Community Guy – Jake McKee

Job Board Update: 7 New Candidates & 10 New Job Openings

Lots of new job openings and job seekers!

Community Job Seekers

• Looking for telecommute or traveling Community Manager position  ()
• Community Manager seeking Work at Home employment  (Huntington Beach, California)
• Community Manager/ Social Media PR Guru  (Boston, MA)
• Online Community Manager/Executive, 10+ Years Experience  (San Francisco, CA)
• Online Community Manager  (San Francisco Bay Area, California)
• Online News/Content Media Professional  (Southeastern US)
• Social Media Video Producer, Distributor, & Consultant  (Boston, MA)

To see all candidates: http://www.communityguy.com/jobseekers/

Community Job Openings

• Online Communications Specialist 
• Online Community Manager 
• Manager of Social Media Marketing 
• Community Manager  
• Manager Online Strategy  (NYC, NY)
• Online Marketing and Communications – Mgr/VP  (NYC, NY)
• VP – Online Content Manager  (NYC, NY)
• Community Curator  (NYC, NY)
• Community Manager – VP  (NYC, NY)
• Online Community Manager  (London, UK)

 To see all job openings: http://www.communityguy.com/jobboard/

Jake’s on Vacation. No really.

For those of you who know me (or have gotten emails from me at the wee, wee hours of the night), you’re probably going to need to sit down to hear this… I’m on vacation.

No, seriously.

After two years of consulting work, I’m taking my first real vacation. No laptop, no work tasks, no contact, and no 2 year old. The wife and I are heading to Cancun for some much needed beach lounging.

The CommunityGuy.com blogging schedule will resume on 4 August, refreshed and reinvigorated.

Presenting in Dallas: How LEGO caught the Cluetrain

Strangely, as much as I speak, I rarely do so in my hometown.

The presentation I gave to Social Media Club Louisville, “How LEGO Caught the Cluetrain” was very well received and as luck would have it, SMC: Dallas needed a speaker. Having not spoken much in Dallas, I couldn’t turn the opportunity down.

If you’re interested in coming out, the details are below. If you can’t make it, check out the video version I gave of this presentation.

Here’s the overview of the presentation:

When the Cluetrain Manifesto arrived nearly 10 years ago, it put to words what I was trying to pitch and explain to clients. I’d been struggling to explain what was happening and why the Web was changing the world of marketing.

When I joined the LEGO Company in 2000, community and customer (the end customer) engagement weren’t ….let’s say priorities…. within the company.

During my 5+ years at the company, I was part of an incredible team who helped push the principles put forth in the Cluetrain Manifesto out to the larger company and we had incredible success. Today’s LEGO Company is a significantly different organization than the one I joined so long ago.

Since leaving the company 2 years ago, I’ve been able to see a different view of the company and the way they’ve caught the Cluetrain.

This is that story.

RSVP if you’d like to attend. I hope to see you there!

Thursday, July 24, 2008
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM (CT)

imc² Dallas Office`
12404 Park Central
Suite 400
Dallas, TX 75251

Another take on non-organic community

I recently ran across an interesting, if not over the top, article about Communispace-style community and whether it’s “totalitarian”. It’s a bit extreme, but it’s interesting to see others talking about this topic. This article linked to a very interesting look at what the problem with non-organic communities is. Outlined below are the author’s main points.

Off the top of my head, I believe that there are five important differences bewtween the “Communispace”-stype constructed community and the organic variant that arises on its own, which I have been participating in for the last two decades (I was a dedicated Compuserve member for a while in the 1980s, and participated in BBSs long before the wonders of Mosaic, deja.com, and usenet readers) and have been studying for the last 12 years.

1. Motivation. I question the difference in participation and information that extrinsic (rewarded by corporate payments, as with focus groups, panels, depth interviews, and so on) and intrinsic rewards (I love or hate the brand and want others to know about it and share in it).

