on the web is important
• If you like, you will be found out
  • Lonelygirl15
• You may believe there is not such thing as bad PR
• Disclose company sponsorship

Did They Connect?

• Reality is that all profiles and accounts were deleted
• Violates terms of service
  • You can probably get away with it, but expect a short run
  • Those sites own the customers, not you

How to Do It

• Update content frequently
• Don’t spam inboxes
• Kep on top of the community
• MySpace
• Design in CSS
• Purchase a branded profile to avoid being kicked off
  • Partnering, like buying an ad
  • Give you a forum, addt’l features

Listening to the Conversation

• Social media sites are populated with people describing their preferences to the world
• Market researchers pay people to tell them what they like and what sites they visit
• The goal is to find the non-obvious place to reach your audience
• Don’t market a golf club in a golf magazine, market it at Home Depot
  • A lot of golfers, but no other golf clubs

Using Del.icio.us

• Search the product category (not name)
• Look at related tags
  • Gives you other ways of looking at it
• See who else bookmarked the site
  • People who bookmarked this site, bookmarked this (similicio.us)
  • Thinkgeek.com, Threadless were most similar for tea
  • Market on those sites

Del.icio.us Tea results

• Terms for SEO and further research
  • food, shopping, coffee, health, recipes, design, gifts
• Sites to partner or advertiese with
  • Thinkgeek, etc.

Using Technorati

• Search in blog directory
  • Who’s site has an overarching theme of what you’re looking for
• Bloggers often are looking for sponsors

User Generated Ads

• Marketing manager loses control
  • “Don’t buy me”
• Big companies susceptable to being mocked

Creating your own social site

• Do not create another social network
• Create something that makes your audience’s interests easier
• Rather than buing an ad, sponsor an entrepreneur
  • More interactive than a spot
  • Engages your audience
  • Creates a true community you can communicate with
• Sponsor a UI overhaul or upgrade

Actually… pretty good talk. I can’t help but be skeptical about folks talking about using social media for marketing. But it was more than just making a MySpace page for your product. Showing how to listen and not just how to speak within social media was a nice twist that not enough people are talking about. Good job.

Panelists:

• Tom Markiewicz, EvolvePoint (Moderator)
• Emily Chang, Ideacodes, ehub.com
• Bill Flitter, Pheedo Inc
• John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing
• Greg Reinacker, NewsGator Technologies Inc

How talk about RSS?

• Everyone wants to deliver information to their customer/audience faster.
  • Direct stream, whether they know it or not
  • Benefit for users, efficiency for company
• What result do you want? Don’t even call it by name. Find out what they want and tailor solution.
• Need to show ROI – how do you leverage it?

How fast is RSS moving into the mainstream? Is the adoption rate there?

• Growth rate is still accelerating.
• IE7 is first exposure for hundreds of millions.
• Does adoption rate matter? There is a sector that want info this way.
  • We all get info in lots of different ways, might as well enable it.
• Going towards mainstream, but not there yet.
• Huge spike when Google Reader and some Microsoft products were launched

What about the term? Is RSS something the average user needs to know? Will it be like POP/IMAP? Nobody cares about that. RSS vs. Atom, wil it be called news feeds, feeds, etc.?

• We’ll need the term far less when it becomes better integrated with our tools
• It’s not “RSS”, it’s “subscribing to content”
• Email changed our lives, search changed our lives. Subscribing to content is next.
  • The content comes to us.
• Nobody knows what SMTP is, but they use it. RSS will be like that.
  • It’s a part under the hood that makes the car run.
• Not just for subscribers anymore: It’s for moving the data from site to site
  • How do we measure use of this information?
  • RSS can be an API for anyone’s web site

How are companies using RSS for marketing?

• Don’t even have to have a feed on your site to use RSS for marketing
  • There’s a cloud of content out there
  • Be the people that host the conversation
• RSS for news feeds, RSS as PR
  • Product updates
  • Fast and direct information
  • Job listings
  • Marketing surveys
• Irresponsible to not have this content available
• Anything you do with marketing, you need to measure it.
• Track your competition
• You can know instantly if someone is or isn’t writing about you
• RSS for better search results
• Still important to tell people how to subscribe to feeds

Some tips:

• Start article with company name, make sure that when it is syndicated you at least have that bit of branding.
• Don’t get too crazy formatting content in your feeds. It’s going to be viewed on a ton of different devices.
• Don’t post content just to have new content. Too many sites have one nugget and a bunch of crap every week
• Write down notes on things throughout the day (advice given, info found on sites). You’ll have a backlog of things to write about.
• Instead of RSS, say (for example, a recipe site) “get a daily recipe straight to your inbox or reader”

Speaker: Evan Prodromou (Founder, WikiTravel)

Wiki is:

• Open repository
• Open for everyone to edit
• Collaborate on the same work
• Easiest possible editing
• Web browser interface (almost always)
• Free/Open Content (majority)

Does commerce belong in wikis?

