How I Spent My "Geek Spring Break" (aka SXSWi)

It's been exactly a week since South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) and I've had a little bit of time to let the dust settle. While this was definitely the most stressful of the three SXSWi's I've been to, it was also the most professionally rewarding. Yes, you heard me right. I actually had a good time at SXSWi AND found value unlike others who complained that it's become too big, too commercialized or too whatever. Rather than pile on, I'll let my friends Kyle Flaherty and Jessica Smith and sister, Heather Strout's posts speak to this point as they've really covered all the bases.

What I would like to cover in my recap of my experience at SXSWi are five things. I've bulleted the items below so you can focus on the areas you care about and skip the "who gives a shit" stuff.

• Key take away's from the Dachis Group's Social Business Summit on Thursday
• Location-based services - my $.02
• Speaking at SXSWi and what I think it takes to get on a panel
• The @Redsoxgnome photo meme
• Parties: which ones I liked and why (including our very own Powered Inc. party)

SOCIAL BUSINESS SUMMIT

Fortunately or unfortunately, I was not able to attend very many panels this year. Believe it or not, it was not a lack of want on my part but rather a lack of time (thus the stress) between meetings, briefings, client events, prospecting, etc. I did have the good fortune of sitting on two panels this year (more on that under bullet three) and did get a chance to catch my friend / mentee, Sydney Owen's panel, "GenY Wants to Work with You, Not for You (my friend, Elysa Rice was also on the panel -- both did a wonderful job). I also caught the first half of Twitter founder, Evan Williams', keynote. Like many folks, I was underwhelmed but found a little additional value in moderator, Umair Haque's blog recap/apology.

The reason I'm providing this prologue is that I didn't feel as bad about not attending panels during SXSWi because I had a day of great inspiration on the Thursday prior. (A big thank you to Peter Kim / Jeff Dachis for inviting me). You can visit the agenda to see a list of all the speakers and topics but the highlights for me were the breadth and depth of what was covered. In particular, I really liked Charlene Li's (Altimeter Group) talk on open leadership, Jaime Punishill's (Citi) discussion of operationalizing social, Kate Niederhoffer's (Dachis Group) primer on social psychology,  Frank Eliason's (Comcast) focus on social's impact on cultural change and finally Jackie Huba's (Ants Eye View) highlighting of why the "one percent-ers" matter. Don't get me wrong, all of the speakers were fantastic... these just happen to be the handful that really stood out.

LOCATION-BASED SERVICES

One of the biggest takeaways for me at SXSWi is that location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla are here to stay. Those two may or may not be the dominant players in the long run (I like both companies but my money is on Facebook for winning this game in the long run) but they definitely got their day in the sun at SXSWi. Author, Alan Wolk and 140 Conference founder, Jeff Pulver, shared some interesting thoughts here and here on what LBS lack and why they played a bigger role at SXSWi than Twitter.

As someone that's spent more time than is healthy experimenting with location-based services -- I started using Brightkite in early 2008 -- I had the opportunity to experience the good, the bad and the ugly of Gowalla and Foursquare during SXSWi. For one, Gowalla and FourSquare helped me find out where the best panels, lunches, dinners and parties were during the conference. In particular, a simple check up on the whereabouts of Mssrs. Chris Heueur, Brett Petersel, David Armano or Robert Scoble more often than not let me know where the action was.

Using FourSquare and Gowalla was also particularly useful in trying to track down friends and colleagues when we got separated (which happened fairly often). Lastly, I was also able to figure out who was in the blogger's lounge at any given time (to that end, big ups to Porter Novelli, TechSet, Brian Solis, Stephanie Agresta and Windows for making the BL possible). The Bloggers' Lounge continues to be one of my favorite places to hang out during SXSWi.

