Community Manager - That's a Job? You bet.

I keep coming back to an analogy that I have made many times in the past several months that may help us all. Remember the first web site you saw? Was it in ’96, ’98, earlier? That website was an act of faith on the part of someone who convinced someone else that they (the organization) needed one. So they got some smart technical guys to code up the site and viola – they were ‘on the world wide web’.

This was status quo for about a year, most websites didn't change content, didn't manage traffic, didn't really do much of anything except trumpet the fact that they were ahead of the pack. This changed over time as people saw that the content needed to be freshened, and that audiences demanded more. Going back to the original developers become very expensive, especially to do things like text changes.

A new job was born – the Web Master. Someone who became facile at the rapidly developing set of available tools. This job DID NOT EXIST prior to this time. Now when you ask an organization about their Webmaster, they may tell you they have two or three or a team of 12.

We are at such an inflection point today with online communities, social networks, social media and all of the related technologies. This explosion in the tools, the rapid adoption across the general population (some reports suggest that 1 in 6 will be using these tools globally by 2012) and the ease at which a social media strategy can be implemented has us at another inflection point. Enter the Community Manager. Once you have discovered your social media strategy, built it out and launched it, you will definitely need to focus ongoing attention to the care and feeding of all of the aspects of it.

This reality is causing many to postpone efforts or to try to find another way. I would suggest that is like planting a garden and hoping you don’t get any weeds, that none of the plants need watering and that you never have to prune them if they do live. It is not realistic.

That is why we will focus on understanding the work related to running a successful online community this Thursday with webinar to listen to a panel of professionals discussing what they know a lot about: Managing Online Communities.

For the past seven years at introNetworks, our focus to date has been on crafting and launching the community, with a more casual approach to managing, or tending it. In the past six months I have been focusing on why such a casual attitude and I believe that in most cases people just don't know what to do. Many are making it up as they go along, as they have been tasked with task of managing the masses, and don't have the background or temperament or more importantly, the time to do the job well.

That's why this month I thought we would focus on answering these five questions:

· So what does a Community Manager do all day?

· Why is having a community manager so critical?

· What are the characteristics of a great community manager?

· What is appropriate to expect from a community manager?

· What happens when you don't have a community manager?

And to help us better understand the answers, we have these experts joining us:

· Moderator: Jim Storer 


o Co-Founder, The Community Roundtable,
blogging at JimStorer.com

· Rachel Happe 


o Co-founder, The Community Roundtable,
blogging at TheSocialOrganization.com 


· Howard Wahlberg


o Asst. Executive Director, Community Manager,
the National Science Teachers Association

· Amber Naslund

o 
Community Manager, Radian6,
blogging at AltitudeBranding.com and AmberNaslund.com 


· Mark Sylvester
 (me)

o Co-founder, CEO, introNetworks,
blogging at MarkSylvester.com 


Each of these people has an amazing back-story – all have been involved in some sort of online community or social media activity for quite a while. They are dealing with issues in their community on a daily basis and are helping to light the way for the rest of us to follow.

Join us in the conversation. Or follow along on Twitter, #introchat

Register here.

PreWebinar Sound Bites - a quick conversation with Mark Oehlert

I had the chance to chat with this month's webinar guest speaker, Mark Oehlert, the Innovation Specialist at the Defense Acquitition University yesterday and was inspired by what he had to say. I can't wait for tomorrows webinar when we will be able to dig into the topics even more.

The Webinar title is: "How To Overcome the Top Three Challenges to Building an Organization Dedicated to Social Learning" - and it is overarching enough to allow us a lot of latitude in where we go. You can register for the free webinar here

Not to preempt the talk (much), but the 3 Challenges are Fear, Control and Trust. Mark speaks on this topic a lot and has a lot of passion for it as I could tell in our short talk.

Here are some quotes I took down as fast as I could that could be longer conversations in their own right:

• Social media efforts are not culturally neutral - they will change the organization
• Disruptive Discovery - I will let Mark discuss this one live
• Have an Organizational Development and Change Management professional on the team
• "The truth of the organization instead of the organizational chart"
• and my favorite: Do you trust your employees

Mark has a strong take on this topic and I am sure we are all going to learn a lot from him.