• Part of a healthy ecology of the wikisphere: personal, commercial, and non-profit
• Frees up public-sector resources
• It’s OK for a company to do the right thing

Other ways to support a wiki project:

• Out of pocket
• With donations, grants, government funds
• Move to a wiki farm

Four kinds of wiki businesses

• Service providers (Wikispaces, Wetpaint, PBWiki)
• Content hosting (wikiHow, Wikitravel, Wikia)
  • Croudsourcing
    • Get suckers to do work for you
    • Then make them pay for it
    • Eff that.
    • Hates term crowdsourcing
  • Wiki contributors are smartest, most altruistic people
    • They may let you be a steward of their community
    • A platform for knowledge (needers and havers)
• Consulting (SocialText)
• Content Development (WikiBiz)

Rules for commercial wikis

• Have a noble purpose
  • Ambitious, captures imagination of your internet public
  • More important for commercial wikis
    • People will be thinking about the crowdsourcing model
    • Make sure they don’t
  • Value for the contributor
    • Blog = Ego
    • Photo/Video = Friends
    • Wiki = Purpose
• Demonstrate value
  • Creative Commons
  • Post Katrina, wikis were set up to find survivors
  • Ways to add value
    • software development (customization)
    • systems administration (big wikis, keep it running)
    • community management (be part of the conversation)
    • external promotion
    • carry the torch (hold the mission high)
• Be transparent
  • Have a lot of feedback loops with the community
• Extract value where you provide value
  • Don’t try to get money from places that you haven’t provided value
  • Advertising: You provided bandwidth
    • The leading way to commercialize wiki
  • Sell physical media of content (books, cd-roms, etc.)
  • Attempts to extract data can be bad (they are your audience, not your guinea pigs)
• Set boundaries
  • Where business decisions begin and community decisions end.
• Be personally involved
  • Best wikis are the ones where the wiki founders are involved
    • Use real name, have their picture up there
• Run the right crowd
  • Be part of the wiki/open content/open source community
  • People will judge you by who you hang out with
  • Find people and projects you would like to work with that will add value

For such a short (25 minute) talk, Evan covered a lot of great information. I feel I have more options to apply to my project now.

Update: Liz Henry took great notes. She also recorded a great quote from Evan:

Prodromou says: “EFF THAT. I hate the term crowdsourcing. It’s one of the ugliest terms ever invented on the internet. People in wiki software are some of the most idealistic, altruistic people on the planet. We don’t want to exploit people.”

Update: Mike Linksvayer’s notes.

Panelists:

• Ted Rheingold (Dogster)
• Shanalyn Victor (Pixelgirlshop.com)
• Gabe Rivera (Techmeme)
• Tara Hunt (Citizen Agency)
• Ryan Carson (Carson Systems, Vitamin)

Ways People are Making Money Online

• Advertising & Sponsorships
  • Adsense: Easiest way to make $50 a month.
  • Sites like PlentyofFish make a ton
  • Sponsorships: Great
    • Annual buy, lump sum
    • More concerned with brand outreach and continual presence
• Affiliate Programs
  • Can’t find one good example of anyone doing it
• Selling Goods
  • SuperDuper – sell software
    • One person company
  • Jonahtan Coulton – geeky songs
  • DeviantArt – buy a print of anyone else’s art
  • Piexelgirlshop – online store
• Services
  • Laughing sqid webhosting – great support
  • DropSend – Buying online storage
  • Citizen Agency – consulting
    • Business is the “Get in Touch” link
  • Future of Web Apps – training
• Subscriptions, Virtual Currencies, Virtual Gifts
  • DeviantArt – show advertising and say “subscribe now and don’t see this”
  • Hot or Not – give virtual flowers
    • Made one flower that that was $10 to make the others seem cheaper
    • Ended up being the #2 cash generator
  • Dogster – Zealies, earn them and give them away
• Micro-Sponsors, Donations
  • Save Karyn – in debt and people bailed her out
  • Ze Frank – buy a duckie. Has message attached.
    • Bling Duckie – $250
    • Anyone can have a gimme some candy

Start because they wanted to do it or because they though they could make money?

• Ryan: Even when passionate, think about the business model because you want to be able to keep doing it.
• Shanalyn: Did it for free until hosting costs were too much. Never realized it would actually make money.
• Tara: Need to support passions more than make money.
• Gabe: Comfortable with low range when started (resume-ware), high range was national sensation.

On Business:

• Need Mentors in Business
  • Tara/Chris interested in experimenting, exploring. Perhaps hire someone for the business side.
• Invest in marketing
• Dogster’s advisor was non tech serial entrepreneur
• Who’s selling 50% of the time?
  • Shanalyn is
  • Tara says she and Chris incorporate it into everything they do
    • Keeps them “top of mind”
  • Shanalyn endorses advertising
    • Tara endorses being part of the community that you serve
      • Doesn’t come naturally to everyone

How do you determine the price of what you’re selling?

