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.

Maria Ogneva, Moderaor and Head of Community at Yammer

Paul Gilliham, Director of Customer Marketing at Lithium

John Virtes, Community Manager at Flipboard

By Julie Blaustein

Brian and Shoshanna Zisk

The 7th. SF MusicTech Summit came back to town on Monday, December 6th. at the Kabuki Hotel. It was another great gathering of the various players in the music industry who drive its innovation, creativity and growth in this constantly evolving space. Topics discussed and debated included entertainment, product development, wireless and hand held, start ups, legal issues and, so much more. The very first SF MusicTech had maybe 300 people whereas now, there are over 800 attendees and over 27 sponsors! There was barely enough room for all the sponsoring logos to fit on the Sponsor plaque. The team responsible for securing all these sponsorships include the “music gods” Brian Zisk and his lovely wife Shoshana along with their partner-in-crime Todd Tate. They all have a deep history of performing and working in the music industry and are now seeking to keep the music alive through the collaboration of those that are seeking to make music and those that are seeking to make money. I also gained  better understanding of what made the SF MusicTech Summit a “must” attend by talking to a few of the sponsors and vendors.

Michael Hobson of HRT

High Resolution Technologies (HRT) would normally have exhibited at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas which is way larger than the Summit, but due to their employer Michael Mercer’s recommendation they chose the SF Music Tech Summit. Not only was HRT the largest sponsor of the show but they spoke on a panel and took the opportunity to announce their new product’s launch, The iStreamer which allows you to deliver high performance digital audio playback directly from an iPad, iPhone or an iPod.

Sonic.net provides Internet connectivity to the technology start ups in the community. This is their 2nd. year being a vendor and a sponsor with the summit. Tiffany Lawson, an Account Manager with Sonic.net was eager to be a part of the Summit in part due to how easy it was to work with Brian Zisk, the Executive Producer. “Zisk was great to communicate with, he is always on the same page and he genuinely cares about making the conference a success for you.”

Gianluca delli Carri of MusiXmatch hails from Italy with corporate offices in London. MusiXmatch provides a way to distribute lyrics. Usually they would attend evnts such as Music Hack Day where they would engage with developers. Based on a partner and a past, colorful attendee Robert Kaye of MuicBrainz, they chose to commit to the event.

Peter Jung of Vocoo

Not to be outdone in terms of going the distance to attend SF MusicTech Summit, Peter Jung, Manager of Vocoo.com that provides your voice over background of the hottest songs for iPhone, Android, PC, YouTube, FB and more, came from Seol, Korea! Based on the recommendation of their PR firm, ICR, they came in the hopes of meeting other companies. In fact, it appears that MusiXmatch is now in talks with Voocoo about providing their expertise in lyrics. That, my friends, is worth the airfare and certainly  justifies the ROI of the event to any manager questioning its worthiness to attend.

If you are involved in the music scene in any way, do your self a favor and attend the next SF MusicTech Summit in the spring of 2011 to learn, meet new and old friends and do business. You can’t go wrong.

Go here for more pictures and for Past SF MusicTech Summit Events and check them out on Twitter at #SFMusicTech.

Photo Credit: Sean Percival

This week is the National Women’s Health Week empowering women to make their health a top priority. And it’s not only women’s health that we should be concerned about. Childhood obesity in United States has more than tripled in the past 30 years, and there are more than 1 billion overweight adults globally, of which at least 300 million are obese. Food industry is vowing to make processed food healthier, meanwhile studies showing how addictive fatty foods are, also suggesting that processed carbohydrates may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does.

Jamie Oliver’s new TV show Foodrevolution has a mission to fight childhood obesity and change the way America eat. His combined Facebook and Twitter community has passed 700 000 followers and the petition to improve school food has so far been signed by half a million people. It’s a great example of how to create awareness by engaging directly with the community, both online and offline. Watch this clip with Stephen Colbert (4min in) and the magnitude of the challenge the nation in whole is facing becomes evident.

