Managing an online community
Every now & then you stumble across the perfect information at the perfect time! During my ICSP workshops last week we talked about having a dialogue with customers and how to keep members active and participating in online communities. My advice is to keep seeding the conversation and reminding people about what terrific things have been happening in the community – so they come back and participate in the dialogue.
I just stumbled upon this post by Jeremiah Owyang about What a Community Manager does. The post is almost 4 years old (Nov 2006) but is spot on. Here are Jeremiah’s points:
- Listen: Use listening tools like Technorati, Talkdigger, read blogs, forums, wikis, to find out what customers are saying
- Respond: Depending on what’s being said, respond quickly when appropriate
- Inform: Tell the right stakeholders in the company what’s happening, this can range from Engineering, Product Management, Product Marketing, PR, Marketing, Bloggers, or forums moderators.
- Shut up and sit back: One of the most important jobs of the CM is to connect the right internal people with customers and let them work it out, stay out of the way if you don’t understand the problems.
- Listen more: Keep on listening, responding, informing, and connecting the right folks. A community manager is an odd looking being, big ears and eyes, and a small mouth
I’ve added Jeremiah’s blog to my regular blog reading list – you might like to add it to yours. A nice find 
Royalty Free Photos
There are many places that you can find royalty free photos. I’ve listed some below – please use the comment section to share any you know.
There are many available under creative commons licence on flickr. A tool I find useful to search flickr is flickrcc. It’s a simple online tool that will search for creative commons flickr photos. You can read more about it in a blog post I wrote. A couple of other useful flickr search tools are Compfight and Search flickr by colour.
Or simply go to flickr and use the search box. Be sure you check the copyright conditions – see the right hand column of the page. Many are available under creative commons but you must include the link and/or attribution. If they have an “All Rights Reserved” copyright you may not use them. Below is an example of a flickr photo used in one of my presentations – with the link back to the photo at the bottom of the slide (click on the photo for a larger version):
Wikimedia Commons is a database of 7,035,164 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.
Commercial sites
iStockphoto – you can buy photos for $1 but every week they have a free photo – just sign up (it’s free) & collect the free photos. You can see some of the images in a slideshow I put together:
Other commercial sites are:
Enjoy…..
How can Social Media benefit your business?
We had a great session on social media at the ICSP breakfast this morning. I can’t relay all the wonderful ideas from the panel or the discussion we had, but here are some links.
Read about the V Australia tweeting campaign (4320 LA) here, go to the 4320 LA site or watch the video highlights on YouTube.
Go to Catriona’s blog with blogging tips.
Go to CareerOne’s Facebook page.
Check out Kate Carruthers’ website.
Here are the links from the Melbourne breakfast:
The Feedback ASAP website
The Tourism Victoria Visit Victoria website.
The Brandaide website.
Here’s my presentation from the breakfast:
Free Business Cards
You can get free and/or cheap business cards at VistaPrint. They’re an online service that operates in over 20 countries – so you pay in local currency.
If you choose one of the many free templates they have, all you pay is postage. We use these for a variety of advertising campaigns – it’s great to have a card to advertise your latest product or service. Here are a couple of examples of the free templates that we’ve used. The first we use to advertise this website, the second is as a dinner entry ticket at one of our conferences.
If you’re clever with the fields that would usually have name, address etc you can customise the card quite a bit.
In return for this free service VistaPrint will add a promotion for their services on the back of their card. It looks like this:
You can also create your own design for a fee. I use this service to print cards to advertise my books. Below is one I’ve just made for the upcoming Boost your Business with Web 2.0 book. I uploaded the book cover as a jpg file and used a text box to create the back of the card. The front will be gloss finish & the back matte. This cost me $70 delivered to the door within 21 days – they usually arrive much quicker than that. You can pay more for faster delivery. I’ve always found the cards to be good quality stock and printing. Click here to see what they have to offer and bookmark them for later if you don’t need cards just now.
Social media and sentiment analysis
Ever wondered how those online ads are just right for your age & interests? It’s about to get even better – or worse – depending on your point of view!!! There was an interesting piece on Radio National last week on ‘sentiment analysis’.
If you’re on any social media sites (Facebook, Twitter etc) you will have noticed the ads are targeted specifically for you. (Sad to say I get lots about facelifts & creams to make me look younger!!!) This is because advertisers can access large amounts of personal data – from where you live to your interests. The next step is sentiment analysis, where online conversations are mined for words and thoughts, for a commercial advantage. The Radio National program explored whether this is ethical and whether computers could really sift sarcasm from enthusiasm!
