Archive for the 'Social Computing' Category

Wanted: Online community managers

Published at 21 July, 2007 in Social Computing. 2 Comments

Seth Godin thinks that online community organizer sounds like a good job to have in the future. He sees some desirable characteristics as:

It would help if that person understood technology, at least well enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write. But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications. They have to be able to balance huge amounts of inbound correspondence without making people feel left out, and they have to be able to walk the fine line between rejecting trolls and alienating the good guys.

Tangler is looking for community managers at the moment. They define their needs as:

We need people to spend time to help other new users use the product and supporting new groups.

We are looking for two or three people to work three hours a day using our online application.

Looking for people who are:

  • Friendly.
  • Very good with writing English.
  • Fun
  • Helpful
  • Confident on computers and using the Internet.
  • Interested in a broad range of topics.

Are Seth and the Tangler guys talking about the same person? I think that they are, and I think that as social computing grows, there will be more job adverts like the Tangler one.

Facebook invitation ettiquette

Published at 20 July, 2007 in Social Computing and Consulting. 0 Comments

At last night’s Canberra IA Cocktail Hour discussion turned to Facebook invitations. Some of us get a lot of them, and sometimes we wonder how we know the inviter.

Penelope Trunk has the following advice for inviting people to LinkedIn. I’ve been a LinkedIn user for a while now - I can see the applicability of this to Facebook:

1. Don’t say yes to an invitation from a person you don’t really know.
LinkedIn works best as a way to leverage your professional circle of people you know well or know their work well. I love looking through my friends’ professional networks to get an idea of what introductions I could possibly get from a friend. My friend can say to her friend, “This is Penelope, you should get to know her because of x.� But this only works if my friend actually knows me and the other person well. Otherwise, I may as well make the introduction myself.

In that respect, your network on LinkedIn is really only as strong as your ties to the people in it. You will get more benefits from LinkedIn if you have a network of 30 people you know well than 300 people you don’t really know.

2. Don’t send invitations to people who don’t know you.
I feel like I kinda know Mike Arrington. I know I’d like to have dinner with him (does he ever stop blogging to have dinner?) I read his blog every day, and I know the type of connections he could offer me. But he doesn’t know me. Even if I have emailed him three times and posted ten comments on his blog, he doesn’t know who I am. He probably reads 400 emails and comments a day.

…5. Remind me how I know you.
Sometimes, I do actually know someone, but I communicate with so many different people every day, that I don’t remember. Yesterday I got an invitation that said, “It was great to do the podcast interview with you today� right before the standard LinkedIn invitation text. That was great. I knew exactly who the woman was and I connected. This also brings up another point, which is act immediately. The best invitations come right after you’ve made one, solid connection with a given person. For example, if you go back and forth in email six times, send an invitation that day.

What’s the easiest way to screw up a Facebook invitation? By getting it to run through your GMail or Outlook address book and inviting everyone you’ve ever emailed without thought. Chances are there are a lot of people that were CC recipients of mailing list responses from 12 months back that don’t know you from a bar of soap - you have no reason to invite these people to be Facebook friends, so don’t invite them.