You can still register for the free webinar here

Tweet What You Eat - Sunday Inspiration

Last week was my daughter Melissa's birthday and I had to be out of town so we missed our traditional dinner out. My wife suggested that instead of going out, that I cook instead and offer to cook her favorite meal.

"Great idea," said my daughter when I suggested it.
"So, what's your favorite meal?" I asked.
"Well, do you mean what would I want as my last meal, or what would I like to eat every day?" she replied.
"Doesn't matter, pick one."

She picked BBQ Beef Ribs, Mac and Cheese, Spinach and Chocolate Cake. Excellent.

So, yesterday I started the ribs by searing them after rubbing them with a nice mixture of spices, then placed them in the crock pot to simmer in a quart of bloody mary mix - a secret tip. I only let them slow cook for about 4 hours - just enough to tenderize, but not have the meat fall off the bones. Seems that she really likes them when she has to work a bit. After four hours I pulled them out and put them in the fridge. I then took the broth, some minced onion, Hawaiian sugar and balsamic vinegar and boiled it down for about three hours until I had a wonderfully piquant BBQ sauce that I will use to baste them when I finish them off about an hour before service.

The Mac and Cheese, while a wonderful comfort food, was begging for an 'interpretation'. My wife Kymberlee had sent me a link to a restaurant in NYC that only serves Mac and Cheese and I thought, well, what would they do on such a momentous occasion? I guess an answer would be to do a Lobster Mac, but that is a bit upscale, so I came up with some inspiration from a TV show, The Worlds Deadliest Catch, on the show you see how trecherous it is to catch crab. This led me to deciding to do a CrabMac. One thing I didn't tell you about the conversation with my daughter was that her first answer was, "Can dinner just be Bacon?". That's my girl. As Tony Bourdain said when he was here at the Arlington Theater two months ago, "Everything is better with bacon."

So here is the recipe for my (soon to be famous) CrabMac and Cheese.

• 3/4 pound Elbow Mac (old school) or Cellantani (a corkscrew variant of elbow mac), cooked for 11 minutes in rapidly boiling salted water, I used the Cellantini
  
• 1 pound fresh dungeness crab claw meat. Trader Joes has this amazing fresh crab that comes in every morning.
  
• 6 green onions, diced with 6 cloves of garlic, minced and sauteed with 6 slices thick bacon cut in 1/2 inch diced
• 4 cups Bechamel Sauce (melt 4 tablespoons butter, add 4 tablespoons flour, blend until thoroughly cooked, about 4 minutes, add 4 cups of fat free half and half, yeah I know why bother with fat free... add 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard, 1 teaspoon sweet paprika, 1 teaspoons salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper - whisk until velvety smooth)
• 2 cups grated extra sharp cheddar cheese

Blend the cooked and cooled pasta with the crab and bacon/onion/garlic mixture. Mix so that everything is well distributed.

Mix the cheddar cheese with the Bechamel Sauce until well blended.

Add the sauce to the pasta and blend well. It should be soupy.

In a casserole dish place half the mixture and put another cup or so of Cheddar Cheese on it. Cover with the remaining pasta mixture.

Cover the top with a bit more cheese and Panko crumbs, or breadcrumbs if you don't have Panko.

Bake for 45 minutes at 350

To compliment the Ribs and the CrabMac I am going to serve steamed asparagus, sauteed spinach and leeks and peas and carrots that I am going to make using petite carrots and sugar snap peas I found at the local produce market this morning. Hopefully the triad of vegetables will counter balance the meaty, cheesy, carbolicious goodness of the main courses.

Dessert will be a Triple Chocolate Fudge Cake served at room temperature to fully appreciate the rich flavors of the chocolate and extra strong black coffee, which is a great way to finish this rich dessert.

I am writing this several hours before dinner, so there are no pictures, except the ones in my mind of everyone licking their lips, wiping their fingers and helping my daughter celebrate the one day of the year that is uniquely her own.

