One of the things I’ve been advising clients to do a lot lately is consider hiring a full or part-time community manager to communicate closely with their users online. I thought I’d write a post about why community managers are good to have, but then I thought that instead I’d ask it as a question. Do startups need community managers? If not, I’ll stop suggesting that so many of them make that type of hire!

That’s how I phrased a deliberately vague question on Twitter, and it got some great replies by email and on FriendFeed! Twenty people replied, many of whom are community managers, others of whom have hired community managers and a couple of others are cautionary or cynical. It’s a great discussion!

Most of these thoughts are unique and very worth considering – even if they don’t all agree. I’m going to turn these replies into a coherent (and weighty) post on ReadWriteWeb in the morning but I thought I would post them online first and let people knock them around a bit more first. Would you like to respond to any of these arguments in the finished post? If so, please leave a comment here and make sure you tell me where to link your name to.

The final post has been put up here, thanks to all who participated.

I was planning on putting these up on a wiki first and encouraging people to go over there and make edits for replies – I’ve done that before – but then I thought that sounded like a missed opportunity. So here’s a discussion that will turn into a blog post – your thoughts are formally requested…big thanks to the people who have already joined in. I’ll include my own thoughts in the final post.

PS. Big congrats to Drew Olanoff, who was just named Community Manager and Evangelist for Strands.com today!

I do think that startups need community managers, but that being said it depends on the community and what needs to be managed. A lot of what I do at CubeSpace is function as a startup community management, but that is very different than the work that Dawn does. I think it depends on the style and distractability of the folks in the startup and how they like to collaborate with peers as well as how they define their peers. I am not trying to be cryptic, I have just worked with a range of startups who need different kind of support and community management.

I would be happy to have a longer conversation with you about this if you are interested. It might also be a good session for http://www.sideprojecttostartup.com/.

-Eva

Eva Sari Schweber
Chief Cat Herder
CubeSpace, Your WorkSpace Community

Read on for the rest of the discussion
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I’m in the San Francisco airport flying back from a wonderful Foo Camp where I lead a discussion about RSS power user tips. It was a lot of fun. Several of the attendees had never used Yahoo! Pipes, one of the most powerful tools in the RSS toolbox. I told them that I too didn’t really learn to use Pipes for a long, long time after I first discovered it because it seemed too complicated for my poor little non-developer’s head. Once I was shown just two buttons to push in the service, though, I found out that some great results are actually very easy to achieve using Pipes. Just seeing some one do the simplest things there makes it a lot less scary. In that same spirit, I offer the following 5 minute screencast demonstrating 3 simple things you can do with Pipes. I hope it emboldens you to learn how to do even more with the service, but even if you only feel comfortable doing this much – I believe it will still prove very, very useful. Plus it will keep your toes safe (you’ll know what I mean after watching the video below.
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Super-cookie service MyBlogLog just emailed users to let us know about a new “friend finder” the site is offering. The feature is remarkable because it makes it really easy to add your friends from around the web – without asking you for any passwords! With just a few clicks your friends on services from Flickr to FriendFeed can become your friends on MyBlogLog. I wish everyone did that. Here’s a few bullet points on the implementation that could be helpful for other application developers to consider.

• This doesn’t just work with early adopters. Most services have you “add friends” by asking for your email password because that’s where most of the online world has most of its friends. It’s creepy though and a bad practice to do that. MyBlogLog can grab the “Friend of a Friend” (FOAF) data from your public profiles at services like Flickr, Facebook and MySpace – hardly a tiny set of bleeding edge users. Your application could consider doing the same. Think also about using the new GMail contacts API.
• There’s still no “add all” link. In what I assume was a silly oversight, there’s no link to “add all” when you pull up your friends from these networks. You have to add them one at a time. It would be nice to be able to select all and then deselect a few. That’s no small thing, it would make a big difference in growing the service and I assume they will fix that soon. As it is, the list of 20 friends at a time gets mixed up a bit like FriendFeed recommendations. Implementation of both are clunky though and could scale much better by presenting more options at once and displaying more information about users you are prompted to add as friends.
• Service discovery could be faster. MyBlogLog is “discovering friends” via the public profile pages you filled out in your MBL profile. That process presents you with a long list of services from around the web and asks you to fill in the part of profile URLs where your username goes. Everyone should check out how Lijit discovers new accounts from other sites. It asks you “what is your most common username” and then searches to see where it can find an account with that username. You then confirm or deny each one and can enter exceptions to your standard username on any particular service. It’s really smooth and smart. I wish MyBlogLog and everyone else did it that way.

Almost every service on the web wants to connect users with their friends elsewhere, for aggregate activity feed displays or “viral introductions.” There are some best practices emerging for doing that, though. Companies looking to implement such features should take a look at oAuth and at Niall Kennedy’s recent post on user authentication best practices. If you want to see something cool about MyBlogLog, I’d also recommend checking out the BlogJuice bookmarklet. You’ll like it, I promise.

