eBiz Tomorrow by Chris Salazar

I read this article about the 6 ways to not get stumbled. A lot of these reasons are logical and really take aware from the essence of the content posted. We all know that you need to not only report/summarize other content, but add some sort of value, right? Yes, this is all true, but HOW DO YOU GET STUMBLED?

Readers will stumble your blog if its useful and entertaining to them. This means your blog has to be in tip-top shape! Let’s review my 4 C’s of Blogging: Content, Clarity, Conversation, Customer. All of these shape your blog into something that is real and filled with value.

1. Content - Your content has to be relevant and up to date. This is what keeps your users coming back for more. Don’t just provide the bare bones, but add extra interesting and thought-provoking incite. Content on your site is key…and gauge success by noting trends and periods when you have most traffic.
2. Clarity - Make sure your voice is clear. Take a clear stance and prove it! In fact, be clear from the beginning of your goals for each blog post. This will help you stay on track with the blog post and gauge your success at the end. Is the purpose and point of your blog post conveyed clearly?
3. Conversation - Create an atmosphere that is ready for conversations. This will not come right away and takes work, but gear up and be ready for when it does happen. Conversations is important, but its not most important. First connect with yourself, write down your thoughts, then work on getting others involved.
4. Customer - Plain and simple, think of your users as customers. What do they need? What mediums do the use? How can you best express your thoughts? And, why are you blogging? Treat your users like customers, work on not only finding new customers, but keeping them. Shouldn’t be too hard considering we are all each other’s customers, just put on those shoes and write to your specific audience.

These are pointers on how to have a good blog, but theres still a lot of effort needed from you. You’ve got to connect with other people around the blogosphere. Don’t wait for them, go out and get them yourself!

Each corporation has several different entities and business units. Somehow, someway all of these must fit together to work towards the overall business strategy. Its imperative that each corporation have their own brand, but still hold together and create one…this is especially true for corporate online communities.

In an attempt to show this, I’m noting all of the different business units in a typical corporation:

• IT
• Marketing/PR
• Finance/Accounting
• Channel Partners

For every company this may be different, but these entities MUST work together for the overall purpose of the corporation. However, each must take into consideration their target market and specific customer.

Here’s some examples of different brands for each:

• IT - “The Techies”
  • Your experts in all the back-end tech stuff that not very many other people even understand. Your brand is “geek” and use this to attract these types of people.
  • Tech shows, blogs with technical info, podcasts, videocasts…doesn’t matter what it is, it should be TECHY!
  • Community Actions: Create tech shows, blogs, forums podcasts and videocasts demonstrating the capabilities of your products. Think about what “you” as a techy would want, and create it! Host user forums, live demos, and work closely with user groups during customer events.
• Marketing/PR - “Creative and Customer Facing”
  • These groups touch the customer. All eyes are on them, messaging is on them, they’re the face of the company. Again, speak your customers language, but stick to what you’re good at (leave the tech stuff to the techies)
  • Informal blogs, marketing campaigns that reach the customer, reach out to user groups and connect them with IT folks. Make the connections, generate leads, gain interest…and do all of this informally (thats the key)
  • Community Actions: Use PR and Blogs together as compliments. However, do not confuse them. Marketing should make sure the online community is involved in all customer touch points (events, product launches, R&D, etc). When creating PRs, Marketing should create two versions…1) the PR, and 2) a human version (informal) of that for the blogs
• Finance/Accounting - “It’s all about the numbers! Show me the money!”
  • Provide customers with the good numbers. Provide all of the other business units with the right numbers to pave ways for improvement.
  • Financial advisors need numbers, provide these to them. However, always, always be accurate.
  • Community Actions: You’re the number geeks, show your expertise. Do not be afraid to boast how well the company is doing or even a specific product! Strategically let your customers know through the blogs, events, or even website…just make sure this does not come off as bragging. Customers don’t like big egos.
• Channel Partners - “Customer Outlets…the VARs”
  • Other than direct sales, channel partners bring in the majority of the customers. Strengthen relationships with VARs, work with Marketing to create tools and campaigns that are beneficial for your partners.
  • Help partners increase visibility of your products/services, encourage them to promote them too!
  • Community Actions: Create tools your VARs can actually use. Videocasts, webinars, demos…all of this is good, but make sure the content is relevant. Partners are very specific in their needs, get one of your Partner experts talking to customers. Channels need a spokesperson, whether this be a blogger, podcaster…it’s important.
    

Each business unit can work on creating and enhancing these brands. All can work together to create a group of bloggers that target each one of these, or even a set of podcasts with an expert from each brand involved. Doing this will inevitably reach your customers in a variety of different ways.

Each brand should have one individual who represents them and touches the customer. This person should be savvy enough to know about the industry, company, product/service, and their specific brand. As each person markets their brand, they will all be working together to improve the overall brand of the corporation. This shows synergy…synergy is attractive and customers like it!

