“Marshall provided us some great insight into our platform and user experience in particular. We had demo’d the product for a variety of different target markets, but we hadn’t really thought through the user experience for one of our main segments. Marshall pointed out this blind spot and then offered several very practical recommendations to tighten up these parts of our platform. In addition, he provided us with some great referrals and pointed us to some hard-to-find resources. I wouldn’t be surprised if one year from now, I reflect back on my conversations with Marshall as being pivotal to our success with acquiring and maintaining users. I strongly recommend his services, especially for those of you who
might be trying to navigate the social Web.”

Thanks, Glen!

Various services have different ways for users to separate their “friends” into different groups, viewable by topic, category or type of connection. Facebook is making changes today to make it easier to break your Facebook Newsfeed into groups. That’s going to be very important. The best Twitter applications offer group functionality that the site itself doesn’t. MySpace offers no such feature, yet. The Facebook news prompted us to try to articulate the value of group creation online. By better understanding the value that groups can deliver, we can better strategize our creation of groups.

First we’ll discuss four ways that small groups separated from a full river of news can help you use the social web more effectively. Then, for context, we’ll briefly contrast this with the value of the full stream of information. Using both together is more useful than merely limiting the full stream to a manageably small group of sources on a given topic or of a certain priority.

Forgive me if this is all obvious to you; I know it’s not to everyone. Even if it is, I think there’s value in discussing fundamental qualities of emerging methods of communicating. The assumption in discussing these values is that you’re an ambitious knowledge worker. If that’s not the case then this logic may or may not apply.

The Value of Groups

Prioritization

Pulling high-priority sources out of the full stream and putting them in a special place enables you to catch more of the high-value information those sources publish. Why lose valuable messages in the whole sea of marginally valuable information that we all have access to? High value sources don’t always publish high value information, but the increased likelihood of their doing so warrants putting them in a special place so that the unusually high signal-to-noise ratio they offer is maintained.

Below: I follow thousands of people on FriendFeed but have about 100 people who often discover or make news early in their own group.

Context

Different words and links have different meanings in different contexts. When subscribing to a large set of sources it’s sometimes easy to forget who or what certain sources are when their content comes barreling down a full stream of information. Placing sources into contextual groups helps put messages in context, adding meaning and offering insight into the significance of some content.

Right: I’ve got a list of 300 tech industry analysts on Twitter pulled into a separate group in Tweetdeck. It’s good to know that when I read these messages, they are coming from professional analysts.

Intimacy

We’ve all got far more connections online than it’s realistic to maintain closely. You may be familiar with the concept of the Dunbar number. Researcher Robin Dunbar argues that 100 to 150 is the approximate natural group size in which everyone can really know everyone else.

Serious users of social media often maintain far, far more connections than that, though. What can you do? Strategic creation of groups facilitates social contact disproportionately frequently relative to contact with the entire list of our social connections. That disproportionately frequent contact lends itself well to greater intimacy.

Left: The ReadWriteWeb writers’ chat, an invaluable resource for us in a world swimming with social connections.

Speed

Some sources of information are more important to be up-to-the-minute with than others. Strategic creation of time-sensitive groups allows you to have those groups alone delivered in a way that fits their time-sensitive nature. You don’t want to be interrupted by updates from every source of information you have any interest in – but some sources are worth being interrupted by.

Right: High-priority RSS feeds delivered by IM.

The Value of the Full Stream

Many people are tempted to solve information overload by cutting back on the number of connections and subscriptions they are signed up for online. We argue that this is a mistake; group creation can help capture some of the same benefits of cut-back without incurring the loss of benefits felt by restricting a well-populated stream of information.

Serendipitous Discovery

Do you cancel your cable TV subscription just because you end up not watching most of the shows that are on at a given time? (Maybe with Hulu you do now.) Probably not. Channel surfing is a way to discover new things.

So too with the web; it’s better to have too many options than not enough. Subscribing to a source of information substantially increases the likelihood that you’ll see something good from that source.

Just don’t worry about reading everything. Scan what you can and let fate bring you value from a bulk of undifferentiated information. Problem solved.

Weak Connections

All of us have some social connections that are stronger than others. There’s value in those weak connections, too. Welcoming people into your full stream of social information is how weak connections are built and maintained.

Reciprocity

Some people say that social media makes almost everyone famous, at least to a small group of people. One definition of fame is a circumstance where the number of people who care about what you’re doing is more than you are capable of paying attention to yourself. Online, though, we can all pay a little passing attention to the people who are paying attention to us. People appreciate RSS subscribers; they like friends on Facebook and Twitter. If someone follows you, it only makes sense to follow them back. (I need to follow my own advice better on Twitter.)

If a person isn’t terribly important to you, just don’t include them in a high-priority group. Interact with them when you get the chance. They’ll appreciate the reciprocal connection, though

That’s one take on the strategic value of groups and the full stream of information. What are your thoughts on this topic? Have you come up with any other super-useful ways to build, manage, or find value in groups online? We’d love to hear about it!

Title photo: Your Days РDecember test Group : 31 D̩cembre 2006 by Nawal_ CC on Flickr

If you’re unfamiliar with Techmeme, it’s a mostly-automated “meme tracker” that captures the most discussed blog posts in the tech blogosphere. More than 8,000 authors have made an appearance on Techmeme, but only 4 have made more appearances than I have.

Headline #500 was Sunlight Foundation Receives $4m For Obama Era Data Visualization. I’m glad that was the topic.

The Techmeme leader-board is maintained by robots on Crunchbase. Henry Work and Mark McGranaghan of TechCrunch gave birth to those robots. Thanks guys.

You can click on the image to see the full list, in context.

What would a job like that involve? If you’re a startup company reading this post, should you hire a community manager? To explore this question in general, I’ve reposted below a post I wrote this Spring at ReadWriteWeb. It’s titled Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers? I’ve posted it in full below for the benefit of casual readers, but the original post has been read by more than 10,000 people, 69 of whom left comments, many of which are also worth reading. I should also take this opportunity again to thank the 22 people who contributed their thoughts to my research on the article.