Happy Birthday Melissa.

Everybody's talking about Learning

A week or so ago I was encouraged to write an extended post about what I tweeted about, which was a surge in conversations related to Learning, Training and Education.

In talking with people from a variety of industries and market segments one thing that has struck me is that there seems to be a focus on education that I don't recall noticing in the past. These conversations are not exclusively from educators or professional trainers, but managers, directors and C level executives that are concerned with the skill level of their employees, the knowledge about product offerings and use with their customers and partners and providing expertise to their prospective clients in the form of webinars, white papers, and connections in a business focused social network.

We have been focusing on learning, both formal and informal, for some time here. You can watch some of the webinars we have sponsored to get a sense of our interest out there in the market. This emphasis on 'social learning' is growing (it seems exponentially) and there are so many great questions from people searching for solutions.

I just heard that Learning 2009 is going to be focusing a conference-within-conference on Social Learning, and a topic of much discussion at this week's Annual Conference of the USDLA was on how social media (of all types) plays into a blended learning agenda for organizations.

Other evidence of the surge in interest in this area is the monthly virtual events that are being produced by Dr. Tony Karrer's Corporate Learning Trends initiative - you can sign up for the June online (free) conference here. The one this month was extremely informative that was hosted by Jay Cross, you can read his take on the experience here.

Why all the interest?

My take is that in these challenging economic times we have to maximise the resources we have available to us, and the most expensive one is our people. Making sure that they have the information to do their jobs is a primary concern, and it is accelerated by the fact that so many companies are working with reduced staffs, so people are having to do things that they have never done before. They are relying on their networks of connections to help them solve problems - but as those networks have collapsed, it becomes important to build new ones. That seems to be why they are calling us.

Education is important, finding a way to make it most effective for the money spent is a critical part of the strategic discussion. There are a lot of resources out there for you, I especially like this site eLearningLearning. It's very helpful.

Three Things You Must Know About How Distance Affects Your Organization

I just got off the phone with Reggie Smith, the President Elect of the United States Distance Learning Association to go over details for Wednesday's (4/22) Webinar. We discussed how this webinar series is geared towards education of the audience, not education in the traditional sense.

For the past several months we have been doing this series of conversations with noted authorities, experts, thought leaders to learn from them in an interesting format. As this series evolves, we are getting better at both delivering a message and finding ways to engage the audience more effectively.

Last month we used TweetChat to have a back channel going on during the webinar, it worked great. This month we will do the same (using #usdla).

So, what should we expect from this month's conversation?

• A brief history of Distance Learning
• A focus on Corporate Learning (as opposed to K12 and Higher Ed)
• Best Practices and Anecdotes
• Alignment of Learning to an Organization's Strategy - and Some Tactical Tricks
• Backstory from the Booz Perspective (Reggie is a Booz Consultant & President of USDLA)
• Statistics from the USDLA Archives
• Thoughts on Integration of and Participation in Distance Learning (Mgmt and Learners)

This ought to be plenty to get us started. If you are interested in any of these ideas, join us for the Wednesday Webinar. You can register by clicking here.

We will post a replay at http://www.intronetworks.com/webinars.aspx later that day.

introNetworks inSight - an experiment in communications

Today, after a lot of discussion we have launched a new video blog called inSight that will be crafted each day, be short, and interesting (well, if not, you will tell me).

This first one is just me getting my feet wet. I tell you, sitting in an empty room staring at a red light is challenging. I think I did this ten times. But, practice makes perfect and I am pretty sure that in a week or so, I will be able to whip these out quickly.

Kymberlee (my partner and President of introNetworks) is also going to be doing inSights as well - she has a completely different point of view (think mars and venus) and I am anxious to hear what she has to say.

I was encouraged by a client today to be much more vocal about our software and how it is (or could) be better used by clients - he suggested that he would watch everyday if he could get a tip or two. In fact, he said he would 'weep for joy' if it helped him run his community.

Well, Michael - start crying.

