WE had  alot of snow in New York yesterday and I did not get a chance to summarize what I learnt at Online Community Unconference East 2010 till now.

choosing what sessions to go to – they were all quickly posted to mounted paper grid – which was later moved to the hallway.

First Session I attended - from Lurkers to Contributors

Convener: Zack

Notes-taker(s): Vladimir Barash vlad43210@gmail.com

• (This may include key understandings or new learning, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion – action items, next steps)

• 90-9-1 rule
• 60% lurkers is good!
• asking questions
• contests -> photo contests
• not just making contributors, keeping contributors
• messaging users as incentive
• not too frequent, not too rare
• 3 points of contact – profile comment, invitation to groups, and adding as friend
• leverage your users
• silly tutorials
  • Video tutorials! be mindful of your audience – they may not know what to do on your site! weekly digests! lurkers find value in your community, too!
• busy members need triggers
• tools:
  • AREN’T THERE! mostly internal, in-house, solutions “arms race” between users
  • pay attention to users’ notification settings
  • notify by email default: on or off?
  • target to user – leaderboards, leaderboards, leaderboards
  • Use  implicit reputation – “10K” club for first 10K joiners, healthy competition and contentious communities.
  • Just how many managers / community – no way to quantify, so hire moderators!
  • how do you activate the volunteers?
• self-policing
• the naive user litmus test – are popular threads welcoming or nasty?

Vlad from Node XL showing how to find Influencers using this Excel Plug in

… influence doesn’t seem directly linked to how many people you are connected to. It’s a function of being connected to others who have short chains to many other people with high betweenness. Or, looked at differently, betweenness is a measure of how many social circles, or social scenes, a person is connected to.

….do you have short paths into other social scenes, both incoming and outgoing? That is the deep structure of being truly connected: bridging over different social scenes, acting as a conduit, a vector, a filter and amplifier for ideas good and bad, the best insights, and deadly viruses.

With Node-XL you can do the following things …

1.Overall network metrics (e.g. number of nodes, number of edges, density, diameter)

2.Node rankings (e.g. degree, betweenness, closeness centrality)

3.Edge rankings (e.g. weight, betweenness centrality)

4.Node rankings in pairs (e.g. degree vs. betweenness, plotted on a scatter gram)

5.Edge rankings in pairs

6.Cohesive subgroups (e.g. finding communities in networks)

7.Multiplexity (e.g. analyzing comparisons between different edge types, such as friends vs. enemies)

While it was made clear you could build up a locational map based on social media data (such as map of the United States and people who were tweeting about a subject – where are they located) you can not yet pull in live data and have the map change in real time – I mentioned this would be a nice feature and Vlad and the Node-XL team are looking into it.

Also, the book will be coming out shortly on Analyzing Social Media Networks with Node XL by Mark A. Smith, Chief Social Scientist of the Connected Action Consulting Group.

The book will contain…

.. a broad introduction to social media, social networks and the operation of the NodeXL application and then features a series of  chapters from leading researchers that focus on a particular social media system (email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, flickr, Wikis, the WWW hyperlink network) and the networks each contains (replies, friends, follows, subscribes, comments, favorites, edits, links, etc).   A final chapter outlines a programmer’s view of the NodeXL code, in contrast to the code-free approach of the remainder of the book.

Once I have a chance to sit down and look at the chapters that were sent to me – and thank the authors for reaching out to me – I’ll play with Node XL and let you know what I come up with.

After lunch I hosted my own session with Frederic Guarino on the  State of Online Community: Monitoring, Metrics, Tools - which I don’t have notes for so I’ll have to rattle off what I can recall from memory.

After discussing various social media monitoring tools that I have looked at I asked the audience, along with Frederic – who helped keep me focused – what they were looking for in terms of getting metrics for their communities.   Turns out there is not good way to do this.

Someone from Forrester Research mentioned he spends a bit of time creating charts and graphs on how engaging the analyst community site is – and his goals where to show how the content is moving the audience of readers along – he puts all his data into Excel but admitted he’s groping and trying to figure this all out, just as everyone else is.

Another lady shared how she spends a lot of time looking at each thread of her community and qualifying the value of it which she then reports.  I mentioned this is an extremely manual, time consuming process and likened it to “Qualitative Data” – similar to the type of questionnaire data  one can collect with tools like iPreceptions.   My sense is there are few people who appreciate how hard it is to be a community manager and how much work needs to go in it.

Then the conversation went back to why monitoring tools like Radian6, Alterian/Techrigy/SM2, Sysomos, BrandWatch and Biz360, to name the one’s that I have examined recently – don’t provide the needed tools and reports to justify the Community Manager’s existence -  we came up with the realization that vendors like Radian6 aren’t going to really address this problem in a meaningful way until Social Media Community Managers organize into groups and tell vendors what they need their platforms to provide.

I don’t know what I would have done if my former co-chair from the WAA, Elena, was not in the room – she crystallized why such a group was needed – and why – in a way, our now defunct Social Media Committee at the Web Analytics Association which I created and which Elena helped run, which tried to draft standards for Social Media Metrics – failed to get get off the ground.

The need to have standards and metrics that help Community Managers  show what they are accomplishing must come from the community itself – Radian6 and the other vendors probably would not be able to drive this – only we can, by banding together and figuring out what we want and telling it to the vendors so they can implement it.

Anyway, the seed of that movement began in the room, in my session, yesterday – where it goes from here – is anyone’s guess.

At the end of the conference – as dusk approached and as the snow was falling hard – seeing it outside the windows – the Forum One team ended with inviting attendees to elect individual attendees who they found most helpful during the day – as we had a case and a half of wine to give for this purpose.

It ended up that the Bill Johnston – who runs this conference – wanted to thank me for my recent posts on Social Media Monitoring comparing the various tools I have access to – and nominated me for a bottle of wine – I took red.

That’s it – I had a great time and need to process it all some more – and also write the next few posts in my series – please stay tuned.

Earlier this week I wrote about the Online Community Unconferece East that Forum One is running here in NYC on  February 10th, 2010; there is a discount code of marshall25

In fact, Community Management might be one of the most “in”, most “up in coming” jobs in Social Media – the position that going to be strategic in many companies and industries in the future – a future that is rapidly emerging.   Take  this post about Tweet Your Way to a Community Manager Position which tells you what you have to do to get into Social Media community management .

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mage credit: geek & poke

The subject of Community Managers got more important today when Jeremiah Owyang posted about the List of Corporate Social Media Strategists, Corporate Community Managers in 2010 with the people on that list that he’s keeping are similar Social Media Community Managers though Jeremiah calls them Strategists.

From what I can tell by comparing the Online Community Unconference East attendee list with the Jeremiah Owyang list there are individuals from organizations on his list attending the Forum One conference on the 10th of February.

Here’s some of the organizations that are common to both lists.

1. Thomson Reuters
2. IBM
3. Microsoft

As Jeremiah Owyang points out, Altimeter Group is in the process of defining the skillsets needed to be a strategist, and by extension, a Community Manager – which often overlap:

The Altimeter Group is developing a free research report, on “Skillsets of Social Media Strategists” and will identify the attributes, backgrounds, experience of this emerging role,if you’re interested in receiving a copy, please register on this form.

But, even more importantly, if you want to find out what it takes to be a community manager/strategist, or meet people who are successfully doing it  – you should attend the Feb 10th Online Community Unconferece East and use the conference code marshall25 to get a discount.