If you’d like to learn more about the particular community manager role I’m trying to fill, email me at marshall@marshallk.com. This position in particular is best for someone on or willing to move to the East Coast, but that may not be 100% essential (and other companies will be looking to hire for similar positions in the future) so… if you’d like to do this kind of work now or later, drop me a line. Whether this kind of position is of interest to you or not, I hope you’ll enjoy the following discussion.

Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?

You know what little startup companies need these days? They need to hire more people! It may be a frightening thought, but in an increasingly social world – being social is becoming an important full time job.

“Community Manager” is a position being hired for at a good number of large corporations (see Jeremiah Owyang’s growing list of people with that kind of job) but what about smaller companies? We asked a number of people what they thought and the following discussion offers some great things to think about, pro and con.

What Is a Community Manager?

A community manager can do many things (see below) but the most succinct definition of the role that we can offer is this. A community manager is someone who communicates with a company’s users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for.

True believers can’t emphasize the importance of the role enough. John Mark Walker, the Community Manager at CollabNet articulates this perspective well: “I firmly believe that the community manager should be one of the first hires – right after a solid engineering group and before you invest in corporate marketing people.”

Not everyone sees it that way, something that causes substantial distress for people in the supply chain who are advocates for the CM role. “Start ups and all companies that exist online need to be looking at a community manager as a salaried position,” said Dylan Boyd of eROI. “We have been working with big brands and it kills me when they just give ’social media’ to someone that already has 10 other roles…At Omma Social last month in NYC that topic came up asking all the people in the room from Big brands if they had a community manager. 90% of them did not and are still trying to find out how to spec out a job description in order to hire for it.”

Dissenters: Community Management Does Not Need to Be a Full Time Job

Others see community management as something that doesn’t need to be a full time job. “Community management is essentially a public relationship issue, so whoever picks up that gauntlet is on point for representing their company to the rest of us,” consultant Peat Bakke told us. “It doesn’t have to be a specific person or a full time job, but it is part of starting and running a business, almost by definition: if you’re in business, you’re doing community management whether you like it or not.”

Some would go so far as to call an explicit community manager position a bad idea in the early days of a startup. Darius A Monsef IV, Executive Editor & Creator, COLOURlovers.com told us he thinks that in the early days founders need to be in the thick of managing their own communities.

Jonas Anderson voiced concern about community managers being caught between loyalties to the company and its users, while being tripped up by employer nondisclosure agreements. (Others though, such as former BBC blog producer Robin Hamman, point out that having a community manager can greatly reduce legal risk when a company engages extensively with its users.)

Startup founder Sachin Agarwal splits his time between community and other work. Though he wishes he had more time for this kind of work, a full timer isn’t necessary, he says. “Our contact us page encourages people to ask each other and post on other sites before coming to us – we’re happy to help, but I’d wager that other users know how to get the most out of our site better than even we do.”

Similarly, Twine’s Candice Nobles says after some consideration being given to the position, her company found that their users have been incredibly self-organized and regulating so far.

While those thoughts might seem valid, consultant Dawn Foster emphasized that for some companies – making one person ultimately responsible for community work can be essential. “For startups where community is a critical element of the product or service,” she told us, “I think that a community manager should be an early hire. Without a community manager, the frantic pace of the startup environment can mean that the community gets neglected simply because no single person is tasked with being responsible for it. This neglect could result in failure for the startup if the community is critical.”

Can Founders Manage Their Communities?

We talk to a lot of CEOs on the phone here at ReadWriteWeb and we’ll try to be polite in answering this question. Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta answers this question diplomatically. “The [community manager] role can be played by one of the founders early on, but as the project grows you need a person that knows how to listen,” he told us. “Founders have a vision and might be a bit stubborn about what their product represents and offers (that’s why they are founders). Someone a bit more distanced might be much better community manager since he has a lot more empathy for users and their problems and can relay that to developers and managers. And vice versa.”

Pete Burgeson, director of marketing for online marketplace crowdSPRING says that a good community manager can help raise the voice of the users themselves. “We want to be able to build a platform for our community to have a voice, showcase their talent and become as active in speaking for crowdSPRING as we are speaking for ourselves.”

Still others believe that users may not want to talk to the founder or a community manager, but some one with tech chops and focus. “I think a startup should put a developer in the community as opposed to a ‘community manager’”, Rob Diana told us. “Even though the developer may not be as good of a communicator as a marketing guy, there is a different type of understanding of what people want.”

What Does A Community Manager Do?

There are many ways that a community manager can benefit a startup company and it often varies from company to company. Eva Schweber, co-founder of CubeSpace says “it depends on the community and what needs to be managed…the style and distractability of the folks in the startup, how they like to collaborate with peers and how they define their peers.”

It’s a complicated job, but one that can help bring cohesiveness to the life of a company. “Any opportunity to interact with the community forces one to think about the product/feature considerations and ramifications of one choice over another,” says Nagaraju Bandaru of SmartWebBlog. “In many ways, community manager is the evangelist for company’s products and the voice of the customer in internal discussions. It’s critical to react to online discussions with skill, consistency and aptitude; The role is hard to understand from outside but impossible to miss once a startup is in execution mode.”

This coherent communication can have business development benefits as well. This seems to us to be one of the most important benefits of the position. Graeme Thickins, VP of Marketing at doapp explains:
“Their world includes the online community that represents both prospective customers/users, as well as strategic partner companies, possible future investors, future employees, and more. Perhaps thinking in terms of a ‘listening manager’ would help a lot of startup founders better come to grips with what this job is all about.”

Carol Leaman from AideRSS says investing in a community manager position has helped her company “gain maximum benefit from our early adopters and growing base of users, as it’s a key link between them and our development team. NOT having someone on this full-time would impede our growth and success. We consider ourselves fortunate to have both realized this need early, and to have found an amazing Community Manager to fill the role.”

Does that have to be one person in particular? AideRSS’s Melanie Baker explains that specialization is as appropriate in this role as in others. “While especially at startups there’s a shortage of bodies and it’s all hands on deck, not all hands are best suited to all activities,” she said. “No one would want me writing code, and I wouldn’t necessarily want just anyone talking to frustrated users, for example. It’s also totally a hybrid role. My background involves marketing, web, QA, and writing, and I use all of it as a community manager. Someone with a more specialized background can certainly learn what it takes, but might have a hard time wrapping his/her head around the customer service/marketing/business analysis/tech support/software testing/documentation/journalist needs of the role.”

