Building Community
The new art of digital storytelling
When I was a kid, many of our family vacations involved camping. During these trips, late at night (well, shortly after dark anyway) my Dad would crawl into the tent with my brother and I and tell us stories. Random characters doing random things would spill out of Dad’s imagination.
Since then I’ve been fascinated by [...]
Beautiful woman as an analogy for community development
Martin, the blogger at the wonderful Community Spark blog recently posted a wonderful article, “Why your online community is like a beautiful woman“. Considering that most of my presentations have some connection to the idea that community is about relationship building, this struck a cord.
I’m already thinking about how I might be able to work [...]
Microsoft Photosynth is Amazing
You know those moments where you are introduced to a new technology and the only thing you can say is “Holy f**k”? Microsoft Photosynth is one such technology.
Here’s how the Microsoft site describes it:
Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays [...]
Creating your own posse
A couple years back I was quoted in the book Primal Branding about my work with LEGO. Since reading the book, I’ve been fascinated with the concept that “every brand is a belief system”. I certainly felt that way about the work and product at LEGO, but I’ve wondered what happens when someone says “what [...]
How to talk about your competitors
Josh started an interesting discussion in the beginning of April that I’ve been meaning to respond to. Basically he asks “Should you talk about your competitors?”
Here’s my problem. One of the other sacred tenets we’re supposed to uphold in the groundswell is to “be authentic.” I strongly agree with this – pretending to be something [...]
OCRN: Community Netiquette: How to Avoid Stepping on Virtual Toes
The firehose of OCRN content has been turned on! The next whitepaper is has been posted, and this one is entitled: Community Netiquette: How to Avoid Stepping on Virtual Toes.
Most of us know that in the typical online community, it’s not kosher to post blatant marketing materials. But when confronted by other more nuanced issues, [...]
Moderation sets the tone
Tweetcret.com launches as a concept similar to PostSecret, twitter-style. Mashable points out a great point about systems that are developed without proper moderation.
Operating on precisely the model of the celebrated PostSecret blog, Tweetcret, is very elementary new site, evidently created in virtual anonymity, that offers a Twitter-like tablet for which individuals from all [...]
Introducing your Admins
One of the forums I follow regularly had a very activity I wanted to share. In the words of the Nikonians admin who started the thread:
Celebrating our 8th year of Nikonians, jrp and I thought it would be good to let the team members “in the background”, both volunteers and staff, come forward and present [...]
OCRN: 9 Tips for Inspired (and Inspiring) Text Communication
I’m pleased to share that last week published my first whitepaper for the Online Community Research Network: 9 Tips for Inspired (and Inspiring) Text Communication. Here’s the synopsis:
Text is the base language of community interaction and engagement, yet far too many community professionals don’t put the focus on it [...]
The New Journalism
It seems like only yesterday that journalists were laughing at blogs and the idea that blogs might have something to offer the “news” space.
Things have changed a bit today. According to this study, 73% of journalists survey say they “sometimes or always use blogs in their research. The most often cited reason for using blogs [...]
