Year: 2009

Crowdsourcing Conference Note-Taking

I’m still working on my NorthernVoice09 conference recap, but I had been meaning to check out the amazing Raul/Hummingbird604’s live blogging of the conference. I had not realized Raul was using Coveritlive WITH Twitter. So he was tweeting his live coverage and pulling in any other tweets with the #northernvoice09 hashtag at the same time. VERY clever.
photo by Tris Hussey, cc on Flickr
Take a peek at one of them:  Rob Cottingham on Teh Funny. The mashup of Raul’s intentional notes and the audience’s reaction, while not always coherent, is very cool. However, I can’t judget since I was there. It would be interesting to hear from one of you who was not there how coherent this crowdsourced live blogging is. This is another example of using the network. One person can’t do it all, even the amazing Raul. Having done a lot of liveblogging in the past, I know how much energy it takes!

I wonder what would happen if a smaller, defined group did this with a specific session tag. Does a group create a more coherent record, or the network? (EDITED IN LATER: Check out Beth Kanter’s great blog post on working with conference backchannel which could be considered unto itself conference capture or note taking.)

Just to recover, the peripatetic Raul is committing to one day a week of slow blogging. Raul, you MUST read Barbara Ganley’s blog!

Photo of Raul – ©Tris Hussey, 2009. Non-commerical use permitted with attribution

Network Effects: Advice for TJ’s and Any Organization

You know the routine. Get up. Walk and feed the dog. Make tea. Check email. And there is a note that David Armano is following me on Twitter. Being the half brain for names that I am, I say, “hm, I know that name” and click in to follow back. Then I click into some of the links in his tweets and find my  way to his blog and this great post. Logic+Emotion: The Best Little Ad Trader Joe’s Never Made

First, the embedded YouTube video – a customers video of “if I made an ad for Trader Joe’s” is amazing. (Dear readers outside of some parts of the US, Trader Joe’s – or TJ’s as we know it – is a very successful grocer that plays by its own rules. Intentionally quirky? ) I’m embedding the video because first, it is a fabulous piece of work by the creator, and second, David’s point about the video carry weight for any organization – even my colleagues and clients in international development.  Over 257,000 views of this video in just three weeks. 

 
Here’s the video:

Here are some snippets from David – click in to read his specific advice:

Listen
There are close to 100 comments on the video and over 33,000 views of the video. Track all mentions and embeds of the video and listen to how people are responding to it…

Learn
The video is mostly complimentary but shows Trader Joe’s warts and all… Remember, a brand isn’t what you say it is—it’s what they say it is. What can Trader Joe’s Learn if anything?

Adapt
Use the video as fodder to figure out how your orginzation will respond to these types of inevitable situations…

Respond
Engage your customers in the comments…. Then go back to listening—lather, rinse and repeat.

I heart Trader Joe’s. And this video. It’s catchy as hell and one of the best advertisements they never made.

I am getting ready to co-facilitate a short online workshop on social media for communications managers of a large international network of research centers. I am going to link to the TJ’s video and David’s blog. This idea of listening may not seem as relevant to a research center whose most numerous constituents are poor people who are very much NOT online. But a smaller, strategic constituency is more and more online: funders and policy makers. And future brilliant researchers they want to attract. And influentials they want in their court as they undergo their own evolution forward in a changing world. These centers  can listen, tell their own story, ask their constituents to tell their stories. It’s not the same as TJ’s, but the potential of the network effect is the same. And it matters.

We know not every non profit is going to make a clever video. But one of their constituents just might share something that gets to the heart of the matter, especially if they inspire the kind of love Carl feels for TJs, even with his criticisms. After all, we take advice better from our friends we know love us. They tell us if we have brocolli in their teeth!

Two more things. Read more of David’s blog. He gets the visual thing, the network thing and the friend thing. And I remembered now, how I know of David. Of course – through my network – via Beth Kanter. Small world, eh? That old network effect. It is real. Powerful. Ignore it at your own risk.

 

P.S. Also check out David’s visual graphic on Twitter.

Hot List from the Communities & Networks Connection

Rachel's Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies from cc Flickr photoLast week Tony Karrer and I launched the Communities and Network Connection, a place to bring together and surface good stuff about communities, networks and all the juicy stuff around them. Tony continues to tweak the code behind it and one of the outputs is a hot list of the posts that got the most “social juice.” Tony explains how it works for one of the other aggregated sites he stewards, the eLearning Technology site.  Check out Hot List : eLearning Technology

Tony explains: 

In other words, we are using what is happening:

  • with the content out in the network
  • on the eLearning Learning
  • searches that land on us and that occur on the site,
  • and various other kinds of behaviors.

Together these social signals indicate that the content is likely of higher quality (or at least of higher interest). Thus it belongs in both a best of list and a hot list. This is going to take some work to get it right, but we believe it will help to highlight various hot list content.

We are particularly excited that this capability will soon allow us to have a weekly post that highlights hot list for the week. This will be something like:

Posts: 

  1. Branding in the age of social media
  2. Clay Shirky: nonprofits must become new-style convenors – or lose their members
  3. Assessing the health of a community of practice using net promoter score
  4. Mathemagenic ” PhD conclusions in a thousand words: blogging practices of knowledge workers
  5. From Command and Control to Collaboration and Teamwork – Preparing Business Leaders for the Knowledge Economy
  6. Knowledge Retention will no longer be an explicit strategy
  7. Co-operatives: The Feeling is Mutual
  8. Avoid Profile Potpourri
  9. MicroGuilds Musings on Scrum and Team Integration
  10. Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities

 Other Items:

  1.  Online Community Success and ROI | Will Pate’s Blog
  2. Facebook | Community Manager, Advocate, and Evangelist
  3. Facebook | Should Brands Join or Build Their Own Social Network

 Keywords: 

Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies photo by rachel is coconut&lime

 


 

Welcome back, Seb

Photo by Stephen DownesSeb is back blogging! I was happy to hear Seb Paquet has restarted his blog. So I have to welcome him back. He was one of the first people to welcome me to the blogosphere in 2005 and I adopted his welcomeing practice. You can read about it waaaay back:

Seb Paquet taught me my first explicit blogging community indicator: welcoming. When Seb noticed a new person blogging who he knew or was interested in, he blogged a welcome post, linking to that person’s blog and, if available, a picture. Immediately Seb connected me to his community and expanded mine. I now follow that practice, which has been labeled by one of those I’ve welcomed as “kindness.” I like that!

Photo by Stephen Downes

Penmachine’s Pictures of the Graphic Recording Session

Nice photos Derek, aka,  Penmachine!You really captured the energy and the vibrancy of the people and the beautiful images people made together today at Northern Voice. Yes we CAN draw! And express ideas, tap into different thinking and have FUN!

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