Video from the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives

Here’s the video from the panel I participated in at the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives social networking conference last month:

The rest of the videos can be found here.

A Vertitable Online Community Smörgåsbord

Anyone who remembers the wonderful 1973 animated adaptation of E.B. White’s immortal Charlotte’s Web remembers the hilarious musical number in which Templeton the rat eats up every last delicious morsel once the county fair has shut down for the night.

I felt a bit like Templeton last night at the Online Community Round Table organized by Bill Johnston of Forum One Network. There was almost too much good information to consume.

I Twittered the heck out of the event, which apparently added value for a lot of my followers. I got a lot of encouragement to write a blog post out of all my notes.

Before I get into the stream-of-consciousness, I’d like to wrap up a few main takeaways from the event:

1. Online community starts with the people in the community, not the technology. Know their needs and habits intimately and build your feature set accordingly.
2. Communities with robust existing user bases often police themselves more effectively than administrators can.
3. Communities have active and passive contributors. Lurking is a contribution, too.

Below is a list of my tweets in a reasonable approximation of chronological order with annotations where necessary:

• @choconancy is talking about knowledge sharing. Sometimes technology supports people, sometimes it’s the starting point. Contradicts POST. [Nancy was talking about starting knowledge sharing databases for within companies or professional associations. The POST I was referring to here is the POST method advocated by Forrester.]
• Sometimes new leadership and culture shift can kill internal community initiatives,, sometimes they are so bottom-up that it doesn’t matter.
• ppl sometimes don’t appreciate online community resources until it adds direct value in their personal experiences [In other words, sometimes some people within an organization are not supportive of spending time and resources to build online knowledge bases until those information repositories help them directly.]
  
• Sometimes the “not invented here” mentality really gets in the way of organizational mandate
• @nancywhite is her username, not @choconancy whoops!
• Kim malek is talking about the tensions between creating an invitation only community while working to grow membership virally.
• Invitation only as an acquisition tactic, like how bleeding edge online tools raise hype
• Discussion about core groups policing the group with regard to invitation-only vs. open
• An audience member observes that effective online groups usually represent a diversity of perspectives grouping around a common experience.
• Talking with these online community geeks is reinforcing my takeaway sentiment from SXSW: geeks can save the world
• Some people huddle together for warmth, others are there for content
• Peer review becomes seriously important the more bottom-up the content becomes
• Community managers should ask 1) should we try to scale ip size of community? And 2) why do we want to grow? and 3) will growth benefit us? [The third question was originally supposed to read "will growth kill the community?" but I ran out of characters.]
• TED conference is trying to scale while remaining meaningful [A presenter was showing how the TED conference was using online community building as a way to maintain the personal connections built at its conference while growing the audience.]
• We’re getting a demo of the TED online community
• TED profiles are content rich and very specific. You have big buckets for privacy. Users can tag themselves. Looks a lot like facebook.
• There’s no social graph representations that we can find. Wish they were doing that.
• Online overlays help conferences to flesh themselves out. [We talked a lot about how the online overlays of Twitter, Facebook and Meebo were integral to the SXSW experience this year and last year. I referenced Jeremiah Owyang's post on how online backchannels were the source of groundswells during the conference.]
• Discussing conferences that use compulsory registration vs. optional off-site resources.
  
• build vs join issue: engagement metrics are challenging when you use someone else’s tools.
• Gates foundation education practice is trying to increase HS graduation rates, working to connect principals and teachers for information
• How do you build online communities for non tech-savvy people? How do you determine what people will do?
• I get a massive high from these networking/discussion events. I really need to do this more often.
• People often don’t know what will make them happy. [This was in reference to an audience member's comment that the idea that people can tell you what features on an online community site will make them happy is a faulty premise. I agree.]
• Don’t chase too many features. Non tech communities are by definition not early adopters.
• “cool shiny factor” vs. Bare bones and iterate [This reminded me a lot of the logic that goes into developing successful Facebook applications. The best developers are the ones that repeatedly throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. This is also remeniscent of the Chorus methodology now in use at Eli Lilly to determine the best compounds for late-term efficacy studies.]
• The major theme of this conversation appears to be that knowing your niche audience and how they function is essential.
• I have a lot of new empathy for teams like facebook and myspace thst are trying to serve hugely diverse groups.
• Reading and absorbing content is a seriously underrated “passive contribution” to a community.
• how do we incent passive contribution? Show what someone is listening to. [One audience member brought up Last.fm's Facebook application which shows what channel users are listening to. The idea behind this is that it incentivizes reading and making passive contributions by adding content consumed to an aggregate of someone's expertise as it's represented online. Some audience members point out how easy it would be to game a system like this.]
• That would add massive value to my practice of following individual attention streams as a way to monitor relevant online conversations. [I advocated this methodology in a PRWebinar I gave about a month ago and elaborated on it here.]
  
