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. ☺

Jake McKee of CommunityGuy.com interviews Paula Drum of H&R block about their community & social media strategy, and working with legal. Great insight from a big brand.

This video was originally released to Online Community Research Network members. For information on joining, click here.

Jake McKee has been conducting a series of interviews with Online Community experts for the Online Community Research Network.

The latest is with Sean O'Driscoll (formerly of Microsoft) about working with the legal team on building communities.



Please let add your thoughts via comments.

Also - drop me a line and let me know what you think about the value of these interviews - bjohnston@forumone.com

This month's Expert Interview is with Mario Anima, Director of Online Community at Current. Mario was kind enough to spend time answering a few questions about Current, the unique community that he helps manage, and the intersection of traditional, new and social media.


Mario Anima
Director, Online Community
Current

"I’m obsessed with online communities, products, and technology. I love when these three things converge, but i’m also a huge film geek, avid reader, and have been known to enjoy video games and music."

photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid



Q: Can you tell us a little bit about Current?

A: Current is a television station wrapped up in an online social media site at Current.com. Essentially, our community submits videos, news stories, blog posts, and anything else they find around the web (or create themselves) to Current.com, and then our community votes on the submitted stories to help collaboratively determine what gets made into TV segments (called pods) and aired on Current TV. We also have a full swing production team that produces regular programs like infoMania and Vanguard.

Q: What has surprised you most about managing a community of newgatherers and newsmakers?

A: Everyone involved in a social online community has a dedicated interest, and these interests range from the constructive to the destructive depending on who they are. Seems obvious enough. On Current, however, things can be uniquely rewarding and difficult. Diffusing situations is commonplace in communities, but more often than not, our team finds themselves diffusing dustups between community members who are undergoing an ideological clash of greater proportions. It’s both rewarding and challenging to be caught in between two people who really are committed to being informative, but are on the polar opposite sides of the spectrum ideologically.

Q: What has been one (or some) of the most difficult issues to manage in your community? How did you handle?

A: Censorship. We are largely a social news site, so issues with the censorship crop up frequently. It’s an ongoing issue, but one that we are trying to manage this with transparency and openness. We have a group of online programmers who help facilitate the transition of content from the Internet to TV. Things crop up, sometimes sources are not credible, other times we don’t have the rights to use video that our community really found compelling. We are trying to get better at messaging these decisions in a way that doesn’t leave the community scratching their heads.

Q: What advice would you give to someone interested in becoming a community manager?

A: You really, really, really have to love being online, being socially active in online communities, and being willing to jump into just about any situation as called for. In addition to that, you also need to have a keen eye and understanding of when and when not to dive in. It takes dedication and patience, but those are two of the most commonly shared attributes I’ve found amongst other community managers.

Q: What online community and social networking trends do you see on the horizon that are the most interesting to you?

A: Well, the whole micro-blogging thing is extremely powerful, although it’s been talked to death lately. I really think aggregation of social content/profiles still has a way to go, but there are some opportunities there. I think overall, media as we know it will continue to evolve thanks to the Internet and the social networks that continue to crop up. I’m very excited about the mobility and portability of identity and content.

This month's Expert Interview is with Christine Perey, Analyst and freelance associate of Informa Telecoms & Media. Christine has a truly global view of the topic of mobile social networking as a former Bay Area resident who now resides in Switzerland. Christine was kind enough to spend time answering several questions about mobile-based social networking below and expands on some of the findings published in the new Informa Telecoms and Media report, Mobile Social Networking: Communities and Content on the Move.


Christine's Bio:
Christine Perey is an analyst with over 15 years experience in new and emerging multimedia communications markets. She is a freelance associate of Informa Telecoms & Media and a regular contributor to Informa’s Mobile Media information service.

Christine was the publisher and editor of The QuickTime Forum from 1991-1993 and the founder of The QuickTime Movie Festival. Christine is an invited speaker at industry events and serves on boards, panels and committees dedicated to the advancement of rich media experiences in business and consumer markets. In 2008 Informa Telecoms & Media published Mobile Social Networking: Community and Content on the Move, the most comprehensive market research report on mobile communities, researched and written by Christine. Previously, she authored the Personal Mobile Video Communications market research report published by Wainhouse Research in 2006.
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Q: What are the key differences you see in the mobile market in the states vs. Europe and Asia? Specifically, what are the key barriers to innovation in the US?