On the bad/ugly side of LBS, there are privacy issues that are starting to arise. For one. FourSquare has developed a feature that automatically includes other "friends" that are checked into a common location when a user decides to cross-post on Twitter. Normally, this is no big deal but increasingly is starting to cause confusion or even trouble. As an example, think about this use case... I check into the Iron Cactus for lunch. As the day wears on, I get caught up with work and forget to check into another location. At 3:30, a female friend that I'm connected with on FourSquare checks into the Iron Cactus and says "doing tequila shots." The problem is, unknowingly the aforementioned female friend's tweet might look something like this, "@SusieQue is doing tequila shots w/ @aaronstrout at Iron Cactus (225 Fourth Street http://4sq.com/4r8adF)." While I may, or may not care whether I'm being accused of doing tequila shots, if my boss and/or wife are watching Twitter, they might see this tweet and wonder, "what the hell is Aaron doing with Susie Que at 3:30 in the afternoon when he should be working?

On a side note, one of the bright spots of SXSWi for me was a social network / platform called Plancast. I covered this with my podcast partner, Jennifer Leggio, a few weeks ago on the Quick-n-Dirty podcast show and will be interviewing their CEO, Mark Hendrickson sometime in April. Even if you are not socially inclined, it is a great way to discover events (and keep track of events that you have signed up for). You can also find out more from the interview that my friend, Simon Salt, did with Mark here.

SPEAKING AT SXSWi / GETTING ON A PANEL

As I mentioned earlier, this was my third year attending SXSWi. My first year here, I was just in awe of actually coming and did not submit for any panels. For 2009, I submitted for a panel that made it all the way to the finals before being nixed. And then there was this year. I only submitted one panel and that was on behalf of my colleague, Kathy Warren. It was to include Kodak client, Tom Hoehn, and friends, Shawn Morton of Nationwide and Peter Fasano of Coke. The focus was how businesses were generating ROI using social (I mean, who would want to see that panel, right?) Unfortunately, that panel did not make the cut but my friend, Tim Walker's panel on using sports metaphors in social did. I was also lucky enough to be asked to join a panel on Digital Identity Theft by my friend Beth Gwazdosky at CSIdentity.

What's the moral of this story? One, it's an arbitrary process from what I can tell and two, make friends with people who have a good shot of getting their panels approved. Oh, and keep trying because as frustrating as it is to submit and fail, you don't have a shot (unless you've got the right friends) unless you try. For summaries of the Digital Identity Theft panel I did with Bill Morrow, see my sister's post (referenced earlier). My friend, Christine Major, did a nice wrap up of the sports metaphor panel that Tim and Kyle Flaherty were kind enough to include me on.

THE REDSOX GNOME

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and that couldn't be more true when it came to this year's photo meme. For those who are wondering "what's up with the gnome," the short version of the story is that my good friend, Jim Storer (the photographer responsible for many of the photos in this post) decided to start a photo meme last year called, Sad, Mad, Glad. This year, our goal was to one-up that meme so we solicited suggestions from Twitter. Former colleague, Susan Koutalakis, teed up the idea of taking pictures with the Red Sox Gnome ala Travelocity. I've included a few of my favorites below but be sure to head over to Jim's Flickr stream to see all the victims participants in the meme.

THE PARTIES

I could wax poetic on this last topic for a while. But I won't. Mainly because I don't want to reinforce the perception that SXSWi is all about the parties. Don't get me wrong, there are A LOT of parties. But for anyone that really "gets it," you realize that the networking is what's important and that can happen in a number of different ways including breakfasts, hallway conversations, the Blogger's Lounge, car rides to the Salt Lick, etc.

With that said, here are my five favorite parties/events from SXSWi in no particular order:

• Allhat II at Guero's (thrown by Richard Binhammer and David Armano): Great people, great venue, great music and great food. Have I used the adjective "great" enough yet? (photos)
• Firefly Fandango at Molotov (thrown by Jason Falls, Tim Hayden, Tom Martin and Chillie Falls): all the right people on a roof deck with enough room to move around. (photos)
• TechSet at Speakeasy (thrown by Brian Solis and Steph Agresta): this party always tends to be one of the "Bells of the Ball." Fun accessories like Kyle Flaherty's boa (pictured at the top of this post) and funky white shades. Got a little crowded mid-way through but fun nonetheless. (photos)
• Flash Party at Belmont (inspired by Chris Heuer): sometimes the best parties are the ones that happen spontaneously. I think this was the most fun because of who showed up and that it wasn't on anyone's calendar. Chris just made it happen. (photos)
• The Powered Party at Scholz Garten (thrown by my company, Powered -- props to Drillteam and Beth Lopez for making this party kick ass): If the venue, people, food, weather etc. made Allhat II great, add actor/comedian, Brian Posehn, to the mix and you had a perfect mix of funny and chemistry. Thank you to everyone that showed up for this party. It meant a lot to me/us. (photos)
• Honorable mention: The group that Peter Kim and I got together at the Salt Lick. (photos)
• Also honorable mention: the Chevy party thrown by Christopher Barger at the Salt Lick. And yes, I got my share of BBQ during SXSWi as evidenced by the Porky badge I earned as a result on FourSquare.