“You need someone who understands the fundamental distinction that while you want to grow your user base, a user base does not equal a community,” Baker said. “The best success involves growing the former while making every effort to evolve them into the latter. Because communities grow themselves organically a lot more easily than user bases do.”

Isn’t it ultimately about marketing? Kim Bardakian, Sr. Communications Manager, at the wonderful music site Pandora put it this way: “Pandora just created this position about four months ago and it’s been INVALUABLE to our company, in such a short time! It’s opened a whole new world of communications for us! Lucia Willow fills that role for us and she’s great. With the iPhone/Pandora launch on Friday, the Twitter network and followers were making tons of buzz! It was very exciting.. ”

Is Community Management the New PR?

Hutch Carpenter points to an example of community management leading to extensive new media press coverage and saving money on PR.

Others see PR evolving towards a community management type of role in this increasingly social world. “I particularly liked the reference to PR as ‘public relationships’, interjected Kathleen Mazzocco ClearPR. “[That] conveys the directness and transparency of today’s new PR. How can it not be given the open conversations going on? That’s why Community Managers are the critical new PR position.”

PR has long got a bad rap, though, and if PR pros are going to get into social media (they are already here in large quantities) then there may be some challenges to their ability to play a community management role. “The idea of a ‘community manager’ is a good one as long as that person has the freedom to discuss the negatives as well as the positives of the company’s efforts,” says Dave Allen of Nemo Design. “If we consider all the aspects of social media as PR 2.0 then I would argue that it is a very important position given that companies would hardly have gone without PR 1.0. I posted a top 10 list of what you might call a ‘community manager’s’ activities might be like here.”
(Disclosure: the author has a consulting relationship with Nemo)

Is This Worth Paying For?

Why would a busy little startup spend precious money on this kind of role?

“While a Community Manager isn’t the same as a traditional PR role, ideally they should work together,” says Meredith from A Little Clarity. “Startups are in a blur; often they’re being run by engineers with VCs looking over their shoulders — they don’t know from community managers; so there should be some accountability, and that’s the tricky part. Do you measure connections? Responsiveness? Transparent ‘public relationships?’ Whatever it is that your company will value, get it out there and agree on it, because one thing startups don’t always have is time to do it right after getting burned.”

You want tangible? Semantic web researcher Yihong Ding will give you tangible! He says that community managers are tasked with tending the most precious asset that many startups have staked their future on – user content.

“As we know, most of the Web 2.0 companies are built upon user generated content,” he told us. “Philosophically, User Generated Content is embodied human mind. This embodied mind is generally the fundamental asset for the company. Maintaining a proper community so that users may embody their mind with high quality is thus a central issue for the growth of the company. The duty of community managers is to supervise and maintain the high-quality production of the fundamental mind asset used by the company. Therefore, I would say that community manager is a critical job title for most of the Web 2.0 companies.”

We agree with Yihong. User data and community content are the foundation that web 2.0 style innovation and company valuations rest on. Failing to focus meaningfully on tending those assets is a foolish choice.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this conversation. We hope readers will contribute their thoughts in comments below.

CC photo by Flickr user ItzaFineDay.

Personal

Most important, I’m getting married to my partner Mikalina! Many of my work contacts here on the blog haven’t met Mikalina but many of you have. She’s wonderful and I love her very much. We’ve been together for more than 4 years already and she’s studying to be an environmental engineer. Or a ceramicist – she’s a rock star in both and hasn’t decided what to do about it yet.

We’re looking to get married pretty darned soon, I proposed to her last weekend when we were vacationing on the Oregon Coast.

Yay!

Work Changes

Readers here may or may not have known that I have only been working roughly half time at ReadWriteWeb since I came on board there in September. That’s now going to change.

The other 30 hours each week has been spent doing consulting, for more companies than I can count right now.

I absolutely love consulting – but ReadWriteWeb is growing fast and site editor Richard MacManus has offered me a great full time position as his VP of Content Development. I’ll be working there full time on a number of initiatives that we’ll be rolling out in the coming months. For now we’re saying that I’m going to be working on premium content, publishing systems and all-around magic, some of which will be behind the scenes. I’ll also continue working in my capacity as lead writer there, so you can expect roughly the same output from me as well.

I am really excited about getting to bring some of my other ideas to fruition with a team of good people and Richard’s support, though. I’m very proud to have been part of the team at RWW that helped the site move from being the 27th most linked-to blog on the web up to #9 today. (Take that Mashable! And look out, ICanHasCheezburger, we’re coming to get you next! I kid, kind of.)

Consulting

I’m really going to miss the rush of consulting, but in order to stay fresh and in touch with the market, I will continue offering one 1 hour consulting session per week. Those sessions are fast paced and a lot of fun, so let me know if you’re interested in scheduling one. Feedback from past associates and clients can be found here.

Did I Mention That I’m Getting Married?

Thanks for all the interest and support that friends have offered here and privately. I’m very excited to be moving into new stages in the two most important parts of my life. I think many of you will really like what you see us come up with over at ReadWriteWeb. The joy that will come from the transition in my personal life will be much less public but I thought I’d let readers here know about it too.

I honestly love consulting and will continue offering limited one hour sessions periodically, but I will no longer be spending half of my time on it. I’ve got another opportunity I can’t pass up.

In other words, if you’ve been thinking of getting in touch with me for a high-energy, rapid-fire one hour session about product usability, market positioning or launch planning – now’s the time because the pipe is going to be far more narrow very soon. I’ve been doing three or four one hour sessions per month for the past year and people love them. Let me know if you want to do one next week by email at marshall@marshallk.com

Otherwise, hang tight for some news next week. It’s nothing earth shaking but it should be pretty exciting. Thanks as always for your ongoing support.

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

Hutch Carpenter points to a blog post about how a good community manager saves money on PR and has other benefits.

http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008/06/12/smart-social-media-marketing-caleb-elston-and-toluu/

interacting with bloggers saves money on PR

I firmly believe that the community manager should be one of the first hires – right after a solid engineering group and before you invest in corp. marketing people. I have my reasons and am happy to get into details.

–
John Mark Walker
Community Manager, CollabNet

http://www.collab.net/

Just saw your Twitter post about community managers. Pandora just created this position about 4 months ago and it’s been INVALUABLE to our company, in such a short time!

