The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

DJ Waldow on Scale Issues and a Day in His Life

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The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management. Since there’s a bit of an overlap between this series and @TheCR Quick Chat, we’re posting these in place of the QC for the time being.

DJ Waldow from Blue Sky FactoryOur first episode features an interview with DJ Waldow, Director of Community at Blue Sky Factory. From their web site:

Blue Sky Factory is all about your success (Blue Sky), and the idea that success isn’t luck or an accident, but something you make (Factory). Our chosen vehicle for helping you achieve success is email marketing.

Highlights include:
– DJ answers the “isn’t email dead?” question.
– We discuss the difference between social media and community management, and how DJ juggles the two roles.
– DJ describes a day in his life, from monitoring to outreach and response and even prospecting
– We discuss scale issues for smaller companies, larger companies, and franchises

*Special Bonus: DJ mentioned being an expectant father during this recording. Eva Claire Waldow was born Tuesday, March 23, 2010. Congratulations!


Download this episode.

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

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Aaron Strout on Measurement and Best Practices

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tough night I’ve been friends with Aaron since he and I were on the team together at Shared Insights. We worked on community projects like “We Are Smarter than Me” and traveled the country recording podcasts with industry rockstars. It was a bit odd interviewing Aaron since we’d tag-teamed so many interviews in the past, but we muddled through. 🙂

On the podcast, Aaron shares more about Powered, including how their “four super powers” – Strategy, Content, Measurement and Platform – support communities for clients like Radio Shack, Sony, HP and Atkins. We dug into content and measurement in detail, exploring how companies should think about these important facets of community building.

We also talked about Aaron’s role as an evangelist (or the Kevin Bacon of social media as Adam Cohen noted) and what best practices he’s picked up along the way. Given Aaron’s success and influence this is must-listen stuff. He’s humble of course, but shares a lot of nuggets about the secrets to his success.

Download this podcast (22 minutes/19.8mb)

 

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Conversations with Community Managers – Diane Hessan

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Diane Hessan from Communispace is one of the most approachable CEOs you’ll meet. When you meet her for the first time she really wants to get to know you and listens intently. It’s not surprising she runs a successful social media company given this trait and it’s also not surprising she has her team actively (and publicly) sharing via a group blog.

We talked about the blog and what executives need to think about when they’re getting started in social media. Her advice in a nutshell? Start slow and be prepared to mix business with personal. Diane does a good job of this with her popular @communispaceCEO Twitter profile, where she shares what she’s thinking about and reading and isn’t afraid to be herself. It shouldn’t surprise you that Diane was named the 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce last month. Enjoy the podcast!

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Conversations with Community Managers – Michael Brito

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I found Michael Brito (@britopian) through a mention on Twitter. He’d written a blog post called “Social Media Marketing Will Soon Become a Commodity Skill Set” and it somehow found it’s way into my stream. I agreed with the premise and let Michael know on Twitter. We had a back and forth and before long I asked him to join me for a podcast. We spoke a couple days later the the rest is history (captured on this podcast for your enjoyment).

We talked about listening and responding via social networks, humanizing brands and what happens when those humans move on and finally talked about the blog post that originally brought us together. It was a great chat – I hope you enjoy it!

Download this podcast (17mb/18 minutes)

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Conversations with Community Managers – Bryan Person

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It’s a little ironic that I’m doing a podcast with Bryan since the first time we met it was to discuss the best practices and lessons learned he’d accumulated in creating podcasts for Monster.com. He taught me everything I needed to know about podcasting, which served me well at SXSWi when Aaron Strout and I recorded 15 interviews in one evening. Ah the memories…

In this interview, Bryan shares what he’s learned working at Monster, building the highly-successful Social Media Breakfast series and with the talented team at LiveWorld.

I love how Bryan answers my question about his time as a community manager at Monster. It sounds like what a lot of community managers are experiencing today – the “tip of the iceberg” effect.

Download the mp3 (19 min/17.5 mb)

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Conversations with Community Managers – David Alston

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Rachel and I had a chance to sit down with David Alston from Radian6 last week. I first met David at a Social Media Breakfast in Boston and was inspired by how he looks at the way marketing (and the role of the CMO) is changing as social media and community become more prevalent in business. In this podcast we explored this dynamic and learned how Radian6 helps community managers stay on top of brand conversations across the web. We hope you enjoy it and would love to hear how you see marketing changing in your organization.

Download the mp3 (21 min/19.7 mb)

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Introducing @TheCR Quick Chat

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While Rachel and I spend a lot of our time working with Community Roundtable members to help them be successful community managers, we also want to make sure some of what we do gives back to folks that aren’t members yet, but still want to stay on top of the latest trends/issues in community management.

With that in mind, we’ve created a podcast series we call @TheCR Quick Chat. This series focuses on issues, ideas and best practices for community managers and social media practitioners. We’re scheduling chats with community managers, analysts and social media consultants with a goal of uncovering nuggets of wisdom each week. We can’t promise they’ll always be quick, but they’ll be full of great insights if you’re interested in community management.

We’re working putting this up on iTunes, but didn’t want to stop us from sharing the conversations we’ve had to date. Subscribe to this blog and we’ll be sure to post an update when we get iTunes set up.

We’re pleased to make our first chat available, recorded recently with Keith Burtis from Best Buy. Keith is the community manager for the recently launched Best Buy Remix, the open API for Best Buy’s product catalog. In this podcast he shares how he got started in community management, how he supports the Remix community, his thoughts on metrics for community managers and more.

Download the mp3 (24 min/21.8 mb)

Future @TheCR Quick Chats:

David Alston (VP – Marketing/Community, Radian6)

Adam Cohen (Partner, Rosetta)

Bryan Person (Founder, Social Media Breakfast & Evangelist, LiveWorld)

Michael Brito (Social Media Evangelist, Intel)

If you’d like us to add you or someone you know to this list, drop us a note or add a comment to this post. Thanks for your support!

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