Please join me and Mike Pascucci of Mzinga for a webcast about best practices in community moderation.

Best Practices for Moderating Your Online Community
A Webcast Co-sponsored by Mzinga and Forum One Networks

Date & Time: September 30th at 2 pm ET

Join online community expert, Bill Johnston of Forum One, and Mzinga moderation guru Mike Pascucci for in-depth examination and discussion on all aspects of community moderation, including key best practices. Session highlights will include:

- Developing effective community member guidelines and policies for appropriate content
- Ensuring a welcoming and risk-free online community environment, without hindering member activity and discussions
- Multiple moderation techniques, from proactive monitoring to content seeding and post-moderation—and practical advice on which approach to take
- Featured business cases that explore how leading brands are using moderation to support and grow their community initiative and membership.

Register now

This month's Expert Interview is with Tom Diederich, social media/Web community manager at Cadence Design Systems in San Jose, Calif. Tom recently relaunched the Cadence online community with great success, and he shares insights from the launch in this interview.

Tom was drawn to online communities during the Internet's early days. He began "blogging" in 1996 (though he called it his "online journal") when working in Tokyo as a journalist to keep friends and family informed of his adventures there. Since then, Tom has worked to build online community at various companies including Intuit, Symantec and Cadence Design Systems. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Ohio State University.

Q: You recently re-launched the Cadence community, and have had a great success in attracting members. Can you talk about the techniques you used for launch and growth?
I spent a lot of time working with power users – educating them about the new community (which unlike the old site incorporates Web 2.0 technologies). Many of the enhancements came from the community, so they were eager to see their ideas brought to life. Once they had a sneak peek, they became evangelists and really did most of the promoting.

But I also spent a great deal of time talking to bloggers in Cadence’s market, the so-called “electronic design automation” space, often referred to simply as “EDA.”

We also introduced blogs – Cadence employees, mainly engineers, architects and product managers. I have spent (and it’s an on-going process) a lot of time recruiting bloggers and also reminding them to post regularly. The content they produce resonates with the community, so in this case it really was a matter of: “If you build it, they will come.”

Our new Website also puts “community” front and center – right on the landing page of cadence.com. I don’t think there is another company in our industry (or many others) that does that. It’s the first thing visitors see and it pulls them in.

Q: What plans do you have in place for fostering ongoing member engagement?
A few things. Right now I’m working on a program for super-users. I’m also planning to roll out a ranking system that will correlate with the point system currently in place (that is also new to the community). For community members, striving for that next bump in rank can be addictive!

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the Cadence strategy for integrating community into the corporate site?
Sure. We wanted to get more out of our corporate site than the usual one-way delivery of information. We wanted to leverage the site to connect Cadence with our customers and get successful customers connected with other, creating a vibrant community. Visitors can now interact with each other and with Cadence in a more conversational way, sharing and learning from the collective participation. This will help us better understand our customers' needs more quickly and develop solutions that will more closely meet their needs.

We feel confident that our incorporation of ‘New Social Media’ into the corporate site is accomplishing our business objectives both in terms of metrics and community interaction. Better for our visitors, and better for Cadence, so a win-win result.

Q: What general online community trends are you paying attention to? What is on the horizon for the industry 24-36 months out?
It’s a brand-new community (launched in mid July) so it will take a little more time to really dig into trends. But on a high level, I’m looking at new registrations, page views, RSS subscriptions, incoming links, thread volumes, post/thread tone, blog comment traffic compared to posts …

I’m also working on sharing some key conversations (customer-driven innovation) from the community (lessons learned, product enhancement ideas, new product and services ideas, etc.) with product management and customer support.

I’m not sure what’s in store for the EDA industry, but 24-36 months from now I’d like the Cadence community to be seen as “the” go-to place for Cadence customers – and non-customers alike. I’m going to propose some pretty cool features and functionality in the meantime to help make that happen. ☺

The agenda for the Marketing & Online Communities conference is coming together nicely. The conference will be held November 5th at the Tribeca Grand in New York City. The event is intended to be an informative and interactive discussion of the intersection of marketing and online communities. If you are an agency seeking to better understand the possibilities of online communities, a brand manager looking to engage in community-building activities, or a community expert seeking to expand marketing relationships, this conference will be of value.