So that's a wrap. Longer than I wanted it to be but missing a bunch of things I wanted to talk about. Isn't that always the way. An additional shout out to some of my peeps that I hung out with during SXSW including: Joe Jaffe, Doug Wick, Bill Fanning, Sydney Owen, Mason Nelder, Zena Weist, Adam Cohen, Selina McCusker, Zane Aveton, Bill Johnston, Jaime Punishill, Anna O'Brien, Frank Eliason, Deb Micek, Aaron Brazell, D'Ann Faught, Alexa Scordato, Keith Burtis, Rocky Barbanica, Brett Petersel, Reem Abeidoh, Heather Elias, Hadley Stern, Martha Hayward, David Smutek, Liz Phillips, Marlooz Veldhuisen, Jeremy Tanner, Maria Ogneva, Greg Narain, Ginger Wilcox, Derek Overbey, Andy Kaufman, Jeremiah Owyang, David Berkowitz, Maggie Fox, Lionel Menchaca, Greg Matthews, Shawn Morton, Chuck Hemann, Bryan Person and about a thousand other people I'm going to piss off by not mentioning here.

Special thanks to Jim Storer for being my partner in crime and making the conference incrementally more fun with all his awesome photos. And special, special thanks to my loving and supportive wife, Melanie and my three awesome children for letting me be an absentee husband/dad for nearly six days.

7 Reasons You Know You're Experiencing SXSW Withdrawal

There's no doubt that by the end of South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), we are all tired, brain dead and a little overwhelmed... yet we all seem to have a big ole' permagrin on our face (not to mention hundreds of new Twitter, Plancast and and Gowalla followers). This is partially due to the fact that there is just nothing quite like "South-by" as locals call it. It's just such a perfect mix of sun, friends and a deeper understanding of what makes "social," well... "social."

As a three time veteran, I feel the need to let other South-by attendees that they aren't the only ones to feel that twinge of remorse as their planes touch down, especially those that have to go back to colder climes. What better way to empathize than to share my seven reasons you know you're experiencing SXSW withdrawal with my friends.

Drumroll please...

7. You can't stop using the world "douchebag"... including with your kids, grandmother and your boss.
6. Checking into every room in your house using Gowalla and Foursquare feels perfectly normal.
5. You find yourself daydreaming about BBQ... ALL THE TIME
4. Neighbors look at you funny when you ask them which parties they are going to tonight.
3. None of your co-workers know where or what the "Blogger's Lounge" is.
2. You can't help but wonder if you'll randomly bump into Robert Scoble, Gary Vaynerchuck or Guy Kawasaki  in your local Starbucks.

AND THE NUMBER ONE WAY YOU KNOW YOU'RE GOING THROUGH SXSW WITHDRAWAL...

1. You keep looking at the @RedSoxGnome's Twitter stream to see which wild and crazy guy or gal he'll end up with next!

Great seeing everyone. Sorry we didn't get a chance to visit more. A more serious wrap up SXSW post will be coming soon!

Photo Credit: my main, techmology man, Jim Storer. (respect, respect)

Quick-n-dirty Podcast Recap 33: Reunited Edition!

It's been a few weeks since my podcast partner in crime, Jennifer Leggio, and I have been able to do a Quick-n-Dirty podcast together. For two weeks in a row, travel prevented me from joining her on our weekly show. Fortunately, we had a couple of more than capable substitutes in Brian Solis (author and principal of FutureWorks) and Greg Matthews, director of innovation at Humana. Write ups from the shows with Brian and Greg can be found here and here on Jennifer's ZDNet blog.