We are very active on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr etc. I’d be happy to have you speak to our Community Manager if you’d like. It’s opened a whole new world of communications for us!
Lucia Willow—she’s great and has a great, fun online voice.

With the iPhone/Pandora launch on Friday, the Twitter network and followers were making tons of buzz! It was very exicitng.. that we even posted a haiku contest for some free Pandora swag to the Twitters!

Kim Bardakian

Sr. Communications Manager
Pandora

Someone else sent in a link to a slide deck regarding The Costs of community managers

http://www.cybersoc.com/2008/06/my-slideshow-fr.html

Community management is essentially a public relationship issue, so whoever picks up that gauntlet is on point for representing their company to the rest of us. It doesn’t have to be a specific person or a full time job, but it is part of starting and running a business, almost by definition: if you’re in business, you’re doing community management whether you like it or not.
Peat Bakke peat.org

If by “community managers” you mean someone that keeps track of what is happening in a certain community, then yes, startups need a community manager. Especially if that company pays attention to social media. Social media is so important for many companies these days, but the sheer volume of information that is shared can be a problem for them. I think it takes at least one person in a startup to “keep an ear to the ground”. That person should be reading feeds all day and paying attention for appropriate information and content. That person should be writing a blog and listening to their other networks. A social network community manager should learn about what is happening in that company’s field every day and report it to their team.
Doug Coleman

I think it’s an important *function* to be filled, but it’s not necessary to have a position dedicated to it. I think it’s a matter of resources – I know some firms that have a full time head very early and some keep it to an intern after they’re 100+ people. But it is important to *do*.

I fill it in between the other things I do – vendor relationships, inbound inquiries, sales calls, balancing the books, etc. I do wish I had more time/resources to it, however – I’m much more reactive than I am proactive. dawdledotcom is our username on a variety of sites, from Twitter to CheapAssGamer to all sorts of sites in between.

I use Summize and Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying, and we have a board on GetSatisfaction (empty for now, but ready to be used). Our contact us page encourages people to ask each other and post on other sites before coming to us – we’re happy to help, but I’d wager that other users know how to get the most out of our site better than even we do.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Sachin

–
Sachin Agarwal

I put down a lot of thoughts about community building last week on Rick’s blog: http://siliconflorist.com/2008/07/08/community-the-secret-sauce-of-a-successful-internet-startup/

My opinion on community managers is that they are OK when you’ve established a community. Not for just launched startups. You need to be in the thick of it managing your own community in the early days.

Cheers,

-D

Darius A Monsef IV

Executive Editor & Creator

www.COLOURlovers.com

It depends on the startup. For startups where community is a critical element of the product or service (Twitter, open source product, etc.), I think that a community manager should be an early hire. Having someone in place and responsible for managing the community helps make sure that the company is responding to the needs of the community. Without a community manager, the frantic pace of the startup environment can mean that the community gets neglected simply because no single person is tasked with being responsible for it. This neglect could result in failure for the startup if the community is critical. In many startups, the community manager can wear another hat, too. I worked at one startup where I was the Director of Community and Partner Programs, since partners were a big part of the community. Other logical combinations include some marketing roles, social media (blogging / podcasting), developer relations (for developer communities) or website development depending on the skills of the person in the role.

I think that each startup needs to decide exactly how critical the community is to their particular business and use that information to decide when to hire a community manager.

My 2 cents.

Take care,
Dawn

–
Visit my blog at http://fastwonderblog.com
—————————————————————————–

Marshall, that’s a story I’d like to read! Great benefits could be gained by establishing links between a startup and it’s followers, early. However, the community voice needs to be free The community manager would need the suport of the community. There is a danger that a community voice in management would have split loyalties. Maybe even tied by NDA’s. This would make him/her more of a hostage (worse case). If these fears, as well as the benefits, can be voiced and talked about there is great merit to your idea.

Best wishes

Jonas Anderson

Start ups and all companies that exist online need to be looking at a community manager as a salaried position. We have been working with big brands and it kills me when they just give “social media” to someone that already has 10 other roles.

As a “start up” ourselves, or at least always in our minds as one, we watch and participate in the online communities a lot. We have someone on our team in the marketing dept that gathers all of the mentions and
conversations RE eROI and reacts to some as well. This of course is also beneficial to us as an agency to know and understand how to listen, measure, and use this service to helping our clients get the word out on campaigns that launch.

At Omma Social last month in NYC that topic came up asking all the people in the room from Big brands if they had a community manager. 90% of them did not and are still trying to find out how to spec out a job description in order to hire it.

So yes if a start up wants to gain traction they either need to hire someone or dedicate someone to the tasks.

two cent rant over

Dylan T. Boyd | VP Sales & Strategy
www.eROI.com | Inc. 500 Company

There are certain startups needing community managers – those addressing consumer bases with products that need their constant engagement, feedback and course correction.

This role can be played by one of the founders early on, but as the project grows you need a person that knows how to listen. Founders have a vision and might be a bit stubborn about what their product represents
and offers (that’s why they are founders). Someone a bit more distanced might be much better community manager since he has a lot more empathy for users and their problems and knows how to rely that to developers
and managers. And vice versa.

Andraz Tori, CTO
Zemanta Ltd, London, Ljubljana
www.zemanta.com

A startup community manager would probably have the title Marketing Manager
or VP Marketing…or maybe they raised a little bit too much money.
N: Mark Grimes
W: http://www.ned.com/

an internet company these days should have three legs:

1.) the money backers + revenue focus
2.) the rockstar tech devs
3.) the community advocate + social media expert

It’s my opinion that the money backers alone want build old-skool products not suited for the new web (b/c they see it as too much risk). The tech guys want to build all this fun stuff, but tend to allow feature creep, don’t think of revenue front-of-mind and often don’t actively participate in the mediascape. I couldn’t do anything without the former two, but I feel as though my input is highly valuable as to user interface, industry trends and community feedback.

I’ve got more if you want it.

