Community Guy – Jake McKee

Amazon down?

Am I the only one pulling up Amazon’s PDA site when you hit the home page?

Social Media Club Dallas – next meeting

The first meeting of the Social Media Club – Dallas chapter was great fun. The next meeting is coming up soon,  hope to see you there!

Find out more about Social Media Club here.

Blogging the Presidential ‘08

My buddy Dave is putting on a fun event on Monday. Check it out if you’re into politics, or blogging.

Bandwagon has arrived. Please board quickly.

I’ve never actually felt dirty after reading a book description. Thanks to David Silver, that’s all changed. Check out the description of his latest book, Smart Start-Ups: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities:

While I’m certainly trying to keep an open mind, this just smacks of negative vibes. I’ll be interested to see if anyone offers me a review copy!

Hat tip: Communiteer

OK! We get it!

OK, OK! We get it, Saint Anna Nicole Smith’s death is a tragic loss for all of mankind. Without her here to guide us through our daily lives, we’re all likely to suffer the pain of a thousand deaths. She left so much unfinished… how can we continue her legacy? I’m not sure it’s possible…

Can we move on now?

Clue Unit Podcast: Episode 4 is live

Lee, Chris, and I knocked out a quick recap of the Community Next event that took place this last weekend in Stanford. If you’re interested in hearing our thoughts on the event, head over to the Clue Unit web site, or:

(click here to listen – MP3)

(click here to subscribe to this feed)

This is by far my favorite episode to date. Feedback welcomed!

links for 2007-02-15

• eModeration blog interview
  My friend Tamara runs a UK based, internationally focused company called eModeration. They focus on high quality moderation work of user generated content sites, mostly for big brands and brand-sponsored UGC sites.
  (tags: eModeration moderation interview)

CommunityGuy.com gets dusted off

After several years having the same, marginal design I spent a few minutes last night dusting off the design and moving some things around. Nothing’s missing from the previous sidebars, they’re just now at the bottom of the page. Hopefully this cleaner look will give me a deep breath for my internal voice that has been screaming "You need to redo your design!!" for months now.

I’m going to continue to tweak and improve the design in the next couple of weeks, so if you see something odd with the layout, just drop by later.

Hope you enjoy!

New Woodford Reserve site launches

Ah, horse racing and Kentucky Bourbon… not much goes together quite so nicely.  Some time back Woodford Reserve (a sister brand to Jack Daniel’s) bought a racehorse and created a program called Woodford Reserve Stables. The concept was to race the horse and track the activities along the way.

Over the summer I helped to concept a renovation of the Stables site, moving it from a site based around static, rarely updated information with little user interaction to a site that truly engaged users in the innerworkings of training a racehorse. Or two. Or three.

The site combines multiple blogs, and easy to update content so that the horse’s trainer as well as the Woodford staff can quickly post a load of content. It’s only been up a short time, and it’ll likely take a few weeks to pull in the Woodford Stables users to the new site, but there’s already a number of users jumping into the conversation.

I also have to comment on the design – I was blown away by the work of Aaron Stahl on this project. His designs were absolutely perfect for conveying the feel of horse racing. It feels like a Stables without getting too kitchy.

Pop over and check out the site: www.woodfordreservestables.com

Community Next – Event Notes

I’m back from Community Next, nearly caught up on work and still reading through many, many recaps!

There are a ton of people who have left comments about the event. Here’s just one list (scroll down). If you only read one recap, check out Lee’s notes. He notes some interesting distinctions in the crowd:

These are two major groups and subjects that I saw at Community Next:

1. Community *as* Business. These are the web sites and businesses that are built on a foundation of community. Often, community was the intention is starting the site. Examples from attendees include: Dogster, Fark, skinnycorp (parent of Threadless), Daily Strength, My Church, etc. are examples of sites that depend on community as the core component of the site.

   This was the most dominant group by far. It seemed that many of attendees were planning a community-based start-up and looking for ideas and resources for community as business.

2. Community *in* Business . This group was less represented and accounts for existing businesses that are interested in “community” but haven’t yet taken the plunge. A few of the talks, including Tara Hunt’s and Jake McKee’s was more focused on this perspective – thoughts on making community a part of an existing business.

We went into more detail on this week’s episode of The Clue Unit podcast.

Here’s a few of my take aways:

Best recap: Rohit Bhargava’s great summation notes

Best quote: Matt Roche of Offermatica said: "[Social networks, especially MySpace] is the overtaking of American culture by the 8th grade."

Second best quote: Also by Matt: "Finding truth through volume" (Not sure I agree, just find it to be an interesting quote)

Third best quote: "Integrate, don’t infiltrate"

Best Factoid: AIM away messages are used/modified on average 7 times a day

Second best factoid: There are 300,000 churches in the US… more than all elementary, middle, and high schools combined.
 
Best story: Noah’s opening remarks as the event organizer:
"I had a girlfriend in high school — she cheated on me several times. . .she was apparently VERY interested in community/people."

Newest nerd crush: Heather Luttrell from 3jane and indieclick. Her credentials make me look like a part-time grocery store clerk.

Nerd crush quote: Heather said: "A community manager isn’t a VP of advertising, it’s the one who will argue with the VP of advertising on behalf of the community" (Are you starting to see the crush factor??)

Funniest guy ever: Drew Curtis from Fark.com. Man that guy’s hilarious.

Best new word: Ted Rheingold from Dogster coined (or at least used): Netmanity – i.e. the flood of communication that flows into a community liaison.

Scariest thought: "Becoming an entrepreneur is like signing up to be bipolar" – James Hong of HotOrNot.com.