No one cares more about your cause more than you.

When I first got started as a community manager, this was one lesson I had to learn quickly. I often wondered why it felt like I was the only who cared about putting together a networking group and online community management framework.

Even now, many years into it, I’m extremely grateful for all the volunteers who put their time and effort into helping make the group work.

Some would love to do more if only asked. Others cannot.

Especially as volunteers in a community, everyone plays at their own level of commitment and involvement.

Be respectful of that fact.

Level Up letterpress (Photo credit: artnoose)

It’s April 2009. I’ve been running the New Media Cincinnati social media group for a year and a half. Still connecting with people in the Greater Cincinnati area. Still passionate about taking online connections in the real world.  I decide to take the day off the job that had the commute up to the Dayton area and make time to connect with my online friends in Cincinnati.

I put out the call on Twitter and Facebook, saying that I’d like to meet anyone who’s interested at the Max and Erma’s on Montgomery Road.  Among many who respond is Andy Warner, whom I’ve only known on Twitter and Facebook. We’ve never met in person.

Lunch at the Max and Erma’s goes really well. We’re all encouraged to meet together on a day that’s not the second Saturday of the month.  Andy and I hit it off well, and over the next several months we continue to meet from time to time.  I share my copy of Chip and Dan Heath’s “Made to Stick” with him, because it resonates so deeply with me. Andy even makes it out to a New Media Cincinnati event.

Some months later, Andy lets me know via Instant Message (because we’ve become that great of friends) that he’s moved to Portland, Oregon for a new job.

Many months later he invites me to be on his new podcast, “Mind Tilt.”  Andy describes it as “thought leadership at the intersection of sales, marketing and strategy.”  Last week he releases it to the public: 

Daniel has a deep passion for connecting strangers and promoting the richness of personal stories.  This driving force for Daniel is clearly evident in everything he does from his early days of daily phone calls during his commute to weekly lunch meetups to founding New Media Cincinnati.  Daniel and I discussed his learnings with New Media Cincinnati during this week’s conversation.

I’m honored that Andy let me come on his program and talk his head off  and tell the story of building community here in Cincinnati.  Check out our conversation here: Mind Tilt Podcast Episode 8 — Daniel Johnson Jr – A Community Manager Fighting for the Users.

A privilege and an honor, he lets me talk his head off about my approach in building and managing a vibrant community.

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via Bill Trammel

I’ve been playing Real Time Strategy (RTS) games for about 10 months now. Thanks to a former coworker, I started playing Starcraft 2 (SC2). Thanks to Daniel Lewis, I also recently started playing Lord of Ultima (LoU).

Both of these games have multiple processes going on at once, and good game play requires adequate attention be given where needed; i.e., a good combo of micro-management and macro-management. For example, in StarCraft 2 you have to get your economy up and going at the beginning. Once you get that going well, you begin building the rest of your base and your battle forces. Eventually, you go in for the attack. At every step you have to make sure your economy is still going strong. When you’re sending troops to attack, you have to make sure your troop production is still going.

I’ve only been playing Lord of Ultima for a couple weeks now, and yet again, timing is key. You have to get your resources going, so you build and upgrade Wood Huts, Cottages, Quarries, and Iron Mines, for example. But you only have so many build and upgrade orders you can issue at any one time, and the higher the upgrade, the longer the process will be.

Similarly, you have a recruitment cap. You can only recruit troops based on the levels of your barracks, training grounds, and other related buildings. When you want to issue commands to raid dungeons, you can specify a mix of troops, but it takes time for them to travel to and from.

It’s like building and managing community.

The community has needs. It needs to be fed and nurtured. You want to be building it so that it grows in numbers but also in strength. All members of the community participates at their individual levels of engagement: some are very actively involved while others are only occasionally or remotely involved.

Setting expectations helps considerably, both for community members and for the community manager. For example, instead of figuring out what day or time was best to have an event, I decided that we would hold New Media Cincinnati on the second Saturday of every month, except for December. That makes planning a lot easier! When are we meeting? I might not know the exact date, but we all can look at the calendar and identify the second Saturday.

In StarCraft 2 there are build order constraints. You can only build a Starport, for example, after you’ve built a Factory. Similarly, there’s an order that must be followed in putting together an event like a New Media Cincinnati Second Saturday. Things like making sure we have the venue for the date, setting up the theme and getting the word out. There is an order to this as well. Some of these actions can be done concurrently; some depend on other actions to be done first.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Trailer

Lord of Ultima – Walkthrough Part 1

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Image by leslie feinberg via Flickr

Last year I worked for a payroll software solutions company, primarily on their integration between their flagship product, which is based on Microsoft Dynamics GP, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  I enjoyed the experience immensely because it gave me a “behind the scenes” look at how businesses in the Professional Employer Organization (PEO) industry can create and manage customer interactions.

Of course I came from years of experience with social technologies and community management, and I was intrigued at the potential to bring some of that into my work. In my learning, the question of ROI would often come up as businesses and organizations were considering entering the social media space.

