Monthly Archives: July 2009

The difference between B2C and B2B communities

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Interesting comparison on the difference between B2C and B2B communities from B2B expert Vanessa DiMauro who says on the community managers’ forum e-mint: “B2B online community building is less common than B2C communities and is just starting to garner attention in the media. I have been working exclusively in B2B for many years and i can say the entire strategy, process, rules and metrics are very different than b2c.” Sound interesting to you too?

Worth also checking out Vanessa’s Leader Networks White Paper (pdf) on the subject of creating professional peer-to-peer communities.

One final thought from discussion on e-mint is that for B2B community management it helps if you have some business experience to bring to bear. For example Vanessa’s presentation makes clear B2B communities benefit from simple presentation, not overloading with information. One further issue would be to discuss the pros and cons of anonymity in this B2B space, and possibly the value of profiles. One to come back to, for sure.

See below for her slideshare on this subject:

Social Networking for Business: How is it different?

Holy Bones, Leicester

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The news that Amplified Leicester is now looking for participants came through today. Sign up below if you want to get involved..

Holy Bones, Leicester
Originally uploaded by Stuart Glendinning Hall

Brighten up the winter in an exciting Leicester experiment and learn some 21st century skills. We’re looking for people who are open-minded, enthusiastic and curious.

Amplified Leicester is a city-wide experiment to

- explore diversity and innovation

- build a network across diverse communities

- create, share and develop new ideas

- use social media like Facebook and Twitter as an amplifier

This is an opportunity to work with people you might otherwise never meet and learn how to:

- benefit from Leicester’s huge diversity of people and cultures

- generate lots of new ideas quickly

- think like a futurist and see the bigger picture

- organise and collaborate better

- be persuasive in different social situations

- share and develop creative ideas

- manage the stream of information which bombards us every day

- choose the best people to collaborate with

- make the most of different kinds of resources – social, economic, creative

Participation is free of charge but places are limited. Deadline for applications Friday 11th September 2009.

Find out more and download an application form from http://www.amplifiedleicester.com

For an informal chat, please contact Sue Thomas or Thilo Boeck:

Sue Thomas t: 0116 207 8266 e: sue.thomas@dmu.ac.uk
Thilo Boeck t: 0116 2577879 e: tgboeck@dmu.ac.uk

Amplified Leicester is managed by the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in partnership with the DMU Centre for Social Action and Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre. The project is commissioned and supported by NESTA, an independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative.

“A group that thinks in diverse ways will address a problem from many angles.” Charles Leadbeater, The Difference Dividend

Simple twitter measurements

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Linked to the Twitter policy objectives in this new doc for UK Government departments, I like the range of methods to gather evidence of effectiveness:

  • Web analytics for [dept].gov.uk and clickthroughs from URLs in our tweets (using bit.ly) – to track referrals from Twitter to our web pages
  • Twitter surveys – regular ‘straw poll’ surveys on Twitter to ask for feedback
  • Twitter data – the follower/following data presented in our Twitter account
  • Third party tools – analytics tools including measures based on re-tweeting (Retweet Radar; Twist); online reputation (Monitter, Twitter Grader); impact and influence (Twinfluence, Twittersheep); unfollowers (Qwitter)
  • Alert services – tweetbeep.com and other methods for tracking mentions of our stuff
  • Real time observation – http://twitterfall.com/ and similar tools

Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments

Valuing your Twitter profile

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What a lot of people may have missed in the excitement about the 15-year-old Morgan Stanley summer intern (pdf online) saying teenagers don’t both with Twitter is this salient point about the value of profiles -”they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless”.

I have discussed the subject of how to use profiles to build community a few weeks ago, focusing on the value of a rich profile.

But I do digress, back to Twitter. If I use the application TweetValue it calculates my profile value as a number, $339 to be precise. The ‘About’ page for this service wittily reads: “This service was created in 4h by the Swedish entrepreneur and developer Jonas Lejon. The value is calculated with a Ph.D algoritm that is based on the public information available on your Twitter profile. uuhm. not really :-) .”

So if instead I use Twitterrank I find my profile is higher than 90% of people, which sounds better to me, so perhaps I’ll stick with that as my profile measurement tool for Twitter. It even creates a unique url to come back to and check progress (I’ve gone down 3pts in 16 days ;-)

PS: By coincidence the next day the 28th July a new tool came out, TwitViewer.net, which claimed to show how many people had visited your profile. Sadly, according to Mashable, it turns out to be a Phishing Scam: “It’s unclear that this is phishing, as the site does let you know that it will send out the auto-tweet. It’s almost certainly not doing what it promises though, as there would be no conceivable way for it to know who has been visiting your Twitter profile. In short: be wary of this app, and if you logged in, you may want to consider changing your password.”