A: As far as the general topic of mobile services for consumers and businesses is concerned, there are dramatic regional differences. For example, in the US, most (somewhere over 90%) subscribers are under contract, meaning that they receive a bill every month for the services they used in the prior 30 days. When a service provider has a guaranteed revenue stream, they are less likely to innovate than when people are changing operators every week or month. Also, until relatively recently, both in-bound and out-bound calls were charged and the consumer or business contracted for a flat rate monthly plan based on the “block” of minutes. This affects how people use the phone service (it lowers the tendency to give out the mobile number, for example). By contrast, in European and Asian markets, pre-paid services and dialing party pays are the rules, not the exceptions. People “top up” the phone cards in their phones and can change carriers any day of the week. Many have two phones (with two different carriers). There’s a good article on the US cellular market performance with some of Analysis Research’s recent report findings. Here’s a snippet:

Analysis Research predicts that total annual subscriber growth in the US nationwide could fall to 2 percent a year by 2012, compared with the 11 percent to 14 percent growth posted by the three wireless carriers, AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA. But add in Sprint Nextel, which posted two consecutive quarters of subscriber losses, and the total annual subscriber growth last year for the top four carriers dropped to 9 percent – the slowest growth in a decade.

Technologies for mobile networks are not the same around the world. In the US and most of Latin and South America, the technology is based primarily (with the exception of AT&T Wirless/Cingular network and T-Mobile which are GSM/UMTS) on CDMA2000 which is a different radio technology than what was adopted and deployed in Western (and most of the Eastern block) Europe and Japan. In Europe and in many other parts of the world where advanced mobile services are offered, the technology is GSM which is the predecessor of WCDMA and the step up (to UMTS-3G) is relatively easy. There are proponents of these different technologies in each camp, for sure, but the bottom line is that due to the fact that these differences exist today, some mobile services are easier to build or deploy and will advance/develop more rapidly in some regions than others. In Europe, the UK and Italy are very advanced markets for mobile but for different reasons.

In Japan and Korea, mobile network services are the most advanced in the world, although the UK is not far behind. The competition among carriers and the penetration is high (exceeding one handset per person). Let’s look at Japan to compare and contrast the drivers of innovation, getting to your question about possible barriers to innovation in the US market. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo had the foresight in the mid- or late1990s to create an environment where a rich ecosystem for application developers could develop. In addition to having developer APIs and other tools, they provided a strong financial incentive for developers who created new services on their network. The developers in the i-Mode ecosystem would receive 20-30% of the revenues charged by the mobile operator for the services. The economic reward system is an important driver of innovation but the mobile network operators in the US market have adopted a strong “walled garden” approach where they and only they choose the services offered and if the successful services are provided by a third party, even then the “cut” of the action (revenues) which returns to the application developer is much lower (5-10%).

Despite the regional differences in regulation, markets, technologies and revenue sharing strategies, mobile communities are rapidly expanding in all parts of the world! I don’t have hard statistics to provide about on-deck and off-deck community tendency, but my impression is that mobile communities are making themselves easy to find and people are looking for them on their mobiles. Subscribers are looking for community services on the mobile operator’s deck as well as on the Mobile Web.

One of the barriers to subscribers using mobile communities is the cost of the data traffic. We’ve all heard and many have experienced the sticker shock when you download large files to a mobile handset or do a lot of surfing. In countries, such as Japan, Korea, UK and a few other European markets, there are flat-rate, all-you-can-eat data tariffs offered, which really reduce the barrier to using the mobile data services such as mobile communities. These are catching on and where available, User-Generated Content and mobile community services are high on the list of compelling reasons to take a flat rate data plan with your contract.