Here then is the episode #201 of introNetworks inSight. Please use the comments to tell me what you would like to hear about. (I see that when I put the YouTube embed code here, it clips the HD (shot with MinoHD) - you can see the full view here.)

The World of Twitter - some tips learned in 72 hours.

Just putting the word Twitter into the title of this post will ensure that at least five new people will auto-follow me - strange? You bet.

So if you have not heard of Twitter, you can move on now and get back to your regular life. If you are new to Twitter then you may want to read on as I have some things that I have found that will either make your life wonderful, or have you pulling out your hair by the fistful.

I don't want to do a newbie guide to Twitter, there are a ton of them around, think of this as an advanced beginner roadmap to some of the places I have found along the way in the past 72 hours. Telling you about them may help you on your Twitter journey.

IPhone Apps

I worked with Twitterific from the time I got my Twitter account until this weekend when I loaded up Twitterverse. Hands down a 1000% improvement. If you have the iPhone, you need this.

Web-based Apps

I have a Twitter gadget installed on my iGoogle page, but it requires that I have that page open, and I don't want to be SO obsessive as to be refreshing that page over and over and over. So, I got a clue from @moehlert about finding good Twitter clients (what you call anything that lets you Tweet that is not at Twitter.com). If you look at a tweet and pay attention to the line at the bottom that says:

Mark Sylvester about 5h ago via twhirl

If you click on the last word it will take you to the web page of that client and you can go from there. So, I started paying attention to the people I follow to see which clients they use. I thought that if @timoreilly was using a specific client that would be a great start. He is. When he is not posting from the web, he uses an AIR application called twhirl. I love it. I can leave it open on my desktop and it is nice and unobtrusive, in fact, you can set transparency on it, so it fades back even better. Try it.

Twitter Chat and Groups

Ok, this is where it starts to get really scary (I mean interesting). Remember chat rooms? Sure you do, but you may or may not admit being in them. This is the same idea but on steroids. There is something called a hashtag in Twitter that lets others search on a word easily. There are tons of search tools, both built in to the clients and at Twitter itself. But both of these are childs play if you really want to seriously drink from a firehose.

People are starting to set up Groups (more on that later) and organize times when they all get online and chat. Each tweet has a #hashtag in it so that it will show up in the various search tools that people use. It is a mad free-for-all during the online chat, with archives posted for those that miss the melee. For example. I checked on the #journchat this week and wow it was amazing. I only had an hour for each, and just watching the activity was inspiring. You can join in a Chat at this site but you have to know the #hashtag. (Try typing anything in the search box).

These are serious and fun at the same time - professionals taking an hour out of their week to discuss their profession or avocation or general interests. There are 100's of them (who knew?). You can find these groups here. But I didn't even know this site existed until today. I found that several of the people I follow had the #journchat tag in their posts on Monday evenings, so I checked it out. Really interesting.

Great thing here is that you can jump in, or not, and learn a lot, which is what Twitter is so good at, right?

I am sure that there are more sites devoted to Chat and Groups

Tweet Grid

Ok, so let's say that you stop everything, join a bunch of groups, start following a ton of people, embed #hashtags in your tweets and generally give up the majority of your day doing so, then what. Well, you can then sign up to get the NORAD display of all this activity and put it on your biggest monitor and completely give in. NORAD display? Have you seen the wall to wall monitors in the command centers in the news, movies or TV? Well, there is a site that you can go to and put in all of these #hashtags and have a realtime update on all of them at the same time. Go to TweetGrid and click on example grid on the far left, that will give you an idea of what you can do. So, imagine tracking everything you are interested in all at once.

I asked @marciamarcia last night how she did it, as I have noticed her tweets are cogent, inspired, thoughtful and fast. She said that she is an accomplished multitasker and says that this is the best source of lateral thinking she knows of. Well said Marcia.

Summary

So, this is just in the past 72 hours that I have updated my phone, my desktop, my #hashtags, my Twitter Groups and Chat and I am feeling a bit overwhelmed but in a good way. I feel like I am more connected than ever before and coincidentally I run a networking company, so have not ever had a feeling like I was not connected.