CommunityNext Brings Community Leaders Together

by Brian Solis on February 10, 2007

by Brian Solis

Brian Oberkirch, Michael Arrington, Jennifer McClure

ValleyWag’s Megan McCarthy

With so many communities popping up on the web, CommunityNext felt it was important to bring everyone together by creating “the” conference for online communities and social networks. Well lucky for us, community leaders arrived from all over the world – many of whom I had been hoping to meet in person for quite some time.

Yahoo sponsored the pre-party, and it was indeed bub.blicio.us. And, you better believe that those drinks had glow-in-the-dark Yahoo-branded ice cubes! That’s so very 2.0.

Brian Solis, PR2.0 / FutureWorks, and Lane Hartwell, Fetching.net

It truly was a rare gem-of-an-evening to be able to hold so many incredible conversations in a small, comfortable setting, without having to contend with the usual crowd of people that “geek out” at the site of Mike Arrington, Brian Oberkirch, Frank Gruber, Gabe Rivera, Ted Rheingold, and Megan McCarthy.

Ted Rheingold of Dogster

Frank Gruber and Gabe Rivera

Brian Breslin, Gabe Rivera, Sundeep Madra

Noah Kagan has certainly made a positive name for himself by having the vision and the connections to bring the right people together with the most interesting things to say, at the right time. In fact, he’s one person I hope to work with in the near future. Along with Brian Ngouchi, President of Bases, the CommunityNext team set out to answer:

How did different online communities grow, get initial traction and what viral growth tactics worked?
Why did some social networks succeed while others have failed?
What are the right tools to build and scale your social network?
Where is the revenue going to come from?
What is the future for online communities?

It’s a pretty solid set of questions, and it seems as though they had a very qualified team scheduled to tackle them – although I would have added a few other candidates, such as Stowe Boyd, Greg Narain, among others. Although, there were live reports from the Saturday event via Twitter, that “The scariest thing here is that a large nuimber of the audience members ARE mostly (only?) concerned with monetization.”

Lane Hartwell, photographer

Brian Oberkirch

Other people I had the opportunity to meet with and toast included: Sundeep Ahuja, Jeniifer McClure, Annie Chang, Angie Chang, Brian Breslin, Alex de Carvalho, Sundeep Madra, James Im, Tim Bonneman, Kurt Collins, among many others!

At BlueChalk in Palo Alto, the only thing most were concerned with was using the drink tickets provided by Yahoo and CommunityNext before the downstairs party, made its way to our little community.