Some notes from OCU 2007

I was able to go to the Online Community Unconference in Mountain View this week and what a great day!  Saw so many old colleagues and made tons of great new contacts/friends.

Instead of posting long joi-speak notes from the event, I thought I would actually post a couple posts about the ideas it sparked over the next couple of days.  Plus, there is so much content on the wiki for the conference that I still have to go through.

But there were a couple of sessions that I had pure notes for – the session evangelizing your community and the session on using volunteers in your community.  So I thought I would post those here.

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Evangelism of your community

– Paid Ambassadors
– Internal and External promotion
– Need to set ground rules
– Presence at Conferences
– Qumana – nulk posting of posts
– Badges for other sites
– User forum for their ideas
    – make sure you ackowledge their contributions
– Street Teams – online and off
– Cool Psts Feed
– Celebrity Endorsement – for bands contact their manager, not publicist
– give away schwag
– embeddable content
    – widgets
    – feeds
    – games
    – videos
– have humility
– Tagging
    – have to make sure all using the same tag

—–

Managing volunteers in communitites

Certain areas are naturally higher touch and should not be run by volunteers
– U13 kids is a good example

Volunteers have limited access
– no access to user data
– yahoo groups has user database and emails them without them knowing email address

Make sure you have vaguer language with volunteers

Clearly defined project lengths are helpful

Talk of the need to have a more automated way to manage volunteers
– look at flickr – no management
– reputation based system may work
    – how do you ensure quality based reputaion rather than just quantity based
        – i.e. digg, slashdot – easily gamed
        – lithium has a good repuation system built

technorati tags:ocu2007, evangelism, marketing, online-community, Mountain-View, widgets, volunteers, management, incentives

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