In addition to the mobile operator related regional differences, it is clear that there are also economic and societal differences which influence the rate of mobile community adoption. I’ll just look at a few of these non-operator factors to make my point. In many (most) economically less well developed regions of the world (outside the Western and Japanese economies), the mobile handset will be people’s first and only access to the Internet. The number of mobile phones has already exceeded the number of Web connected PCs. Increasingly these mobile phones are capable of accessing data services such as mobile communities. It’s not a question of choice, there just aren’t broadband Internet services available at affordable prices, or the PC in the home or office is shared among an entire family or group of people and you don’t want to have your community experience to be shared by your parents or siblings! The mobile handset personal experience is private and personalized and for some services, dating, for example—a very popular mobile community service—it’s not the type of experience you want to be doing in a living room with people around.

Like in web communities, there are strong cultural drivers which influence the appeal of communities and the feature popularity. In Asian markets, digital gifting is very popular. In Japan, people love to view UGC on their mobile, but are more conservative than Americans when creating their own content. In the US market, more subscribers are exhibitionists with their camera phones.


Q: Why doesn't having international players like T-Mobile help spur innovation and openness in the domestic US market?

A: T-Mobile has operated a very innovative service in the US market called MyFaves and after over a year of success it has expanded this service to Germany, the UK and elsewhere. Please read about this.
Mobile network operator groups, such as Hutchison Whampoa, Telefonica, Orange and Vodafone are very actively pursuing mobile community partnerships and view these services as important to their differentiation and competitive advantage both within a country and between geographies. Mobile communities, like their web cousins, need critical mass to continue growing. Having the ability to reach people on other networks in other regions is very valuable as some of the larger chat communities (e.g. Jumbuck and AirG) have shown.

One of the things we know that users are against is being in a walled garden in their community. Since mobile network operators can prevent the subscribers of other operator networks from joining a community, this can reduce the viral effect. If I’m an Orange customer and you are an O2 subscriber, we should still be able to be friends in the community. This is one of the great appeals to being off-deck or at the very least to join communities which are independently operated.

Q: What are the most interesting trends you are seeing in the mobile social networking space, and where (geographically) are they happening?

A: Mobile communities that offer people the ability to find others with like interests or to meet the numerous other human needs they have over the course of their days and lives, are blossoming. They are not copycats of web communities. Rather they are evolving in their own unique directions because people are taking risks and experimenting.

One of the things that we see increasingly is the desire on the part of community participants to take part in the mobile economy. In other words, those who are driving a lot of traffic for advertising or downloads want to get a fraction of the community host’s revenues. The systems which reward users with points or internal currencies are quickly going to link with recommendations. If I recommend that you go see or purchase something within our community and you trust me and follow that advice, then I should get a reward. Consumers will, over time, become the purveyors of micro-advertising campaigns. If I like a brand of hair product, computer or a sports team, and your transaction is influenced by my preferences, the community will track these social shopping patterns. This isn’t unique to the mobile communities. It is likely to be implemented and adopted well in mobile because the identity of the users is known to the platform provider based on a unique relationship they have with their phone and the mobile network operator.

In parallel with the evolution of communities, community features will be integrated to many if not all digital experiences both mobile and online. In the future, a social networking service will struggle to survive and attract new users simply by providing a social networking functionality as a core service. Instead, the features and functions will be offered as part of other services helping to drive personalization (through the data gathered), drive loyalty and to drive sales. At least this will be possible when a set of universally accepted community user feature-centered standards are developed, ratified and integrated into all future platforms.


Q: What key trends should online community and social media professionals pay attention to?

A: There is a great deal of uncertainty in this market, but the dimensions of the opportunity and the number and types of companies participating in the industry indicate that Mobile Social Networking is going to improve quickly and the service themes at its core – meeting the needs of people to stay in touch and feel that they belong to a group, to be entertained, to increase their productivity, to make a difference or have an impact – will persist over time.

In the future, entertainment will be very different as a result of mobile devices that enable sharing of digital content. According to Nokia’s research entitled A Glimpse of the Next Episode, published in December 2007, approximately 25% of the entertainment consumed by people in 2012 will have been created, edited and shared within ‘peer circles’ rather than produced and distributed by professional firms and studios. As a result of the popularity of online and mobile services like Mobile Social Networking, people will be accustomed to sharing their ‘instant’ social media with people they know as well as with people they have just met. In parallel, they will be learning to use the new tools at their disposal and developing collaborative media skills that will prove more rewarding and engaging than passively watching, reading or hearing the entertainment media produced by the impersonal entertainment powerhouses.

