It just so happened that Beth had the perfect destination for them… take a look:

A buddy of mine, Sean Coon, has been working on a project down in (relatively) rural Greensboro, North Carolina for some time called The People, Yes.

The goal of the project is founded in acting locally:

To reach out to our neighbors on the other side of the digital divide and provide the necessary training and logistics for enabling a new online community of voices via blogging, podcasting, vlogging, etc. We plan on directly engaging with the homeless community and folk living at or below the poverty line, but will work with any Greensboro resident who would like to publish their point of view.

After struggling for a year to get off the ground (meanwhile running his own consultancy), Sean has a shot of getting some great support through Net Squared’s Technology Innovation Fund contest as part of their upcoming N2Y2 Conference. He’s submitted a proposal outlining the goals for the project and now needs your support.

From now until April 14th, you can go an read up on the projects submitted, see what Dan Ben-Horin, president of Net Squared’s parent organization, thinks and then cast your votes on the slate of 10 projects that you think are most deserving of support from the NetSquared community.

More specifically, here’s how to make sure your vote counts:

1. First of all, get to know the projects participating by downloading and reading the N2Y2 Voter Booklet.
2. Next, sign up for an account on Net Squared and login (this is a must for your vote to count).
3. Once logged in, head to your ballot and choose at least five different projects, up to a max of 10. And remember to choose wisely, because the top 20 projects will receive a portion of the $100,000 being put towards these projects over the course of 2007-2008.

Oh, and I should add, Citizen Agency will be participating by donating a number of hours of our service to the fund, so clearly, we want a shot at working with the best of the best!

Lastly, I should point out that Net Tuesday is taking place tomorrow night at Citizen Space starting at 6:00pm. This month’s topic is “How Nonprofits Can Use and Build Online Social Networks: Change.org and Ning at Net Tuesday” featuring Gina Bianchini, the co-founder and CEO of Ning and Benjamin Rattray the CEO of Change.org, a stellar line-up, to be sure!

So there you go, two solid ways to do some good. And, in case you’re still not meeting your do-good quota, check out the Giving 2.0, Lighter Footstep and Helping Hand groups on Ma.gnolia.

I’ve put together a nifty survey to gauge what we need to do int he next while to serve everyone’s needs. If you have 10-15 free minutes, stop by and fill it out:

Take the Survey HERE

Thanks so much for your help! We hope to take this movement to really cool places for everyone. It’s all part of our ‘Building Blocks‘.

Chris and I are off to ETech this week. We are giving a workshop entitled: Community Marketing: Your Customers in Charge

Which is a bit melodramatic for the pretty nuts and bolts workshop we’ve put together.

Stay tuned, because we’ll also post the slides to Slideshare as well as the notes from the session soon!

See you there?

Last week I spent time talking to a lot of different technology
people, from all over the world geographically and organizationally and culturally.
The conversation kept looping back to Microsoft, and to the same sentiment: They’ve lost their mojo. Lots of people will end up using Vista, but does anyone care? The Microsoft execs look haggard and joyless, and half the interviews feel phoned-in. There’s real innovation in the Office UI, and everyone says “But it’s OK, the old keyboard shortcuts still work”. The advertising campaign is vapid and lame, but then that’s nothing new; they haven’t run an effective one in years. I’m sure that Microsoft can come back, the way IBM did after their bad patch last century; maybe the energy is building in a building in Redmond where nobody’s looking. I’ve never liked Microsoft, but now I realize how much energy they used to inject into the ecosystem, because it’s not there any more and I miss it.

What’s interesting about this, while a curious take on Microsoft’s challenges to keep its dominant industry position, is that it speaks to a much greater challenge, and one that might have otherwise been avoided.

Witness the loss of one’s mojo from the outside is never pretty. Especially in the slow mojo-death of Microsoft over the last five years, it’s been a rather excruciating affair. Though there have been glimmers of hope, much thanks to Scoble’s voice, the truth of the matter is that the core of Microsoft never changed, and that the values that propelled it to the top were antithetical to the openness, transparency and ethics that would rule in Web 2.0.

And mojo isn’t about what’s right or wrong inside an organization — it has much more to do with what’s going on externally — and how your actions and behaviors make people feel.

A wise woman once said that it’s not what you say, but how you make your audience feel that matters. And how Tim feels resonates for many, I would guess.

So in extending this a little further, I think Microsoft could have benefited from taking a Tinkerbell mentality — that is, one of utter subservience and partnership with its customers — listening to them, responding, guiding forward and taking risks, all because it believed it was acting in the interest of its most important customers, and not its shareholders.

But this is not what Microsoft did, and now, five or so years later, after countless missed opportunities, when Microsoft’s Tinkerbell is at its weakest, needing its customers to clap for it just to keep it alive, they can’t be bothered, much the same as Microsoft couldn’t be bothered when Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape, a product of the ether, to answer for Microsoft’s insouciance. Now it seems, given the lukewarm response to Vista, that Microsoft’s Tinkerbell has, much like its mojo, died.