“Rushing into social computing initiatives without clearly defined benefits for both the company and the customer will be the biggest cause of failure.” — Gartner.com

What I love about CRM is that it provides the ability to get a 360-degree view of a customer, starting from before the sale and continuing long after they’ve been a customer.  Entering social CRM can be tricky. As with any other CRM system, Social CRM adoption must be company-wide in order to achieve peak efficiency.

Back in January I was reminded of CMAD: Community Manager Appreciation Day. The more I think about how CRM has evolved, the more I can see the need to have someone – or many people – who can see and understand many aspects of the business as well as have the ability to successfully interact with a community, in order for it to work.

Check out this infographic and the related links below for more information: INFOGRAPHIC – The Evolution of CRM

Also useful to read is the Altimeter Report: The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, The New Rules of Relationship Management

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Image by danieljohnsonjr via Flickr

Organizing New Media Cincinnati events has been something that I’ve grown into, ever since the very first one in October 2007. I sincerely appreciate the NMC Steering Committee members who have been volunteering their time to help make New Media Cincinnati the best version of itself in the area that it can be, and I hope the community can feel their influence and impact.

Back in 2007, these events initially were extremely informal meetups where we’d let people know we were meeting and would see who’d show up. Eventually, we began having more structure around a certain topic, and it gave me a chance to explore different sorts of events. Some of these were conducted well, and these were certainly some great learning experiences.

I’ve been thinking about different types of events I’d somehow like to be involved in, whether organizing, running, or just participating.

5-Minute ‘JOLTS’

In March 2009 I opened it up to the New Media Cincinnati community, looking for five people who wanted to talk about something they were passionate about. I vividly remember back then, when I was doing everything: emceeing, recording, live streaming, etc. I really enjoyed this type of event because not only was it a great opportunity for more people to share from their areas of expertise, but also it provided more variety than one person talking about a single topic.  I also recorded them and posted them to the New Media Cincinnati website.

Pecha Kucha

Similarly, in November 2008, we tried out Pecha Kucha (20×20: 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide), in which three of us, Angelo Mandato, Brian Monahan, and myself, each gave 6:20 presentations about something we were passionate about.

CreatorCamp

I first heard about CreatorCamp from Bob Goyetche and Mark Blevis on the Canadian Podcast Buffet podcast.  Although I’ve never met Mark and Bob in-person, I’ve learned a lot from their community-building expertise over the years. Bob mentioned that he’s become weary of the marketing-heaviness that many of the social networking events have been. He put forth the idea of just coming to an event to create something. Mark took his idea and set up the CreatorCamp.org website, which includes a free e-book based on the learnings they had from the first CreatorCamp Ottawa.

Again, the idea is that the event is organized around creating. What can we as a group create during our time together? Whom could we invite to demonstrate something creatively and give us insight into their creative process?

In early 2008 I invited Cliff Ravenscraft to show us how he produces his podcasts, and he brought his portable recording system to the Panera in Tri-County, where we’d met. Cliff gave each of us an opportunity to say something as he recorded us and then released it as an episode of his Podcast Answer Man series.

Roundtable

Organize people into tables and give them different topics to discuss for about 15 minutes. Then a representative from each table would report on the discussion to the entire group. We did something like this in 2009.

A similar, but different approach: set up sections of the meeting space where people have already agreed to be the Champions of discussions about different topics, and let people choose for themselves where they want to go, À la Podcamp‘s “Law of Two Feet”. The Law of Two Feet, you might recall, means that if you’re not getting something from a session or discussion, you’re free to go find and/or create a discussion of your own.  A big thing we learned about doing this in 2009 was that we need to have a Champion to be responsible for keeping the discussion “on track”.

What ideas for events would you like to organize, help run, and/or participate in?

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In this video I share about the upcoming February 12, 2011 New Media Cincinnati Second Saturday event. We’re excited to have Debba Haupert from Girlfriendology.com to come and talk about how she’s built a great community around the concept of female friendship.

Whenever I’ve been a speaker at different groups around the Greater Cincinnati area about social media, and I notice there are women in the audience, I always bring up Debba and Girlfriendology.

When I first met her back in 2008, I had no clue what Girlfriendology was, but I was intrigued by the name to find out.  For the past several years, over time, she has WOWed me and others as she’s connected with other women. She inspires me as a community leader, and I’m really looking forward to learning from her this Saturday.

Click here to watch the embedded video.

“Build a little community of those you love and who love you.
Morrie Schwartz”
— Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie)

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My friend Carole Baker, who founded the New Media Dayton group, recently shared on Facebook:

I just want to say that I’ve been deeply involved in social media (for businesses and brands) for two years now and never once have I poked anyone. I do not understand why anyone would want to poke me, and I have no idea what it means. There I said it. I had to get it off my chest. And another thing…I have never thrown sheep. Why the heck would you throw sheep?

Now I’ve been using Facebook for about four years now, since 2007, and I have poked, been poked, and I think I’ve even been super-poked. I think back then Cliff Ravenscraft declared me the winner of an informal poking contest. I’ve often wondered what the metaphysical consequences of what happens when you poking yourself.