• Ryan: Set a price and see if people buy it
  • Make sure not to offer too much for free (came from Jason Fried)
• Tara: What are comparable products/services? What are they charging?
  • If you are boutique, can charge extra
• Shanalyn: Value your time as well.
• Ted: Once you get the first sponsor, you have set your bar.
• Ryan: Do a spreadsheet and found out how much you have to make to quit your job.
• Shanalyn: Open schedule is worth a lot of money.

Exit strategies?

• Ryan has a lifestyle business, you can do it as long as you want to.
  • DropSend has an exit strategy, for sale now
  • Every company should be built to be sold
• Tara: To sell her company would be selling her and Chris.
  • She wants to do this as long as she can
• Gabe: Has been approached and met with them, but not looking to sell
  • They don’t tend to see the value the same (and not just price)
    • What’s valuable about the service
• Shanalyn: Never thought of it until someone asked a month ago
  • Started as a hobby, not very business oriented
  • Still feel it is growing, so hasn’t evaluated
  • Premise of Pixelgirl is that it is her.
    • She could be consultant, but that would be boring
• Ted: Feels exit strategies are distracting
• Ryan: Read “The E Myth”

Jeremiah asks: What are the sacrifices.

• Ryan: Work 4-day week
  • Works in product based business, but not service
• Ryan: Sacrifice is peace. Sometimes money just doesn’t come.
• Tara: Sacrifice security
  • Early on, a lot of sacrifice of personal life
    • Found they were losing what they were good at
    • You don’t make sacrifices like that, you cut back on Gucci bags
• Gabe: Went 2 years without a salary
  • If you enjoy doing it, it’s not sacrifice
• Shanalyn: Loves what she does, always is online
  • Took laptop on honeymoon.
  • When nobody cares about it as much as you or is doing what you are, you can feel alone
• Ted: Don’t spend more money than you can afford to spend. Leave money to try the next thing.
• Tara: There are ways to do things for free.
  • Software, advice, etc.
• Shanalyn: Free is good, free desktop, free widget, etc.
  • Sign up, free earrings

Q: Keeping users coming back on a consistent basis?

• Tara
  • Web 1.0 – Sticky pages.
  • Web 2.0 – Everyone wants communities
  • Go to where the community is already

Ryan:

• Now is the most exciting time to be alive and doing business because we have this amazing enabler called the web.
• If there was ever a time to succeed it is now.
• Just cover your expenses for a while.
• Doesn’t matter where you live.

Hiring:

• Ryan: Don’t hire anyone unless you REALLY eed them.
  • Get to the point where you will quit or kill yourself, then hire someone
• Shanalyn: hire contractors
• Tara: Make sure you are on the same level—not someone that just wants a job.

This panel totally lived up to my expectations.

Update: Good notes from others:

• Jeremiah Owyang
• Rex Hammock
• Alex De Carvalho

I attended this panel mostly because of how it relates to one of my ongoing projects at Aptima. I’m not sure what I’m looking for going in—mostly some tips on how to cultivate the soil so that a community has the best chance to grow and prosper.

Panelists:

• Jory Des Jardins (BlogHer)
• Betsy Aoki (Microsoft)
• Jessica Hardwick (SwapThing)
• Lisa Stone (BlogHer
• Jenna Woodul (LiveWorld)

Notes:

• Web 1.0: Community was a “nice to have”, something you added to a business
• Today: Community IS the business
• Doesn’t grow like a regular business: organic, living breathing thing
• People who do it best are like sociologists
• What is a killer of community?
  • Non-participation. Has to be something people want to participate in
  • If they have ownership, they will participate
  • Any community is a social thing (like a party or meeting)
    • You have to think of culture
    • Who are the leaders?
    • I have my place here, I know people here”
  • Having no mechanisms for defense (spammers, etc.)
  • Ask, don’t tell.
    • Get people involved
    • “Do you want to try X, Do you want to do Y?”
    • 9000 members know more about what they want than the community leaders
• Building a community within a corporation
  • Built communities wihtin Apple, became critical to culture
  • There’s a tendency to think it’s about technology
  • It’s the people, stupid.
  • Dove campaign: asked What is real beauty?
    • Showed real people, not models
    • not pushing product, but shows respect for customer
• Reviving Community
  • Microsoft CodeFlex
  • Servers were crashing
  • Provided a voice to complain to
    • Nobody at Microsoft would read it – but she did
    • Keeping constant dialog back and forth
  • Put someone out in front
  • Be honest about what is going on
    • People would offer to help
• Q: How do you find your experts?
  • A: Jessica: Write through blog
    • Experts post comments, keep tech support questions low
• It’s good to plan on what your user base will be
  • But whoever shows up IS your community
  • Be sure to make the first people to take part feel comfortable
• Customers will talk about you on their blogs
  • Or other social networking sites
• Paul asked: For some clients, he things “a community would be hugely beneficial for them.” But they fear letting go.
  • Had a customer that wanted community, so they set up a forum
  • But it died because the customer insisted on moderating every single post
  • How do you pursuade them to let go of control?
  • A: If you require that everything be previewed, you will cut down your volume drastically
    • To the point peopled don’t participate at all
    • You have a lot to gain from community
    • People are talking about you and your brand anyway
    • Better for you to listen in and be able to respond to what they are saying
    • That indicates an open attitude towards conversation with customers
    • Talk about ROI—acquisition, PR
      • Participants in community will buy 57% more than other people
      • Harvard Business Review: Set up a bunch of newbie eBayers
        • Those involved in community bought 56% more
        • Those involved in community sold SIX TIMES more
    • Liability concerns? Check the laws (may be different in UK)
• Insurrection: When community turns sour
  • How do you handle mis-perceptions or misunderstandings
    • BlogHer: Men actually ARE invited
  • Let the community know about misunderstandings so they can help clear it up.
  • NEVER LIE
  • Brought up Edelman/Wal-Mart fiasco.
    • Many said they would have read it even if they knew it was paid
  • MS Live Q&A: Community members sometimes refer others to code of conduct
• Lurkers are just as important as posters
  • How is a newcomer perceived and treated?
  • Use pull-quotes, featured posters to show lurkers that there are people like them here
  • You’ll never have a community where 100% of them are comfortable communicating
    • Provide alternative means of feedback, ratings, etc.
• Don’t call it “community”
  • Just pose questions “What do you think?”
  • It won’t feel like walking into a room of people you don’t know
• Is anonymity cryptonite for a community?
  • Moderators know who they are “This isn’t SpamHer or PornHer. This is BlogHer.” –Lisa
  • Identity (even a pseudonym) brings accountability
  • If there’s no character building, there is no persistent identity. Less benefits.
  • SlashDot has a generic “Anonymous Coward” login.
    • Shows they respect an identity much more.

Update: Christopher Carfi’s notes.

Update: Read/Write Web’s coverage.

Today, at a company-wide Brown Bag lunch presentation, I officially launched the CogBlog: The Cognitive Science Weblog. Ever since returning from Webvisions 2006, I pushed for my company to establish a blog. And now it has happened.

One nice thing is that it isn’t just a corporate blog for Aptima. Aptima is simply hosting a cognitive science blog for our company, customers, partners, competitors, and other members of the community of interest.

I’ve got two posts on the blog as we kick off. First, I provided a Hello World! post to kick things off. A sample:

I’d like to brag that I fought a gallant battle to convince Aptima to host a weblog in order to better have a pulse on the human-centered engineering community—but I’m proud to say that there was no “fight” involved at all. Aptima’s line of work (new and exciting technological solutions to mission-critical problems) is a breeding ground for great ideas that should be shared with our customers, partners, competitors, and other interested members of the field.

I also provided a more research-based article titled “Distributed Learning for the Army: Cost Effective or Just Plain Effective?” In this post, I talk about how distributed learning might not be simply more cost and logistically effective for the Army, but but also far more effective because it will be using technological means that new recruits will already be familiar with. A snippet:

I’d suggest that the benefits are not just about efficiency, flexibility, and frugality. In the not-too-distant future, distance learning could actually be a preferred method of training for new soldiers. Why? Because we’ll be seeing more and more enlistments from the MySpace generation.

I would really like to send a big thank you to Brian Oberkirch and Jeremiah Owyang for their indirect support during the planning stages. And of course, Dan Cederholm was very inspiring for the development stage. I recorded the audio of my presentation to the company kicking off the CogBlog, so I’ll see if I can mash it up with my slides to make a compelling archive.

So, check out the CogBlog if you get a shot. It’s also semantically marked up, designed to be bulletproof, and kinda pretty if you ask me.

Guy is as pleasant as ever. I have to admit, I have not been keeping up on his blog (not that I’ve been keeping up on too many blogs lately). He made a few great points about how marketing is changing, especially when marketers are trying to reach young people. This is the Tivo and YouTube generation. Traditional advertising is just not reaching them. A key point he made is that a teenage is far more apt to buy a watch because Jack Bauer was wearing it on 24 than if an ad for the same watch was shoved down their throat.

Two fun moments were when some strange squeaking noise (that sounded like a chimp) overtook the podcast. Jones’ asked “what was that?” Unfortunately, we never found out. Another highlight was Guy cutting out for a second to tell is son that he can’t practice piano while he’s recording a show.

A couple other recent shows of note from Jennifer include interviews of her new Podtech colleague Jeremiah Owyang and blogging guru Seth Godin.

I’ve talked quite a bit about Jeremiah Owyang and Brian Oberkirch here. Both have been a huge help to me.