Future mobile devices will have better microphones, perhaps even microphone arrays combining multiple mobile devices into ad hoc sensor networks, for superior capture of sound, such as music and speech. In addition to sound and video, the mobile device will detect other users in the vicinity and, if they are known and part of a user’s community, applications will automatically embed tags associating faces and voices with names.

In some high-end devices, continuous measuring and monitoring of a user’s surroundings will detect when to begin and end a capture sequence, automatically zooming and focusing on items of interest. Since social media is rarely visible from inside a pocket or purse, mobile devices for social media capture will more likely be wearable, mounted on the user’s glasses or hat.

Systems in the mobile handset will permit the manual or automatic annotation of social media with information such as the place, the date and time, the objects in a scene and possibly more ‘human factor’ data such as the emotion of the user. By associating metadata at the time of the capture, the social media blending tools will have the ability to identify whose media was used in an edited composition, as well as to remove or hide people who do not wish to be identified or heard.

Q: What are your recommendations to those hosting and operating online communities?

A: Providers of community services aimed at the broadband-connected PC users are already using three of the four strategies available to them to expand the reach and use of their platforms to include mobile devices. The first strategy is to build a WAP version of the online services. Many add some value to the user by offering the option of receiving alerts when the platform detects community-relevant events via MT SMS and permit message management and viewing using the handset. Orkut and Facebook have used this strategy to date. MySpace also offers a WAP portal interface among its other strategies.

The benefit of this strategy is that it gets a rudimentary level of service deployed, so that the early adopters can at least browse and check their communities when mobile. So far, few of the online community providers using this strategy have enabled the rich social media features which the users of mobile handsets would most like to see. This is because the level of investment necessary for re-architecting the service platform for correct display and formatting is high, given the online community operator’s lack of historical concern with device management, and difficult to justify based on their existing banner ad revenue models. In the future, this strategy should persist and improve as online communities acquire the expertise necessary to build robust mobile community platforms or gateways to their existing services.

The second strategy is to port the online service features to a mobile operator’s proprietary service environment. This is essentially what MySpace did with Helio and, to a far lesser extent, with Vodafone. The service is offered on-deck and is easy for the user to log in, especially if an application or applet is installed. This strategy will also persist and involve pre-loaded applications on feature-rich handsets for mobile community services and social media.

The third strategy is partnering with a mobile community platform provider, such as InterCasting. Bebo and Piczo are among those choosing this strategy for their mobile service access. By using a mobile community platform and aggregation service, the online community reaches the largest number of potential registrants. As long as the community keeps its service brand and feature set, this is a sound strategy and significantly reduces the time-to-market. Other online communities are likely to follow this route when it is proven both from a technology integration and business model perspective.

The final strategy that has yet to be tested is for an online community provider to partner directly with a popular independent mobile community operator. The technologies for creating the gateway between the two will need to be proprietary but need not depend on a third party developer and could evolve at the speed that the two partners require. One of the reasons that this has not been properly explored yet is that mobile community service providers have not, to date, seen much advantage in this. However, as more broadband-connected PC users seek to access via mobile, the overlap between the two access types will drive the dialogue around potential partnerships.

To be successful with a mobile strategy, online communities will need to make a more significant investment to understand and meet the needs of mobile community participants than they have to date. Well-designed surveys, free trials such as that conducted by Sulake, the provider of Habbo Hotel, and the engagement with mobile community industry experts will all contribute to the education of the online community operator.

The most challenging domain for online community service providers to tackle will be in the area of revenue. As community participants have become accustomed to having access at no cost, they are reluctant to begin paying for equivalent or inferior services. As the mobile advertising market heats up and brands feel more comfortable with their community campaigns, this obstacle will gradually decline.


About PEREY Research & Consulting
PEREY Research & Consulting builds and leads senior management teams conducting and applying market research. Component and systems vendors, network operators and value added service providers rely on Perey Research to tap emerging multimedia technology trends, and to devise and implement new business development strategies in light of these trends.

