Author Archives: Julie Blaustein

By Julie Blaustein

It’s the countdown to the Data 2.0 Conference, Monday, April 4, 2011, at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco.  Discover how the online data revolution will shape and transform the world of technology for years to come.

Data 2.0 is about the rise of data accessibility.  Do you know what new innovations are possible with the growing abundance of social, geo, government and advertising data?  Hear speakers from Google, NAVTEQ, and comScore alongside Jay Adelson, CEO of SimpleGeo; Gil Elbaz, CEO of Factual; Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir; and 50 other data companies at the full-day conference. The event will culminate in a data startup pitch contest, judged by Robert Scoble and five Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

The conference will also feature the launch on-stage of the $3 million Heritage Health Prize, the world’s largest data challenge.  At least 6 data companies will be launching new products and features. If interested, send an email to info@data2con.com if you are interested in launching.

Click here to Register for the Data 2.0 Conference

Special for our Bub.blicio.us, USE discount code “data2on11” to get 25% off the standard conference registration. Hurry, tickets are selling fast!

By Julie Blaustein

The Social Media Club of San Francisco held their monthly meeting Tuesday, March 22nd at the CoTweet offices in SOMA. The title of the event, The Future Role of Community Management, Is It a Dying Role?, provoked stimulating conversation.  The strong panel of Community Guru’s included Moderator Maria Ogneva, Head of Community at Yammer, John Virtes, Head of Community at Flipboard, Paul Gilliham, Director of Customer Marketing at Lithium and Scott Rutherford, Co-Founder at UserVoice.

The Panel with Moderator Maria Ogneva of Yammer, John Virtas of Flipboard, Paul Gilliham of Lithium and Scott Rutherford of UserVoice

The panel opened with the topic of What exactly IS a community manager? It was quickly determined that its hardly on the brink of dying but rather evolving into a critical role at any company whether its small, large, consumer facing or enterprise. As Gilliham stated, “Its not seen as a dead function, just a changing function.” The role is morphing from being focused on customer service to one that is now a key role as an evangelist of the company. Virtes pointed out, “It means something different at different companies. Support should be distinct but it still touches upon so many places in the company.” Rutherford emphasized its essence to a company, “Its become an incredibly important role. A key role, the breadth…the touch point…the positive voice of the company that can be found through blogs writing, marketing and other touch points.”

What makes a GREAT Community Manager? “The great community manager is kind of like your business’s Swiss Army Knife,” Gilliham so aptly put it. Someone who is able to have an agnostic role within the organization and know how to navigate all the different groups within the company, works well with people, is consistent with one’s policies and respectful of those in their community. Meg Clark, Community Manager at CoTweet pointed out, “Its someone who treats others like she would want to be treated.” To focus on the CoTweet brand and not to confuse her CoTweet community, she makes sure to use her handle of @meg_cotweet to refer to anything having to do with CoTweet while keeping her personal handle separate.

What happens when the voice of the company, your community manager who is possibly even seen as a Celebrity Rock Star leaves? You have to set expectations and boundaries with your community from the launch of your community. Most importantly, as Virtes points out, “You have to leave your ego at the door. This isn’t about you, its about the community and you should be able to hand over the role to anyone else in the company if you were to leave.”

A recent graduate from Texas University brought up another great topic. What makes a good community manager and what are the skills and background needed to BECOME a Community Manager? It was pretty much agreed by all on the panel that it takes someone who is not too junior, has a varied background, tremendous writing and communication skills and most importantly, someone who is passionate and perhaps even a“Super User” of the product or service of the company. As Ogneva stated, its someone “oozing with enthusiasm.” How does one actually LAND a job as a community manager? The panel was in agreement that it will almost naturally happen by being a part of your community of interest, networking in person, connecting through events, online blogs, communities and in the communities of social network sites such as LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook, Twitter, etc. The Social Media Club is definitely one way to become connected with like-minded, community people. Another way is to join the Facebook group, Social Media Jobs where there are numerous community manager jobs being posted by contacting them at socialmediajob@groups.facebook.com.

