Connie Bensen

While I was taking a bit of time off to spend with my sister & her boys, a very proactive educator found my blog. Yesterday I saw the trail of tweets … That’s the joy of social networking! You can pretty much follow the word of mouth.

So today I talked with Kevin Jarrett who is actively employing social media to help educators. I was impressed when I read his bio & look forward to exchanging more ideas with him!

Kevin invited me to speak in Second Life. I never thought I needed to go there, but yes I do! (ok, I must admit I was intrigued after seeing Connie Reece sporting her green pea dress & dancing. Today she tells me she’ll take me roller skating!). It seems that I have many friends that will teach me the in’s & out’s. I will be ready to speak in September!

What are educators doing? Well they have Classroom 2.0 with more than 10,000 members. And Kevin is gearing up to have middle school students publish an online newspaper. They’ll have a great time doing that & what better way to start gaining the skills for real life (or should I say ‘virtual’).

If you’re in the education field, drop a note. And I welcome Kevin & all of his friends to my blog. I started a new category for you. Let me know how I can help!

There have been many references to ROI in terms of social media. A couple of my favorites are:

• Return on Influence
• Return on Interaction

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the Community Manager position.And the article in the WSJ about the Deloitte study brought out many from the industry in defense of communities. My take was that it underlines the importance of the community manager role. Brian Solis recently had an article on the new MarComm. He highlights why companies need to start considering marketing in relational terms.

A friend that’s a VP of Marketing of an Open Source solution says it provides 12x the valuation at his company.

Here are a list of returns:

• Humanize the company by providing a voice
• Nurture the community & encourage growth
• Communicate directly with the customers
• Connect customers to appropriate internal departments
• Ensure that messaging will connect
• Build brand awareness through word of mouth
• Lower market research costs
• Add more points in the purchase cycle
• Provide support to customers that have fallen thru the cracks
• More satisfied customers because they’ve been involved with product development
• Shorten length of product development cycle
• Build public relations for brand with influentials in the industry
• Identify strengths & weaknesses of competitors
• Collaborate & partner with related organizations
• Provide industry trends to the executive level

Ian’s suggestions:

- Identify popular problems in user work flow
- Communicate use case developments to team
- Represent the user experience to organization

Your first comment will be – there aren’t any numbers there! You know your organization best so I’ll let you decide what value each of those offers. There are other factors to consider before deciding if you need a community manager, but I hope that that list starts you thinking about the value of the position.

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*cross posted at Marketing 2.0

Twitter, Plurk, Identi.ca, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Facebook, Mashable, Plaxo, Tumblr & Pownce, LinkedIn

That’s where I update to. Before you schedule help though – I really only interact on half of them. I’m really finding ping.fm to be an excellent timesaver. (use pingscompany to sign up – they keep changing it)

Ping.fm efficiently updates 10 services for me with one click. Here are the advantages:

• I think twice before I type those 140 characters!
• I try to add a question that elicits a response from friends
• It keeps me active everywhere.
• I don’t have to choose one service.
• Different people respond at different services.

Then awhile later I will pop into my services of choice. Usually Twitter, Identi.ca & Plurk. Doing it this way I’m finding that:

• I don’t stay as long in each one.
• I don’t ponder all the noise when I pop in (there is more of a purpose)
• I’m updating less, but it’s far more meaningful (and probably appreciated by my friends!)

One could argue that I’m not gaining the same value that I was before in getting to know people there. In regard to that I can always spend time wherever I’d like when I choose too. In many respects I feel like I’m offering more value by not contributing as much to the noise. I feel like I’ve shifted to a new level of use again (it’s like #3 or 4 – I should review them again here).

What do you think about updating often?

I’m starting something new on my blog of sharing links to articles that caught my attention. Here are some ideas for your community strategy:

An incredible article about Brands building community on Flickr

Beth Kanter pointed me to this ongoing wiki project that is going to be an amazing resource for Non-profits using Social Media. I’m sure that she would love your contributions!

A must see slide at Dogster.com along with this truth "Being a community manager is never about you, the community manager or the company you work for. It’s always about the community member or site user, who we like to call the customer.

Wall Street Article on Why Most Online Communities Fail? (yes, lack of human intervention) Take a look at how the industry spoke up in this article.

That was a warm up article for this one by Augie Ray that provides an excellent analogy between gardening & nurturing a community.

And kudos to Dell!!  Dell Opens Up Social Media Sites to All Employees