So, what if you could bring a personal trainer, dietician and motivator with you all the time? In your pocket? Now you can. DailyBurn and Swedish ShapeUp Club are two easy to use online weight loss and fitness services, both with free iPhone apps. Yes, you can get started with your new life with zero cost (ShapeUp Club is soon to have an application available for Nokia). DailyBurn’s freemium model also offers a basic functionality free online, whereas with ShapeUp Club one can sign up starting at $3 per month to get added functionality, such as advanced nutrition tracking with charts, back-up and online community.

Setting up ones individual health program is quickly done in both services, whether one is looking for losing, keeping or gaining weigth. The iPhone apps make it really easy to record daily food and exercise, with metric system of ones choice, allowing one to create, add and favourite food items and meals. Both services sync all data with the online account. DailyBurn is a bit more fitness orientated with lots of various workout program and challenges, where one can find like minded people for support to achieve fitness goals.

I spent previously four years on developing the largest online weight loss service in Sweden (Viktklubb.se) in collaboration with an obesity unit, that also conducts research studies on weight loss online with help of the service. These are my learnigs and thoughts on why I think the two services have figured out the key success factors of weight loss, thereby already enjoying over 100 000 users in respective service.

1. The social aspects of weight control. Gaining and retaining motivation with the help of the community, day or night, is very important. To find and interact with other people in the same situation has shown to be crucial to many. Besides from the inbuilt communities, this is where social networks like Facebook and Twitter come to help to increase the interactivity, thus strengthening the core service. ShapeUp Club has been more focused on blogging than social networking so far, where I’m especially happy to see DailyBurn engaging with its users.

2. Easy registering of daily calories and activities. iPhone apps do just that! The most annoying thing users know is spending a lot of time to fill in the diary of daily calories and activities. It brings down the motivation and once one skips registering, it gets harder to stay on track. I think both services have done a great job even if I find it a bit easier with ShapeUp Club. On the other hand, DailyBurn offers a FoodScanner app for $0.99 to easier find foods by scanning UPC barcodes or typing in food names.

3. Visualization of the progress. This is the number one motivational factor. To see charts and diagrams over ones weight, waistline, body fat, to name a few, does wonders. DailyBurn is also connected to Withings, a WiFi scale linked to the Internet that automatically tracks weight and body fat directly to DailyBurn. Trust me, men like this one. Men has shown to be more competitive, also when it comes to fitness and weight loss, thus making the information publicly available a good motivator.

4. Watercheck/Water tracker. Grown ups should drink at least 2 liter (0,5 gallon) water per day. Registering and visualizing the daily water consumption is a great way to get a hang of how much water one actually drinks during one day. I’ve learned how easy it is to be mistaken of ones daily water consumption. I particularly like the neat implementation of watercheck in ShapeUp Club’s iPhone app.

As Andy Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of DailyBurn, said: “You manage what you measure”. (quote by Mark Suster). I couldn’t agree more.

Ps. Not to worry! For the occasional social drinks, stick with gin & tonic and wine. They’re the kindest when it comes to calories.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

by Brian Solis, via PR 2.0

I recently visited the gorgeous San Francisco offices of Loic Le Meur and Seesmic to discuss his company’s roadmap, photography, how to build online communities, as well as my new book with Deirdre Breakenridge ,”Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.”

Loic suggested that we spend a few minutes discussing the book on camera to share with the Loic.tv community. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse – after all, Tim Ferriss had occupied the same chair moments before I arrived.

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, or Facebook

by Brian Solis

TwitterFriends is one of the most compelling analytical tools for identifying relevant conversationalists, revealing conversation patterns, and visualizing material conversation networks, by Twitter ID. The services aims to map the “relevant net” for any given user, which is incredibly valuable to any communications or service professional identifying influential voices and associated social graphs. For example, stats list to whom you (or any username) reply most often and those who reply back.

The system determines a Conversation Quotient (CQ) that attaches a metric to the volume of tweets that include @ replies. For reference, the average CQ is 25.4%. The reports also provide the size of the relevant net (those you reply to or receive replies more than once in the last 30 days) outgoing and incoming, number of fans, loyalty, Twitter Rank, ratio of outgoing/incoming contacts, the follow cost, the conversational rank (number of public conversations with users), number of replies, a Retweet Quotient, Link Quotient, among many others. Perhaps most interesting, is the visualization of the TwitGraph which displays the rank of any user across multiple axes, Twitter Rank, CQ, LQ, RQ, Follow Cost, Fans, @replies.

