Month: September 2008

The importance of community management

One of the great arguments in favour of employing social web tools is the fact that they are pretty quick, and usually cheap, to put together. However, that’s not taking into account the other costs, one of which is managing the community created by such sites.

This entails a number of things: welcoming new people, seeding some discussions, encouraging people to get involved. At the bare minimum it should consist of moderating content, getting rid of the rude, the crude and the jibberish. You simply have to allow for time to do this. Otherwise you end up with problems like those that Jamie Oliver, everyone’s favourite fat-tongued foodie, seems to be having.

Does this sort of thing actually present anyone in a good light?!

Meatball Sundae

I’m working my way through my dead tree reading list, and right now I’m burning through Seth Godin‘s Meatball Sundae. It’s terrific stuff.

Here’s one nugget from early on in the book -a list of ‘the foundations of new marketing’. It works for stuff other than marketing, though, I reckon, and might serve as a useful way of describing what worldview 2.0 might be:

  • Direct communication and commerce between producers and consumers
  • Amplification of the voice of the consumer and independent authorities
  • The need for an authentic story as the number of sources increases
  • Extremely short attention spans due to clutter
  • The Long Tail
  • Outsourcing
  • Google and the dicing of everything
  • Infinite channels of communication
  • Direct communication and commerce between consumers and consumers
  • The shifts in scarcity and abundance
  • The triumph of big ideas
  • The shift from ‘how many’ to ‘who’
  • New gatekeepers, no gatekeepers

I wonder how many of these things can be applied to government and the governed, rather than producers and consumers?

Load more posts!