Here’s the overview of the program from ABC:
Privacy advocates are expressing new concerns about the way personal information from social media sites like Facebook and Myspace is being used. It relates to something called ‘sentiment analysis’ or ‘sentiment mining’. This is where online conversations are mined for the sentiments they express – and then exploited by advertisers. So if you write ‘I feel like pizza’ online then you could be quickly targeted with pizza ads.
Listen to the Radio National program or read a transcript of the program.
Social Media presentation & workshop
In August I have the pleasure of presenting a series of breakfasts and workshops for International Customer Service Professionals (ICSP) in Brisbane (10th), Sydney (11th) & Melbourne (12th).
The breakfast presentation will address the topic : How can Social Media benefit our business?
A recent Nielsen report found that 70% of all Australian businesses intend to use social media in the coming year. Is your business one of them? Although 26.5% of Australian businesses now have a Facebook presence (17% on Twitter, 10% on YouTube and 5% on MySpace), the Nielsen study revealed a high level of concern about ownership and control issues around these social media platforms and their impact on customer relationships. Should you be concerned?
This presentation will address social media in terms that you can easily understand and apply to your business. It will cover:
- What social media tools you could be using to boost your business.
- How you can use social media to your advantage.
- How some businesses are using social media.
- How you design a social media strategy.
Panel members will also share their enormous breadth of experience in deploying social media within their business – warts and all….
Click here for more information and registration.
This Event will also be followed by a 2 hr Workshop: Designing a Social Media Strategy
You’ll learn about a variety of social media tools including how to design a social media strategy using the most appropriate tools for YOUR business. This workshop will focus on the use of social media to build brand awareness, communicate with customers and market your products/services. At the completion of the workshop you will have:
- an overview of the most popular social media tools
- understand how to use social media to engage with your customers
- know how to build trust and reputation for your brand
- have a 5-step planning process for HOW to use social media in your business
- begin planning your social media strategy
Click here for more information and registration.
Allow clients to book a meeting online
Tungle.me is an online scheduling tool that shows your availability and allows people to book your time. It connects with your existing calendar so is always up to date. It doesn’t show who and where you are meeting, but simply shows when you’re available. Below is a screen shot of my calendar this week – you can see it live by clicking here:
You set up the parameters such as which days of the week you’re available and what hours in the day. (I’ve set mine for Monday to Friday available 9am-5pm.) You also set how little or how much time someone can book and how much notice you need to be given for a booking. (I’ve set mine as being available for anything from 30 minutes to 2 hours and I must have 3 hours notice.)
You add a photo and a personal message and you’re ready to go. Click here to set up your own Tungle calendar.
Make your own movie
Xtranormal is a neat tool that will allow you to make your own animated 
movie. I made a 44 second movie to promote this blog. You can view this movie by clicking here – which will take you to the Xtranormal website. (I couldn’t embed it here.)
It’s simplicity itself – all you do is choose from pre-defined options. The steps involved are:
- Choose your set and number of actors.
- Choose the voices you want for your actors – there are about 50 different styles and accents.
- Write your script – you simply write the words for the first actor then click a + button to add the next set of lines.
- Add in any special actions eg body movements, expressions etc. There are lists of set actions you can use.
- Add sound effects and music if you wish.
Below are a couple of the other sets you can use:
You can preview your movie as many times as you like before you publish it.
Once I mastered adding actions to the script this took about 30 minutes to make – but I did fiddle about a bit with one or two small bits.
My movie won’t win an academy award, but it’s a fun way to get your message across. Why not try one for your business and give us the link in the comments section. Click here to get started.
Use Photofunia to make great promo pics
Photofunia is a great little online app that will let you put your face (or any photo) in a range of places.
All you do is choose the ‘effect’ you want & then upload a photo of your face. You get the choice of downloading the new photo, making it an avatar or publishing it. You can even order a print.
I played around with a couple and below are the results.
With some creativity you could use this app to make some interesting photos of your business or your products. I played about and came up with those below. (For the purposes of this exercise I just ran a search for free images at freedigitalphotos)
If you sell jewellery what about something like this:
Bracelet Image: Tina Phillips / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
And if you make and sell handbags – why not feature your bags on vogue!
Handbag Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
So – off you go – get creative & share what you c0me up with. Make your own.
Taking a break
No more posts for a short time as I’m totally consumed by an upcoming trip to Europe for some conferences.
I’ll try to blog anything of interest I find in Europe – but I’ll be pretty quiet until the end of January.