A great way to learn more about this topic is through the The Community Roundtable who just released its 2011 State of Community Management. The Commmunity Roundtable is a virtual table where social media, community, and social business practitioners gather to meet, discuss challenges, celebrate successes, and hear from experts and they are also dedicated to furthering the discipline of community management. You can gain more fascinating nuggets discussed about Community by the awesome panel and Social Media’s engaging audience on Twitter at #SFSMC.

Kristie Wells, Founder and President of the Social Media Club

Maria Ogneva, Moderator and Head of Community at Yammer

Paul Gilliham, Director of Customer Marketing at Lithium

John Virtes, Community Manager at Flipboard

Social Media Week is being held the week of February 7-11, 2010 in San Francisco. It kicked off with over 46 events! Monday’s opening night’s event was held at the newly opened, posh office of PeopleBrowsr in the hub of SOMA on Bryant Street. PeopleBrowsr provides research, social analytics and brand engagement. They recently unrolled their ReSearch.ly platform that provides analytics and search from 1,000 days of Twitter data while Twitter only goes back 30 days. The event also launched their SF Social Media Command Center with a panel discussion and social hour with food and beverages sponsored by Bear Republic Brewing Co, Vintage Wine Estates and Magic Curry Kart.

Chris Heuer, Founder of the Social Media Club and members Katherine Webster, Renee Blogdett, Ben Wan and Brian Zisk

The panel titled The Evolution of Listening: From Monitoring to the Collective Intelligence included Social Media Expert Brian Solis as moderator, People Browsr’s CEO, Jodee Rich, Tim O’Reilly, the Founder O’Reilly Media and the genius behind all those industry books and conferences you love to attend and Susan Etlinger who is a consultant at the Altimeter Group.

Solis opened up the panel with a few words about the listening tool known as the Conversation Prism. If you are not familiar with the Conversation Prism, Solis provides great detail about it in his best selling book Engage. The idea behind it is to listen, to “observe, analyze, dissect, and present the dynamics of conversations, how and where they transpired.” Solis provided a “secret” to the Social Web, that in every network there is a search box and through the results you can gain access to a list of keywords that will provide insights into your company, brands, competitors and other social networks.

The conversation then moved to Rich who talked passionately of the Interest Graph where your the network is made up of people who share interests with you, but who you don’t necessarily know personally. He sees it now an important business channel. He spoke of how “the world is evolving from a Social Graph to an Interest Graph. What ‘s very exciting for me, and I say this to my kids, what turns me on is, this the 1st. time I think in human history that we have something that is actually catalyzing our generous side and our generous side is about sharing…”

O’Reilly stressed the importance of listening, “Who should be paying attention? Everyone should be paying attention.” He talked of the Clue Train Manifesto that seeks to put the human touch back in the corporate world through technology and compared that to the use of social monitoring tools in corporations today. He believes we are moving away from the old model of studying Business Intelligence reports to building, learning from and tweaking algorithms to make improvements. He cited Google as a company that is successfully embracing algorithms as a way of doing business.

Etlinger is currently working on two research reports focused on mobile commerce and social business measurement. She is also considered an expert on all the social monitoring tools available at this time. She feels there are now very few tools and processes in place to get the right information to the right management. But she does see that there will be a convergence of the Social graph and the Interest graph. Rich though reiterated again how he sees the focus of social media as moving more towards an Interest Graph.

O’Reilly provided this key insight to consider, that with all the tools, artificial intelligence and technology, its the humans that are most important at the last mile.

A great way to learn more about listening and enjoy a few laughs, go to Ken Yeung’s coverage of the panel discussion posted on YouTube. And check out what has been happening with Social Media Week at #SMWSF.

Jodee Rich

Brian Solis

Susan Etlinger

Social Media Week Panel at PeopleBrowsr

The Social Media Club of San Francisco had its first event of the year on Tuesday, January 25, 2010 at the newly opened shared office space, RocketSpace.  A panel consisting of industry thought leaders, known as Influencers in Social media circles, included Sol Lipman, Director of Mobile at AOL and formerly of 12Seconds, Harry McCracken of Technologizer and Time.com, Augie Ray of Forrester and Shel Israel, a Social Media Consultant and co-author of the book Naked Conversations.