Best,
Mark* (@povertyjetset)

Mark Schoneveld
Community Manager
www.xlntads.com

From FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/e/f8ae0b05-6dd9-1ea1-b19a-5220ad810f3d/Thinking-of-writing-a-story-about-whether/

I think it depends on the launch strategy, either to open it up and build community from the start (in which case you definitely would need one) or if you’re going for the super secret beta aspect (in which case you would still need one but would probably call them something else). – Matt Dickman via twhirl

We’re building an Independent Business Platform with a community element, but we’re not sure how that piece will take off. So, for now, each person on the team owns a piece of the product and we’re essentially the community manager for that piece. So far I love it – it’s a great way to get the honest feedback I need on BizUnite. – Sonciary Honnoll

Can someone provide a link to an explanation RE how “community management” is different than “customer service” if the latter is done properly? Or are we talking about the same thing? If so, then yes, every company–no matter the size–needs a community manager/customer service manager/customer advocate of some sort. – Ken Sheppardson

Marshall — We thought it about for a while at Twine and definitely had the need in the beginning stages, but ultimately decided to hold off. Why? It’s actually pretty amazing, but the community started self-regulating, in a very mature and consistent way that we were pleasantly surprised by. We still check in constantly and our team is obviously very active in Twine, but I am curious what other startups are doing. The community is running smoothly now, but we have to see what the future holds… – candice nobles

I think a startup should put a developer in the community as opposed to a “community manager”. Even though the developer may not be as good of a communicator as a marketing guy, there is a different type of understanding of what people want. – Rob Diana

Update: Give it a try, this video may or may not play for you. It was recorded using Jing Project, an application that’s simple to record with but maddening to use once a video is loaded. I get several emails a day saying I’m approaching the bandwidth limits of my free account. I have no idea how many times it’s been viewed or how close I am to that bandwidth requirement though. I can’t resize the file itself to fit into a smaller player, no one has answered my email requesting information despite previous requests from the company for me to try it out again and apparently the only solution to my problems will be to give them a $160 for a year’s subscription. I think I’ll be trying out ScreenFlow instead. But give it a click below, maybe you can watch this video!

The keys in my mind to being a good and employed new media consultant are:

1. Learn how to do cool new things and blog (well) about them.
2. Let people know that you are a consultant.
3. Make sure you deliver clear value to clients that extends beyond your time with them. Search engine optimization and pageviews are the most common things that consultants try to deliver to clients, but I prefer aiming for education, excitement, comfort with new tools and a sense that they can now be full fledged actors in the social media market themselves. My past clients are now happily reading OPML files I built for them, they see the value of and aren’t afraid of Twitter and they have more skills to use in their own work than they did before we worked together. (They are also doing more complicated things like this, in some cases.) I always aim to over-deliver and I don’t worry about giving clients almost everything I know – this market is too new and too big to worry about teaching yourself out of a job.
4. Stay visible by consistently sharing valuable information with other people. I don’t do that so much on my personal blog these days, but I do it on Twitter, on ReadWriteWeb.com and in face to face conversations.

That’s what’s worked well for me so far. Do other consultants reading here have other high-level points that they think are important to communicate?

I didn’t mention it in that conversation – but I do provide training and advising to other consultants sometimes. (As well as working on projects with clients together.) If you’re a consultant interested in some training on the particular things that I’m good at teaching – feel free to drop me a line.

One of my fantasies for awhile has been to hire other consultants for an hour of their training in whatever they do best. I think it would be awesome to do that once a month. Maybe a trade would be good. Oh, the possibilities are nearly endless. It’s an exciting time to be learning about the internet.

What will be discussing?

Much of the discussion will concern things that came up in a webinar that Michaela Hackner lead this afternoon (sorry I’m late blogging about this!) and I’m sure there will be a lot of other general questions.

Specifics that I’ll want to bring into the discussion will include:

*Using Twitter for news, opinion and information gathering.
*Using Twitter for technical help.
*Using Twitter to publicize your events and other work.
*Finding the best people to follow on Twitter.
*Building your network and status on Twitter.

A couple of relevant links that participants may appreciate:

Twitter is Paying My Rent
Using Social Media In Realtime for Crowdsourced Research
How We Use Twitter for Journalism
Fundraising on Twitter – Just one of many Beth Kanter posts on the topic

Feel free to share more links in comments to posts around the web that you’d advise nonprofit participants to check out.

Otherwise, here are some details about how a typical consulting engagement has been going for me lately. For more details on my consulting services, see this link. If you’re interested in working together, I’m not in a position to take on any new large engagements but am always happy to schedule small engagements of the sort discussed below. I’m doing 2 to 4 one hour consulting sessions per month right now and they rock! Those hour sessions are described early in this post.

If I hire you as a consultant, will that prevent you from writing about our company on Read Write Web?

No, though it will greatly increase the likelihood that another writer would need to cover your company instead of me. If, and it is unlikely, I did write about you on RWW then I would be very open about disclosing our financial relationship and would probably be especially critical of your shortcomings so as to compensate for any perception of bias.

Will you consider working or advising in exchange for equity?

If after a short term engagement we both were interested in arranging equity for a long term engagement, I would consider that. Thanks for asking.

What does a 1 hour consulting session include?

That one hour can consist of whatever you like, it usually ends up like this: 30% of the time is you talking, 65% of the time is me offering feedback based on what you show, tell and ask me. 5% of the hour is spent on assorted magical moments and the hour usually goes a bit beyond 60 minutes. It’s a fast paced, action packed session that leaves everyone with a lot to think about and act on. If you’d like to send me some background materials prior to that hour I can spend a few minutes looking at them, too.

How many hours should I hire you for, if I want your help planning a product launch?

There are 3 ways I do this with my clients. A one hour session focusing on launch planning can provide a basic outline of what I suggest you do, questions answered and some product/market positioning feedback. A 3 to 5 hour engagement consists of the first hour as detailed above, some time spent by me coming up with a list of people you should reach out to regarding your launch if you would like that list, then time spent walking you through implementing that plan up to and including launch day. Finally, a 10 to 15 hour engagement can include time spent by me writing and/or editing outreach materials for you and providing detailed, real-time advising on launch plan implementation. I can also spend some of that time building a world-class OPML file of RSS feeds for you to subscribe to in order to stay on top of your field.

I do launch consulting work in all 3 of these formats and clients are always happy about how it helps them advance towards their strategic goals. I have limited availability for 10 to 15 hour engagements, whereas 1 and 3 to 5 hour engagements are easy to schedule.

