Alistair started his presentation with – Community gardening is going to change. It’s about capitalism. Companies are concerned with the bottom line & everything needs to be measured. He wasn’t hard on community managers at all. His challenge was simply: We need to take it to the next level for it to be taken seriously in the Enterprise.

I totally agree & echoed the importance of measurement at my session on the day before. His presentation took it to the next level with a focus on measurement and is aligned with the book that he’s co-authored with Sean Powers, Complete Web Monitoring.

Measurement & reporting are key to building value around the community/social media role. The only way to grow the position is to provide concrete data supporting how it’s contributing to the goals of the organization. And in most cases that’s to increase revenue.

The Big Quandary – I can’t measure social media, right?

Everything is measureable now. Web analytics are mainstream and provide the statistics related to your site. Now conversations online can also be gathered, measured & analyzed in a number of ways. There are many free tools as well as professional ones. I work with Techrigy SM2 & we offer a Freemium version so you can get a feel for aggregating the conversations. (Many use it for their consulting businesses).

Alistair took it one step further. He shared ideas that make it easier for your web analytics software (Google Analytics in particular & it’s free) to track your ‘campaigns’. I’ve also been helping my Techrigy customers do likewise so they can maximize their measurement capabilities.

Why is this so important?

1.  Show Value – Quantitative data is the proof in the pudding. Every other department has reporting requirements, so this isn’t any different.

2. Grow your role – The only way that you’re going to get more resources (ie: time & people) is by providing concrete numbers on your progress.

3. Increased budget – Budgets are only provided to those that can justify them.

5. Expand the benefit to the company across more departments. We already know that there are huge benefits to talking with the customers across the touchpoints of the organization. The only way that more people will be empowered to work directly with the customers is by proving the value of that with numbers.

6. Job security – If you’re providing excellent service your organization will sense that. But how will they know what impact you’re having?

I look forward to reading their book! I predict that it will be a key read for anyone in a social media role.

Check out Alistair’s slide deck from his presentation.

What are you measuring? Is it showing the value of your role?

Dan truly walks the talk of personal branding. He crossed my path in July of 2007 by commenting on my post on branding on DigiScrapInfo.com. This blog didn’t exist back then. He added some ideas & we started a conversation. Two years later finds us having mutually mentored each other & celebrating each other’s successes.

Me 2.0 appears to be intended for those just beginning their careers. But it really is a roadmap for anyone interested in building an online brand no matter their age. I did it at the age of 40. This book is also for all of you that are interested in working in social media & community jobs.

Reading the book made me smile because there are so many parallels to community building. Dan, have you been reading my blog? He has a section on identifying & working with evangelists too! He provides four steps to establishing your brand and building community around it. It’s the same concepts that are used to build community around any brand. Dan does a great job of covering all the various components including social networking and the reasons to be at certain ones.

Dan relates many of his own experiences, including the one related to identity theft. As a result that section provides many good ideas on how to prevent identity theft & what to do if it happens to you. I also really liked the section on setting up a blog along with a check list of necessary items. Finally, his ideas on a press kit are very good & I need to review my presence on this blog and add the things I realized that I’m missing.

There are a number of very helpful charts in Me 2.0. I’m sharing this one because it underlines how interwoven his book is with the concepts of community. Read thru this & ask yourself if this reminds you of traits of a community manager? I had never considered myself entrepreneurial, but others have commented on it.

According to this chart I am. Along with this chart Dan lists the traits associated with it:

Someone that has:

• vision
• creativity – unconventional marketing
• strategic
• tenacity
• passion
• problem solving skills
• highly competitive

See what I mean? It has community manager written all over it!

Thank you Dan for providing us with a book that should be in every public library. It will serve as a great resource for those pondering what direction they should take. The book drives home the point that I continually make here that everyone has the ability to create their own way & be successful. It’s just a matter of establishing short term & long term goals & striving to accomplish them in a consistent way.

It was a total pleasure to meet Robin Fray Carey, CEO & Co-Founder of SocialMediaToday at the Social Media Strategies Conference in San Francisco last week. It’s always inspiring to meet women who are making a difference in the social media world.

SocialMediaToday.com is a unique community that offers bloggers a great springboard to share our thoughts & ideas. Here is why I love it: It aggregates them all in one place allowing us to read each others work, vote on it & comment. I have met new friends there & keep up with old ones. The value that it brings me is that my blog is syndicated there where it is exposed to new readers. They can click thru & explore my blog more fully because permalinks are offered. And they’re doing it in such a way that search engines don’t see it as a duplication & frown on it for SEO purposes.

I have been evangelizing SocialMediaToday for quite some time. I included it in my guest post on Problogger as a great way to take your blog to a new community. It really does give your blog legs! And if your focus is small business then you can syndicate your blog in their sister site, MyVenturePad.com. They have recently launched a new site for marketing specialists called TheCustomerCollective And I see that they have TheEnergyCollective too.