But it doesn’t stop there. Benedikt Koehler aka @furukama provides the ability to measure your network redundancy, density, and network efficiency.  The part I found most fascinating is the ability to visually map your incoming and outgoing network and how your contacts/nodes also connect. For those who wish for a deeper analysis, Twitter Friends can also provide a network map for Friends of Friends (the network of your followers’ followers).

INCOMING:

OUTGOING

Read more about Twitter Friends, the relevant net,  and the social sciences that serve as its undercurrent here and here.

For more on tools and services for Twitter, please visit the directory on PR 2.0.

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku or Facebook

by Brian Solis, sourced from PR 2.0

Loic Le Meur asked for it and now we are the beneficiaries of his request. Jon Wheatley and team spent roughly 12 hours creating Twitority, a new service that that facilitates the search and sorting of keywords in Twitter by authority (read: popularity).

Without getting into the minutiae of the debate between popularity versus authority, Twitority is a simple, yet helpful service that will help brand managers, community managers, and communications and customer service professionals tier research and response strategies and programs. It’s also helpful to identify and measure potential opportunities and new trends based on the weighted discussions surrounding relevant topics.

Over the weekend, Sean Percival and Ryan Sit also developed a search engine based on authority popularity, with a twist. Twithority provides side-by-side results ranked by authority and also time/authority.

Read more about it here and give it a test drive here.

For more on services available for Twitter, please read, “Twitter Tools for Communications and Community Professionals” on PR 2.0.

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku or Facebook

by Brian Solis, originally published at PR 2.0

HubSpot released a report based on the analysis of over 600,000 Twitter users who have utilized the company’s Twitter Grader app. The full study is free and available for download in PDF.

Here are the highlights:

- Twitter has about 4-5 million users, about 30% are relatively new or unengaged users

- Twitter is dominated by newer users – 70% of Twitter users joined in 2008

- An estimated 5-10 thousand new accounts are opened per day

- 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers

- 9% of Twitter users follow no one at all

- There is a strong correlation between the number of followers you have and the number of people you follow

- The average number of followers is 70

For a deeper analysis and interpretation of the numbers presented in the report, please visit Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post at ReadWriteWeb (notice the URL vs. the post title).

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku or Facebook

Subscribe to the bub.blicio.us RSS Feed.

by Michelle Lentz

Fast Company  has named Enterprise Community Partners the Social Enterprise of the Year. Based in Columbia, MD, Community Enterprise Partners is a largely unknown organization which has worked tirelessly for over 25 years to provide clean homes, in a responsible and sustainable fashion, for impoverished Americans.

Enterprise has provided:
–$9 billion in capital and financing for low- and middle-income housing
–$700 million in capital each year to affordable-housing efforts
–Thousands of “green” affordable-housing units across America

I used to live in Columbia, MD, and it was a rather serene, almost gated community. It was the first true planned community I’d lived in, and I believe one of the first in the US. It was created by James Rouse, who also created Fanueil Hall and The South Street Seaport. He was also the grandfather of actor Edward Norton. Rouse and his wife Patty were the co-founders of Enterprise Community Partners.

Now, Norton and the company his grandparents built have become major players in the green movement as well.

In their quest to find new and innovative ways to fund clean, affordable housing, they’ve invented a mechanism to measure and collect construction related data, real world information about which construction, design and appliance choices make the most impact on removing carbon emissions from the air. (The vast majority of carbon is emitted by buildings.) The information is detailed, granular and site specific, and exists nowhere else in the world.

They’ve turned that rich data into a carbon offset fund, which helps raise money for more green housing.  They’re now poised to become a major player in the carbon market, and help save the planet in the process. The money they raise will go to fixing broken neighborhoods all across the country.

All in all it’s an impressive example of philanthropic business. Ellen McGirt has written an uplifting, in-depth article profiling the company over on the Fast Company site. We all need some good news lately. You’ll enjoy the read.

__
Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.