How many hours should I hire you for, if I wanted to do product development and roadmap planning work together?

The same time formats as above can apply to product roadmap discussion, with 10 to 15 hour engagements including website copy editing instead of launch material editing. 10 to 15 hours of product development consulting can be scheduled in regular sessions over a period of several months. This is easier to schedule that 10 to 15 hours on launch planning as the time frame is usually far more truncated.

An hour doesn’t seem like very long to work together? Can I really get value out of such a short work session?

If you don’t mind my saying so, you should be able to provide a relatively full explanation of what you are doing in far less than an hour and users are unlikely to give you that much time before they decide whether to return to your application or not. That said, if you are looking for a deeper engagement than a fast paced hour can provide, I’m more than happy to schedule a 3 to 5 hour engagement to provide that level of in-depth discussion.

That’s it! Those really are Frequently Asked Questions. I hope you found them helpeful and I hope you’ll get in touch if you think that we could work well together.

• 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.

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.

If you’re a Windows user, check out Iterasi and let them know what you think. I want the product to be in tip-top shape when a Mac version comes out that I can use.

I don’t often blog about particular consulting projects because most of the work I do is with pre-launch companies or for internal use only, but consulting is what I spend one to two thirds of my day doing after I finish blogging at ReadWriteWeb.

The Project

After building out a collection of RSS feeds that attendees could use to track the DEMO conference in January, I was approached by Sun about helping build a blog coverage microsite to track discussion of their giant JavaOne conference that starts next week.

This is an example of one end of the RSS spectrum, most use cases are far simpler – so don’t be scared!

JavaOne is a huge conference where scores of attendees will be blogging about a wide variety of Sun products and announcements. I worked with Sun to create a page called BlogCentral (hopefully to be moved to sun.com/blogcentral by conference time!) that aggregates all the latest and the most popular blog posts about the conference and 15 particular Sun projects and products. It’s like a news dashboard for anyone interested in seeing what’s being written about at JavaOne.

How We Did It

The project ended up being more complicated than I expected but it became relatively simple once I figured out the workflow on my end. I’ll describe it here in detail so that you can do something similar for other events or topics, if you like. Of course you can hire me to make it happen, but here’s a How-to in case you want to do it yourself -you can also just hire me so we can do something else magical together!

Step One: Build the Queries

For the conference in general and for 15 other topics, we used Google Blogsearch to search for blog mentions. For each topic we got a list of keywords that would indicate a post was concerning that topic, then we experimented with different queries strung together using AND, OR and – (not). We ended up with queries like:
“Mobile & Embedded” OR “Mobile and embedded” AND (JavaOne OR CommunityOne)

Did you know you could use parentheses in search queries in Google? I didn’t. Some of the queries were much longer and more complex so at several steps of the way we had to check to make sure the full query made it through the search. Once we saw the basic structure of the search results page URL we could often just make changes there. We used -”Re:” to remove the frequent forum postings.

We used advanced search to get 50 results per page and limit the searches to English language sources (per client request).

Google Blogsearch worked best because it gave the most complete, up to date results. There was a little more spam that had to be filtered out by query than was in Ask.com blogsearch (my usual favorite) but Ask pulled in a lot of press release feeds too.

Unfortunately Google doesn’t deliver the original blog source name in the RSS feed for results. That would have been nice to display on the final page. Blogdigger does deliver the source name but it always publishes “via Blogdigger” as well and the results aren’t nearly as extensive.

Removing the HTML in Titles

Google highlights your search terms in titles and summaries and in at least some cases the feed delivers the bold tags as tags. That looked pretty ugly on the page and was a real pain to remove. I asked friends on Twitter for suggestions and a lot of people tried to help me remove the markup with Yahoo Pipes. Unfortunately, as Yahoo! staff confirmed when I asked them, Pipes has an error with its Regex, the function that should have let me get a new feed with that markup removed. It took awhile to figure that out, I was sure I was doing something wrong! Update: See this Pipe it turns out to remove the bold text. Thanks Yahoo!

Instead, I ended up using my beloved Dapper.net to remove the markup, which was relatively easy using this Dapp. Just swithc out the input URL, identify the title as title and summary as item text and then create a short URL for the service. Note – you should check the “fix date” box for each feed, too, as otherwise Google Blogsearch doesn’t want to give you a publish date for the latest posts and that will mess up future steps. That short URL works as an RSS feed. Then refresh the page and repeat for other queries. Thanks again, Dapper!

Removing Duplicate Items

At this point I took my new RSS URL and went one of two directions. For the full feed of search results for each topic, I wanted to remove duplicate items. For this I went to Feed.Informer (formerly called FeedDigest) and chose to remove duplicates by URL, ignoring anchor links – so that blog comment URLs would get removed once the original post was seen.

This left me with a new RSS URL that I then took to Sun to put on the page.

Filtering for Hotness

From Dapper I also took the blogsearch feed URL over to AideRSS, where we got a new feed of just the 20% most commented on, linked-to and bookmarked blog posts in each search feed. That made up the Popular feed that you’ll see around the JavaOne Blogcentral page.

I put the AideRSS folks through an awful lot but they were very helpful. Hopefully we got some kinks worked out of the system but keep in mind two things: if you can give them a short URL instead of a long one they’ll handle it better and second, almost any really crazy feed will error our the first time you input it. In the background, the processing is happening and if you come back later your ranked feed will be available. Huge thanks to AideRSS for doing something that no one else on the web does – give me a simple feed of the most high-value posts from one source, even a search feed. That is a big part of the value proposition of the final project and I really appreciate them for it.

FeedBurner

Ordinarily I would have run all of the above feeds through Feedburner as a final step. That would have let me change the source feed on the back end without ever having to send the client anything new. Sun didn’t want anything from Feedburner, though, because FB is blocked in China. That’s a real big shame.

Putting Those Puppies on the Page

We used the Planet software to display the most recent items in each feed on the page. It works well enough though I wasn’t terribly involved in this end and can’t say for sure how much granular control there is over feed display. Correction! Actually, that software was a customized version of Roller, I’m now told. Other options include (from most to least complex) MagpieRSS, SimplePie and Feed.Informer’s own output.

