Basically, the masseuse wanted to know what I did, and I had to figure out how to explain what it is we do, exactly, in layman’s terms.

I mean, you know the drill: “So, what do you do?” the stranger with no background in your field (and even less technical experience) inevitably asks. And so instantly you’re forced to reduce what you do, day and day out, online and off, into a few human-comprehensible sentences which relate, with little subtlety, to how you make a living doing whatever it is that you do.

“Well,” my common refrain usually begins, “we help startups and tech companies learn how to build healthy communities.”

But no, that’s not quite right, since building communities is often what we advise against, suggesting instead to become part of existing communities and to learn to serve those collectives that already have already formed around areas of interest and passion.

“We’re kind of like personal trainers for companies that want to get better at social media,” I follow. “If we do the hard work for our clients, then we build the muscles, and when our contract is up, the company is no better off, and we leave with a bunch of social capital that our client should have been earning.”

“I mean, simply, we sell our advice and our experience being in the trenches, building grassroots communities, working on open source projects, being transparent, giving away our work and our knowledge as much as we can towards building healthy, global, sustainable movements like Coworking and BarCamp.”

Sure, that’s correct, and that’s transactionally what we do and what people pay for, but it still kind of misses the point of our approach and the way we think about working in social media and online communities.

Ultimately, I didn’t have an answer. Not one that really sufficiently could capture what we do in a way that he could viscerally “get” it. I mean, it wasn’t like I was trying to sell him or anything so it’s not like I was trying to convince him of our merits. But coming up with that short description that captures over six years of cumulative wisdom between Tara and myself working on real-world projects and nurturing but also watching communities grow, stutter, fail, resurge and then transcend is something that probably isn’t possible… and might not actually serve the point of connecting with someone over the work that we do.

“So it keeps you busy then?” the masseuse finally concluded.

“Yeah, I’d say that,” I responded. “And through this work, I’ve had the privilege to know and to meet people who are really pursuing their passions, or just beginning to learn that that’s an okay thing to do. And I think if anything, a good measure of how successful we are with our work is the degree to which, through our advocacy and our own actions, we are able to convince other people to give themselves the permission to pursue their own passions and the things that make them most happy. It’s a hard thing to quantify, but at the end of the day, I can say that it’s a rather satisfying way to make a living.”

Today Citizen Agency is one year old.

One year from the date that we got our official legitedness from the powers that be.

One year.  20 clients. 14 conferences. Zero debt. Two coworking spaces opened ourselves. 11 Coworking spaces opened in total (80+ in progress). 15 BarCamps (or similar *Camps) attended (lost count of how many have happened in the past year). A couple of tiffs. Hundreds of victories. Loads of support. 72 mugs.

It’s been a fine year.

In his post, he writes:

It’s been a difficult decision to take, especially as I love Chris and Tara and have enjoyed working with them so much. Their genuine passion for putting the community first has been inspirational.

However as time has passed at Citizen Agency, it has become clear that my views as to where I would like to see the business headed differ to those of Chris and Tara. Obviously there can only be one long-term direction in a company, and so after much head scratching and deliberation around the table I’ve decided to make a move sooner rather than stick with something which is not going to work out for me.

We’ve really valued Ben’s contributions but also recognize that our future paths diverge. As such, we agreed with Ben that he should pursue opportunities that give him a chance to do what he loves most.

He’s posted a list of his credentials and a link to his CV and LinkedIn profile, so if you’ve got open opportunities for someone with Ben’s experience and talents, drop him a note. We wish Ben the best of luck and support him as he seeks out future endeavors.

From my favorite new book, Small Giants: Companies that chose to be great instead of big, that I’m in the middle of reading (and being inspired by):

Size and growth rate aside, these small giants share some very interesting characteristics. They are all utterly determined to be the best at what they do. Most have been recognized for excellence by independent bodies inside and outside their industries. All have had the opportunity to raise a lot of capital, grow very fast, do mergers and acquisitions, expand geographically, and generally follow the well-worn route of other successful companies.