I got to pose a few questions to the super-busy (and super-smart) Ross Mayfield, Chairman of Socialtext, last week. I wanted to get his take on the state of the social software industry in ligh of the fact that we are likely headed in to a recession, as well as his opinion on the "state of the wiki".



Bill: You have been in the community and collaboration space for some time. What are the key online trends you are tracking as web2.0 hype starts to die down and the specter of a recession looms?

Ross: We started Socialtext in the last recession, back in 2002. Its interesting that Social Software took hold then, perhaps people took to blogging when they were unemployed. But seriously, there are some key trends that will continue regardless of the hype cycle and macroeconomic conditions:
- NetGens, the first generation to grow up with the internet throughout their lives, are in their second year of employment after college. This is the largest demographic shift, at the same time when the Baby Boom generation is retiring, and will have a profound impact on adoption of social software, organizational culture and work preferences and styles.
- The Consumerization of IT, where innovation happens first in consumer markets, is adapted for the enterprise or driven by individuals serving themselves with SaaS and Open Source alternatives without IT
- Individuals trust peers more than institutions to inform their decisions. This not only impacts consumer marketing, but politics and management.
- Its become common for people to express a facet of their identity publicly on the net, and values of transparency over privacy are changing
- The cost of personal publishing and forming groups that can take action is falling to zero
- Enterprise Social Software is being treated as a serious category of enterprise software by executives and IT, especially as more case studies demonstrate business value.

As we enter into a recession, enterprise budgets will tighten, but it remains to be seen if the relative low cost of Social Software solutions are impacted. We have seen a change in Financial Services, but so far its fairly contained. However, the US isn't the only market where companies have difficulties collaborating.


Bill: How has the role of the wiki in online communities changed over the last 2-3 years. What has surprised you?

Ross: We have seen the use case evolve from small groups of technical users doing project communication and lightweight documentation, to non-technical users as usability improved. Mass collaboration started to be realized a couple of years ago, where wikis are testing the scaling limit of productive communities. Now we are seeing process-specific implementations to enhance productivity and sustainable innovation, in solution areas like collaborative intelligence between marketing and the Field, participatory knowledgebases fo service and support, flexible client communication for professional services and business social networks for partners and customers.

Bill: What is on the Horizon for Socialtext?

Ross: While we advance the state of the art for wikis as a tool and the best practices for deriving value from them, I think you will see Socialtext become more social. There is a lot of room for innovation in this large marketing opportunity.

This month's Online Community Expert interview is with Robin Harper, VP Marketing and Community Development for Linden Lab, creator of the virtual world Second Life. Like many of you, I have experimented with Second Life over the last couple of years and have been left wanting something a bit more engaging. I gave Second Life a second look when I heard that Linden had added voice chat, and after seeing orgs like TechSoup (see Susan Tenby's interview from December) getting real value out of in world meetings. I reached out to Robin, and she was kind enough to spend some time with me answering questions from the perspective of a"second look at Second Life".

Q: Could you start with some basic stats about Second Life?

A: There were 921,554 unique people logged-in to Second Life last month (January 2008), who spent over 28 million hours. 45% of that use was women, 55% men. The world now consists of 16,816 regions, for a total size of 426 square miles (San Francisco is 49 square miles). There were nearly 18 million L$transactions among Residents, with average daily volume on the LindeX currency exchange of US$265,528. The top five countries (by use) with populations in Second Life are the United States, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom and France. For more information, please see http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php.


Q: There was a tremendous amount of media coverage about Second Life in late 06 and early 07, which seemed to result in a bit of a backlash after a few high profile marketing experiments (American Apparel) ended badly. How did the attention effect your thinking about product direction and the core value of Second Life?

A: There are always up and down cycles in the media, and as Second Life went through an enormous growth phase, the press responded very positively to the wide range of social and entrepreneurial activity. Eventually they were bound to focus on one or two projects that were less than successful. The important thing to keep in mind is that sometimes a lack of success has as more to do with the project design than with Second Life, and that sometimes projects end because they're finished, not because they failed.