• This does raise some concerns with regard to privacy, people really sometimes do just want to lurk.
• This is what mybloglog is for.

If you found this information just the tiniest bit useful, then you really need to be engaged with the Online Community Round Table group on Facebook and keep apprised of when they’ll be holding an event in your area.

Update: This post was originally supposed to go up over at Web Community Forum, but due to jetlag, my exhausted brain made me post it here instead. Now that you’re done reading, head on over there for more great online community resources.

Fox Starts To Get With The Program

Fox has started broadcasting some of its top shows (Family Guy, The Simpsons, House) on fox.com. While I still think that they are idiots for not broadcasting EVERY episode that they have rights to, at least it’s a start. In the meantime, however, if I want to watch an old episode of Arrested Development or Futurama, I have use SurfTheChannel.com, tv-links.cc, or google video.

Google video, by the way, is amazing. I still don’t fully understand why it is that movie and tv studios want me to have to go all the way to a theatre or blockbuster to watch a movie that I really want to see, as opposed to paying a fee and watching it off their website. I’ll still go out and see movies socially (saw The Other Boelyn Girl last night), but if it’s a Sunday night and I want to watch Walk Hard, I have to watch the crappy version shot with a video in the theatre off of Google video.

P.S. Walk Hard was terrible. If I had actually had to put on pants, drive to a theatre, and pay ten bucks, I would have been really pissed off.

Facebook Just Made Me Realize, I Want to Date WEALTHY Men!

Facebook, you used to be so awesome. I could log into you and find out what was going on with all of my friends. I could tag photos, poke people and write on their walls. The only people I was friends with were my actual friends. The advertising was unobtrusive. It was a nice world.

Then came platform. And Beacon. And targeted advertising. Now I am constantly bombarded with advertising that — based on the fact that I’m single and female — tries to convince me that I’m overweight and desperate for a boyfriend. And as if that weren’t bad enough, this is the ad that popped up when I logged on this evening:

If Facebook thinks I’m this pathetic, maybe I should just log off. Permanently.

Paul, Obama Dominate The Webb

If all the elections, both primary and general, were held today it appears that Hillary Clinton(D) would narrowly defeat Rudy Guiliani(R) for the Presidency. However, if the election were held online, it appears that Ron Paul(R) would crush Barack Obama(D).

Barack Obama is currently dominating the internet campaigning for the Democrats. He receives about twenty-five percent more viewing time on the Web than Hillary, and nearly double that of the other Democratic candidates and the Republican front-runners.

However, while Barack Obama’s Web 2.0 presence is impressive, it is nothing compared to the 70-year-old Congresman from Texas, Ron Paul. He receives double the amount of viewing time as Barack Obama and has received more grassroots fundraising money online than any other candidate.

What I am curious about is why the oldest and most plain-spoken candidate is absolutely dominating the newest and most dynamic form of media? And will domination of the internet matter in this campaign? For all the hype over Web 2.0 in the 2008 elections, the clear online front-runner, Mr. Paul, is only polling around 5%. Is Ron Paul going to suddenly be catapulted to the front of the pack by his massive web presence? Or will his online success go the way of Howard Dean’s?

Join Me for a Facebook Webinar

Want to know more about the power of Facebook for public relations and marketing professionals? Then come check out my webinars on November 26-27 at 10:00 a.m. PST. Click the bug for more information.

Facebook Launches Controversial Beacon

Facebook’s new program, Beacon, is receiving a lot of negative buzz.

The new program shows users online purchases in their news feed. Personally, I don’t want my online purchases shown in my news feed. Not only could it ruin my Christmas presents, it could potentially get me fired.

MoveOn.org has suggested that is in invasion of privacy, and launched an ad campaign against the service. What do you think?

RIAA Sues Single Mom With 2 Kids for 220,000 For Downloads Songs Off the Internet

If you went to college or had a computer between the years 1998 and now, you have probably downloaded songs illegally. Why wouldn’t you - rather than driving to the store and buying a CD with three songs you love and ten you don’t care about, you can stay at home and download whatever songs you want in minutes (seconds when I was in college).