This week, Jennifer and I were back in the saddle again with me broadcasting live from Jackson Hole, WY (yes, I took one for the team). We had an action packed show starting with our featured social network of the week, Hollrr. Neither Jennifer or I had had much of chance to play with Hollrr but saw some decent potential in this site that Mashable likens to "Foursquare for product discovery" (full review here). Both Jennifer and I appreciated Hollrr's off-the-shelf integration with other social networks like Twitter and Facebook and I personally look forward to getting product recommendations from friends and connections. Oh yeah, they have a pretty cool logo too.

Next up was our featured guest (and former "Twitterer of the week,") Simon Mainwaring. If you don't know Simon, you should. Officially, he is a branding consultant, advertising creative director, blogger, author and speaker. A former Nike creative at Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, and worldwide creative director for Motorola at Ogilvy, he now consults for brands and creative companies that are re-inventing their industries. During this week's show, Simon shared some fascinating updates from a recent trip he took to the Middle East as a guest of the Brookings Institute. The focus was on social media and foreign policy, two disciplines that traditionally don't share the same space. I won't pretend to do Simon's interview justice so just this one time, I'm MANDATING that you listen to at least Simon's portion of the show (starts about 7 mins in and runs for aproximately 25 minutes).

Speaking of "Twitterers of the week," this week's choice was principal of The Community Roundtable (and close friend), Jim Storer. As I mentioned during the show, nobody has done a better job at taking community management skills to Twitter than Jim. Regularly mixing helpful tips, humor, love of bacon and Red Sox commentary into his stream, Jim is a "must add" to anyone's Twitter follow list irrespective of what industry they are in.

Last but not least, our point/counterpoint focused on one of Jennifer's recent blog posts, Twitter: Becoming Nothing Special. Jennifer's post theorizes that the recent announcement of Yahoo's partnership with Twitter pushes them from "new shiny object" into the merely "ordinary" category. While Jennifer didn't see this as all bad, she wondered aloud if this might hurt Twitter's future potential. Taking the opposing side of this issue, I argued that this is exactly what Twitter (and social media) need. Making Twitter and other social networks like "electricity" -- something we don't ever even think about in spite of the critical role it plays in our daily lives -- is a good thing. To me, this means that it's so ingrained in our daily lives, personal and professional, that we can't live without it.

Looking forward to next week's show, Jennifer and I will switch places and I will be working with friend and founder of Oneforty, Laura Fitton, as my guest host. Jennifer will be attending the RSA Conference and thus will be out of pocket for this week's Quick-n-Dirty. I'm sure she'll want to listen to the show (as will you). Fortunately for her, our shows are archived here and on iTunes (search on "quickndirty").

EDR's Community Wins Groundswell Award: An Interview with VP Mark Wallace

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of working with my friend, Mark Wallace, at a company called Shared Insights (subsequently merged with Knowledge Planet and became Mzinga). At Shared Insights, Mark was the head of sales, our mutual friend and colleague, Jim Storer, headed up product/community management and I lead our marketing efforts. The three of us were not only lucky enough to get into the social/community space well before the social web started to gain critical mass but we also had the benefit of working with some smart companies like Deloitte, Webex/Cisco and Environmental Data Resources (EDR).

Since that time, we've all gone our separate ways with me heading to Powered Inc., Jim co-founding a company called The Community Roundtable and Mark jumping over to EDR to run their community. I mention this only because the three of us stay in semi-regular touch and of course I've taken more than a passing interest in Mark's social and community efforts at EDR. To that end, I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that EDR's community, Commonground, had just won Forrester's prestigious Groundswell Award for Best B2B Support Community.