Stewart and the Flickr folks are good friends of the Agency. They’re good people, espouse very positive principals and have learned a great deal in working on Flickr. The magazine covers and feature articles don’t hurt their popularity, but in my experience, they’ve remained just as day-to-day and unassuming as if they’d never found international fame. In fact, Tara and I ran into Stewart on the bus to the office a short while ago and it couldn’t have been more reassuringly mundane.

Recently Stewart was interviewed by CNN. His answers were pretty down to earth but didactic all the same:

CNN: Is this desire to be creative and share inspiration a new phenomenon? Where do you think it comes from?
Butterfield:

I think there’s a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that’s music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative — they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever. Enabling and empowering that is a very powerful force in human nature and I think it’s always been there.

When people talk about Web 2.0 it’s this all-new, never-seen-before thing. If you think back to the 19th century, if you wanted to listen to a song you’d get the family together, go into the parlor and everybody would pick up their instruments and play a song.

Over the course of the 20th century that changed with the invention of radio, movies and television, so that when you wanted to listen to a song it wasn’t something you made yourself; it was something you purchased and consumed. The idea of people making music or art or entertaining themselves is much older and I think more fundamental. A lot of the more creative outlets you see in Web 2.0 are a return to that more fundamental human nature.

CNN: What’s the key to making online communities work?

Butterfield:

I’m not sure I have a universal answer to that. Take the people working on Flickr, including myself, a lot of the development team and Caterina Fake who’s my wife but also the co-founder; all had really extensive experiences with online communities, most of us going back to the days before the Web. We worked really hard but I don’t think we had any formula for how to pull it off. Flickr could have gone in a million different ways.

A lot of our success came from George, the lead designer, and Caterina. Both of them spent a lot of time in the early days greeting individual users as they came in, encouraging them and leaving comments on their photos. There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them too.

Definitely give the whole piece a read. I think his attitude and experience is really valuable and just so happens to be very much in line with the things we’ve seen and what we council our clients on.

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.

To nobody’s surprise, we all had a slightly different viewpoint of identity from one another.

One person uses the same login name as their offline name everywhere they go. She is not afraid of the consequences. She is all about truth laid bare.
Another person asked how to manage their personal and private – especially when political views come into play. Should it matter once you are responsible for the future of a company, employing several people that you are outspoken? Maybe…

Another person defines himself through his work. His brand and his business are one and the same and everything he lives, eats and breathes is his business. He hasn’t questioned that.

Someone else, who I thought was pretty ‘out there’ online reveals that there is a secret identity somewhere that none of us could trace. I’m curious.

Some of us know who we are. We let our identities lead. We are out there and proud of it. Some of us hide behind a persona online to be able to accomplish what we can’t offline. Some of us don’t distinguish between the two. Some want all identities merged. Others fight to remain anonymous. Others want multiple personalities.
No matter what, all of us have an intense, emotional relationship with identity.
We hope to continue this conversation in a slightly more serious gathering in the new year. Can the solution ever be automated? I don’t know. Parts of it. But emotions and experiences so unique make it a highly personal experience…

Something that we’ve been talking about lately is ‘higher purpose’….setting a mission and vision, not in the traditional sense of a corporate mission statement that sounds as dry as toast and inspires very little, but in the sense of doing something good for the world, beyond just what you do.

The more we look at the companies we deem as ‘successful’ – the companies whose communities are strong and passionate – the more we see the common thread of higher purpose. It isn’t always as publicized as Google‘s “Do No Evil”…but it is pretty apparent when one takes a look at companies like Flickr and Threadless that there are higher purposes of service there for specific communities.

Chris and I actually sat down well before we even thought up Citizen Agency and wrote down our higher purposes. Our exercise was more of a couple compatibility test, but it has proven to be highly relevant to everything else we’ve done since then. We were to write down our core life goal on a piece of paper, then share it with the other person. Both of us came back with the a statement similar to:

Empowering the end user.

Months later, when Citizen Agency was born, it was born on that higher purpose. The Agency in Citizen Agency is a double entendre.

So, in order to make it dead simple for you to do this exercise start with the personal. What is your personal ‘higher purpose’. (I believe that it is much easier to do this excercise once you have children. That kind of experience forces you to think about someone other than yourself.) Take your personal purpose or raison d’etre and look at what you are creating with your business. Do they match? Can they?

If they don’t, you may have a commodity…and that is fine. Commodities are fine things and much needed in the world. However, it is incredibly difficult to build a community around a commodity. With purpose, it flows.

So, then…what is your higher purpose? We have a client summit on Friday during the day and that is going to be the first exercise. It should be interesting to hear…and then try to work with everyone to see how that works back into their products. I’ll be sure to report the findings here.

[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.