DACHIS GROUP COLLABORATORY — I tweeted recently that all of the details of planning an online community reminded me of planning a wedding. I submitted the tweet at the very moment I felt overwhelmed by the details of coordinating so many moving pieces weeks before launching the community. For the past three months, Dachis Group has worked closely with a community platform provider to design, build, and launch an online community for a client partner. I am a member of the Dachis Group team managing this project, and I decided to write about my experience...

DACHIS GROUP COLLABORATORY — It will come as little surprise to readers here that businesses this year have been getting increasingly serious about social media as they find that their customers are spending a rapidly growing amount of time there. The most recent numbers show that Americans are spending nearly a quarter of their online time in social networks, far ahead of other forms of Internet activity. The numbers worldwide aren’t much different and implications for businesses are many and varied. I’ve explored these extensively before and it goes well beyond such ideas like "Facebooking" the enterprise. Yet due to the top-down way most organizations operate, businesses continue to fall behind what’s happening in the marketplace today...

E-CONSULTANCY.COM — Mel Carson is well known across the digital industry as Microsoft Advertising’s Community Manager, although he also takes on dozens of related responsibilities. Following his five-year tenancy with the technology giant, Econsultancy caught up with him to discuss the ins and outs of successfully setting up and running an online community, the real costs involved and the resources needed...

FORRESTER RESEARCH — Most companies are now building a social media strategy, with a presence on Facebook, twitter or/and YouTube. At the same time there's lots of debate on the value of a 'Facebook fan'. In this whole discussion I was wondering who are most likely to become a fan of a brand? Our Technographics survey data shows that about 13% of European online adults have become "fan" of a brand, company, or product they liked recently. About 10% were interested in interacting with companies through social media but haven’t done so yet. The first group we called "brand fans," the other "aspiring brand fans." How do the two compare?...

ONLY DEAD FISH — For all the blog-posts, white-papers, and conference talks on digital community, there still seems to be numerous examples of a failure to get out of a broadcast mindset, corporate arrogance, assumptive thinking and, well, just plain getting it wrong. So I penned a column for the good folks at Mediatel on the subject and it ended up as a list post (which I'm not usually a fan of, yet I seem to remember the last thing I wrote for them was as well). It echoes many themes about which I've written here before. My sense is that most of this is still counter-intuitive to much 'traditional' marketing practice, but then this is all about people not process so perhaps it was inevitable that it would be so. Anyway, as before, I wanted to make it as pragmatic and as useful as I could, and they've kindly let me reproduce it in full here. So here it is...