As someone that likes to know about these things and is always interested in sharing great case studies, I couldn't resist asking Mark to do a quick e-mail interview with me:

1. Tell us a little bit about EDR and what they do?
Environmental Data Resources, Inc. is the leading provider of environmental risk information services and related workflow applications in the United States. As the innovator of the most comprehensive database of environmental and historical land use information, the company provides reports, subscription services and other solutions to help its customers reduce environmental risk.
2. How did you come to work at EDR?
EDR was one of our early clients when I led sales at Shared Insights. When SharedInsights was recapitalized, I worked with them from while I was with Mzinga. Shortly after I left Mzinga, I was attending the Community 2.0 Conference in Las Vegas when Rob Barber, CEO of EDR, Barry Libert, CEO of Mzinga, and I started talking. Next thing I knew, Rob and Jay Gaines, CMO of EDR, created a position and I joined the company shortly thereafter.
3. Talk about how the commonground community came about?
EDR has always prided itself on innovation. We believed strongly in the importance of social networking and the value it would have for businesses moving forward. EDR invested resources to build commonground to enable our marketplace to harness the power of social media to improve customer loyalty, educate our marketplace, improve our web presence, expand both vertically and horizontally, and ultimately generate new sources of revenue.
4. What role do you play in the EDR commonground community (strategic and day-to-day)?
My title is VP of Social Media for EDR. In that role, I am responsible for leading social media strategy and monetization efforts. I do whatever is required to deliver a valuable experience for our members while focusing on achieving the objectives outlined above.
5. So you just found out that you won Forrester's prestigious Groundswell Award for best B2B support community. Who was your competition?
That is a great question. When we saw the other submissions from SAP, Aflac, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Pitney Bowes, NetApp, we were pleased just to be in the same category as those market leading companies. When we found out from Josh Bernoff that we won, we were absolutely thrilled as it validated all the hard work of our members, partners, and staff.
6. Why do you think that Forrester picked you?
I think Forrester picked us because we were able to share real success metrics on the true business benefits to both members and EDR. Plus we have an extremely high customer satisfaction rate.
7. What are 2-3 lessons that you've learned that you might share with other companies thinking about community?
The three most important lessons I can share are a) Before you select technology, make sure you have a clear and concise strategy with defined metrics b) Content, either user or expert generated, or both, is the key ingredient to a thriving community. c) Many companies fail at building communities. It is not easy to build a thriving community. Therefore, set reasonable expectations up front and make sure you have the proper senior management support, resources, and organizational commitment to realize them.
8. Thoughts on "build vs. join" i.e. do you feel like you've got all your bases covered with your community? Or are you a believer in participating in 3rd party social networks?
I believe in both. It depends on your goals and objectives. Those will drive what makes the most sense. Often times, both in tandem are the best option. As the leader in our market, we decided the best approach was to build commonground. We also have a LinkedIn Group and a Facebook Fan page.
9. Freestyle - give me any other pearls of wisdom or color commentary you'd like to share here. If you feel like you've answered everything you can skip this.
When building a community, it is way too easy to get distracted. Focus is critical if you want to be successful.

NOTE: I interviewed both Mark this year in my Experts in the Industry series. If you want to learn more about him, head on over and have a look see.

Can you judge a book by its cover?

The title of this post asks, "can you judge a book by its cover?" You can when the "cover" is the front page of someone's Twitter account and you're judging whether to follow them. That page contains an avatar image (usually the person's photo), a short biography (no more than 160 characters long), a link to the person's home page (or company, blog, LinkedIn profile, etc.), and -- crucially -- the most recent 20 tweets that the person has sent. You can click through to see more tweets in batches of 20, but if you follow many people on Twitter, doing that often takes more time than it's worth.

And there's the rub: if you want more people to follow you on Twitter, you have very little time to make a good first impression on them . . . but many ways that you could string landmines of the "Don't Follow Me" variety across their path.

