Compelling Reasons Why Your Brand Needs a Managed Community

I recently received the 2008 Social Marketing ROI Report and Benchmarking Guide from Powered – an Austin-based company that creates social marketing programs that helps companies create communities around their brand and “insert the brand into the social fabric of the internet”.
Not only did the companies in the Powered survey report an average of $60 [...]

Gleaning Insight From The Community Ecosystem

Another session at Forum One’s Online Community Business Forum (OCBF2009) touched on gleaning insights from your community ecosystem featuring Matt Warburton from LinkedIn and Barbara Lewis from MarQuant Analytics.
Matt started out by talking about his work with “Voice of the Customer” programs.  He described the various options for running a program starting with in-person meetings [...]

Measuring and Improving Community Performance

The third session at Forum One’s Online Community Business Forum (OCBF2009) covered measuring community performance featuring Mike Rowland from Impact Interactions and Sylvia Marino from Edmunds.com.
Essentially Mike discussed that measurement breaks down into 3 categories:

Traffic – how many?
Behavior – what did they do?
Value – what did we gain?  (such as revenue, leads, insights, brand awareness, [...]

“Context is King” According to Randy Farmer

Social Media and Community Pioneer Randy Farmer was at Forum One’s Online Community Business Forum (OCBF2009) last week and he conducted a breakout session on context.  I did not attend the session, but I did follow up with Randy’s notes on the forum’s wiki and from his website. 
In Randy’s own words, here is what he’s up to:
One [...]

Managing Your Community Ecosystem

The second session of Forum One’s Online Community Business Forum covered community ecosystems with Jen Burton from Digg and Erica Kuhl from Salesforce.com.
Jen started with the comment that “it’s impossible to manage the ecosystem” when the community spans domain and geographic boundaries.  For example, Digg’s ecosystem includes the Digg website, mainstream media, social media, blogs, [...]

Social Media in a Challenging Economy

I really wanted to ‘live-blog’ from the Forum One’s Online Community Business Forum today, but the wireless access was less than desirable so I am settling for ’same-day’ blogging.
Today’s first session was with Thor Muller (Valley Swag and GetSatisfaction.com) and Nova Spivak (Twine.com) on thriving in a challenging economy.
Thor started out with an excellent analog of [...]

Jeremiah Owyang – Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down

Crowdsourcing Jeremiah Owyang’s Fate
Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote a blog post yesterday about some rumors at Mzinga that ended with a strong recommendation for any prospects to stall any movement until he is briefed by Mzinga next Monday.
Here are a few excerpts from the original post:
I’ve been hearing from multiple sources in a variety of [...]

I’m Going to Forum One’s Online Community Business Forum

While it seems like everyone else is attending SXSW in Austin this week, I am going to be attending the Forum One Online Community Business Forum in lovely Sonoma, California on Thursday and Friday.  There are eight great sessions planned over two days including:

Community strategy – thriving in a challenging economy
Managing your online community ecosystem
Measuring [...]

What’s Your Twitter Grade?

Are you Twittering yet?  If you are and you’re competitive like most people, then you’ll probably want to find out how you stack up against others. 
Internet Marketing Company Hubspot offers a great (and free) tool called Twitter Grader which lets you grade yourself and others.  You simply type in your Twitter username or the [...]

Making Web 2.0 Work

McKinsey Quarterly recently published the results of their research into more than 50 early adopters of Web 2.0 technologies.  The authors made a very important point about the difference between Web 2.0 tools vs. the ERP and CRM tools that came into vogue in the 1990’s.  Web 2.0 tools are interactive and require a high [...]