Category Archives: Tech

The new Gmail tabs are exactly why community-building is important

Community, Marketing, Tech

handshakeAs someone who sends email newsletters for many projects, including to tens of thousands of UserVoice customers, I was as scared as anyone that the new Gmail tabs were going to hurt my open rates. I even sent a message to one of my lists encouraging them to set my newsletter to show up in their “Primary” tab.

As someone who enjoys innovation and largely appreciates Google’s work, I decided to give the tabs a try myself. As much as the email marketer in me hates to admit it, I like them. Instead of a huge pile of mail I see the important stuff first. If I’m feeling social I can scope out the social banter, and if I choose to I can scope out “Promotions”.

Here’s what I was surprised by: I’m actually checking “Promotions” pretty often.

Here’s why: these new tabs display an “x new” message when you get new messages.

Gmail tabs notifications

This highly encourages you to scope out what’s going on in each tab. And because it’s not an aggregate (like the intimidating “15,000 Unread Emails” message), it never feels like a chore. Which means I’m scoping out “Promotions” regularly.

What I’m not doing is opening these promotions unless I think they’re worthwhile…which really isn’t any different than life before Gmail tabs.

Which, as many things do, brings me to community. If Gmail tabs aren’t really affecting my exposure to these promotional emails, then it boils down to the quality of these emails and my emotional connection to the sender. I usually open emails from concert promotion companies because I love live music and they provide a concise collection of shows for me. I will continue to open emails from Jason Calacanis and The LittleBigFund because they’ve established an emotional connection with me.

Once again and as always, community and emotional connection trump all. A slight speedbump isn’t going to get in the way of someone and the thing they love. But if they don’t love the thing you’re making, don’t be surprised if they disappear. And don’t blame it on Gmail.

Handshake photo courtesy of Aidan Jones.

The curse of event success – a response to SXSW

Community, Tech

By regular measurements, this year’s South by Southwest is going to be a massive success. Likely record attendance, big-name premiers, packed houses…wow, they’re really doing something right!

sxsw lineBut they’re not. Especially as I talk to folks who have been going to SXSW for more years than I, a picture becomes clear: everyone here is chasing an event that no longer exists. A more quality, intimate event. An event full of entrepreneurs and hackers, not marketers. An event that meant something.

The reality of SXSW’s size is that it simply can’t maintain that quality. In order to accommodate the larger crowds they’ve branched out to new venues. This has meant that panelists have to work harder to get people to come to their particular event, attendees have to traipse many blocks to get to the next venue, and perhaps most significant: there’s less hallway talk. I don’t talk to people as I walk from the convention center to the InterContinental Stephen F Austin. I have 30 minutes, and I have to make it count, because the panel I want to attend is going to fill up quick. Gone are the chance encounters, the lively debates, and the detours to go get beers with new acquaintances.

The core of any conference should be learning and meeting people. With so many options of middling quality and so little time, SXSW is killing both.

I don’t blame the organizers. The event has grown because it was good. The organizers have done their best to accommodate this growth. But should they have?

If SXSW was great before, should they have just stopped allowing new attendees? If that were the case, I wouldn’t be able to go to SXSW. Maybe Evan Williams and Biz Stone wouldn’t have. Suddenly, you’re going to have an event with the same people talking about the same things while the world innovates around them.

burning man 2011Burning Man is dealing with this very issue. This year as they’ve reached their max capacity (even for a huge valley in the desert). Rather than issue a chronological cutoff, they gave out tickets by lottery…instantly alienating many of the founding members and architects of the event who suddenly couldn’t come. Nope, that’s not the way to go.

I’m dealing with this right now as my Community Manager Breakfast in San Francisco grows. An intimate conversation is suddenly not so intimate when there are 30 attendees. I thought about not letting anyone else in…but brilliant friends and colleagues are applying, so that seems counterintuitive.

The answer, I suspect, is not one any of us want to face. We need to let go. Much like TED expanded to multiple events and then allowed anyone to create a TEDx event, we have to let our events grow horizontally instead of vertically. Maybe I need to let other people do breakfasts, or have two breakfasts a month, or something. SXSW needs to give up on fitting everyone and encourage things like North by Northeast, whether or not they control and make money from them. And Burning Man needs to let this passionate community create more, smaller communities, or risk imploding.

Is it easy? Hell naw. I think many community builders are control freaks…because we care so much. We want everything to be perfect and we can’t ensure that if we let go. But you know what? Things aren’t perfect, even when we control them. And organized is not the same thing as great.

Line photo courtesy of dickdavid.
Burning Man photo courtesy of legsonasnake.

How I Prepared for My First Big Public Speaking Gig at FailCon 2010

Misc, Tech

It never ceases to bewilder people, but although I will gladly get on stage in front of dozens of people and sing, I get nervous in when I have to speak in public. Even speaking up at a meeting of colleagues can occasionally raise my heart rate. Public speaking is a different beast, and it freaks me and a lot of other people out.