That’s what I want CA to be: the best it can be. Top quality. To be synonymous with amazing insight, 100% authenticity and kickass, knock-em-dead breakthroughs. When you think of people who truly understand what ‘community’ means to your company and how to reach out to your customers in a meaningful way, you think CA. When you think ‘Inreach’, you think CA. When you think changing paradigms and shifting the power balance, you think CA.

We have a long way to go…but I’m determined to boldly work towards that goal. I won’t stop for less.

2006 was a pretty awesome year…launching CA in June, filling up our client roster in July, expanding to a team of 3 in October, getting our first office in November, with all sorts of little amazing things weaved in between all of that: travel, presentations, events, revelations, etc.

Of course, there are also the hard parts that come with a business: clients who don’t pay and make you feel crappy, all of the paperwork and accounting stuff, the IP legal threats, the insanely long hours and melting away of free time, etc. But these things are the exception, not the rule and we are learning to deal with these as they come, and, really, the downs only make the ups seem that much uppier.

Looking over the horizon of 2007, we got really introspective. During xmas and right before NYE, Chris and I spent some time on the east coast at his parents place in New Hampshire. We were offline and had lots of time to talk and hear ourselves think. And, I’ll tell you what:

It was amazing.

At one point, we were sitting back, taking in the quiet and I thought to myself, “I want more of this.”

Getting back to San Francisco was good. We were ready to come home and missed the energy here, but as the plane neared the city, we started stressing again: “Did you get those mockups done for so-and-so?” “We need to finish that research on blah!” “We should schedule a conference call to deal with yadda yadda.” I could feel my stomache getting tight and that feeling of open-aired creativity was gone. I was forcing square pegs into round holes again just to get things done.

So, when Chris said to me on New Years Day, “Lets get off of our computers and go down to the coffee shop…with books and magazines…no computer,” it all melted away again. I grabbed my copy of The Economist and the book I’m enjoying right now, Small Giants, and we spent 3 delicious hours just reading and talking about what we are reading.

Consequently, The Economist this month is all about Happiness. Maybe that should be part of my predictions for 2007 as well. Happiness is going to be re-examined. TED looked at it last year. The Economist has a whole issue looking into it. Economists around the world are starting to measure happiness itself, since they have found:

Happiness, as measured by national surveys, has hardly changed over 50 years. The rich are generally happier than the poor, but rich countries do not get happier as they get richer. The Japanese are much better off now than in 1950, but the proportion who say they are “very happy� has not budged. Americans too have remained much as Alexis de Tocqueville found them in the 19th century: “So many lucky men, restless in the midst of abundance.� from Economics Discovers its Feelings in Dec 19, 2006 Economist

Which made me think of our good friend, Evelyn Rodriguez, and the day she came into our office and drew for us this amazing diagram of how happiness plateaus…something like this (sorry Ev if I butchered it):

…and she talked about the need to reconnect to amazing offline things like art and salons…and we loved her ideas, but kept fretting about how darn busy we are…

But are we getting happier? We have more money. We travel more. We have total freedom. We have loads of choice (we still have more people wanting to work with us than we can take on, so we get to choose our clients)…but where do I find myself happiest?

When I’m doing my research. When I’m brainstorming one on one with a client. When I’m talking to people about their passions and getting their ideas for the future. When I’m talking to an incredibly passionate developer or designer or the like who wants to change the world.

Do we need to expand? Take on more work? Make more money? Grow the business? Save more money? Buy more stuff? Travel more?

No.

We need to make more time for our community projects. We need to read more blog posts and articles and amazing books on and around these subjects. We need to be talking to brilliant people who have been part of this and write about them. I want to have more time to blog again and carry on more conversations online and offline. I want to take weekends off and go to events and spend more time with the people I love (including my son).