Recently four heavy Twitter users -- Meg Fowler, Jim Storer, Aaron Strout, and Tim Walker -- got to talking (on Twitter, of course) about the poisoned words, phrases, and other cues that automatically signal "Don't Follow" for them. The end result was that the four decided to bang out a joint blog post that talked about best practices in not following based on not liking the proverbial "cover" put forth by fellow tweeters. Here's what we came up with:

Tim Walker's "not follow" strategy

• “MLM” (multi-level marketing). I’m sure that somewhere, some nice person who does MLM could explain to me how it’s not a veiled Ponzi scheme. Until then . . . you’ll pardon me if I continue to think of it as “a veiled Ponzi scheme.” No thanks.
• Tweets that include “buy followers” or “hundreds of followers” or anything else in the “get lotsa followers!” genre. I try hard to earn new followers by being relevant, interesting, funny, and personable. The idea that you would buy yours in bulk -- much less promote that process -- disgusts me.
• Political ig’nance. I follow people of all political stripes, from all over the world. But if you have to wear your politics on your sleeve, and if your politics are of the knee-jerk type (again, regardless of your leanings), I just can’t stand to follow you.
• Calling yourself a “visionary” or “expert” or (shudder) “guru.” It’s much better to say you’re a “marketing veteran” or “experienced sales leader” or whatever. Let *others* call you a visionary.

Meg Fowler's "not follow" strategy (cross-posted on "friend" Gradon Tripp's blog)

Love it, Tim.

• For me, it's more about "who do I need to block around here?" Because no one likes to be spammed. So if I see any of this in your bio and/or first 20 tweets...
• Requests to "follow me back!"
• Promotion of affiliate programs
• Actual affiliate links as the link in your bio
• Any mention of followers ("I can get you followers!" "Get thousands of followers!" "5,000 followers and growing!" "This program will get you followers overnight!")
• "Make money online (from home, easily, doing practically nothing, overnight, with my system, etc.)"
• Promises to "generate" anything: money, cash, followers, success, creeping rashes...
• Promotion of tooth whitening programs (Seriously?)
• A mention of your Twitter Grader Rank
• Mention of "Sponsored Tweets"
• Mention of your "Twitter eBook FREE JUST CLICK HERE"
• Presence of "69" in name (or "Shelly Ryan" as your name... poor, poor real @ShellyRyan)
• Rockstar/Maven/diva/coach/thought leader/guru/expert/pro/maverick
• Porn-star-like attributes in avatar or links (Nudity, actual sexual acts, clear intent to seduce me with something other than words)
• Requests to click through to "see your profile"
• Googly-eyed "Twitter Basic" avatar (upload a photo, PLEASE)
• @ing people the same link OVER AND OVER

Jim Storer's"not follow" strategy
I've never auto-followed anyone, which at this point means I've vetted (to varying degrees) nearly 3,500 people. Until recently you had to click through to a person's/bots profile page to get the skinny on who they are. Now some of that info is available in the new follower email, but what I look for is the same.

• Following to Follower % (you're following dramatically more people than follow you) - If this is too imbalanced there's something fishy and I'm not biting.
• # of Updates to Followers/Following #'s - In the last six months I've started to see a lot of people with 5k+ followers/following and less than 100 updates. That suggests you're just using a program to rack up followers and that just wrong (IMHO). I'm not interested in being another notch on your bedpost.
• If your bio includes any of the following I'm not interested: "more followers", "make money", "expert" (at anything), "MLM" and everything else Tim, Meg and Aaron came up with. I trust them.
• If the words you chose to describe your pursuits in your biography are overly loquacious I will not be inclined to follow you back. Get real... use real words and tell me who you are.
• If you haven't written anything in your bio and/or you haven't added a photo, I'm not following you.
• If you have zero updates how am I supposed to know what you're going to talk about? I'm not listening until you start talking.
• If your last few updates are repetitive and too self-promoting, I'm not interested in seeing that day to day. I already saw what you have to say when I was checking out your profile.

Aaron Strout's "not follow" strategy

The upside and downside of going last is that 1) all the good stuff has been said but 2) it leaves less stuff for me to say. Out of the list above, I'm probably the most lenient of the four. Like Jim, I've never auto-followed (but have considered it) so that means that I've hand followed back nearly 9,000 people (yup, that's a lot). However, I have a few basic rules that I follow:

• In most cases (not all), I like seeing a picture. If someone is obviously a n00b who looks to be figuring things out, I'll cut 'em some slack. Otherwise, they don't make the cut.
• I need a bio. Is it too much to tell me what you do?
• I also need a tweet or two (unless they are a friend of mine and then of course they get the free hall pass)
• No "get rich fast, affiliate or "let me sell you some shit" in the bio or last few tweets."
• One I get stuck on a lot is the news feed/blog title posts. These really depend on follow ratio and quality of the tweets. It also is up to my mood. If I'm hand following 40-50 people, these folks usually make it in. If it's 4-5, not so much.
• I will follow ANYONE from Austin (pornos excepted)
• Oh yeah, I don't follow webcam girls or known pornos.