RIAA could have purchased Napster in the 90’s and turned it into a the greatest thing to happen to the music industry since James Brown, but instead they sued its creator, waited ten years, and had Steve Jobs make a much crappier version that takes longer to install, longer to download off of, has an inferior interface, and has much a smaller selection.

Gee, this is tough. There are two products I can use. The one that is free is superior to the one that costs money in almost every way. Oh, I’ll use the one that costs money because I’m stupid as hell.

Now RIAA (which hasn’t produced a decent artists in the last seven years and is watching profits drop because the best they can do is Akon. Really? “Smack that” passes for a hit record now?) has decided to sue some of the millions of regular people who have been downloading off of programs such as Kazaa, Napster, and Limewire. So far most people have been settling, and lost a few thousand dollars (that seems fair, charging broke college stuents several thousand dollars for downloading songs?!), but one woman decided this is ridiculous, and refused to settle.

In the case of Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas, Thomas, a single mother of two, was sued for 220,000 thousand dollars. Does this seem fair to you? Capitol Records, a multi-billion dollar corporation, sues a single mom for more than 5 times her annual salary? And of course, President “Big Corporation” Bush came out today in favor of the verdict. Is this the society we want to live in, where massive corporations take hundreds of thousands of dollars away from single mothers, for doing something millions of people are doing. I sure as hell can tell you I’m not buying another CD again.

On an additional note, the Television Industry is doing the exact same thing. Currently, I (and millions of other people) have been streaming my favorite shows off the internet. Free and commerical-free. Why the hell doesn’t Fox put all it’s episode on the internet, embed ads, and let me watch them off the internet. Stoned college kids can put this stuff together, but massive corporations can’t figure out how to do it? I’ll pay for the stuff, I’ll watch the ads. Does Fox has some secret reason why I should only watch the Simpsons between 6:00 and 6:30?

Vanessa Fox and Transparency in Life

Vanessa Fox is talking at Gnomedex about keeping your life transparent or keeping your personal life offline. With profiles on just about every social network and copious bathing suit photos of myself floating around, I think my life is pretty much an open book.

How do you handle your online transparency? What are your privacy settings?

Help Out Some Students Leveraging Social Media for a Class Project: Vote Bart Simpson in 08

Some students at my alma mater are working on a project for their campaigns and elections class. The project involves leveraging social media to gather support behind a fictitious candidate. They’ve chosen Bart Simpson as the man of the hour.

Their goal is to get as many people to join their Facebook group supporting Bart Simpson or sign up on their Bart 4 Prez website.

So if you’re in favor of students using social media in their projects, perhaps you’ll consider supporting Bart Simpson for president in 2008.

Did Facebook Crash?

I keep trying to get on to Facebook, but all my browser says is “failed to open page because the server stopped responding.”

What’s going on? Can anyone else get on to the system?

Update: Looks like I’m not the only one having this problem. It also looks like I’m not the only geek in the world not standing in line for the iPhone.

More on Facebook, the “Coolest Self” and Why I Still Think Scoble’s Kinda Silly (But in a Good Way)

I’ve been taking some heat for what I wrote about Robert Scoble yesterday and his very well thought-out response. Everyone’s questions and comments have given me the opportunity to question my position and re-think it. So here are a few conclusions I have come to.

First of all, Facebook has changed. A lot. It used to be a site where people could come to build a network of people they actually knew from college and high school. The idea was to build a profile that showed your “coolest self” by sharing photos of you having fun and doing outrageous shit with all your friends. In some ways, it was a way to testify that you were doing just fine in college. That you didn’t miss your mommy, or your friends back home, or your teddy bear. It was also a way to make an ex-lover see that you were doing just fine without them.

If you don’t believe me, just watch this episode of the hilarious show We Need Girlfriends. It’s about MySpace, but the “coolest self” behavior is clearly evident:

Now, to serve the “coolest self” purpose, you’d occasionally need to post a photo that an employer might not find in the best of taste. There are approximately 369 photos of me currently tagged on Facebook and there used to be a LOT more. I took some of them down when I realized that they might be misinterpreted. It’s not truly bad behavior, but there are a lot of photos and videos out there of me and my friends running around in bathing suits, skirts short enough to be headbands, and outrageous Halloween costumes. In short, things that might raise eyebrows in the “real world.”

A number of those photos were strategically taken/posted to cater to a very small group known as “people we used to date.” We all got a secret thrill from knowing that our ex-lovers might be looking at our online photos and wishing they hadn’t been so rash in cheating/breaking our hearts/whatever other wrongs they had perpetrated against us.