So…as a promise to ourselves in this new year, Citizen Agency will:

1. Follow the lead of our good friends at Carson Systems and work shorter weeks. We’ll start out with 5 days – 8 hour days only. We will work towards the 4 day work week by June. “Work” being client stuff…not our community stuff
2. Pay ourselves a decent wage. This wisdom came from Lane, who told us one of the first questions they asked themselves when forming Adaptive Path: “What do we want to make?” Pay yourself that. Don’t sacrifice your comfort for your company.
3. Always put people before $$. We mostly always do this…but we fail in the area of counting ourselves as people.
4. Say NO more so we have time to say YES to the things we care about.
5. Work exact and specific hours allotted to projects…and stop ‘overgiving’. Our time is valuable. If we don’t remember that, nobody else will.
6. Allot time to do research – that means reading, recording, testing, surveying, interviewing, understanding, crunching, exploring, discovering, thinking, etc. I need to talk to Austin more about this. He has some ideas on how this part of our work can be funded so we can put more time into this.
7. Hire an accountant so we can ignore that stuff.

I’m really excited about the year ahead. We are thinking about bringing on others to CA, but we know we aren’t totally ready for the big leap into hiring…it would mean growth faster than we are organically meant to grow.

Ah…work/life balance. Seems like a cliché, don’t it?

[Juan23 on Flickr: Hellooooo Nurse]

With all of the talk lately about the Ze Frank / Rocketboom numbers, I thought it would be helpful for us to jump in and talk about some of the stuff that we’ve been thinking about.

You see, we deal with this issue regularly. We work with more qualitative (ie. anecdotal) data than we do with quantitative (ie. raw data). When it comes to community measurements, you can’t always think in terms of volume (ie. numbers of signups or page views). Nor can you always think in terms of density (ie. numbers of downloads or, in the case of Devnets, mashups, etc.).

There are always oodles of factors that affect the size or the shape of a community. Some communities abhor size. Some need large volumes to operate. We’ve witnessed communities of 20 to 20 million that could all be deemed very healthy.

But other than to go on ‘gut feeling’, what do we have to measure the health of one community against another. Or…more importantly for us…the growing health of a community? We want to see that what kind of advice we are giving is working and learn from it – adjusting so that we can truly help our clients and our clients’ clients connect.

Jeneane makes a great point when she talks about likability. Robert’s point about engagement is very valid. Both of these factors, plus many others, start to inform us how we are doing when it comes to serving our communities. We figure a good mix of quantitative and qualitative data – weighted just right – will start to inform us. But we can’t forget ‘gut instincts’, either. I have studied stats since that horrifically boring university class, nearly 9 years ago. I remember looking at a textbook example of some trend and thinking, “But that doesn’t account for human emotions. We could change our minds in a second.” Sure enough, every day people baffle the economists and go in directions that could never be predicted. Look at MySpace. Bah, look at Cabbage Patch Kids so many years ago. Tickle Me Elmo? Try to explain the phenomena all you want with scientific theories, but I remember falling in love with Cabbage Patch Kids for absolutely irrational reasons, then falling in love with Tickle Me Elmo for entirely different irrational reasons.

And wild ‘successes’ aren’t the only story, either. What about those phenomena that thrive on rarity and secretiveness… communities driven by their obscurity and closed doors? ‘Buzz’ and press would kill them. We advise almost all of our clients to open up, but there are a few we think will do better doing the exact opposite.

So, what works for one community, won’t work for another – not to mention the individual needs within that community. Everybody has a different motivation for being there. How can you tell if you are satisfying all of those needs? And how do you satisfy all of those needs without getting to the point that you lose your own identity? Or worse…lose everyone to a watered down message?

So, we started thinking about this in a music equalizer metaphor. Take a look at these default settings in iTunes for the various genres of music:

ELECTRONIC

POP

JAZZ

Every song within those categories has a different ideal point on that equalizer to sound just right as well. It isn’t one measurement or adjustment (inputs and outputs) that determines the perfect sound. Some speakers will handle the sound differently. Whether it is an MP3 or a CD or a Cassette Tape or a Record will also make a difference. Oh…and of course the space you are playing the music in. I used to have a stereo that you could pick a pre-set for the ‘room’ of a house you are in: dining room, bedroom, party room, kitchen, bathroom, etc.