DPP_0001-300x200Last week I had the privilege of presenting a 40-minute workshop at FailCon 2010, a fantastic conference about learning from your failures. I’ve done presentations before, but they’ve all been relatively short. I knew this was going to be intense, so I spent a lot of time preparing. I think my presentation went well (and so did others) and I’d like to share what I did to prepare, so that it might help you…and so that I don’t forget next time I have to do another presentation!

(Many of these insights came from a book I fortuitously got for free at the Community Leadership Summit: Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker. The book is a bit haphazard but has some great insights, and my dogears on various pages helped me immensely.)

Here’s what I tried to do (and what I failed at):

1. I Took A Strong Position In The Title

“There’s a Customer Out There With a Bullet For You: Ideas That Kill”. Not only does this catch the eye, but by defining what the presentation was about it helped define what it wasn’t about. Instead of talking about everything I know, I knew what to focus on.

2. I Thought Carefully About My Specific Audience

A fantastic presentation for engineers won’t work well for CEOs and certainly won’t work well for a room full of four-year-olds. I took a look at the attendee list for FailCon and the goal of the conference and determined that my audience would be founders/entrepreneurs and community managers who would want some solid numbers and examples along with the higher-level points. I also knew they’d have a sense of humor and be familiar with the tech industry examples I used (Friendster, Wesabe, Google Wave, etc).

DPP_0008-300x2003. I Built My Slides Last

This one was really key for me, and it’s the first time I really did it. It’s incredibly tempting (and encouraged in some circles) to build a beautiful set of slides first. This is wrong. Your story should dictate your slides. I spent a week and a half building the story and then built slides to support it. The downside? Less time to make your slides pretty. The upside? Your story is compelling, not just something pretty to look at.

4. I Made My Specific Points As Concise As Possible

Confessions of a Public Speaker states it best: “A mediocre presentation makes the points clear but muddles or bores people with the arguments. A truly bad presentation never clarifies what the points are.” Before I wrote any paragraphs or (to the last point) designed any slides, I carved out specific points that I wanted to cover and then worked to build the content to support them. Kudos to Rich White, CEO and my boss at UserVoice, for pointing out that my slides should spell out each point as well, so people who may have been distracted by their phone or computer can hop back in the conversation.

5. I Practiced. A Lot.

Your audience is giving you an hour of their time. Just as companies don’t deserve customer feedback, you don’t deserve your audience’s attention. I tried to respect my audience’s attention by practicing. After finally constructing a story I liked and building an outline for it, I practiced it several times (the whole 35 minutes through) in front of a webcam, cleaning up my performance and trying to cut out “uh” and “um” from my vocabulary. I practiced my presentation for friends and colleagues, and I changed it based on their feedback. Like any performer should, I practiced. Most people leave out this step because they’re scared (I know I was). Don’t skip it.

DPP_0013-300x2006. I Knew The Likely Counterarguments From An Intelligent, Expert Audience

I’ll admit, I didn’t do this as well as I would have liked to. I presented this to friends and colleagues and got some idea of what questions people might have, but I should have asked them to be more aggressive. I definitely got hit with some questions that made me pause. It’s not because my points weren’t valid, it’s just because thinking critically on the fly in front of a bunch of people is hard. Next time I’ll work harder on this.

7. I Got Familiar with the Space

I scoped out the workshop room early in the day and showed up extra early for my workshop to get my setup perfect, walk the stage area a bit, and grok the room. It helped immensely not having to take in these details for the first time right when I went up to present. The nervousness I’ve felt stepping up to the mic at previous events was totally absent.

DPP_0002-300x2008. I Set The Pace

People like to know what to expect. I told people what we were covering so they knew when we were reaching the end, and I kept people updated about how much was left. I didn’t call out the specific time I was going to spend on each section (as the book recommends), but I think that was ok – perhaps if it were a longer presentation I would do that.

9. I Asked For Feedback

I failed pretty good on this front, which is especially embarrassing because my workshop was about getting feedback! I meant to print out feedback forms but got too busy, so I had to resort to asking a few folks afterwards about what they thought. Next time I want to make sure I get this right, because most folks will say “it was great” if you ask them in person. That’s sweet, but it isn’t useful feedback.

10. I Tried To Be Likable

I tried to keep a quick pace, be funny, move around when I could, and talk directly to people. I won’t claim that I was a Johnny Carson, but I think I kept things from being dry – which is key when people have a million electronic distractions in the palm of their hands.

DPP_0010-300x20011. I Kept People Engaged

To the last point – I spoke to the audience, asked them some questions, and offered free books to those who asked questions during Q&A. People want to be part of what’s going on, not a total observer.

Some other things that helped:

1) My bosses Rich and Scott from UserVoice helped usher people into the room and keep them entertained before I came on. This was invaluable.

2) Cass, the fantastic orchestrator of FailCon, gave me a shoutout in the main room right before my workshop. She’s my hero for this and many other reasons.

3) The fact that the session opposite mine wasn’t very interesting (sorry, that’s just what I heard). Some days you’re lucky.