How can you add your blog & join the community? (I highly recommend it)

• Register for a profile
• Follow the instructions
• Your blog’s RSS is fed in & their fabulous Community Manager/Editor Jerry Bowles reviews the posts & chooses which to display.
• Sign up for their weekly newsletter – it rocks! by highlighting news & popular posts

Here’s my post from last week on using Twitter for Business that has been on SocialMediaToday. To date it’s had 524 views! And they kindly highlighted a link in the newsletter.

A huge thank you to Robin & Jerry for providing us with a place to aggregate our collective knowledge. It’s a rich source of information for those aspiring to learn & share our knowledge.

Facebook

The Facebook group is very active. We’re soon going to have 2000 members there! And there are 120 discussion topics. People are seeking help & helping each other.

Friendfeed

On Friendfeed I created a room for Community Managers. I just popped over there & see that it’s active. Yay! Join in the conversation there.

Twitter

If Twitter is your thing then there are the Twitterpacks (I created a section for Community Managers). Here you will find many community managers & you can also add your username. The password is ‘project’. (The info went missing for a bit & gave me a scare, so I put a copy on my wiki. The password is ‘build’. Put your info on either & some day I’ll get them reconciled.)

Contribute to a Project to Create a White Paper

My work is gratifying but my professional involvement also adds to my satisfaction. Here’s an opportunity to get involved to further the community manager role. Axel from Xeequa has started a collective effort for a white paper on Best Practices for Community Manager Responsibilities. We invite you to add your ideas. It’s a pbwiki so easy to edit!

Where are you networking at & getting involved at a professional level?

So I have created a wiki & invite all of you to contribute your favorite resources. Let’s build it together! I think that it will be easier to find things in that format than here on my blog.

Log in with your email address & the key (password) is ‘build’

Please let me know if you think that there is a more logical structure. It’s your Wiki so join in.

Why do I recommend it?

My favorite thing about it is that Andy uses the highly scientific terms of ’stuff’ and ‘things’. Those two words pretty much summarize everything! At my last position when I was meeting with the group of developers (and fairly nervous) I used those terms & it went just fine. It’s a quick read but filled with amazingly effective ideas!

What is it?

It’s simple. People have been using word of mouth marketing for ages. Think back to the days before technology. If you had a great experience you would tell your friends & neighbors. And they would try the service & tell theirs. Remember back to when restaurants had a bowl of matchbooks with their business name on them. You were encouraged to take 2 – one for you & one to give a friend. My purse is filled with pens from various hotels. Word of mouth on the web is having something that’s worth talking about? What makes your business memorable?

Is Word of Mouth viral?

Viral is the big buzz word these days. Just having great content doesn’t necessarily mean it will be viral. You need to make it easy to share your content.

• make it easy to find
• put the content on sites like YouTube (offers 13 ways to share), Slideshow, Flickr, etc
• add sharing tools to make it easy for your customer to bookmark, email, add it to their blog readers, etc

Rather than trying to make something viral, try to find what IS viral then sponsor it & support it. Encourage your team to join in & help out. It should be fun! ‘Where in the Hell is Matt’ videos are sponsored by a company that thought it would be a good idea (and it was). Blendtec invested in a lab coat, goggles for a minimal cost & created ‘Will it Blend videos’ & posted them on YouTube. (I bought one of the $400 blenders & yes it works great! but we only put ice in it, not iPhones).

Word of mouth is the cheapest way to start

If you’re going to do something, then the cheapest way is to begin with word of mouth. It just takes some time each day to get involved in social networks.

• Monitor conversations about your brand.
• Solve customers problems as you encounter them
• Thank people for talking about your product & talk with them
• Gather feedback on your products

Start with a small effort & it will grow.

If those ideas sound intriguing then you definitely need to get the book! Andy also has a great blog at gaspedal.com

 Mixx is like Digg. People submit articles into categories. Then members vote them up. Personally I’ve never gotten into Digg. I know how to Digg things (but it’s usually after I’m asked to – you know who you are! )

You can create a community or group in Mixx. They both have forums & can be personalized, private or public, etc. There many similarities to Ning.

Where I saw the value was in the existing groups. (Remember! rather than creating more, see what’s existing.) These groups have great content going into them & are worthy of browsing.

Social Media Consultants

Social Media Mavens

Aggregation is an amazing thing. An RSS feed is offered of course. Or if you just want to browse periodically. Mixx it up a bit!

Let me know what you think? I wish that I could have it sort by the articles with the most votes. If you figure out how, please let me know.

I regularly point people to his writing:

And now he’s published an awesome e-book, The Essential Guide to Social Media.

What makes it so valuable for me is that it’s relevant & practical. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Marketing is changing. It’s no longer pushing messages out. Brian describes the two way dialogue best:

Engaging with and empowering your customers as an extension of your marketing efforts isn’t new. However, in the era of Social Media, there are new tools and philosophies to more effectively listen and engage with customers and in turn…

• Cultivate a more significant community
• Enhance your brand
• Build relationships
• And, create evangelists along the way.
• Participation is marketing.
• Intention is everything.
• And, actions speak louder than words.