Now hear them talk.

• Living on the Edge: Blogging in the Real World
  by Brian Oberkirch
• Learn from my pain: Business Blogging “Best” Practices
  by Jeremiah Owyang
• Business Blogging Scenario: Lifting off a Corporate Blogging Program
  by Jeremiah Owyang
• Business Blogging Panel at Webvisions
  by Brian Oberkirch

So, who is Brian Oberkirch?

The About portion of Brian’s website describes him as “Social media consultant. Writer. Marketer. Dreamer & tinkerer.” Basically, to me, he is an idea factory. Forget about just social media and marketing, he has great ideas on tech subjects such as microformats and mashups, too. Brian does a series of interviews under the name “Edgework” and he recently rattled off three good ones in a row.

In the most recent episode, as I mentioned, he interviewed Ted Rheingold of Dogster and Catster. Dogster and Catster allow people to make web pages for their beloved pets. So, quite the community has grown around these pages. They talk about how the sites fill niche, passion-centric markets. General social networking sites don’t tend to do so well. It helps to have a common interest that the users rally around. Flickr revolves around photo sharing, for example.

MySpace started off as a site where users discussed unsigned bands that they were fans of. Now MySpace is far more general, but it is sustaining itself—probably because it is so damn ubiquitous. Facebook is now trying to do the same. They were a community that were bonded together by academia. You needed a .edu email address to be admitted. So, there was a sense of community because everyone had something in common. Now Facebook is letting more users in, and some existing users don’t like it. It will be interesting to see what happens there.

Before Dogster, Brian covered Kiva, a nonprofit founded by Matt Flannery. What is Kiva? Let me just let the site explain it:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

There just aren’t many sites out there like Kiva… it’s a great idea. Not only community marketing, but community financing—for a cause. Kudos to Matt.

Finally, before those two episodes Brian talked to Chad Dickerson of the Yahoo Developer Network. The main topic was Yahoo’s Open Hack Day. Yahoo used to hold internal contests to see what types of cool hacks and mashups their developers could come up with. Recently, they opened it up to the outside world. Check out the winners here.

Brian provides a lot of great ideas about the mashup culture, which is nothing short of fascinating. To see more examples of mashups, check out ProgrammableWeb.

To find out more about Brian, check out an interview by Shel Israel on Naked Conversations. I recommend checking it out. One quote from that interview that stuck out to me was when he was talking about how old school marketers will need to be cognizant of the new school “unmarketing” techniques, though it will be a gradual process:

I know we talk a lot about dinosaurs and how everything is changing, etc., but I think it will be gradual. If you don’t eat well, keep smoking, never exercise, eventually that will catch up to you. Same thing will apply. You’ll be able to get away with it for a while, but there will be a tremendous opportunity cost.

I thought this exact quote could relate very well to what will happen if old school table-based web designers don’t pay attention to web standards.

Not to be bandwagonesque, but Jeremiah Owyang also recently had a post about Brian.

So, lastly… I need to ask a question. Brian… when are you going to write a book on all of this? Personally, I can’t wait.

Okay, everyone knows that Dan is my “web design superhero”, but I’ve been dying to get to a Carson Workshop for like… ever. They have a ton of them overseas and in San Francisco, but the combination of a Carson Workshop… In Boston… featuring Dan Cederholm was too much to pass up.

So, I immediately wrote an email to my entire company telling them about the session and what the benefits would be of me going. And then I asked for money. See, I need to find projects to fund me to go to such things (like WebVisions). Luckily, the funding came through, because I had gone ahead and booked it anyway (hey, there’s only 40 seats at this thing). I offered project managers whatever they needed in return—a report, code samples, and even eight hours of clapping erasers.

This brings me to another topic that is related. I have started sending out emails with “Adam the Aptima Scout” in the subject line. My company likes to see everyone go to a conference or a seminar every year for professional development. But with everything that’s going on in the web community, one is just not enough. So, I’ve been aggressively persuing funding to go to more. Call it personal marketing. I’ve already identified at least three conferences I want to go to next year (SXSW, @media, and WebVisions).

A month or so ago, I sent out my first scouting offer, for Refresh ‘06. I was interested in that one because Paul Boag, Andy Budd, Cameron Moll, Jeremy Keith, and many others I’d love to see are going to be there. There was a bit of interest in sending me to that one, but whereas it is pretty much all Web Standards, it was a pretty small group of project candidates.

Luckily, Cederholm’s session is just one day (no hotel stays needed), in Boston (can take the T, no planes), and is relatively inexpensive ($495). So, this has been my first success in my “Adam the Aptima Scout” approach. I’ll try it again next with SXSW. That’s a bigger conference with much more diverse panels, so hopefully that will help me get multiple projects interested in order to cover costs like flight and hotel.

Anyway, you can expect me to blog all about the session with Dan. It’s November 2… and I can’t wait!

