Connie Bensen

I feel like I should put a note here, explain life a bit & apologize for not providing as much content here as I should be for you. I do have news for you. My sister has been building a new platform for me. I’m tired of the red. People have been tired of the red photo for awhile. My new color is on Twitter.   Thanks to all of the nice comments about it.

Do you recognize these guys? Some people said this was their favorite photo of the ones I posted from BlogWorld Expo.

It’s a classic – Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) interviewing Chris Brogan with a flip phone. They are power bloggers, power networkers & uberly great guys.

Successful networking is a great thing, but it should come with a warning! I’ve bemoaned this fact to Darren a couple of times. He laughed…

So I’m sharing this with all of you. Creating a network is a wonderfully awesome thing! I love interacting with all of you! But it has challenged my whole perspective of time & resource management. Add to that my "Chris Brogan traits’ of wanting to help everyone has put my inbox in an interesting situation. All of that coupled with my addiction to work & contributing professionally has caused me to deal with what I need to & unfortunately my blogging suffers.

I am a person of action though. Here we go.. people say by posting it publicly it makes you more accountable. I appreciate your patience as I make another transition to a new level of functioning with a network of 2 k on Twitter & 1 k on Facebook. You guys all rock & you’re important to me!

• blogging here – I am really going to try to get my blogging back on a regular basis even if it means posting quick thoughts. If you’d like to guest post, I totally welcome it!
• DM’s, email & FB message  – if you contact me & don’t hear within 2-3 days; ping me again please

At the end of October I will be speaking in San Francisco & Denver & taking a couple days off to enjoy my first visit to San Francisco. If you’d like to meet in San Fran, let me know! And I’ll be in Denver from Nov 2-5. Same thing there – let’s get together.

Here are links to the conferences, there is still time to register!

Social Media Strategies – Oct 29, 30 San Francisco – discount price here

Defrag 2008 – The discount coupon code for this conference is "foc1" (friend of connie 1) for a discount of $300.

This is a very specific type of writing exercise. It’s much like writing a summary for a resume. You want it to engage the reader’s attention immediately.

Here are the steps that I go through:

1. You need to read the Submission Guidelines carefully & follow them to the letter. They will provide the answers to the who, what, where, when & why. Here’s the Call for Participation at Web 2.0 Expo for next spring.
2. Review additional hints:
• Read about the conference, who hosts it & who usually attends it
• Take a look at the sessions that were presented at the previous one.
• Decide on the tone for your proposal
3. Decide on what your topic will be. You don’t need a title quite yet.
4. Create an outline of your idea for your topic
5. Start to craft the short description by brainstorming. Then create sentences & put them in logical order. Once you get this fairly close then the longer abstract will evolve.
6. Go through your outline & trade out the beginning of each sentence with action verbs. Make your presentation proposal engaging.

This is the short description of a panel proposal that I recently wrote:

This panel offers practical ways & case studies of how to use social media and it’s tools to have conversations in the online space like those on the sales floor. Traditional marketing & advertising efforts are less effective than ever before. By engaging with your community online you can realize: increased brand presence, shorter product development cycle, customer loyalty & satisfaction as well as create positive word of mouth.

For the longer abstract I used the above paragraph, then I asked questions. The goal is to entice potential attendees to start thinking about your topic. Your presentation will be answering those questions.

Customers are discussing your brand online. Are you listening? How are you interacting? It’s a huge opportunity to provide the same personalized service online that you encourage on the sales floor.

I used the following action words to start sentences in the panel description. Be creative!

• enable
• join
• provide
• create
• engage
• celebrate
• participate

Have someone read your proposal & provide constructive criticism. And make sure that you submit it on time!

What suggestions do you have for writing proposals for conferences?

This post needs to start with a disclaimer. When I was at the library we had slips to give the customers saying that we are not responsible for providing legal or medical advice. That goes for this post as well.

This purpose of this is to start discussion & get you thinking about intellectual property & your online presence. What I have learned has been through experience & it taught me some valuable lessons. I mentioned them on Chris Brogan’s post about how valuable your personal brand is & the big risk for corporate trust agents. As a result I was asked to go into more detail.

Again I have no legal training, but can we agree that words need definitions & a contract is nothing more than sets of words. But those words need definitions, right? The interpretations of contracts is fine when both sides agree. But if they don’t then it’s a legal question.

So as knowledge workers, we need to consider the definition of Intellectual Property in regard to the content we’re creating & how it could be interconnected with a corporate brand.

Intellectual property (IP) is a legal field that refers to creations of the mind such as musical, literary, and artistic works; inventions; and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce, including copyrights, trademarks, patents, and related rights. Under intellectual property law, the holder of one of these abstract properties has certain exclusive rights to the creative work, commercial symbol, or invention by which it is covered.

Now, here are some things to think about when you’re blogging or creating user generated content. And this is all meant to generate more questions …and maybe we can find some legal expertise to weigh in?