So thanks to everyone who helped personally or just came out to watch. You can find my presentation on SlideShare if you’re interested. I hope this post helps you put on a great presentation, and if you have any personal tricks, please add them below!

Photos courtesy of Scott Rutherford.

Community Managers Should Be Working Towards Unemployment – Community Leadership Summit 2010 Thoughts

Community, Tech

This weekend I attended the Community Leadership Summit in Portland, OR. I got to know Portland a bit, had donuts that I sort of regretted, but most of all I learned a lot. Because of the “un” nature of an unconference, there isn’t a thesis built in from the start. But while the sessions this weekend bloomed out of topics proposed by attendees on the day of, I got the sense of a common thread throughout the discussions.

As Community Managers, we should be working ourselves out of a job.

Thomas Knoll and Miz GinevraFrom Thomas Knoll and Miz Ginevra‘s session suggesting that we’re killing our communities by over-managing them, to the revelation in my session on support vs community that everyone feels like they should and will become one organization, to Andrea Murphy‘s reputation system session generally deciding that they can’t be entirely based on numbers – everyone seemed focus less on how to handle the next tweet that came in than on how to build a community that was sustainable, self-policing, self-motivating and perhaps even (dare I say it?) beyond anyone’s “management”.

It makes sense. Community Manager as a profession is new – it’s not something born out of the tech industry. There have always been community managers, in some shape or form. As I mentioned in my post about the inauguration, Obama is a community manager (he just has a larger community than most of us). The guy who owns Woody’s Cafe in Oakland curates a community of passionate locals who just happen to also drink his coffee. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, embodies community management and makes it the key focus of the company.

The problem is that as a culture we’ve collectively forgotten how to have an honest relationship with our communities, and instead begun to focus on controlling and automating communities.

donut assembly line

The marketing and business innovations that began in the fast food revolution of the fifties have turned our communities from real people into commodities that are pushed through an assembly-line system of targeting, advertising, harassment and gouging. If the customer is requesting support of some sort that is too costly, they’re ignored or dropped from the service. But with the power of the internet as their communication device, people are rebelling.

The answer to this shift isn’t a group of people at your company monitoring a Twitter feed, or some guy handing out stickers at a conference. It’s about bringing real community back into company culture. Even if it means we can’t find a job as a “community manager” anymore.

I’m not writing this post from a place of arrogance. I’m not writing this post from a viewpoint of “I’m right, you’re wrong”. I’m writing this post because this weekend I realized that I am failing horribly at this. I keep getting mired in the details of getting through the tweets of the day or writing a good blog post – instead of focusing on creating a vibrant community. So I’m sharing my confession and realization with you all in the hope that we can all help each other get there. Let’s do this, yeah?

Photo of Miz Ginerva and Thomas Knoll by Ginevra herself.
Donut photo courtesy of Marc Buehler.

Bottom Line: Steve Jobs Shouldn’t Have Lied

Marketing, Tech

I’m pretty Apple-neutral. I adore my iPod (though I specifically bought a 5th generation because I like it better), I use Windows, I own an Android phone but I absolutely appreciate the genius of Apple design.

iphone 4But this time, Apple really screwed up.

Not in building or designing the phone, mind you. I get it – lots of phones have this issue, it’s only affecting a small percentage of people, the media has clearly blown it out of proportion because it’s a juicy story.

But Apple finally got bit in the ass by their “we make the news” policy. And they’re crying about it.

In the press conference this morning, Steve Jobs admitted that they knew about the iPhone4 reception issue before releasing the phone. Again, I understand – all products have flaws, and I don’t really think there is anything wrong about not highlighting them. People can make their own decision based on reviews.

But Steve Jobs specifically told us that this wasn’t an issue. He told us that we were holding the phone wrong. He lied so he wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences. That’s just wrong.

My #1 rule for fostering a loyal community: be honest with them as much as you possibly can.

People value honesty incredibly highly – I’ve had to deliver devastating news to customers before, and taking the time to tell them the whole truth of the issue often results in a surprising response: gratefulness. Yes, people often respond to bad news positively if you’re actually honest. There’s so much dishonesty in the world (especially the corporate world) that people are just relieved to know what’s going on. Ever had a mysterious ailment? If you’re anything like me, what’s worse than being sick or hurt is not knowing what it is or how bad it is. We, as humans, want the truth.

Apple could have saved money and face by being honest, at least once the initial reports came out.

Had they noticed the buzz in the first week they could have simply announced (hell, via Twitter if they had an account): “Yes, we’re aware of this. Yes, it’s a problem. Most phones have it, it should only affect a small percentage of calls and people.” You know what? Most people probably would have been fine with that. And if they weren’t? Offer free bumper cases to people who came in and requested them. It’d still save a lot more money than shipping them out to people (many of whom probably haven’t experienced this issue, but will ask for a case because of all the hoopla).

In short: even Apple’s might can be damaged by dishonesty. I’m impressed that Apple is actually admitting the truth and listening for once. I hope they keep it up (and their stockholders should too).

Photo courtesy of mkuma443.