Community Guy – Jake McKee

The McKee family is Seattle bound!

If you follow me on twitter (@jakemckee) you know that I’m in the midst of pretty big life change. That’s right, after 6 years in Dallas, our family is moving to Seattle!

When Sean and I created the new and improved Ant’s Eye View in January, we wondered if it made sense to have us geographically spread out so that we could more easily service regional clients. But almost immediately it became obvious that we needed to be in the same physical location. After all, the Wonder Twins can’t active their powers if they can’t fist bump their rings.

Not to say that I’m comparing Sean and I to alien Super Friends.

Ant’s Eye View World HQ (aka thinkspace) is located in Redmond, WA and we’ll be living right up the street. We’re pretty dang excited, both to be Seattle area residents and to get this damn moving stuff completed. Oh, and of course to be a member of Social Media Club Seattle and SEALUG!

Dallas has always been great to my career and my life. After a total of 12 years living in Dallas, I’ll miss it. But I’m also really excited about the move.

And for the record: yes, I know it rains a lot there. Thanks for the reminder.

Why do startups fail?

My friend, Jeremy Leonard made a great comment about why startups typically fail. I thought I’d share.

There are three reasons partnerships fail: 1) they under perform and everyone gets upset 2) they don’t do anything and everyone gets bored 3) they over perform and everyone gets greedy.

Other than that, they typically work very well.

A day a minute on YouTube

TechCrunch reports on an absolutely stunning factoid:

Time Magazine recently called YouTube one of the biggest tech failures of the past decade, which was hilarious. Hilarious in that the site is by far and away the most popular site for video on the web, and has revolutionized the way we view videos, period. Today brings another amazing stat about the site: Every single minute, over 20 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube.

In the time it took me to create this blog entry, nearly 10 days worth of video were uploaded. The power this represents is absolutely stunning.

Are dead communities the sign of a dying industry?

With each new hype, new projects form often without appropriate staffing and resources, only to die down or off a short time later. Today, for instance, the Web is littered with corporate community projects that have little or no traffic or interest. Concern mounts that this dead community litter is the sign of something scary for the health of the social engagement space.

I’m not worried.

As with any hype cycle, there are two parallel paths taking place:

• The Hype Path: Combining the “It’s new, therefore it’s amazing!” news cycle with a very vocal and enabled celebrity crowd creates a standard bell curve of hype.
• The Implementation Reality: On a more random, yet mostly trending upward curve, people are learning growing, doing, and gaining. More people try, some fail, but the trend overall is more not less social stuff.

Think about how many social networking sites have come and gone, yet Facebook is still a massive audience. And this isn’t a new trend: I remember dead BBS, dead Geocities pages, and dead email lists. But online discussion, personal Web pages, and email all carry on more robust than ever. Perhaps robust because of these early experiments that failed.

While many are talking about the hype of the shiny new thing, there’s a group of people working largely behind the scenes to create, learn, improve and create again. In the corporate environment, dead communities come in no small part from the lack of investment in anything past the launch. We’ve seen examples of simple, ugly sites generating large audiences and revenue (hello, Craigslist!) while impressive tech fails to bring in much attention at all (new Friendster, I’m looking at you!).

If community is about building relationships, we can learn a lot about community building by considering how we find, build, and support our personal relationships.

• We date many more people than we marry. (i.e. There’s bound to be plenty of failures in our quest to create something grand)
• If we blow a month’s salary on the first date, there’s not chance we’ll be able to afford the second date (i.e. If you’re budget, time, and energy are solely focused on the launch, what happens after you launch when the real work begins?)
• The backbone of a quality relationship is intimacy, and intimacy takes time and is difficult to get right (i.e. Expecting overwhelming success withing days or weeks or even years after launch is ridiculous)
• Outsourcing intimacy is call prostitution. (i.e. Saying to your agency “we give you a check, you give us an effective community is an unhealthy approach)

Honestly, I’m not really worried about the stage of the game we’re at right now. We’ve gotten through the “so that’s what the kids are doing” reaction, and now we’re onto the “how can we use this in our business” reaction. Dead communities are a sign of experimentation and experimentation leads to learning. Sure, some execs might be turned off by social projects that don’t work and pull the budgets for future development. But we’ve also passed the tipping point where that type of reaction means much for the long term. Businesses are all having to deal with customer expectations built daily based on what other businesses, inside and outside our own industries are doing. When my cable company is responding to my rants on Twitter, I start asking why my favorite shoe company (Nike) isn’t doing the same.

We’re in a fantastic place and we’re moving into a fantastic path towards the future. Failure is all part of the process as long as we’re learning from our mistakes and paying attention to the context those mistakes are taking place in.

UPDATE: Sam weighs in on this topic!

Managing communities

My friend Patrick O’Keefe is a genius when it comes to online forum management. A few weeks back, he posted a video of his BlogWorld Expo panel… and I’m just now getting around to sharing it.

How to Deal with Trolls, Spammers & Sock Puppets Panel at Blog World Expo 2008 from ManagingCommunities.com on Vimeo.

Thanks for the memories, Ford!

A few weeks back, the folks at Ford recently reached out to offer me a test drive of the new Lincoln MKS.

I was a bit skeptical at first, considering the history of the Lincoln brand. Namely, I didn’t figure I was quite old enough. Lincoln is the brand my grandparents drive. Lincoln is the brand of the Land Boats of my childhood. Or at least that’s where I started the weekend.

But after driving this MKS for a few days now, I can see that Lincoln is working on building a product that younger folks would be interested in. The car was feature laden, and for a gadget guy like me, that’s tasty fun.

