Monday, June 29, 2009

How to deal with online communities?

Tribes by Seth Godin: Book Cover

I have to admit, I am still not using a lot Facebook and Twitter. I think I understand now that I could use those tools to build and manage my online communities a lot better.

In the future, I guess our online brand will be critical for both our personal life and professional life. We need to manage them. One issue I have is the separation between those online identities. I don't want my regular employer to know that I am blogging about the Wii or anything else. I don't want anybody to look at my family pictures unless they are very close friends and so on.

Let's start from my need:

- Use some tools to keep in touch with my close friends and manage my personal brand with them
- Spend more time on the Kitesurfing community (and some other forums)
- Develop the community around the Zhorba blog
- Create my professional online brand

A complete list of tools possible:
- I would prefer to have one tool as a dashboard for everything else

Possibilities:  Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Mail, Mailing-list, Forum, Linkedin, friendfeed, su.pr, thwirl, seesmic, flock

For a dashboard, there are 3 possibilities: Seesmic, Tweetdeck and Flock. I am biased for Seesmic as I am following Loic Le Meur for quite some time. But even if Seesmic has tons of fancy features, Flock seems to me more universal. I can update my blogs, forum, tweeter and so  on with just one interface.

And now for each need its process:

- Use some tools to keep in touch with my close friends and manage my personal brand with them

Solution: Use Facebook only in Flock and gmail on Flock. My personal blog is automotically published in Facebook.

- Spend more time on the Kitesurfing community

Solution: Have a page that summarize all the forums activity on Flock

- Develop the community around the Zhorba blog

Solution: Create a twitter account for Zhorba - Use Twitter/su.pr to develop my blog

- Create my professional online brand

Solution: Use Linkedin

Use Flock as the dashboard for everything.

Some good reference:
"Tribes" from Seth Godin
http://yukaichou.com/social-media/twitter-apps-ratings-reviews/
http://yukaichou.com/social-media/facebook-not-replace-twitter/
http://yukaichou.com/social-media/start-settle-fall-love-twitter/
http://www.jamessenior.com/post/Facebook-ate-my-blog-content.aspx

A good example of community online:
http://www.communityofsweden.com/

2 comments:

  1. guest blogger invitation

    Hello,

    This is Rose writing from www.huliq.com. I visited your blog and liked your content.

    Would you be interested to send us a guest post on any of the issues related to the topics that you cover in your blog. We will publish it in our site www.huliq.com

    In return with each guest blog we will give one link in the author's byline back to your blog. We only ask that the guest post ( we prefer it be a news coverage, sources can be Google News, CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo News, BBC and others) be a unique story and not be published in your blog.

    HULIQ is indexed by Google News and Google requires that the length of the unique news is at least 5 paragraphs. We desire it to be at least 6 paragraphs if possible. And that all need to be a unique content. Once you send us a new story totally unique we will immediately publish it with you link in it, and within 15 minutes it should be indexed by Google News.

    Also, please structure author byline as follows:

    author's name:
    author's e-mail:
    author's blog url:

    Please let me know if you may have any questions about www.huliq.com.

    If you want to consult the topic with me first that's perfectly fine as well.

    Many thanks
    ruzik.mail@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Did you know you can create short links with Shortest and make $$$$$$ for every visitor to your shortened urls.

    ReplyDelete