Steve Broback and I joke that Facebook’s alternate URL should be doingjustfinewithoutyou.com.

Now, Facebook has become a place where people who know each other in even the most tenuous ways can become friends and share stuff. I think it’s really, really cool. But it means I have to radically re-think how I use the system. It also means that I might have to take down or at the very least un-tag even more of those treasured “coolest self” photos.

That is, of course, unless Facebook creates very, very granular privacy settings that let the user categorize their friends and then decide, photo by photo and video by video, who gets to see what. I’d like to see that happening sooner rather than later, so that I can manage and continue to frame-switch between my college self, my post-college fun self, and my working world self.

Some people say that my dream of super-granular privacy settings is silly. If I want a professional profile, “It’s called LinkedIn.” But I don’t find LinkedIn nearly as fun as Facebook. I’m on Facebook every day, multiple times a day unless I’m rock climbing or on a camping trip. I check LinkedIn maybe twice a week. Facebook is just more addictive and more fun. Plus, does LinkedIn let you import your blog’s RSS feed and display your shared links from Google Reader? Didn’t think so.

Scoble asks, “Anyway, seriously, there’s no such thing as privacy anymore, is there? What you all trying to hide?!?”

I would prefer not to hide anything at all. And if I was sure that people wouldn’t judge me, I’d be happy to fling the doors wide open and be myself all the time in front of the whole wide world. But Robert, I say to you again that you’re not a woman. You don’t have to deal with the double standard when it comes to sexuality and professionalism. You don’t have to worry about creepy stalkers. You don’t have to be concerned that professional contacts will see you as a party girl or a lame ditz because you’re young and pretty and own a closet full of micro minis.

I’m smart, and I know it. But will potential employers, clients and colleagues really take the time to find that out once they see the photo of me on Facebook in my junior-year Halloween costume?

I wonder. And that’s what I’m trying to figure out.

Robert Scoble Lets Everyone Be His Facebook Friend, Why I Think He’s Silly

I was wasting time on Facebook this weekend, as I am apt to do when I saw that Robert Scoble had updated his Twitter to read:

I’m adding everyone as my Facebook Friend. Join here: http://tinyurl.com/2zcme6

Another one of my friends, Brandon Paddock replied:

@scobleizer, that’s kind of defeating the purpose… Facebook is so great because it’s people you actually know!

I really agree with Brandon on this one, as I wrote on Twitter. But since I’d like to have more than 140 characters to explain why, I’m writing a blog post about it.

Basically, Facebook is wonderful because it creates virtual maps of actual, real-world connections. It’s just like LinkedIn because it assumes that when someone becomes friends with someone else, they are endorsing that person. A friend request is a request for an endorsement. It’s a way to reach out and say, “hey, tell the world that I’m really an OK person.”

Now, that’s not to say that I won’t accept you as a friend if you ping me on Facebook. But if the connection isn’t obvious, you should at least write me a note. I actually friended Stowe Boyd the other day without writing him a note and he wrote back to say, “do I know you?” I felt like such a dimwit.

The real-world nature of the connections on Facebook is about privacy as much as about endorsements. Facebook’s privacy settings are the gold standard for social networks because they are so granular. And even at the most open, there is no way to make your profile visible to every single person.

Those privacy settings enable, rather than inhibit the “social grid” that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg talked about in his f8 keynote. A new user on the network adds value for all the users because his presence makes his friends more likely to update their profiles more frequently. This creates a ripple effect across the social grid.

What’s more, Facebook users are actually more likely to update their accounts frequently because they know that only their friends can see what they’ve done. I’m much (MUCH!) more cautious what I put on my MySpace than I am about Facebook. Why? Because I know each and every person on my Facebook. MySpace is a complete crap shoot.

Now, Scoble can use Facebook however the heck he wants. It’s his profile and his life. But if you’re a friend of his and you don’t want a lot of exposure, you might want to change your privacy settings to reflect that you don’t want friends of friends to be able to see your profile.

Spitting: The Definitive Reason Robert Scoble Should Join Facebook

Robert Scoble says he won’t join Facebook because he needs, “fewer things in my life, not more.”

I totally respect information overload, Robert. But we all know you’ve soured on Second Life. Facebook won’t take up nearly as much of your time as SL did.

But the real reason you should join Facebook is because you’re a spitter. That is, you like to direct little droplets of information you find interesting out into the universe. You spit with your link blog. You’re a spitter on Twitter.

