few months ago, my friend Sam Lawrence (former CMO of Jive Software) and the lovely April Donato launched a velvet-roped social network called Black Box Republic. While I kind of understood what BBR was about, I am much clearer about the value proposition of this new type of online community. Personally, I think these types of communities are going to become more and more prevalent as peoples social and personal lives continue to crash into one another in places like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. With social and community initiatives, that is required bu. It he. MORE >>

Community Manager View Comments December 7th, 2009 Most of the time when people or brands refer to a “community manager,&# they are referring to someone that can manage the online relationships for a particular brand.  Most community manager roles include blogging, tweeting, monitoring the web for online conversations and engaging when appropriate (and possibly a few other things).  Although that may have been what the community manager’s role was it’s not going to be what the community manager’s role WILL BE moving forward. The 2.0 MORE >>

” Community Management Isn’t Content Creation. Now,  I don’t 100% disagree with him that not all community managers are suited to create content. To tell great stories you have to stop having your community managers produce your content. How does that relate to community managers and whether or not they should be creating content? work with a talented team of community managers and I know many more through speaking, conferences and social media. The one indisputable thing I can say about community managers is; they’re a diverse group. MORE >>

A little while back I was catching up with my friend Jim Storer of the Community Roundtable before we shared a panel about social customer support. In our prep, Jim and I continued our on-going disagreement on whether a company needs to own the platform that they are keeping a community on. He is of the mindset that owned is the way to go with community.  In this model, companies can tie members of their community to their database and know which of their customers or members are participating and what they are talking about. What say you? MORE >>

Honor Your Community. Because content dissemination requires word of mouth, an organization or blogger has to be an active, participating member of a community. It means giving back to the community, reading their content, remarking on the things that matter to others, too. Strength of community is essential to a blog’s health. If you don’t have a community, consider cutting one post on your site, and guest posting once a week on other blogs and mastheads to develop a following. They are self identifying as important members of the community. MORE >>