One complaint about the podcast is that it was split into four parts. The parts didn’t break well and had way too much intro/outro music in between them to flow well when all you wanted to do was listen to the whole thing at once (Boston traffic allows me to do this). Part 4 contained some discussion that related directly to the site I am developing.

The UPA (Usability Professional’s Association) has a project called the Usability Body of Knowledge (BOK). The BOK, which has a preview posted, is a community-developed reference for usability. I talked about something similar for my site that I was calling the “wiki-riculum”. The BOK, I believe, is more reference than curriculum, but many points they made about it still apply.

The first question that Jared asked was why not just edit pages on Wikipedia? The response was that even though Wikipedia has a way of policiing content, the BOK is supported by an organization and therefore has an “official” feeling to it and an official content approval process. It is what the UPA agrees on as an association.

Wikipedia, though a great resource, is uncredentialed and you really never know who put the information in. The BOK is aiming to be a definitive reference from an esablished association. The BOK is the product of an organizational process.

It was brought up that efforts such as these are often better suited for something like Wikipedia because when professional associations try to take soemthing on like this it becomes difficult to sustain and is subsequently dropped. With Wikipedia, there are more people involved so it is more sustainable.

On the other hand, an “organization” like Wikipedia generally only goes so deep into the coverage of the information. UPA contributors could go deeper because the resource is about just one topic—not about EVERYTHING.

Lastly, the point was made that companies using information from the site might run into less trouble than if they said “I got it off Wikipedia.” The UPA brings credibility as it is a trusted organization.

Something about this was obviously still bothering Jared, and he finally let on what it was. How do you avoid having a “very UPA viewpoint” on all entries?

My wiki-riculum is similar in that it is a body of knowledge, but it is not coming from on specific source. My site is a professional community gathering, not an official site for an organization. So, it has some aspects of both Wikipedia and the BOK.

You won’t have any potential content bias based on an orgnanizations “official” point of view. The content will be a product of site visitors from many different groups. With that, there is some aspect of not knowing who actually crafted the information. To that, I’ll point to our user rating system and how a contributor is not “allowed” to modify the curriculum until the user’s rating reaches a certain level. The only way this level goes up is if the user is deemed a positive influence on the community by the community itself.

So, the first Spoolcast was a success for me, as it spoke directly to a problem I’m encountering right now. I look forward to more.

For my first social media site (previously discussed here), I have a special interest in rule #7. I asked Jeremiah to elaborate on that point via his blog post, and he (along with other readers) gave some ideas. So, what I’m going to say here is partially reiteration of those comments and partially ideas I had to fill in the holes.

In my site mockups, I have proposed a (currently) numeric system for rating users. With each post and comment, a user can be rated with a “+” or “–”, depending on whether or not the reader found the comment or post useful. I say “currently” numeric, because I have not decided if the number will be the value that is actually translated to the readers or if the number will be used to calcuate a certain user class [for example, will a new user's profile read "Adam Darowski (2)" or "Adam Darowski (newbie)", with "newbie" encompassing all users with a rating of 0-20].

Now, how can one of these ratings systems be used to help encourage particpation and repeat visitation? Here are a few ways:

1. Raise Awareness of the System

Everybody loves public recognition. Well, not everyone, but on the web people welcome it more. For this reason, an obvious addition to the site would be a “Top Contributors” list by rating appearon on (at least) the home page. A “View Entire List” link would make it possible to show the top 100 or so (or however many you want), so more and more people could see their name and be tempted to help out to raise it.

Perhaps allowing that list to contain a short text blurb from that user could convince people to try to raise their ratings. I’m thinking of a model similar to baseball-reference.com where individual page sponsors can contribute any text they like, be it some sort of personal note or an advertisement.

The beauty of this is that it doesn’t take the forum model of elevating users based on their number of posts. User rating only raises when what you post is deemed HELPFUL—and if you start posting dozens of meaningless comments to try to raise your rating, the community will actually knock it down through the minus option. All of this implies that you make the user rating system VERY apparent to your users so that they see the benefits for both themselves and the rest of the community.

And how do you deal with someone getting mad at someone else and giving them minus after minus every time they post? Well, make the rating history for a particular post/comment public. Any sneaky work can be policed by the community. The questionable ratings can be removed.

A second, but very important point within the raising awareness category is to communicate with the top users, letting you know they appreciate what they are doing. A little communication can go a long way.

2. More Privileges

In my example I linked to above, I talked about having a wiki-based curriculum as a main resource on the site (I’m calling it wiki-riculum). Having a user-editable curriculum can not only make it more detailed and expansive, but grow the sense of ownership for your top users and contributors.

Many people with drop their jaw and say “ANYONE can edit it?” That is the beauty of it, but since the field I’m designing for isn’t quite as Web 2.0-savvy as others might be, it scares them a bit. So, the ratings system can help act as a buffer. Once you reach a certain rating, you have proven that you are legitimate and are then given access to the wiki-riculum. That’s WRITE-access, of course—everyone has read-access.