Facebook is the ultimate tool for spitting. It combines the best of del.icio.us with your own little social network. Yes, your link blog has lots of interesting content, but what if you want to make sure that Jeremiah Owyang sees something? You can go through the tedious process of sending an e-mail with the URL. You could open a new tab, go to Twitter and type “@Jeremiah: http://url.com”, send it out and hope he sees it in his stream.

Or you could use the Facebook toolbar to quickly route the information to Jeremiah and forget about it.

So c’mon Robert. Whaddaya say?

The Queen, the Demolition of the Barrier Between Public and Private, and The New Web

Andy and I watched Helen Mirren’s impeccable performance in The Queen (iTunes) this evening. He wasn’t as enthusiastic to see the film as I was, but we both wound up enjoying it.

The film got me thinking about issues of transparency and how far our culture has moved from Her Majesty’s heyday. Technology — first the television, now the “personal” Web — has brought human flaws and struggles to the forefront and pushed institutions into the background. Corporations whose goal was once to preserve brands now use new media to humanize themselves. The same must be true of the monarchy if it is to survive in Britain.

Never was this gap in the generational understanding of the public/private divide made more clear than in the days after Princess Diana’s death. As the movie illustrates, Her Majesty was never brought up to wear her heart on her sleeve. “Duty first, self second,” she states primly to Prime Minister Tony Blair as the film nears its end.

What she didn’t understand was that her duty changed as technology changed her people. Diana was so beloved in England because she put a human face on an institution that has sought to submerge humanity beneath layers of protocol since its inception. Her great physical beauty and poise, and her compassion for ordinary people only made her foibles more endearing. She was photographed — quite literally — to death. The exposure of her every move cemented her role as “the people’s princess.”

The newest phenomenon of people using the Web — it has been variously styled as “Web 2.0,” “emerging media,” “new media,” and “consumer generated content” — to tell their personal stories is a natural extension of the global culture that lauded Princess Diana and decried the Queen for her lack of public empathy with the people. Companies, and corporate communicators in particular need to understand that.

Virginia Tech Students Use Facebook to Organize Vigils, Mainstream Media Falls Behind

The Planet Blacksburg blog has a post up about how students are using Facebook to organize vigils for their slain friends.

Meanwhile Virginia Tech student and blogger Andrew Mager has a post up about the evolving Wikipedia article on killer Cho Seung-hui.

It’s very interesting to watch the Web play such a crucial role in the information sharing during this crisis. On 9/11/01, I remember getting most of my information from the mainstream media. The blogging culture was in its infancy, but still some bloggers were sharing their experiences and making their very real grief felt.

Now, six years later, the blogosphere, social networking sites wikis and other avenues of online communication are providing more up to date information than the mainstream media.

More importantly, the information coming from social media is more poignant and real to me than anything I’ve seen on CNN.com. I’ve seen some of the pictures of the slain students on Facebook and it makes the whole thing so much more real than if they were featured in a newspaper or on television.

Part of watching disasters like this from a “safe distance” is that you can’t imagine them happening to you. But when you’re looking at a picture of a slain student on Facebook, just like you would look at a picture of yourself or your friends, you start to realize that this could have been anyone. It could have happened anywhere. It makes things very, very real.

I have some more thoughts on this posted at Blog Business Summit.

The Virginia Tech Shootings: News and Outreach Come From Blogs and Facebook

Obviously, there’s very little that can be said about the tragedy at Virginia Tech that has not yet been said. It’s horrifying, disturbing. My prayers are with those who are suffering.

One thing that I find interesting about this whole situation is where I’m getting my news. Everything on CNN is just pure repetition. Meanwhile, the most informative news is coming from the students themselves on Facebook. The group I’m OK at VT enables students to share that they are alright with their friends. The conversation here and at the VT community board paints the most compelling, non-sanitized picture of what has occurred. It reminds us that underneath all the monetized media sensationalism, there are people who are really hurting.

Also, facts have emerged on blogs that are not yet a part of the mainstream media. Michelle Malkin posted a deeply disturbing e-mail from a student who was in Norris hall at the time of the shootings. Apparently, the gunman chained the doors. Brutally Honest has the transcript of an instant message with a student that indicates the mainstream media had even less of the real story than we originally thought.

Previously, this kind of word of mouth and the attendant community support would have been limited to the campus. But as we get a real window into the world of the shootings, we become a real part of the affected community. I hope that we can use that extension of community to reach out and help more than we use it for voyeurism.

Next Page »