Farewell to the Catalyze Community

Goodbye Catalyze - It Was Great To Know You

The announcement from iRise yesterday today that the Catalyze Community was merging into the ModernAnalyst.com Community probably didn’t even register a blip on your radar.  But the announcement has more than a touch of melancholy for me as I was the founding community manager from the conception of the community in late 2006 through its growth to over 4,000 members in July 2008 and I want to give the the community a proper send-off.

Giving birth to and nurturing a community is not unlike the experience of raising children as I lived and breathed the Catalyze Community for almost 18 months.  I cut my teeth in community management, tried to set the standard in what professional B2B communities could be, and got started on my journey into social media through my efforts with the community.  I learned a great deal and had a chance to develop many friends in the community space including the team from Mzinga who provided the white label social media software that powered the site (a special thanks go out to Jim Storer, Derek Showerman, Aaron Strout, Isaac Hazard, Mark Wallace and Barry Libert).  I am sure I drove the Mzinga team a little bit crazy as I pushed the envelope to ‘mold’ their software into my idea of what a community experience should be.  I also enjoyed hosting the monthly webinars we held with a wide variety of knowledgeable experts.  Most of all, I discovered my “blogging” voice, and was able to experiment with the new and emerging (at the time) social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, and LinkedIn.

Of course, a lot of credit also goes out to iRise who was the founding sponsor of the Catalyze Community.  iRise’s funding of  the Catalyze Community and mission to keep it ‘commercial-free’ is what drew many of the members into the community.

The demise of the Catalyze didn’t come as a surprise to me as the community has floundered without a community manager for the past two years – and the site had become a virtual ghost town with very few visitors and sadly, very little fresh content.  Anyone who understands community building realizes that a site that is not actively managed with fresh content cannot be sustained and is destined for failure which ended up as one of my blog posts in January 2009.  In fact, I shared many of my experiences with the Catalyze Community in a number of blog posts.

The original goal of Catalyze was to unite and “catalyze” the disparate factions of  business analysts, usability professionals, user experience (UX) and information architects, designers, software developers and others who define, design and create software applications.  The ModernAnalyst Community is a very robust community and boasts over 38,000 members – and most of the Catalyze members will be nore than well-served by the merger.  I hope that the analytical “left-brain” analysts continue to reach out to the creative “right-brain” designers and usability professionals, and that they can continue to find a common ground in defining and designing better software.  I send best wishes to Adrian Marchis and the rest of his ModernAnalyst.com team on continuing the Catalyze tradition.

Catalyze Community Home Page from March 2008

ModernAnalyst.com

Adding A LinkedIn Group To Your Community

If you are managing a community, especially a B2B or professional community, you need to make your community friendly and available to LinkedIn members.  LinkedIn is becoming the de facto social networking site where people maintain their online ‘resume’ and having a LinkedIn Group is a community best practice.

Adding and maintaining a LinkedIn Group is pretty simple and low maintenance.  Plus, LinkedIn Groups are a great way to make your communities “stickier”.  If you can get someone to join the community and your LinkedIn Group, then it is highly likely that this is a member who really supports you community and will be around for the long haul.  Members can also use the group feature to connect with other LinkedIn members who are not in their network.  In that way, the group ‘badge’ acts as a pre-qualification for vouching for a contact.  Since the LinkedIn Group is listed in the Group Director, it is also a great way to drive additional traffic to the community website.

During the 18 months I managed the Catalyze community, about 1/3rd of our community members also joined the LinkedIn Group.  I don’t know if this is above or below average, but I was pleased with that level of commitment and popularity.

How to get started with LinkedIn Groups:

1. Go to LinkedIn Create a Group page
2. Upload a large (100×50 pixel) and small (60×30 pixel) logo — This is probably the hardest part of creating a group as you have to scale your community logo to these exact width specifications.  I use SnagIt to create JPGs which I would highly recommend if you are doing this on your own.
3. Fill out the group information
4. Wait for confirmation that your group is active

And here is how the LinkedIn Groups will appear in your profile:

LinkedIn Group Listing

When your group is activated (it takes a couple of days to get approved), you get a group URL that you can use to direct members to so they can add the group to their individual profile.

You should also include the link on the About page of your community.  I also included the link in my bi-weekly email updates.

I set up my LinkedIn Group to require me to manually approve all members which allowed me to make sure that LinkedIn members who were not affiliated with my community were included.  I found that there are a lot of recruitors and LinkdIn badge collectors who would try to hone in on our community group.  Checking and approving members took me about 5-10 minutes several times per week.

With LinkedIn Groups, a list of all members and their emails is also available for download to the person with adminstrator or manager rights.  You could use this list to supplement your community email marketing efforts or provide the LinkedIn members with special offers.

I am interested in your experiences with LinkedIn Groups.  Add a comment below about how LinkedIn Groups is working for you.