We continue to believe that Second Life offers the best and most flexible platform for development of 3D, immersive experiences. To help ensure the success of large scale projects we are working closely with the over 300 companies that have grown up in Second Life and are now providing consulting and content development services to their corporate and educational customers. We're helping them define best practices for successful projects, and making sure they have access to the tools and support they need.


Q: Is there a place for in world marketing of real world brands?

A: We've seen many well-recognized brands engage in successful projects within Second Life. Scion and Intel, Adidas, Reebok, Pontiac, Reuters... the list goes on. One of our Residents made a video about it: http://youtube.com/watch?v=tEGHJuCbGdo. I think the thing to remember is that the most successful projects are those whose creators realize that this is not a medium in the traditional sense -- it's not about reach and frequency, or impressions. The value of marketing within Second Life comes from having the opportunity to involve potential and current customers in an experience that they can help to design. From this you can learn an awful lot about their perceptions of your brand and products that is far richer than any focus group.


Q: Who do you consider the key audiences for Second Life, and what are the key points of value for these audiences?

A: Second Life has become a development platform which attracts a wide range of people with an unlimited number of ideas. In the consumer arena there are people from around the world who are starting businesses ranging from the unexpected (magic wands!) to the more traditional (apparel and home furnishings). For them Second Life offers new opportunities for entrepreneurship relative to the real world -- the difference being that their customer base is global and their costs are comparatively low. On the social side people attend concerts and the theatre, throw parties, go skiing and ice skating. The benefits of online community are well-known to the readers of this newsletter -- a removal of geographic constraints and an opportunity to make new friends you'd otherwise never meet. And you don't have to pay for lift tickets.

In addition to the consumer aspect of Second Life, corporations are finding it a place to hold meetings with global employees and customers, to build prototypes, to create showrooms. Educators simulate everything from 3D molecular structure to game design. The value lies in the simulation and design capabilities coupled with the ability to bring together groups of people from nearly anywhere in the world.

Q: What are the new features or services that get the folks at Linden excited? What is on the horizon?

A: We're in the process of building new search features into the Second Life world, making it easier to find things to do or the essentials of virtual life, from shoes to French lessons. We think the simple fact of web-based indexing will make Second Life more accessible to a broader base of users. On the graphics side our new Windlight technology is opening up capabilities for environmental effects that are simply beautiful. Second Life Residents have been experimenting with atmospheric enhancement to add mood to their builds and are showing off the results on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=windlight&w=all.

We see nothing but potential on the horizon as the world continues to grow and diversify. Of course there are challenges brought on by the intersection of real world and virtual, but in the end we believe there is a net gain in the creation of new economic and social value.

This month's Online Community Expert interview is with Susan Tenby of CompuMentor / TechSoup. Susan is an expert at community building, and is pioneering new techniques and interactions in the virtual world Second Life.

Susan's Bio:
Susan Tenby is the Senior Manager of Online Community Development at TechSoup, where she is responsible for the promotion, management and direction of the TS community forums, with an audience of 100,000 unique visitors a month.
She recently launched a community of over 400 nonprofit staff members and volunteers in Second Life. This community has a shared community blog at http://www.nonprofitcommons.org <http://secondlife.techsoup.org> and a wiki about nonprofit activities in SL. They have a shared community tagging project using the tag “NPSL” (Nonprofits in Second Life) on sites such as del.icio.us, Technorati and Flickr, weekly in-world meetings, every Friday from 8:30-9:30am PST to teach scripting and best-practices to nonprofits in SL.

She launched a sim in Second Life called The Nonprofit Commons, with the NPSL community, on land and buildings, all donated by Anshe Chung Studios. This nonprofits-only sim houses 40 organizations, free of charge, to lower the barrier of access to the virtual world.

She runs monthly online community meet-ups in San Francisco. She speaks at conferences (in June, she organized a panel on Nonprofits in Second Life at Games for Change on Virtual Activism and presented on Using Second Life an innovative marketing tool at Supernova2007.) In August, she spoke at SLCC and in October, she presented at Faster Cures and Using Second Life for Social Work. She also writes on the topic of online community building in its various forms.

Q: What is the Nonprofit Commons?