Custom Search Engine

While we were at it, we also put a Google Custom Search Engine that indexes just a handful of selected Sun domains on the bottom of the page. Added value with just minutes of extra work!

Conclusion

How’s that for RSS awareness? It’s pretty simple, really and once I got the markup removal figured out it was a lot of fun. My brain hurt at times, but that’s a good thing.

How did Sun feel about the project? Joanne Kisling, the person who brought me in on the project was kind enough to leave the following in comments here:

“I was Marshall’s contact at Sun and he was AWESOME to work with. He really knows his stuff. He dogged every detail and got answers, even when I was thinking we’d hit a dead end. I didn’t see the frustrated Tweets or anything like it; he was nothing but upbeat and pleasant despite some trying circumstances. I really like his determination and willingness to try new things. Great job, Marshall! ”

Thanks Joanne! Hopefully the description of the work above will help other folks do similar kinds of work with less frustration! I’m real happy though with how BlogCentral turned out.

Please feel free to ask any questions you have about the process, I’d love to give a quick bit of help if you’re trying to do something like this yourself. Of course if you’d like me to do something like this with you, availability is limited but drop me a line.

Happy RSS Awareness Day, everyone!

Logo from http://enterpriserssdayofaction.wikispaces.com/

Read on for a Flash audio player and links that we discussed.


Check out the play button below where you can listen to the interview using the Yahoo Mediaplayer, which was super easy to include here! It did change the color of the text on this page, though. Anyway, here’s the interview.

Dave Winer interview of yours truly.

Links we discussed include:
*The ReadWriteTalk interview with the founders of FriendFeed – where by the way, I’ve since learned that there is a lot more than just RSS going on over there. Check out that interview, there’s a transcript available too. The differentiation starts at about 8 mins in.
*The RWW Primer on Lifestreaming
*Our list of 35 lifestreaming services
*The popularity filtering service we talked about was AideRSS and the feed scraping service is Dapper.net

The highlights of the post are the link to this Wired article about the economy of screen scraping (great article) and this screencast about how to use Dapper that I finally recorded.

These types of tools are things I use often in my consulting work. They are really exciting and worth a close examination by anyone who reads this blog.

I suggested that instead of adding a social network to their site, they should just add rich user profile pages, site-mail (user-to-user messaging) and the ability for users to track each other’s content. Add personal publishing to this list (their site already offered this) and what have you got? All the useful traits of a social network, without the Yet Another Social Network baggage.

Social networks have caught on for a reason – they offer functionality that’s very useful for a lot of people in many different communities of interest. That said, everyone is wary of copy-cat, roach-motel, me-too social networks. Why not have your cake and eat it too? By framing the extension of your existing site as just that, an extension of your existing users’ profile capabilities, instead of as a social network launch – you can make everyone happy and maintain your dignity.

It’s a big, big world out there and there are far more people who will find social networks useful in the future than there are people who are using them already today. That said, just as no one can launch an online video startup today without most people asking “why do I need this when there’s YouTube?” – so too is offering a social network a dangerous proposition, even if there’s ample need for more of them.

Serving power networkers

I am guessing that the people most likely to roll their eyes at a new social network are people who are already familiar with the genre and who are already using other networks. These are a relatively small number of people compared to the total number that a niche social network aims to serve. They are vocal and energetic though and it’s important to have them on your side.

One of the easiest ways to serve these people is to allow them to populate their profile on your site with information they are already inputing into other sites around the web. RSS allows you to do this dynamically. Ask them for their user names on other networks and display their most recent activity there on your site. See MyBlogLog, Tumblr and Wink for good examples of this strategy in action. No one has taken it as far as it could logically be taken, though.

White label options

You could build your own social networking functionality for your site, but chances are that’s not your area of expertise. In that case, you may want to let someone else do that for you. Check out KickApps, CollectiveX, Elgg, PeopleAggregator and the TechCrunch list of white label social network vendors. Try out Ning, it’s high profile and has plenty of resources to invest in improving, but I think the usability there is awful so far.

Look for customizability in a white label social network. This includes aesthetic customizability, as the look of your pages is extremely important to the user experience. Make it easy for users to access and populate. Ask any vendor you look at about portability of user data – chances are no one will give you a satisfactory answer but someday you’ll be able to tell your prospective users that any energy they spend populating their profiles on your site will be easily transferable if they chose to leave. OpenID and unobtrusive email confirmation are other key considerations that can help reduce friction in adoption.

There are enough white label social network options on the market that it should be a buyer’s market and vendors should be innovating rapidly to serve user needs and differentiate themselves.

Those are some of my thoughts about offering social network functionality on top of existing sites and services. It’s a good idea, users in active communities will appreciate it. It will increase pageviews, user investment and site utility – but it won’t turn an inactive community into an active one. That’s another matter altogether.

Small sustainability-minded businesses now have a greater opportunity than ever before to experience “information power parity” with larger and more traditionally oriented competitors. There are a new class of tools, specifically blogs and RSS syndication, that enable businesses to:
1. speak directly to consumers without being dependent on anyone else for media coverage
2. to turn marketing into issue leadership and website visitors into subscribed stakeholders
3. to gain first-mover’s advantage on industry news and the moves of competitors by automating your online research.

I’d like to write a how-to overview of those possibilities in the sustainable industries context. It would be based on the experiences I described in this article: social media for marketing…

I think that’s pretty good but I’m interested in your opinion of the ideas and articulation. I’ve been a big believer since I got into this business in the power of advanced RSS to help anyone smart become a leader in their corner of the information economy – whatever that might be. It’s worked very well for me, I’d like to spend some time with green businesses helping them do the same. It’s always a challenge explaining it, though, particularly before getting to do a visual demonstration. At that point everything becomes clear, but how do you open the conversation with ambitious people unfamiliar with the concepts?

The one thing I haven’t been able to get out of my head in the weeks that have passed since I tried the service out is how easy it was to get started with SquidWho. It’s simple, really – and I was kind of kidding about using the word unforgettable in the title of this post, but I really do keep thinking about it. It’s more like it’s unnoticeable for once!

Easy login is important because there are so many web applications launching every day that yours should be as pleasing to use as possible at every step or you’ll loose out on the use and advocacy of early adopters – at the very least.