And…no matter how ‘great’ you make it sound…the recipient’s enjoyment of the music itself also depends greatly on their ‘taste’. I heart old R&B, Funk and Old Skool and cannot understand for the life of me why Chris can’t get into it. He can’t understand why I can’t get into alternative rock.
So, seeing that music is a nearly perfect metaphor for the way we approach community – gives us some solid measurements while allowing for endless variations – we are in the process of developing adjustable equalizers on three distinct levels that interact (as discussed as well at BarCampBerlin):

1. ENVIRONMENT – total inputs. You can’t adjust these. Things like: politics, trends, competitive environment, language, reputation, timing,  etc. TimeCabbage Patch Kids today are just not as cool. Garbage Patch Kids, however…I like to use the example of one of the best marketing books ever published, Gonzo Marketing…launched days before 9/11. Think it got much airplay?
2. PRODUCT – more inputs. Stuff like: features, user experience, design, platform, interoperability, language, sociality, documentation, complexity, etc. The product does not exist outside of its context, like the Environment and the Community.
3. COMMUNITY – transparency, mood, communications, relationships, reputation (the part you can work on), trust, etc. The mix of the ‘gut’, the qualitative and the quantitative. This is the most complex system of measurement and the most delicate. We thought about calling this part ‘communications’ or ‘marketing’ or the like, because the overall goal is to measure the health of communities…but this is more the ‘little c’ community portion.

We’d love your feedback on the work we are doing and plan to start to publish more as we actually get moving on it (one of the issues has been time – between the new office, the client load and all of the events, we’ve been too swamped to work on this). When the office is set up, we plan to have evening get togethers (with wine) to discuss stuff like this.

That’s less than the cost of 3 Aeron Chairs ($2697). What did we get for $2672? This is what makes it really awesome:

• 10 desks with ample workspace
• 20 boardroom chairs (stackable)
• 4 movable boardroom tables (small, can come together or pull apart)
• One Coat rack
• 4 File boxes
• 3 perfectly awesome adjustable ergonomic chairs
• 2 bookshelves
• 5 waste baskets
• One beautiful black leather sofa (new)
• One coffee table (to go with the leather sofa)

…and some other stuff, too. Of course, we have to put it all together ourselves now, but isn’t that half of the test of whether a team can work together?

We looked at all sorts of options, even buying used furniture from former startups gone under…loads of Aeron chairs and fancy modular units. All still very expensive (fyi…Aeron chairs second hand don’t lose much value…which I suppose is important).

We even talked about making it all ourselves from scratch, but a trip to home depot to work out the costs proved that Ikea (we don’t know how they do it) is only marginally more expensive – and it all sort of comes together, so no major labor.

We started out four and a half months ago, no savings (not even personal savings), no funding and no clients. Today, we have 10 clients, an office (we are sharing Citizen Space btw), ability to eat and now furniture! We are still fumbling through much of this business stuff and definitely behind in our own promotional materials (like the website, etc. – but we have so many requests for work that we haven’t had time to promote…wait…um…).

We are learning, too. Things haven’t been all sunshine. There are rough moments. Months we couldn’t pay ourselves. Scary moments when you question everything you are doing. Sad moments when a relationship doesn’t work out. Unfortunate moments when someone wishes you ill-will. Most of these moments are when we have to get a little real, put down our ‘embrace the chaos’ banners and think of real ways to move forward (which are still about embracing the chaos, but add a little ‘protective’ layer so that we don’t end up being taken advantage of by the self-centered interests that exist).

But, we are proud of ourselves for working hard and pushing through…and especially that office full of furniture that is being delivered this Friday for under $3k.

I’m a wee bit late on reporting this story…we missed it when we were in Europe and I’m finally catching up!

I just got the chance to watch Carlos demo his upcoming release of Scrapblog on Podtech. It looks fantastic!

Scrapblog is another awesome client who implements quickly and designs beautifully. They’ve created a really delightful product. We’re proud to be working with them
Okay…so, um, Carlos? Release it already!