We had a great crowd – and had a great conversation on Friday at #TheCRLive. We were joined by some ‘social regulars’ like Wendy Moldauer, Barbara Gavin, Jim Spencer, Joselin “Jose-lean – as in thin” Mane, & Kate Brodock by some new faces – Jim Hughes, Liz Tran, and Christine Sierra. Topics ranged from member engagement, text analytics, BuddyPress, event management, and the origin of the hashtag.
Best practices that came up:
- Give aways and contests are an effective tool to grow your audience *IF* they are aligned with your other content. I.E. giving away tickets for the House of Blues is a great idea but giving away an iPod if you are a clothing store is not really a great idea because you will recruit people interested in winning an iPod, not exploring fashion.
- BuddyPress is a good tool for extending the WordPress platform into a community – but still a bit limited in terms of permission structure.
- In mining Twitter for information about influence it is critical to analyze the content of links, not only the content of the tweets themselves.
- It’s never too early to start community management – passion and engagement is more critical to long-term success than initial scale.
We also had a very interesting conversation on social media attribution and verification. Sometimes – for example with the protests in Iran – attribution is stripped (in that case for security reasons) but then verification becomes challenging. There are few cultural standards on how to verify and even around the table, not a consistent practice of how to attribute – some attributed to the first and last person they got information from, some only did last. No clear answer or best practice but clearly an issue in an age where it is so easy to pass along and magnify information (as eximplified over the weekend by the news of the Palins divorcing quickly followed by a retraction… not an important subject but I was struck by seeing both pieces of information so close together).
In New York, Michael Chin hosted a very small gathering to kick of #TheCRLive NYC – apparently New York is quiet over the summer or there is a serious derth of people interested in community management. We will likely wait until people are back in town from their summer jaunt to hold the next one. Thanks to Stephen Kline and Mark Palermo for attending! We are also looking to kick off#TheCRLive in San Francisco soon – if you are interested in helping out, please contact us!
Also we are learning a few things as we do more of these events. The first is that a big, round table is actually a lot more condusive to good conversation than long tables. The second – which unfortunately doesn’t come with our regular location – is that wifi would be incredibly useful mostly because it is hard to type quickly or moniter the digital conversation on phones. Something to think about for you event planners out there. What we have liked? Getting a relatively small group of people together to have an interesting conversation vs. having a bigger but more social gathering.
Please join us at any of our upcoming roundtables!