Don’t make this rating level too hard to attain, though. All you’re doing is weeding out those that are not serious. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you are policing who can or cannot do work for you for free. Make it accessible.

The ratings system can also dicate who can post on the site’s main blog versus who is only allowed to comment. Same rules appy—just weed out those that haven’t quite earned the trust yet, but let people contribute for free if they want.

3. Give them Gifts

Who doesn’t like presents? Give your top users physical gifts. Give them t-shirts and mouse pads (does anyone still use a mouse? mine’s been in a drawer for six months). If you use the “freemium” business model, give them a free premium account of they reach a certain level. If they have already paid for it, extend them a year. Does your site have a sponsor? Work with your sponsor to give top contributors free or discounted products or services from the sponsor. Does your site have an Amazon book list through the affiliates program? Buy them something off that (perhaps something that’s on their Amazon wish list)—at least you’re kicking back a little money to the site in the process.

4. Invitations and Branching

This last one is a bit more out there… I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. Word of mouth, of course, is the least expensive way to attract new users. So, perhaps when a new user registers, an optional “referred by” field appears. If a user is listed as a referrer, then he gets a kickback through the user rating system.

Once the user that you referred reaches a certain status, you could get a boost in your ratings system. It’s like some corporate programs that offer employees bonuses once their recommended hires are there for six months or so. Once the user you invited hits 20, you get 10 points (or something like that).

You could even take it a step further and say that for every point that your invited user friend accumulates, you could get a percentage of a point. So, if your system dictates that ever ten points your friend gets means one more point for you, you could be consistenly rewarded for introducing new users. The system does, after all, attempt to measure your contribution. When you bring in new users that contribute a lot, you are helping the community in a big way.

Of course, what happens if your invited user gets hammered with negative ratings? How will that affect the member in good standing? Do you get points taken away for letting a bad contributor in? Tough to say.

There are still some quirks to be worked out with my user rating system, but I think it is developing well. One of the more prominent sites to feature a user ratings system is digg. One of the reasons that system has gotten a lot of pub is that AOL tried to lure top users away by offering them cash money to populate the new Netscape. Then there’s the problem where 56% of digg’s content is contributed by the Top 100 users. This isn’t as much of a problem for my site, since it is a very focused profession, but for others it could be.

Am I missing anything? Feel free to comment!

Update: Here are some problems with user rating systems, inspired by Digg.

The traditional software model goes something like:

Develop Software » Sell Software » Write Upgrade Version » Sell Upgrade » Repeat

Then came the web. The original web model was generally:

Publish Free Content » Plaster with Advertising » Repeat

Other more application-like sites then came along and were able to charge for their content or service, like:

Develop Service » Generate Paid Subscriptions » Enhance Service (through features or content) » Repeat

These models were created for tools that have a user working with the tool within a vacuum. The user can have a great experience with the tool, but he really has no idea who else is using the tool or what they think of it. Social media web applications fill the void for users wanting something more interactive where they can tap into the collective opinions and expertise of the other users of the tool.

There seems to be a lot of information out there about how to treat your existing users well; how to keep your users; how to allow your users to best use your application; how to make money off your traffic; etc. But my burning question has been… how the heck do you get the users there in the first place?

Not all social media web applications are created equal. Just to give you an idea of what I’m dealing with, my site is a professional resource that allows users within a particular field to work together, train each other, solve problems, and communicate. So this is not a MySpace where people are just there to socialize and connect. This is also not like the social aspects of Amazon, where the discussion is essentially a layer over a database of products or other items. The approach I need to take for my site is much different than the approach other developers should take for theirs.

I have brainstormed about four different approaches to solving the problem of how to get the initial user base for your web site. Different approaches, of course, need to be taken for building on an existing user base. But as far as your first group of users, here’s what I’ve got:

1. Populate Static Data to Spark Discussion

This first option doesn’t really help me for my site, but it can help in others. For example, if you were creating a site where the discussion revolved around books, you could populate your site with a database of books (I’m not sure where you would get such a database, but perhaps it is out there). The thought here is that if it is out there to be discussed, people would be more apt to discuss it.

The problem is, you’re starting at zero here. Your very first user—make that your second user (you need to be your first user)—will come and see absolutely no discussion. So what is that user’s incentive to stay? Sure, there is a sense of “I was here first” that appeals to some, but how long is user #2 going to wait for user #3 or user #100?

2. Populate With Supplemental Content

This is an approach I’m heavily leaning towards with my site. Again, my site is a professional resource for a particular field. The supplemental content we intend to provide is a training curriculum. So, even before any discussion ensues, there is already something of value available on the site.