So what's your strategy? Who do you or don't you follow? Share your tips in the comments below.

photo credit: library.cornell.edu

Experts in the Industry: Jim Storer (29 of 45)

Ahhhh, Jim Storer. So many things I could say -- all are good but some are not fit for print. The reason I know this is that Jim -- someone I worked with for three years at Shared Insights/Mzinga -- is one of my closest friends in the socialsphere, and in life in general. While at Mzinga, Jim (Twitter handle) was the sr. director of social media. He is now one of the most valuable free agents on the street (think Manny Ramirez but without the attitude or the $25 million/year salary). Did you hear that potential employers?

There are three things I will tell you about Jim (he'll appreciate the irony of my making it "three"):

• He is one of the most savvy community people out there having spent several years managing numerous communities both big and small.
• Jim is every bit the sports nut that I am -- and in fact is one of the most regular commenters and contributors on our group sports blog, Big Papelbon.
• Up until four months ago, Jim was the guy that I turned to to vett most of my big ideas. Oh yeah, he also was a GREAT partner in our podcasting efforts. Two particular instances stand out -- one at SXSW last year where we did 15 or 16 podcasts in one night (part 1, part 2, part 3) AND a tour de force at last years Community 2.0 event where we interviewed the likes of Charlene Li (in a limo), Tony Hsieh of Zappos and David Weinberger, co-author of Clue Train Manifesto.

I could go on forever but I won't. Here's how Jim answered the five questions from the Experts in the Industry series:

In one sentence, please describe what you do and why you're good at it.

I help companies build better relationships with their customer and employees, often through the use of social technologies. I've been at it for a while (see below), have tried almost everything and have a pretty good sense of what does and doesn't work. 

 

How did you get into the world of online community, social media or social marketing?

In the 1990's I worked for a trade show company and we found some of best customer relationships were started/developed by participating in newsgroups. Around the turn of the century (I just love saying that), we decided to launch a series of communities to support the technology topics we covered with our events. We didn't always know what we were doing, but we learned a lot and developed some very strong 

customer relationships that helped the company weather the tough times in the early 2000's. 

 

If you had $10 million to invest in one company and one company only based on their use of "social," which company would it be and why?

I thought about this for a while and really can't justify giving it to anyone but Zappos. There are a lot of companies that talk social media and some walk social media in certain segments of their business, but very few companies live it to the core. Zappos is one of them. Tony Hsieh is both a 

very smart businessman and social leader rolled into one. He and the Zappos team are building something special and I'd love to support their vision. 

 

Which business leader, politician or public figure do you most respect?

Ok, I'll spread the wealth and won't pick Tony again. I'll go with Jack Welch. He may be seen as an old school businessman, but he always been pushing the envelope of business practices. Just the other night I caught a video of him discussing how businesses need re-invent how they think about human resources. He's simply an amazing man... and it doesn't hurt that he's a UMass/Amherst alum. ;-)

Would you join a toothpaste community? Why?

Community? Probably not, but it really depends on what the sponsoring company decides to do with it. I'm not sure there's enough in it for me to join a toothpaste community. If they wrote a blog with tips on getting kids to brush and floss every night and gave me coupons to save money on brushes and toothpaste I *might* subscribe. If they started following me on Twitter, I *might* follow them back. I'd love to see them humanize the company, but I probably won't engage around a product. Check out Rachel Happe's excellent post on the difference between community and social media for more on this topic. 

 

Freeform – here's where you can riff on anyone or anything – good or bad. Or just share a pearl of wisdom.

I get the sense that companies spend a lot of time thinking about getting into social media, often over-evaluate the options (and there are a LOT of them). It's not expensive (often free) to dip your toe in the water and start listening to what's being said about you and your brands. Most social media "gurus" would advocate this approach. My advice? Just get started.