So perhaps the moral of this story is that (a) Teenagers don’t bother as you can’t if anyone’s visited your profile (b) Scammers think there’s a demand for such a tool. (c) There’s a need for a Twitter profile analytic tool a-sap.

21st century literacies

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“My 40 min vid on 21st century literacies from #rebootbritain,” says Howard Rheingold. See below for the video…

All about communities

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Really useful slideshare from Dawn Foster on what to consider in setting up a community, how to engage with tools like Twitter, and dealing with trolls. Plus she has a great sense of humour which is a bonus, and also (!) likes the Flickr simple approach to community management.

Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy

Twitter for your team?

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Ross Mayfield, head of SocialText and all round good guy, sent me an invite to preview their new micro-blogging tool on 22 July. It’s a secure Twitter-type product for team use. I like the fact that its integrated in with profiles, which makes it sound more powerful than the likes of Yammer.

  • CIO article: “It lets enterprise employees communicate in a real-time stream about projects, documents and other items. Think of it as Twitter for just your team. It also lets companies build their intranet using social networking profiles that employees maintain.” Full article >>
  • eWeek article: “A potential salve for corporate IT administrators wrestling with security concerns over tools that don’t let IT control membership, content or company policy.” Full article >>

Free Webinar – Socialtext Microblogging Appliance Wed July 22nd, 9am PDT Register>>

Talking about complexity

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I was going to write a long piece about the use of complexity science by innovative airline provider DayJet after hearing the inpsiring Brain Storm! podcast, but then realised that despite the Fast Company piece in 2007 saying they were able to predict the future they weren’t able to keep their head above water, and already have gone under.

Oh well, I could have told DayJet president, CEO and founder Ed Iacobuccithem how to apply complexity in the real world without over-reliance on the maths/technology, but looks like I’ll just have to apply it for my own benefit for now:-)

How can mentoring help online communities?

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The job of the community manager is not an easy one. He or she has to juggle competing internal cultures of IT, senior management, and the community itself in order to deliver results. Results in terms of engaged, active discussions as opposed to corporate generated content which is typical of traditional websites.

But that said what positive tools can help you build a sustainable community and support your community manager? At SiftGroups we recognise how difficult this balancing act is. I’ve written about helping your community manager avoid burnout in the context of trying to run a customer-facing service without the skills and experience to meet those demands. Read more at the SiftGroups blog.

Acquia launches enterprise search for Drupal

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This looks interesting for Drupal enterprise users; wonder if it may include a basic social network analysis element in the future too:

A hosted Search service that can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 website has been launched by Acquia, the company that offers enterprise support for the open source content management system.

Search was released into beta in March 2009 and provides support for enterprise-scale site indexing and navigation.

By leveraging faceted search navigation, content recommendations and configurable results weighting, Acquia Search creates a rich index of site content and dramatically improves end-user search experience.

Results can be navigated based on date, author, taxonomy, term, content type, or other built-in/customizable categories. Acquia promises search capabilities up to ten times faster than native Drupal search – an increasingly important function as businesses work to keep visitors actively and meaningfully engaged on sites longer.

“Acquia Search provides great value, both for site visitors and administrators, supercharging a Drupal site’s search capabilities and eliminating the drain on infrastructure and administration,” said Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project and Acquia CTO.

“For visitors it all comes down to better user experience; Acquia Search makes it faster and easier to find content on your site, yielding more accurate results and recommendations encouraging visitors to stay longer on the site. For site administrators, Acquia Search offers the enterprise-quality, highly-available, secure, scalable, and fast indexing search solution that Drupal was missing. And because Acquia Search is offered as a hosted solution, it’s simple to install, and requires no expertise to deploy, manage and scale.”

Delivering the capabilities of Lucene and Solr technologies from the Apache project, Acquia Search can be implemented as a web service for Drupal websites of any size. Acquia Search is built on a redundant hosted service infrastructure, with no servers to deploy or manage. The platform actively follows and contributes to the development of the Solr application and manages service performance and backups automatically.

Acquia Search features and functionality include: Faceted search – enable your visitors to find information faster by clicking search filters that refine the search results Results sorting – enable your visitors to sort their search results by date, type, author Results weighting – improve the relevance of search results by weighting certain results higher than others by using fine-grained controls Content recommendations – suggest additional related content alongside of search results and increase visitor time on your site Faster performance – improve site response times and lower abandon rates by offering a faster search experience than Drupal’s built-in search.

A basic level of Acquia Search is included free with any Acquia Network subscription. Additional search capacity is available for purchase.