A: We are a group of nonprofit employees and volunteer friends of nonprofits who believe that there is merit and much potential in collaboarating and working in Second Life. Our group lauched in May of 2006, and we have grown to about 400 members. We currently have a nonprofits-only island, where we house nonprofit organizations for free, we hold weekly, open town-hall meetings, every Friday, from 8:30am-9:30/10ish. In these meetings, we talk about ways to use the interactive technology to build community and eventually, to achieve our missions to change the world. We also have a community blog (nonprofitcommons.org), community tagging project (tag is NPSL for nonprofits in Second Life), wiki (linked form blog) with shared resources and free shared tools for nonprofits using the virtual world. We go to live and virtual conferences and throw mixed-reality events where avatars interact with people in the real-world room.

Q: What advantage do you see in using an immersive world like second life, over a more traditional social networking site?

A: With Second Life, you can augment reality, by using the fact that you can build your own tools and experiences to share your ideas with little cost to do so. You can show a group of people a vision and invite them to interact within that vision, in a way that text chat or videos will not accommodate. You can use virtual worlds to make animated stories or movies, through an easy process called Machinima. SL can provide you with a creative avenue to express what is not possible in the real world, while also allowing for a live teleconferencing environment which will eventually integrate with outside technologies, positioning it well for online learning environments. SL is live and can accommodate many languages simultaneously through internal translator tools, like the Babbler. I see SL as a hybrid between a website, a social networking platform, a webinar and an animation studio, where fairly un-technical end users can achieve some fairly complex tasks, with ready-made tools that are free-to-nearly free. Second Life also allows for anonymous self-expression and freedom from logistical, sociological and economic confines. For more information on this see: http://nonprofitcommons.org/node/174 and http://www.techsoup.org/community/Secondlife

Q: What have been your team’s key learnings to date with the project?

1. It is essential to organize your volunteers and empower them to take on their own ideas and implement them. It is not helpful to have a room full of good ideas with no one to take responsibility to implement them. I had to learn to stop trying to get all the ideas done by myself and I was forced to accept that everyone has a role and anyone can find one thing they are good at to help the community, no matter how small. If you can’t think of what you could do, be the one to organize the volunteers, or put them to task by being the note-taker.

2. I have had to learn to not take it personally if people don’t agree with my choices in structuring the community. There is no right or wrong way to do community, as we know. This is a fuzzy science, and we make a lot of it up as we go along. Just trust that your vision is right, and stick to it, while also being open to variances of opinion, but never try to please everyone, or you will get nothing done.

3. Enlist your most opinionated and helpful volunteers and create a “management group” of sorts. Connect with them every month, outside of the larger group, if possible, through a conference call, take their agenda items and and help them help make the community a success by forming the structure of your community with their ideas and your vision.


Q: What advice would you have for other organizations thinking about establishing a community presence in second life?

A: I would recommend that they listen to my learnings above and that they actually spend some serious time in-world, before they decide that they are a community manager in SL. This is a much more challenging community to manage than an asynchrous forum or email list, for example. People who are into the platform, at this point, tend to be leaders, innovators, and seasoned techies. In my observation, not many even think of it as an online community. They are not accustomed to following the lead of a community manager, or behaving in a way that is always conducive to productive online activity. SL is the type of environment that tends to attract the types of people who want to make the world what they want it to become, due to the nature of the client. That is, you can create your own content in-world, so who is to say how you should behave, what you should look like, what you should wear (or not wear, much to my horror, in one instance), or how you should proceed within a community of other volunteers. Many people are there to check it out, not necessarily to participate in a community endeavor. Feel free to befriend people in SL whom you may not necessarily have much in common with, as they may know tricks about the tool or ways to work within its limitations that could help you in the future. If you have volunteers offering to help you realize your vision, make sure that you have back-up volunteers for their roles. Many people get very excited about the technology and then lose steam, interest or time to finish what they started, as is the case in any volunteer effort. If you can have repeat events (like our weekly Friday meetings) and establish patterns of behavior and appropriate conduct, the community will eventually adopt this way of behaving as a standard, and you will have a more thriving, exciting, creative and active community.