2. Social media consists of tools – it’s not about the technology it’s about the interactions & relationships. Brian includes the analogy of a hardware store & using the correct tools for the job at hand.

3. He gives some very good advice & points out that many companies are focusing on the tools & explains why that doesn’t work:

Most Social Media Marketing initiatives have started with the tools first…

• Brands opt to engage using the most popular tools and networks to attract relationships instead of going to where their existing or prospective customers are congregated.
• They didn’t observe or listen prior to jumping in.

His advice is right on:

Conversational marketing requires observation, which will dictate your engagement strategies.

It starts with a combination of social and traditional tools to discover, listen, learn, and engage directly with customers.

• It helps us find where the conversations are truly taking place.
• The goal is to help them make decisions and also do things that they couldn’t, or didn’t know how to do, before.
• Build relationships through conversations without objectives.

4. Brian provides practical advice for getting started:

• Observing – Identify who your customers are & where they’re at
• Listening – What are they saying & what’s the sentiment?
• Immersion – Getting involved in the conversations (engaging)
• Become the customer – we are all customers but I think marketers often forget to think like a customer creating a disconnect in the message

5. Personnel & Budgets

• A Community Manager – I was so pleased to see that Brian agrees with me that this position is a requirement. He noted:
• a community manager is required at the very least.
• Resources – he provides some formulas for calculating the time required

6. Policies & Guidelines – this isn’t to be entered into lightly – it’s going to require a shift across the organization

7. Personal Brand – this is always a factor for everyone involved whether they want to increase their visibility or not.

My only comment is that it doesn’t address measurement & ROI. But that comes naturally after engaging with the customers (as a community manager – not just only with social media tools).

Kudos to Brian for another great resource. I’m adding it to my Resources tab.

What are your favorite community building resources that should be in my list?

Almost 60 bloggers each submitted 5 interview questions. I was quite appreciative of having my questions in the top 12 chosen. Then it went to vote. The five with the most votes would receive an autographed copy of Rohit’s book and the top vote getter would receive a $100 gift certificate.

Jonny Goldstein & I got to know each other on Twitter & agreed to blog about our campaign techniques after the fact. Jonny deserved to win (how could I compete with a face like this?!

It was an exciting race. I was in the lead for quite awhile. I probably made Jonny nervous & pushed him to that extreme.

My votes came from my personal network & I called upon the digital scrapbooking community. Those ladies are a lot of fun! They totally got into the spirit of things.

Thank you Rohit for such a creative book launch! I can’t wait to read your book! I’ve been recommending it for quite awhile.

I feel like I’ve put this into a lot of the interviews today, I but I would have to say the single most powerful thing is removing their “employee silencing policy.” This is what it sounds like, the requirement within many companies that employees not talk publicly about anything. Unfortunately, this is a big factor in a company becoming faceless and the best way around it is to allow these employees to share their voices.

2. What is your favorite example of how a brand creatively increased it’s personality?

My favourite current example has got to be what Gary Vaynerchuck has managed to do with WineLibrary.TV by consistently doing innovative marketing (from flash parties organized by Twitter at SXSW to running an online secret santa contest in March to give away wine. Now, he started from a base of having a personality, so perhaps this is not what you were actually looking for in a response but he has certainly increased his. If you mean a brand that has gone from bad to good … .the classic example now has to be Dell for how they have managed to get real people to speak for their brand and turned their image around.

3. What suggestions do you have for measuring ROI on these efforts?

I think the greatest ROI on personality will always be customer loyalty. Secondary to that is the word of mouth effect (usually noted as the #1 most influential source of information) that results from this loyalty.

4. As companies add community managers, do you think the brand’s personality is based on the person that’s outwardly representing the company?

Yes, I think they will definitely be linked. Is Starwood’s reputation in the popular frequent flyer community FlyerTalk based on the repuation of William Sanders – also known as Starwood Lurker on the site? I would have to say yes. But you touch upon what is likely to become a big issue as these “accidental spokespeople” as I have called them (and I am one as well), start to build their own profiles and have them linked to the brands they work for. There are really only two models: The first is Scoble’s model, where he goes from Microsoft to PodTech to Fast Company and takes all his equity and personal brand with him. The other example is Randy’s Journal, Boeing’s corporate blog which was run by Randy Baseler, their CMO who recently retired, and was taken over by another fellow named Randy, who also happened to be CMO.

5. Should companies worry about their customers imprinting on the person representing the brand? (ie: social media mgr or community mgr)

I think this relates to the earlier question, but yes I think this will continue to be an issue … particularly as these individual profiles continue to rise in popularity and visibility.

I’ve been recommending this book for quite awhile already. I can’t wait to read it!