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.”

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

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.

The overview?

1. Define your own success
2. Pick the right people
3. Diversity is essential
4. Community first
5. Don’t reinvent the wheel
6. Communicate, communicate, communicate

Full article here. Thanks Allen!

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?

We had a blowout time last night at Citizen Space celebrating Ma.gnolia’s one year birthday.

Enric has posted some photos and we also captured some with Tara’s laptop iSight, which were uploaded directly using FlickrBooth.

I’ve posted the Wine List to Flickr and you can also check out the related wine entries and on, (where else?) Ma.gnolia under the magnolia1yr tag.

Oh, and thanks to Cris Pearson from Mac devshop Plasq for attending remotely from Australia.

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.