Here’s a quick run down of some of the fun features:

• Badass cruise control – this was probably the most enjoyable feature about the car. The dynamic cruise adjusted to deal with obstacles around you (i.e. other cars) and slows down and speeds up to keep a safe distance from the car in front of you. Even if the car in front of you has recently occupied that space. Very cool. When you put this car in cruise control, it really controls your cruise, so to speak. Unlike typical cruise controls, it doesn’t make you hit the breaks when someone changes into your lane.
• Seat heaters… and coolers! Yeah, it’s cool to heat your seats. Unless you live in Texas. I’ve dreamed of a day when I could drive to a meeting in a nice shirt on a Texas summer day without walking into the meeting with sweat marks down my back. Gross, sure. But if you’ve ever been in this situation, you’ll feel me.
• THX Sound – who knew they did cars and Pixar movies!
• Microsoft Sync – Worked pretty slick for my iPod, but I couldn’t for the life of me get my iPhone’s bluetooth to connect. Looked pretty cool if it had though. Had I had the car longer, I would have googled to figure out how to fix it.
• Seats and mirrors that readjusted automatically if changed. I didn’t have enough time to deal with figuring out how to set my own preferences.
• Smmooooooth ride – like any of the Lincoln models I’ve been in over the years, this one had a pretty smooth ride. A bit on the rough side on the freeways (though not “rough”, really) but on city streets it absolutely floated over bumps.

As much as I liked the car overall, this is definitely not a kid friendly car. The car seat barely seemed to fit overall, allowing The Girl’s feet to be well within kicking distance of the passenger seat. The bottom seat anchors for clipping the car seat straps in were aligned really poorly and were far too far apart to make the short strap on our car seat actually work. And the trunk, while big enough to fit a body, wasn’t very deep. I often find myself changing The Girl in my trunk, or letting her play in it while I deal with bags or strollers. (Don’t worry, I leave the lid open!) The way the MKS was designed, it doesn’t really work for that.

Of course, families with 2 year olds certainly aren’t their target market!

Thanks to the kind folks at Ford for the drive. I’d be happy to drive anything else you want to loan me!

Check out some more photos on Flickr!

The power of a great story

Shortly before Christmas last year, I needed a new watch. It was time to step up to a “big boy watch”, forsaking the $100 jobs I’d been used to. Since this was likely to be a large purchase, I started searching the Web. I found a number of fantastic watches, each of them with a great story.The WWII Soviet watch on eBay, for example, wasn’t functional, but holy cow did it have a great story! But yeah, actually being able to report time seemed like a major criteria, so I headed to the jewelry store.

When I started shopping, I didn’t have much interest in brands, and certainly didn’t know the difference between Breitling, Omega, Tag Heuer, or Rolex. Regardless of quality or even style, I couldn’t really get excited about spending money on “just a watch”. So I told the salesman that I wanted a watch with a story. He showed me the Omega Speedmaster and told me that it was the first and only watch worn on the moon. Sold!

Well, not quite. I left the store without the Speedmaster, but lusting after it nonetheless. I went home and checked online to see if this story was correct; according to the Omega Web site, it sure was. But their own excitement about this story was, as you can see, less than compelling.

But after a few days, I realized I’d been talking all about this watch to friends and family. I was telling the story of this watch over and over again.. and I didn’t even own it. The depth of the story was selling me.

Christmas morning, I was overjoyed to find the Speedmaster under the tree. I couldn’t wait to learn more about the story of this watch timepiece. But in the box was literally nothing related to the story. Not one mention of its history and barely anything about its functions. (Although the manual was translated into 753 languages… gee thanks, that’s helpful)

But this watch’s story was so easy to share, that I found myself sharing it. Bragging about my new present, sure. But it was also about space, watches, the design style of the 1960s.

Stories are not just about the person tell it though, they’re also about what happens when someone hears it. Like my father-in-law who sent me the photo below from the Houston Space Center museum on his recent vacation trip. The story I told him about the watch, my passion at the time, provided context for him to both understand my passion and be on the lookout for it in the future.

There are two key lessons to learn from this experience:

1. Providing a story about your product makes it easier for people to talk about your product. If this was just a nice watch, how would I show it off without looking like a jackass? When I can talk about the story, it’s much easier.

2. Stories explain passion. It’s easy to understand why I’m excited about a watch, and it’s easy to create a reason for people to be on the lookout for the Omega brand if those people understand why I’m so excited.

It’s incredibly disappointing that Omega is overlooking such a great opportunity to let their customers tell great stories about this product, or I assume the rest of their product line.

Maybe that’s a good thing though… I don’t have to share this story with anyone!

7 New Community Jobs

A lot of great new Community Jobs this week.

• *HOT NEW* Social Network Coordinator/Facilitator, Boca Raton, FL
• *NEW* Community Manager Team Leader, Gibraltar
• *NEW* Community Manager, Gibraltar
• *NEW* Community Manager, Anywhere
• *NEW* Social Media and Content Strategy Guru, Seattle or Telecommute
• *NEW* Front End Developer, San Francisco, CA
• *NEW* Director, User Operations, San Francisco, CA

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

1 New & 3 HOT Community Jobs

Please feel free to post any Community based Job Openings you may have or someone you know.  http://www.communityguy.com/jobs/

• *NEW* Facilitator (Wikipedia Strategic Plan), San Francisco, CA
• *HOT* Community Manager – seeking AGENCY background, Watertown, MA
• *HOT* Community Manager, Truckee, CA
• *HOT* Community Manager for Social Networking Site, El Segundo, CA
• Still open -  Global Digital Communications Manager, Dearborn, MI

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