• What does your company view as intellectual property when you’re working for them?
• Was there an amendment that explains that anything created by you while working for them is theirs? Does this include:
• blog posts about their products or brand? (possibly on your blog?)
• tutorials & user-generated content that you create (on your 3rd party site?)
• your ideas & potential new business opportunities for you for a certain period of time after you leave employment?

On the flip side if you’re a company having your contractors & evangelists to create user generated content & blog about your product. I will suggest that the best path is to show appreciation to these people who are loyal & uphold your brand (even if you’re paying them). I don’t understand the point of the corporate legal department quibbling about ownership of intellectual property that is supporting your company & customers? As pointed out in the book Groundswell it’s all about relationships. And when it comes to the relationship between contractors/employees & the brand/company I think that user generated content & personal blogging are going to start challenging traditional norms.

Some quick suggestions:

• agreeing in advance of employment or contracting is much easier – I specifically state that all of the content on my blog is mine
• both the company & employee should know & understand
• the bounds of the blogging policy
• acceptable interactions in social networks
• whether participating is acceptable on work time (reading blogs, microblogging, participating in social networks, etc)
• your blog’s domain name is not owned by you – it’s like a phone number which you pay an annual fee to maintain it. (I tend to think of my blog URL as my property, but it’s not).

I’d love to hear your ideas & comments. And it would be great if you can bring the legal aspect to this. The topic of intellectual property is going to become more relevant as we continue to produce content online. What do you think?

Not too long ago Aaron Newman, Founder of Techrigy, & I began a conversation about his product and the needs of the community. That evolved into his inviting me to join his team & lead their community! I enjoy the brand monitoring space for a number of reasons so it’s a good fit – more on that below & why.

I will also continue to work with Network Solutions. So I like to be busy, what can I say?! For those that know me well (ie connected on IM) you know that I work seven days a week.

In regard to Techrigy, I’ve been connected to them for awhile. They’ve been syndicating my blog into their community for their customers. Their product SM2 is a monitoring & measurement tool. If you read my blog regularly you know that I focus on building brand & social networking. My philosophy is that a community manager should be actively participating in the full range of marketing, PR, awareness of competitor’s products & visibility, product development, etc.

I’m excited about SM2 for a number of reasons! I’ve been using various tools since 2006. The trick is to efficiently identify the relevant information & respond. The other aspect is the reporting & to be honest I’m a bit of a stat’s junkie. (That may be because I have majors in math, chemistry & physics. You didn’t know that huh?! I’ve always enjoyed collecting data & making sense of it. Now you know the rest of the story! I enjoy pondering ROI too.).

In addition to SM2 they also offer a Freemium version that allows 5 keyword phrases & up to 1000 results. Aaron & his team have created an amazingly robust product! There are many tools that offer the same basic features. The following features in SM2 stand out for me:

• Results are emailed to me daily – so I don’t need to use a number of monitoring sources
• In the dashboard, the results are displayed in a variety of manners allowing for easier interpretation (they’re sliced & diced in many ways!)
• The keywords define the results, but categories subdivide the results offering more in-depth interpretation
  • preset categories are available to get you started
  • you can create your own
  • you can share your categories with others & likewise use shared ones
• Access to results back to late 2007. Or you can choose specific time segments
• Demographics – this information that would be very helpful to marketing as you identify your customer segments

These are graphs from my search for the keywords of ‘Community Manager’, ‘Connie Bensen’. The 2/3 male results are as expected as is the age. All graphs are drillable to view the results that generated them.

Domain information lists the domains, along with the # of results, & an authority calculated by an algorithm (for some reason Twitter is my highest!)

Maps have pins depicting the number of search results. (As everywhere you can drill down & see results from a certain locale).

Finally each result has this powerful little tool bar:

From left to right:

• pencil/paper – you can edit the placement of that result in the categories
• magnifying glass – you can view information on a specific result. It provides considerable information on the blog & owner including author demographics, email address, traffic details & ranking. This is really helpful to quickly gather information on an identified influencer.
• mark as spam
• delete result

The last 3 each open a new window so that you can view the result in the corresponding analytic tool.

• technorati
• compete
• alexa

See why I’m loving it? My goal is to provide the community with:

• assistance in learning to use the tool so that it’s a timesaver
• workflows for utilizing the data on a daily basis & for reporting (ROI)
• ideas on how to use the search results & data to leverage their social media efforts (I hesitate to use the word ‘campaign’)
• gathering product feedback to make improvements & for feature development
• increasing brand visibility
• connecting them with others to share ideas on how they’re using the tool

If you want to check it out, sign up for the Freemium version. The trick is to use keywords that aren’t too broad. We will be glad to help with that. If it pulls the max search results, then just delete them, and make your keywords more specific.

And of course let me know if you need assistance. On Twitter I am @cbensen or send an email to:

connie@techrigy.com or support@techrigy.com