If I remember correctly, here’s the way it used to work:

When you poke someone, you are trying to get his or her attention. They are notified of your poke and can see who you are and view your profile information as though you are friends. It’s a way to say, “Hey, come check me out!” or “Hey, come and see what I’ve been up to over here!” You can ignore the poke or go check them out. Once you check them out, you can either poke back, send a friend request, or ignore it.

I was close.

Over the years, Facebook has changed the application and privacy settings so much that poking seems to have become irrelevant and more of something silly to do.  Still, every so often, I’ll see that someone has poked me, and I take that to mean they’re trying to reconnect in some “old-fashioned” way or otherwise draw my attention to them.

But what do you say? Is there any value in Poking? Especially you other “old-timers” on Facebook… can we finally stop poking one another, or, as Carole mentioned, throwing sheep at one another?

Click here to see the embedded video.

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I don’t like the prick of needles, and I certainly don’t like looking at them. I make sure to look away.

So I can only imagine what it must be like to go to the doctor every month and get pricked to offer some of your blood to be analyzed for anything bad in it. Or to have to receive blood transfusions every month. I can’t imagine what this is like because, thankfully, I’ve never had leukemia.

Jim is a friend of mine, one whom I highly respect. As an elder in the Cincinnati Church of Christ, his life has made a huge difference in the lives of many. And yet he has benefited from the lives of many others who gladly donate their blood every eight weeks. And he’s battled cancer and still survives. It’s gotta be humbling and moving to look out into a congregation of people whose blood may be saving your own life.

This Sunday, January 16, 2011, the Cincinnati Church of Christ and HOPE Worldwide Cincinnati are hosting a Hoxworth (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube channel) blood drive for the community from 8:30 am till 2 pm in the cafeteria/fellowship hall of the church building.

4220 E Galbraith Rd
Cincinnati, OH 45236 (map)

To schedule an appointment please contact Laura Huesman at 891-2856.

Double Red Donation from Nov 2010

As someone who donated a double-red donation last November, I personally am ineligible to donate again until March. I would if I could, though.

Hoxworth does a fantastic job in keeping up with regular blood donors, and it’s amazing to see how they run an event like this one. I’m grateful that we have them here in the Cincinnati community. One thing that moves me is that some time after I’ve donated, I get a message from them, saying that my donation helped save someone’s life at a particular area hospital.

Amazing. My little time of getting pricked with a needle, uncomfortable as it might be, helps saves the life of people like my friend Jim.

Who will YOU save?

Click here to watch the embedded video.

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Geez. It’s October already.

For three years now, I’ve been organizing events for the in-person social networking community I founded called New Media Cincinnati. We actually have the October event coming up this weekend.

My approach in getting the word out about these events has changed over time, from sending multiple direct messages to followers, to using Facebook as the medium to plan and organize the events.  For awhile we even had a wiki set up. I thought I’d share some of  my current approach to getting the word out.

An approach to event marketing

In 2008, I began using Eventbrite to organize, plan, and run the monthly events, which have become known as New Media Cincinnati Second Saturdays (mostly because people always wondered when we met). I’ve enjoyed using Eventbrite, and I’m not ashamed to recommend them (and for you to use my affiliate link!).

One of the main reasons for using a system like this is just to know who is planning on coming to events and having an easy way to follow up with them.  Over the years I’ve understood that it’s important to have a database. As Chris Brogan says, “you live and die by your database.”

Past attendees. For New Media Cincinnati, part of that database is the list of past attendees — registrants, actually, since not everyone who registers always attends.

E-mail signup list. People would also contact me to ask if they could be invited to future events.  Instead of wrangling multiple emails to make sure people got their invitations, I set up the New Media Cincinnati E-mail Sign-up List. I’ve also added it to the New Media Cincinnati Facebook page. I make sure people on this list get an invitation.

E-mail subscribers to the blog. When I set up the New Media Cincinnati website, I added a way for people to sign up to receive updates at the website via e-mail through FeedBurner. Some of these people may or may not already be connected to the group through one of the many other touchpoints, so I make sure to invite these people.

Cincinnati-area LinkedIn connections. The main reason I founded New Media Cincinnati is to take connections made online into the real world. Over time, another reason is to help promote digital literacy in the community. It’s so easy to make connections, and I think that New Media Cincinnati events are a great opportunity for me to re-connect in-person with people in the Cincinnati area I know through LinkedIn.

I’ll leave the mechanics of how this all comes together for another time.  One thing I will say is that Eventbrite definitely helps keep track of the status of invitations, including responses from people who say they are not interested or have otherwise unsubscribed from these types of communications.

As well as those who are.

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Taste of Cincinnati is an annual tradition every Memorial Day weekend. The city of Cincinnati closes off several blocks downtown, and food vendors set up and offer a Taste of what they typically serve at their restaurants in the Greater Cincinnati area. It’s a chance for folks like me to “graze”.

I remember the first one I went to in 1993, when I later told my girlfriend Jennie that I loved her. We later married.

I’ve been to Taste of Cincinnati 4 out of the past 5 years since we’ve been back in town.

This year was interesting because I went by myself. It was great to meet up with some friends I know through New Media Cincinnati.