One of my consulting clients is a company called Iterasi, providers of a browser plug-in that lets users “notarize” a perfect replica of any web page’s current state. That includes forms and AJAX states. It’s a pretty potent tool and one that I’m really excited to use for my own research…once there’s a Mac version available! (Coming soon, they say.) The company is doing a great job of using social media, including a prolific blog that I designed for them and now a series of short videos produced by my former co-worker at SplashCast, Alex Williams. You can read about our very successful use of social media for marketing at our previous place of work in this post.

I’ve been hesitant to write about Iterasi here just because I generally don’t write about consulting clients (though I did in my last post too, so maybe things are changing). Alex did a short video interview with me that went up yesterday, though, and I realized after watching it that I should make sure any readers using Windows know about it right away. It’s really useful! I want to use it and will officially give them a hard time for not having the Mac version done yet, as I told them many bloggers would. Seriously, I’m anxious for its imminent completion.

Below is that video we did together about one way I want to use Iterasi. Here’s a page of links to press they got for their launch, which I advised on. At the end of this post is a screencast demonstration of the product’s functionality, which was produced by Rick Turoczy of Return Corp (and the fantastic local blog SiliconFlorist!). I tried to produce a screencast but had issues. Hire me for overall strategy and RSS work and you’ll be very happy – don’t hire me to produce screencasts!

Read on to watch the videos.
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I just listened to the most amazing podcast about the future of the web and semantic analysis. It was an interview with BYU Phd student Yihong Ding, a researcher in what my ReadWriteWeb co-author Alex Iskold calls “the top-down semantic web.” The first 15 minutes of the hour long show are about Yihong Ding’s personal background, the next 15 about his research and the last 30 about his very compelling view of the future.

This interview shows just how much untapped potential remains in the world of web applications. Once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, there’s a whole lot of work that will already be done, allowing our human, creative minds to reach new heights.

Download MP3 [50 mins, 23Mb]

Ding’s research combines the application of a manually supplied ontology (set of terms with connections for meaning), automated analysis of the structure of a web page (what’s in h2 tags? that’s probably a section title) and learned meaning after repeated application of the above and correction by the user. It’s fascinating and a prototype should be available in the first half of next year. I hope to get an early look at it so I can write about it on ReadWriteWeb just before public launch.

The vision of the future described in the interview is beautiful. It’s one of the most clear explanations of the semantic web and what some people call web 3.0 that I’ve heard yet. I’m just starting to dive deep into this, so forgive any excess enthusiasm, but I’m telling you – it’s good stuff.

Ding’s vision of a future web not of sites and pages but of “educated agents of meaning” (smart software applications is what I’m seeing), driven by human beings to serve our needs, is a really interesting one.

His conclusion makes me think of Google Custom Search, Lijit (which I must spend some time with) and I don’t know what else. It’s got me on fire, though.

I found the interview through a path you might find of interest. It was highlighted in the blog of Talis, a vendor in the semantic space, in their This Weeks Semantic Web round up. It’s a very rich resource, not to mention a great marketing asset for the company. I found that via the blog of semantic web rock star Danny Ayers. I was reminded of Ayers’ blog and have picked it back up with a renewed interest after seeing it in a list of 60+ Semantic Web Blogs at Semantic Focus, a fascinating looking group blog where, co-incidentally interview subject Yihong Ding is a regular contributor. So we come full circle and have found a whole lot of valuable resources along the way.

I’ve been asking PR people lately to send me an OPML file of their clients’ blog feeds. One person sent me a list of links to their clients’ blogs in an email tonight, but other than that no one has been brave enough to try. This is something that everyone could benefit from knowing how to do. That big blue icon is the proposed icon for OPML, which stands for Outline Processor Markup Language (stay with me here, non technical people!).

An OPML file is an outline. In this case, it’s a bundle of RSS feeds that can be moved into and out of any RSS reader as a group. No matter what RSS reader you use, it can import and export OPML files. It’s real handy. If PR people, for example, would send me one OPML file of all their clients’ blogs and a news search feed for each of those clients’ company names – I would throw it into my reader and have a long term connection with all their news. It would build name recognition if nothing else, but I’d likely find something in there someday to write about too. There’s a billion other reasons to use OPML – just ask yourself in what circumstances you can imagine sending someone else one link or file that contains a collection of dynamic sources on any topic. I know these are the sorts of questions that keep me up at night.

Here’s how you do it…
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I’m a very recent convert to the belief that mind mapping tools can be valuable. After years of sneering at them as vague and superflous (without ever really trying them) I did a one hour consulting gig with the folks over at Imindi a week or so ago.

Now I am hesitant to think about anything without the ability to “write it down” in a mind map. The ability to document the free flow of connected thoughts is just too seductive to pass up when thinking through complex proccesses.

I could use some help figuring out what the best mind mapping service is, though. Here’s my criteria so far – above in an image from MindMeister (which is AWESOME so far). Can you suggest anything I’m missing or favorite tools I should evaluate?
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