Here’s how it works. After you create an account on SquidWho, to edit a page on the site for example, you are able to start making your edits immediately – before you click on the confirmation link sent to you by email. You are not able to save your edits until that confirmation link is clicked, but that’s ok. Once you switch over to your email tab or client and click on that link, SquidWho is loaded and you’re already logged in.

This might not sound remarkable unless you consider the far more typical scenario. Too often when you discover a new web application the following is true:

• You can’t do much of anything until you create an account.
• Once you create that account, you cannot proceed in using the application at all until you click on the confirmation link sent to your email.
• That email doesn’t always show up right away, sometimes you have to wait for several minutes or longer until you can use the app.
• Once you get the link, you click on it, the app is loaded, you’re told you’re confirmed and then sometimes you have to click on yet another link before you’re even prompted to login!

Compare all of that hullabaloo with the SquidWho flow: sign up, keep using it, then click confirmation link just before saving and SHA-POW! you’re logged in. Pure joy. Note that Squidoo proper doesn’t seem to work like this and isn’t perfect otherwise, but I like this part of the program a lot.

Want an even more seamless login experience? Try some OpenID well executed, perhaps with a little APML mixed in. The future will be smooth and painless – or at least logging into it will be!

Softrax came to me with almost no experience in using new web applications and by the time our work together was done they had a topical OPML file, a system to easily aggregate industry news on their website and a solid initiation into the web 2.0 experience. This case study is an example of one sort of plan I help clients strategize and implement.

The problem

The RevenueRecognition website has quite a lot of content on it but the company felt that it wasn’t dynamic and timely enough to retain as many of their first-time visitors as they would like. They knew just enough about RSS to know that it might be the solution to their problem.

The solution: a short version

Here’s the short version for people familiar with the concepts. If this is new to you, read the next section below for a more detailed explanation. To summarize: I built the company an OPML file for their industry by finding feeds, scraping feeds from sites that didn’t have them (most in the accounting world) and turning email lists into RSS feeds.

I showed them how to choose and use a feed reader. Then I set them up a work-flow that would allow them to populate sections of their website with news simply by tagging items of interest in their feed reader with the social bookmarking service Del.icio.us and syndicating the Del.icio.us RSS feeds for various tags back onto their own site. Check it out, that’s what’s happening in the grey “news” box front and center on RevenueRecognition.com. The descriptive text on the left side is from the “notes” field in del.icio.us. I’ve also put an image of that part of the page below.

This turned RevenueRecognition.com into an aggregator of the best news in their industry, giving them a chance to become the go-to resource of choice for people interested in what’s happening in the world of accounting.

I also advised them on how to appropriately excerpt third party content and briefed them on their options for in-house creation of original content.

Feedback

“Marshall provided us with a very effective and manageable system to bring a wide range of relevant news content onto our site. He did a great job managing the project – it required minimal technical resources and was very cost-effective. Our percentage of returning visitors and our depth of visit metrics have both improved since the implementation.”
-Gerry Murray, Director Corporate Communications for Softrax.

The solution: non-technical explanation

Here’s an explanation of the work I did with Softrax, without the acronyms. The company provided me a list of their favorite websites they visit for news about accounting and search terms they use to search for topical news. I also identified the most authoritative accounting blogs for them.

I then put together a system that checks all of these web pages, news searches and top blogs for any new information available and delivers it automatically to one place, an application called a “feed reader.” I showed Softrax a variety of different feed readers they could chose between and we discussed the benefits and disadvantages of each. It was easy for them to try out each one by loading a file I built for them with all their web page feeds into each feed reader. We talked through the basic features of a feed reader over the phone while we both looked at screenshots I sent them from my computer.

Once a feed reader was chosen (FeedDemon in this case) I showed Softrax how to organize and filter all the information coming in. We set up a simple system by which they could “tag” any news item that they wanted to display on their web site – with just a click and a typed-in description of the story, it is sent to appear as a link with descriptive text on the RevenueRecognition site (see image above).

This content is kept up to date without ever touching the code of the page itself. It couldn’t be simpler, and yet it’s quite a powerful system.

Why: Why would you want to put a bunch of links on your site that lead off site?

There is so much information flying around in the world today that the role of information-curator, “cool hunter” or trusted collector is becoming an increasingly powerful one to play. Some of the top blogs on the web, multi-million dollar media companies now, are far more focused in vetting the best information from all around the internet than they are in doing their own original reporting.

Obviously original content creation is important – but the point is that if you can offer a timely collection of high quality resources in one place, you can play a leadership role in your industry. People will come back again and again to see what you have had the time (or the technology) to discover. I believe the system we set up will lead to significant increases in visitor retention, and thus increased sales of their services, over time. (See feedback quote on this above.)

If Softrax can populate its news section to the satisfaction of its visitors – then come sales pitch time, it will have the added advantage of having already established itself as capable of adding value to the work lives of potential customers.

Additionally, in and of itself, the creation of a system to pull accounting industry news into one place automatically gives Softrax a first-mover’s advantage on any number of events that other companies may have to search for manually or wait on industry press to report on.

How we worked together

My work with Softrax consisted of a number of conversations on the telephone, time spent assembling resources for them and troubleshooting the initial implementation during testing. I used Grazr set up on a wiki page to demonstrate how an OPML file works and screenshots of various feed-readers in action to discuss their functionality and relative merits.

All of this ended up working wonderfully; after each conversation on the phone my contacts at Softrax remarked that the technology, our plans and the power behind it all were becoming clear and clearer. Eventually they had such a firm grasp of this relatively complicated chain of applications that I only had to answer passing questions while they took the lead with the project.

The final implementation isn’t perfect yet, but it’s pretty darned good. The company’s website and relationship to industry news have changed radically; they now have the infrastructure and the strategy to establish themselves as a go-to source for accounting industry news. As a result, they’ll have more opportunity to put their products in front of prospective customers and more credibility as an established “value adder” when they do so.

This is but one example

My work with Softrax is just one of my favorite recent examples of consulting work I’ve done. I’ve also been doing online product usability and market analysis and assisting in forming launch strategies. There’s lot of things we can do together – including just talk about what you’re doing and how new tools and emerging players on the web could help you do it better. If you’re interested in working with me on a project or on an ongoing support basis just drop me a line. Contact info can be found at the top of this page.