It was a full house and it was quite apparent that this was the Social Media Club by the name-tags featuring just one’s Twitter Handle. Chris Heuer, Founder of the Social Media Club started off the event with a video featuring Social Media professionals from Adobe, Facebook, Research in Motion, Intel and Sony Electronics at CES who spoke about what they thought was in store for 2011. The common themes that emerged were the hopes for more content creation, scaling, community and more, oh please, more attention to Social Media to get consumers to use their products.

Israel spoke first about the trends of social media in 2011. He talked of normalizing social media so that success isn’t measured by the number of people that follow you. He feels the question of ROI will be all about good business and using the right tools to get the job done well. He sees a future where the ability to easily translate and communicate around the world will become a reality along with the Internet becoming truly ubiquitous. He also summed up his thoughts regarding 2011 trends in his blog, Global Neighborhoods.

McCracken sees the social mobile web as the new frontier similar to how it was for the web back in 2005. “The social mobile network is doing well now and will continue to do so in the future.” He sees Facebook as something that people will use without even thinking about it as a social network. He is seeking clarity in the future of the dominance of the mobile social network, the dominance of Facebook and how companies will control the social aspects of the web. His blog Technologizer features his thoughts about the mobile social network in-depth too.

ROI to Ray will no longer be the focus of social media. ”Its not the year of the ROI obsession where one needs to provide it in order to get financing. It is also not the year of Facebook or Four Square.” He sees FourSquare as limited by handsets carried and not all have location-based services needed to use them. Proving his point, he conducted a survey of the audience asking how many are on FourSquare and most raised their hand. When asked how many check-in as frequently as they did when first on the service, less than a third raised their hands. Additional great insights are found in his blog, Augie Ray’s Blog.

Last to speak and also most entertaining was Lipman, who talked of trends in terms of what the new and hip AOL is seeking when hiring a Social Media guru. They are interested in someone who is all about niche social networks, personalization and building social connections, about content that appeals to all audiences and one who will focus on iPad devices. If you have what it takes, you should contact The Solster.

If you have not already joined the Social Media Club, you can do so here and connect with others who are passionate about learning and sharing what social media can provide to your organization and community. You can also join the conversation about this event at #SMCSFO

By Julie Blaustein

Trendy Lime is having their holiday party at Circa on Friday, December 17th. and YOU are invited. This is one holiday party not to be missed! Its Marilyn Monroe inspired theme “Some LIke it Hot” will make for a HOT time.

If your not quite sure what to wear, well here are some sexy ideas to get your wardrobe ready and in the mood. Ladies, consider the black and white colors, lace trims, low cuts, and corsets that were the rage in this film. Red lipstick, long lashes, and tousled hair are a must! “Timeless Glamor” from Oprah.com offers more tips. Gentlemen, you have some choices. The male actors in the film dressed in disguise as women, so if you’re up for some fun, give us your best Marilyn (see pics)! If you’re not so in touch with your 1950′s bombshell side, then toss on a bow tie and classic suit or naval officer attire.

There will be a Gift Exchange so don’t forget bring a gift of minimum $10 value labeled with your name — boys bring gifts for girls, girls bring gifts for boys — and we’ll tell you how to meet your mystery gift giver as the night progresses. There will also be Holiday treats on-site including Belgian Chocolates from Leonidas. Part of the proceeds will go to Children’s Charity. Hurry to get the Early Bird pricing of just $10!

The event is kindly sponsored by the Ukuku Law Group, specializing in structuring early stage start-ups for success.

If you are not a member of Trendy Lime, what are you waiting for? Go to their Facebook Group and Like Trendy Lime and you will instantly be part of a Social Network of 3,000+ professionals in San Francisco/ Bay Area. They are also a Social Media driven producer of JETLAG, an upscale social and networking events around Fashion, Travel, and Technology for trend-setters and world travelers.