Session and Breakout Topics will include:
• Designing for Conversation
• The Social Web: How Consumers and Brands are Connecting Online
• Secrets of Successful Community Campaigns
• Community Generated Media: Giving Customers a Voice and Companies Insight
• Integrating Customer Communities in to the Marketing Mix
• Measuring Social Marketing Programs
• Best Practices for Adding Advertising to Your Community
• Engaging with Mass Social Media
• Worst Case Survival: What To Do When Things Go Horribly Wrong

Confirmed session leads include:
• Heather Gold – subvert.com
• Elisa Camahort Page – BlogHer
• Deb Shulz - Independent
• Heather Lutrell – 3jane / indieclick
• Belinda Lang – American Express
• David Rubinstein - ExpoTV
• Peter Friedman, Moderator – CEO - LiveWorld

To learn more about the conference, including a summary of topics, presenters and attendees from last year, check out the official events page on the Forum One Networks site:
Marketing & Online Communities 2008

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

The tag for the event is #moc2008

The Online Community Compensation study was initiated in July of 2008 as part of our ongoing research efforts with the Online Community Research Network. Our intention of the study was to get a broad look at online community compensation, factors that effect compensation, and the current environment of the community team and community staff roles.

I posted key highlights from the report a few weeks ago.

Since then, we have been looking at other cuts of the data. One of the most interesting has been how salaries differ by region.

Key findings from the data
• The highest average / median annual salary in the USA comes from the research participants located in the northwest region. The average salary for the northwest region was $90k with a median of $90k.
• The lowest average / median annual salary in the USA comes from the research participants located in the southeast region. The average salary for the southeast region was $72k and the median was only $67k.
• There were general peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k) for all regions except the southwest regions.
• The northwest region peaked at the higher salary ranges than that of the other regions, peaking at both $65-75k and $85-105k
• The midwest region peaked at the lower salary ranges, peaking at both $45-55k and $65-85k.


As you can see below, our highest concentration of respondents was from the West, and in particular, CA.

Response Distribution by US Region:



Salary Averages and Medians by US Region



If you would like more information about the Online Communities Compensation report, feel free to contact me. The report can be purchased here.

Two "Friends of Forum One", Kaliya Hamlin and Joi Podgorny, are hosting separate but related events in November. The invitation from Kaliya follows, please give them a look.

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I am writing to invite you to the next Internet Identity Workshop. This will be our 7th one.
November 10-12 in Mountain View.
http://www.windley.com/events/iiw2008b/announcement.shtml

There is an independent but related event on Nov 13th - Kids Online: Balancing Safety and Fun
http://kidsonline.eventbrite.com

The community that comes together at the workshop is really amazing. It is a working meeting for a range of groups focused on the technical, social and legal issues arising with the emergence identity, relationship and social layer of the web. The key thought leaders in the area are all there in a highly interactive environment.

We have been focused on "user-centric identity" - considering how end-users, regular people, can manage their own identity across the range of websites, services, companies and organizations that they belong to, purchase from and participate with.

A lot has happened since we first met in the fall of 2005 in Berkeley:
We have several foundations that have formed around key technologies - OpenID and Information Cards.
LIberty Alliance continues to be actively involved in the community
OASIS TC's have started actively participating.
The Vendor Relationship Management project has sprung up out of the community continues to evolve.
OSIS - (Open Source Identity Systems) was founded at IIW and is working on its 4th major interop event happening at DIDW next week (#3 was at RSA in the spring).


As a community we have been exploring these kinds of questions:
How are social networking sites and social media tools applying user-centric identity?
What are the open standards to make it work? (identity and semantic)
What are technical implementations of those standards?
How do different standards and technical implementations interoperate?
What are the new social norms and legal constructs needed to make it work?
What tools are needed to make it usably secure for end-users?
What are the businesses cases / models that drive all this?

You can check out our community aggregate blog http://www.planetidentity.org

Who comes to IIW?:

Anyone interested in identity (user profiles, social linking, user history & metadata etc) on the web and in digital systems.

Entrepreneurs who are working companies about people and their identities online - profiles, social linking, group formation. Basically those doing ANYTHING with the word SOCAIL in it.

Product Managers who are trying to figure what to do now and plan for interms of user-identity and information sharing in your product.

Engineers/Programmers who have to implement the emerging standards that are covered at IIW.

Researchers/Academics studying identity online.

Lawyers who are interested in end-user agreements and how new technologies change/improve how people interact with companies.

Sociologists, Anthropologists who are considering online life and the implications of identity online.

This is a conference where you get out of it what you want. If you have something to present you are most welcome to. If you have questions you need answers to you can find them.

You can read what community members have said about the quality of the event.
http://iiw.windley.com/wiki/What_is_GREAT!

Cost:
The event is VERY affordable for a 2.5 day high quality conference with the leading professionals in the industry.

Students - $50
Independents (small startups, nonprofits)- $200
Corporate - $350