Since this content starts off independent of the social discussion, it won’t run the risk of sounding forced, as some early discussion could sound. The curriculum is used to spark discussion for the social aspect of the site: users following the curriculum can post problems they have encountered, tips and hints, success stories, etc. The curriculum will also be editable by a yet-to-be-determined user class with certain privileges. So, the ability to contribute to what we hope will be the premier online training resource for this field could help motivate discussion in other aspects of the site.

This approach, however, can run the risk of an identity crisis for the site. Is it all about the supplemental content (in this case, the curriculum)? You have to make connections to the social aspects of the web site to make sure users know there is more available. Another downside for this is that somebody still has to be the first user to enter the social aspect and risk talking to themselves.

3. Pay for Content

I’m not sure if this approach is used much at all, but I don’t see much of a benefit. A company could hire an outside firm to pay users to contribute to the site (for example, a pay per post incentive). What this paid-for content can give you is a base of content on which to build.

However, if these users are paid, what happens to them once the incentive (money) to take part is gone? With social media sites, the value is just as much in connecting with users as it is in reading their contributions. So, if the new users see that all of these contributors have jumped ship, how does that look to new users?

4. Invite-only Extended Beta Period

What would a Web 2.0 application be without a proud “BETA” badge on it? Seriously though, the invite-only period can be a huge help. This beta period starts off with enlisting friends and acquaintances to take part in your system. These people will generally be passionate about the site—that’s why you asked them to take part. So, in that respect, they will most resemble the type of users you are trying to attract once you go live.

Starting with users that are close to you will also mean your early adopters will be more forgiving and cognizant of the “beta” aspect of the site. But including them early will give them a strong sense of ownership to the site, which is the holy grail for user experience on a social media site. You can release more invites to your users periodically, allowing them to invite their friends and acquaintances. Word of mouth is an extremely effective advertising there is. This way, the size of the user base can grow consistently with the robustness of the infrastructure and the expansiveness of the content.

Of course, there are some downsides to this approach, as with all approaches. Taking this approach assumes that you have the contacts to get it off the ground. If you’re creating a social media site dedicated to Saint Bernards but don’t happen to know any Saint Bernard owners, you have a more difficult time (though hanging out on canine message boards and blogs is a good place to start).

You also aren’t getting a good sense of the behaviors of your potential users that weren’t part of the invite process. The beta users will be more forgiving and less apt to fade in their activity. Outside users have nothing invested in the site. Will they sign up based on the home page design you are using? You forget that your beta users probably signed up without seeing the current iteration of the site.

My Approach

For my first social media site, I plan to take a combination of #2 (supplemental content—the curriculum) and #4 (invite-only beta). The beta period should be interesting, since I’m not part of the field I’m designing the site for. But I know some people who are, and hopefully together we can identify the best ways to approach that community.

If you have any more approaches, please leave a comment.

Two days ago, I gave my brown bag presentation titled WebVisions 2006 Recap. It was an internal Aptima presentation shared over video conference (Woburn, MA and Washington, DC). The talk lasted about 38 minutes and included topics such as web standards, semantic markup, microformats, community marketing, corporate blogging, decentralized living, bulletproof web design, and social information architecture (all related back to the sessions I attended).

The feedback from the presentation has been quite good—it was my first presentation while flying solo (did one as a duo before… another as a quartet). To give you an idea of the audience, most of these technologies were absolutely brand new to folks within Aptima. So, some of it may be a little high level. But I find all of it very interesting and it was a pleasure to make the presentation.

• View the Presentation (audio with slides… 18.7 MB Flash file)
• Listen to the Presentation (audio only… 17.4 MB mp3 file)

I wanted to throw some thanks to Brian Oberkirch, Erin Julian, Nick Finck, and Will Pate for the use of their photos in the presentation. Also, big thanks to Aptima for sending me to the conference!

Yesterday, 37signals posted an article detailing three ways to make money with your software. Their three were:

1. Advertising-supported
2. Subscription-supported (or single price)
3. Support-supported

Now, 37signals makes some great productivity web apps, so they prefer #2. Their business model allows for #2. When designing a site that relies greatly on community interaction, charging your community to help YOU isn’t always going to fly. You need your visitors just as badly (if not much more) than they probably need you.

Brian Oberkirch has published Beyond Adsense: A Business Model Checklist—a post that has become invaluable to me. He also presents three options, but expands on many approaches within each. His three are:

1. Advertising
2. Make Them Pay
3. Because of, Not With

So, the first two are very similar, although Brian expands on more opportunities within each on his blog. But the third, “Because of, Not With”, took me a second to get. But what it boils down to is indirect revenues that occur because of your site.

For example, I’m working on a “community of practice” site. If that community grew to a certain size, perhaps a “meetup” or small conference could happen. That would be in this third category. Say the contributors to the site released a series of books together. That would be one more way.

So, yet again I am helped along my path of becoming a web-developer-marking-guy-and-god-knows-what-else by a couple bright minds sharing thoughts on EXACTLY what I need to research right now.