Jeremiah recently reported that his blog post has been translated to Hebrew, and I’m happy to report that my post on Social 2.0 and How to utilize its full potential in business bas been translated to Spanish here!

This is great for me.  Not only do people read my content, but some feel that it’s worthy enough to translate late into a different language.  This is awesome and definitely gives me a lot of motivation.

Thanks to everyone for reading.  Look forward to more collaboration in the near future!

I am not hosting my own blog! I’ve figured that since having WP host it was okay, it limited my ability to really bring what I want to my blog.  So there we have it…i’ve set up my blog and now look for more content soon!  Please, please make sure you update your bookmarks and RSS feeds!

I’ve previously talked about the basics for building an online community starting with corporate blogs. This is great for building a foundation, but each online community must have an underlying strategy to keep it living. Strategic planning is vital in ensuring online community goals are met and evolving.

Here’s my list of milestones and goals for all online community blogs (within the first few months):

• Integrate corporate blogs in all customer touch points including:
  • Announcements
  • Product Launches
  • Product Developments
  • Support
  • Customer Events

• Create community blogs to foster industry conversations (2-way) and thought leadership

• Encourage Product Marketing to actively participate in the online industry conversation:
  • Watch corporate bloggers and step in when needed
  • Interact with other industry practitioners and build an online social network
  • Provide corporate bloggers with research and ideas from the blogosphere

• Allow corporate blogs to be used as a feedback mechanism to improve products, support/tech help, messaging, and strategy
  • Connect product teams with current customers/users to build better products
  • Connect users with users to solve technical issues and log information in archives/database

• Utilize corporate blogs as sales tools
  • Use blog entries as conversation starters
  • Refer to corporate blogs and/or specific posts for tech help/information
  • Use blogs/bloggers to answer questions from the sales field

• Improve communication with partners and vendors
  • Blogs = reseller tools to promote vendor’s product info and support
  • Another medium to foster communication, product awareness, and channel partner advantages

• Use corporate blogs as a mechanism to keep track of competitor’s successes and advantages
  • Listen to their customer feedback - what are they doing well?
  • How are their customers reacting to your product launches, etc?
    • How can this information help your company improve product and operations?

This is a great list to start off with. It’s general, yet each corporation can prone it to their own liking. Additionally, here are some other thought-provoking posts that can help with your planning:

1. How to sell social media to your boss
2. Social 2.0 and How to utilize it’s full potential in business
3. The 4 C’s of blogging
4. Benefits of corporate blogs
5. Users vs Consumers - Who’s in, Who’s out

Jeremiah posted his eight things, so I’ll post mine here too!

1. I am a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. TKD has been a big part of my life since I was 7 years old. I actually got beat up before I started, my parents put me into TKD to gain some confidence…well it worked! The next time someone tried to pick on me, I made sure it was their last! Since then, I’ve done boxing and kickboxing too.
2. My first car is a scion tc becuse of Jeremiah. I was stuck on a Toyota Corolla (type s), but he said one day “how about a scion?” I said …”whats that?” I went back to my cubicle, looked it up, then called me parents.
3. Speaking of Jeremiah, I was his intern and believe it or not, I was there when he went from intranet manager to social media evangelist…I witnessed his newfound passion.
4. I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico…moved to San Jose, CA when I was 7-8 years old.
5. My first name is Chris and up until a few years ago, no one called me Chris except for when my mom was mad at me. Everyone else (family and friends) knew me as Anthony.
6. I am a DJ. Although I don’t DJ much, I did for a few middle school dances!
7. Im a pool shark…I love pool…and will hopefully join a tournament some day. I have yet to find someone who can beat me consistently…no one can. Im not being cocky, just no one that I know can.
8. MY LIFETIME GOAL IS…to become a music producer…work in the studio with artists. Not necessarily doing the creative part…but overseeing a music company like Jive Records.

Please, let’s keep this going. Let me know what your eight things are.

Everywhere around me, people talk about being an online community manager and being a community evangelist and how to deploy a successful online community. But, I think they’re (and me too) are getting ahead of themselves. There are some important Project Management skills and knowledge that you must have to be a successful manager.

The 4 Phases for any project/product launch are: Define, Design, Develop, and Deploy. These are critical milestones in every project that must be accounted for and documented in the critical path.