2. Anonymity. Online anonymity is paradoxical. There are so many tags, cookies, trails and tracks that the online world can be a control freak’s dream. In many ways the Internet has turned into a gigantic panopticon. However, this tracking is counterbalanced by an amazing freedom. I think that a balanced combination of freedom and loss of privacy creates a very fruitful level of engagement in onlin communities, one that has a decade-plus long history. People will have multiple identities to express different ideas, or to flame other people. They play fluidly with identities as part of the communal interaction. But I wonder what happens to this balance when it is shifted into the constructed community model.

3. Contributions. Organic community members want to contribute. Sponsored community members are compelled and directed to contribute in certain ways–and perhaps want to contribute in those ways. As Julie’s comments make clear, it is the needs of the company which are paramount in Communispace, not the needs of the community. In sponsored communities, as Julie’s comments indicate, this leads to a more productive and efficient atmosphere. But communities are not necessarily about productivity and efficiency–those are economic goals. Sponsored communities do have wider contributions, less hierarchy, and probably more discussion around interests of focal concern to companies. But what is different, or what is lost?

4. Commercial orientation. Online communities come in many sizes, shapes, and forms. Many lifestyle communities provide very interesting, contextually-embedded informaton on brand uses, choices, and relationships. By “managing” the format, and directing it into an online brand community, the sponsored community model constructs a particular kind of interaction and commuity experience. That is useful, but again, it may not be what we’d see emerging in a natural online discourse. I suggest that we are less likely to see resistant discourse and anti-corporate or anti-brand pushback. We may be less likely to see wider contexts, or to be able to discern how incidental, noncentral, or unimportant our products and brands may be to people. I also think that these elements might be valuable to know. Julie’s comments suggest that perhaps these elements can be managed and play a part in the Communispace experience.

5. Community Restrictions. Do people in sponsored communities form strong alliances? Do they take them offline? Do they move them to SNS as well? Are they free to email each other? Can they make their own rules, control their own community experience as much as they would like? Can they discuss the topics that concern them (for instance, politics, religion), or only what concerns the brand and brand managers? Are people being put into an artifical “brand community” box for the convenience of market research data gathering? How open is that box, if it is pen? What are the effects of that closedness or openness?

Six Drivers of Credibility

Pete Blackshaw, author of the new book Tell 3000, has collected up a very smart list of the six drivers of brand credibility. This list is brilliant in its simplicity.

Rapid Fire – Sunday, July 20

Rapid Fire – Saturday, July 19

Go Scott Monty!

Genius social media guy, Scott Monty has taken the plunge and joined Ford as their in-house social media guru. Adweek has the details (and a good article around big brands starting to step into this realm):

When it comes to social media, Ford is an admitted neophyte. It dipped its toe in the water with its well-received “Bold moves” campaign in 2006, and it hired a social-media consulting firm to create blog-friendly press releases. But for the most part, it has remained on the sidelines when it comes to using new technology tools to foster two-way conversations with customers and its employees.

The company hopes to change that, in part with the recent hiring of a social-media expert, Scott Monty. The well-known blogger and exec at new-media shop Crayon is trading a “virtual company” of a handful of people for a 250,000-employee monolith that’s struggling to reinvent itself.

“They needed an internal evangelist, someone who can work within the company to bring all the disparate groups together,” said Monty, whose background includes a stint as an account director at b-to-b agency PJA Advertising + Marketing. Monty’s new boss, vp of communications Ray Day, agrees: “Frankly, we were behind the times. We need to leapfrog where we are and move really quickly.”

Congrats, Scott. We’re all rooting for you! (Oh yeah, Ford too)

FFF: Blurry Foreground

This week has been an interesting one as far as my business “larger picture” goes. More on this soon, but there are some exciting things in the works. When I saw this picture, it immediately made me think of my week: the big picture is clear, the end result is obvious, but the details to get there are still a little murky.

Rapid Fire – Thursday, July 17