Define

• Define organizational and project objectives - LISTEN to goals, EVALUATE and audit, ANALYZE data, RESEARCH solution, create a NEEDS assessment proposal
• Define success criteria, project benchmarks
• Competitive/Industrial Analysis (if required)
• Define budget and cost
• Develop communication protocols and expectations

Design

• Build prototype or demo to test assumptions
• Develop architecture and navigation (design and look/feel)
• Develop technical design and infrastructure
• Test prototype usability and functionality
• Review progress in relation to project benchmarks

Develop

• Complete design based on client’s feedback
• Develop main sections and subsections from copy provided by client
• Test functionality
• Review progress in relation to project benchmarks

Deploy

• Coordinate offline advertising and marketing
• Deploy statistical tracking software
• Develop Meta tag code and search engine strategy
• Launch site line online
• Provide training and support
• Monitor success

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Now that the phases are set, these should be incorporated with the Project Plan. The typical plan is the critical path, which is the absolute minimum steps to finish the project on time. However, in order for the critical path to be successful it must take into account the following:

• The comprehensiveness of the work plan
• The correctness of the ordering of tasks and lags
• The accuracy of individual task-duration estimates

Steps to creating a Critical Path:

1. Identify tasks necessary to complete the project.
2. Estimate the duration of the various tasks in the network.
3. Identify task dependencies.
4. Draw a network that depicts the order in which various tasks can be executed.
5. Identify the critical path by adding up the duration of the tasks along each path and determining which path of the network will take the most time to complete.

Some like to not only create a critical path, but an “Adjusted Critical Path” which incorporates a contingency plan as well. This is a great way to help foresee any problems that could arise and allow time for damage control.

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Now that all of the planning is out of the way, a project manager must communicate with all members involved (developers, PMMs, Business Owners) via weekly meetings. Meetings are very important because they check the overall status of the project, can identify roadblocks, and ensure everything is on track. Since meetings are very important and should be efficient, here’s some tips…

Tips on running successful meetings:

• Planning a meeting
  • Set objectives for the meeting
  • Decide how long the meeting will last
  • Provide an agenda beforehand
  • Decide who will attend
• Running a meeting
  • Start the meeting on-time
  • Manage the meeting efficiently and stick to the agenda (do not introduce new topics that will confuse anyone)
  • Assign action items
  • Document actions
  • Summarize key points from the meeting in Meeting Minutes

These are rules and tips that have helped me, but I’m sure you have other tips as well.  Please feel free to share your thoughts with me!

For the next few months, I will be putting on the hat of an Online Community Marketing Manager and pretending as if I’m starting my own from scratch. For simplicity reasons, let’s assume I’ve already got all the back-end server stuff taken care of.

Some questions to ponder about building an online community are:

• who will participate?
• how much time with contributors need to spend on the tool(s)?
• how long does it take to see results and how are these measured?
• how will the online community integrate with other promotional and communication efforts?
• should you allow comments?

Some corporations have only a few bloggers, usually expert thought-leaders, and others have a wide range of employee bloggers (like Sun and IBM). Figuring out what best fits the company’s culture is very important. Either way, here’s a good blog policy to follow (created by sun).

The next important question to ask is why you are blogging. How can you align the blog with the online community and most importantly, the overall messaging of the company. Here’s a few steps to do this:

1. What is the corporate message? Write it down on a piece of paper and figure out how you can achieve this
2. How can you shape the blog to support and coincide nicely with your company’s overall strategy?
3. What trends and topics are hot in your industry? Visit sites like technorati to find out. Using tools like Google Alerts to keep up with the market. You need to be 100% up to date.
4. Who should blog? An individual, a group, or the whole company?

It’s one thing to create tools and push them out there, but its another to have a strategy and a goal for them. They must be part of the value chain that ultimately leads to the corporate message. The blog should spark conversation within the industry, somehow promote the company’s image, and be used as a knowledge base for all.

There are a few important aspects of blogging that serve beneficial and could help jump start other community marketing tools as well:

• Tagging - the method of categorizing information by topic, idea, customer, solution, etc
  • Taxonomy - formal categories grouped by data hierarchy, data relationship, and data type
  • Folksonomy - allowing users the power to define categories to make info easy to search, find, and store (i.e. flickr)
• Webfeeds, RSS - allow sumarries and/or full text entries to be read in feedreaders (MyYahoo, Google Reader)
• Comments - allow all comments, only delete spam. This fosters a dialog between multiple individuals at a time
• Web Analytics - how will traffic be analyzed? Google Analytics is a great tool. What stats must every blog have?

These are all things a Community Manager must take into account and be ready for. Just the first step in creating a blog, but there’s more. What about other help docs? If I were to create help docs (as few as possible), they’d have the following titles (in no particular order):

1. How to incorporate blogs with Flickr
2. Best Practices for blogging: Blogging 101
3. Blogging etiquette: What should and should not be said
4. How to become social and up-to-date with industry trends
5. Blog Analytics Essentials: How to make sense out of graphs and stats

Last, but not least, the role of a Community Marketing Manager is important. This person must possess certain characteristics in order to successfully evangelize the importance of such tools and to keep a program growing. Jeremiah has the 4 Tenets of a Community Manager, which are very difficult to uphold.

This should be enough for now. Please let me know how you’re doing…what roadblocks are you facing? Maybe we can help each other!