Why Companies Should Leverage The Community Roundtable

by adam on March 1, 2010 · View Comments

in Community, Marketing Strategy, Rosetta, Social Media

Over the last couple of years I’ve been fortunate to get to know the founders of the Community Roundtable well.  Jim Storer and Rachel Happe are two talented community practitioners with tons of experience.  When Jim told me about his idea for TheCR (as it’s known in short), I was intrigued from day one.  While there are many social media practitioners, blogs and community platform companies to leverage out there, TheCR provides at least two unique differentiators as part of its value proposition:

  • The Community Roundtable is a peer network of social media practioners and community managers.  In essence, TheCR is using community to enhance and better people and businesses who are practicing community management every day.  This isn’t social media or community 101, it’s 501.  It’s a network for people who practice the discipline daily.
  • The Community Roundtable is pushing the envelope to advance the field. With their background in organizational design, TheCR team has built a framework of business processes to apply to various stages of community lifecycle.  This isn’t (only) for selling community into an organization, it’s aimed at best practices at sustaining and growing them.  TheCR is the answer to the question, “You have a community. Now what?”

As companies look at branded and non-branded, public and private, enterprise and customer-facing community platforms and decisions, TheCR provides a highly concentrated armament of resources and network of peers for support.  Rosetta, my agency has been a partner from early on due to the complement to our own value proposition, and as Rachel describes it, I’m a self-professed “Cheesehead.”

So it’s not a surprise that Rosetta is pleased to be a sponsor, along with Fuzebox and Powered (another Rosetta partner), of The Community Roundtable’s first annual State of Community Management 2010 report.  This 60+ page report, with an introduction from Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang, is a tremendous resource that combines the voice of participating members representing “over 180+ years of community management experience” and what the group learned in 2009.  It’s an asset to anyone exploring starting or improving their community initatives in 2010.

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How Social Media Has Changed My Job

by adam on February 26, 2010 · View Comments

in About me, Rosetta, Social Media

TK479: "They told me it was less boring than looking for droids on random planets." TK455: "I have a bad feeling about this."

In the last 2 years of blogging I’ve been able to share my own views on social media, interactive marketing and other topics.  During that time my day job at Rosetta has evolved from working with exciting companies like Coach and Borders to leading our Search and Media practice.  I’ve had the fortunate experience of working with talented teams and innovative clients, with an agency leadership team who was willing to help me launch our social media practice over a year ago.

Helping clients leverage social media has been a passion but up until recently only a part-time gig; I’ve had many fun and challenging responsibilities to work on in parallel while trying to see if we can add social media to the value proposition Rosetta brings to the table.  In the meantime, this blog has served as a way to capture thoughts and more importantly to hear from you, continuing conversations that weren’t as suitable for Twitter or some other forum.

For my two-year blog anniversary post, I’m excited to share details about my expanded role.  As we’ve grown our social media team, I’m pleased to share that my role is now 100% focused on helping clients develop social media programs.  My goal is to build integrated programs that treat social media tactics as informed strategies, leveraging deeper understanding of a brand’s most valuable customers and prospects through Rosetta’s Personality®-based segmentation.

What this really means:

  • After 15 years in consulting (first 12 at Accenture), I’ve been able to craft a role for myself (with leadership team sponsorship) at a digital agency I’m excited about.
  • For a long time I’ve been advocating that social media marketing tactics should be treated alongside other digital initiatives in an integrated and strategic way, leveraging CRM, segmentation and consumer insight.  Now I get to truly focus full time on making that happen.
  • I’ve spent the last two+ years learning and applying what I’ve learned in social media, now I get to learn and apply on a full time basis.  (But I’m no expert, just trying to help clients make informed decisions).

Frankly I’m very grateful to see a more formal career path emerge from ideas.  I’m looking forward to sharing more here with a reinvigorated sense of purpose, and to thanking a lot of people in person over the next few weeks.  At risk of forgetting to call out a few, a hat tip to a few folks who continue to inspire me in this space:  Len Devanna, Ken Burbary, Marc Meyer, Aaron Strout, Jim Storer, Kyle Flaherty, Tim Walker, Amber Naslund, Beth Harte, and Rachel Happe.  And certainly Mark Taylor who has been my biggest advocate.  Now to deliver on the promise…

Photo credit: st3f4n via Flickr

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Donation Connect: Text Some Good

by adam on January 30, 2010 · View Comments

in Mobile, Philanthropy, Rosetta, Social Media

The devastation in Haiti has struck a chord in individuals and organizations around the globe. I’m going to shamelessly plug this app since it’s a great way for our agency to contribute to the cause.  What started off as a project to showcase Rosetta’s mobile team skills turned into something better - a useful app which allows people to look up charities that accept donations via SMS and click to donate.  It’s a simple directory service with buttons to send a text message right from your iPhone. Donation Connect also allows you to promote your donation and the app through Facebook and Twitter. The app is free; if you like it please use it and tell a friend about it. Let me know what you think. This was created on volunteer time after hours from our mobile and creative teams.

Donation Connect (iTunes App Store)

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The Ultimate Location Based Service

by adam on January 8, 2010 · View Comments

in Geolocation, Social Media, Travel

You Are HereWith all the buzz about geolocation and geo-tagging services, I still can’t find a service that:

…allows me to see where my friends are right now, especially if they are near me
…allows me to forecast where I’ll be and when, if I want to
…allows me to see if my forecast lines up with my friends (maybe even suggest a common place to meet?)
…provides really easy tagging of photos, audio or other posts by location, including favoriting or voting on most relevant/interesting for that location (and reporting spam if necessary)
…recommends places of interest to me based on my history or my friend’s history in locations - I’d love a “Pandora” of locations and related content
…allows me to share location with ‘groups’ of friends (I’d love to me more open about my location at a conference/event for connecting with professionals, but at other times restrict my sharing to people I know or even only share with people in that location)
…really gives the user a tangible benefit for sharing info by location. (Yes, Foursquare has a lot of potential here in working with businesses).

Ultimately whether it’s Foursquare, Gowalla, Dopplr, Google’s Latitude, Loopt, Brightkite or some other player, there’s room for improvement/consolidation here.  Any one of these does a lot but not all of the functions.  Ultimately the one that wins is the one that everyone actually uses.  (cough cough Facebook cough cough).  And don’t forget the security risks associated with sharing, which Jim Storer discussed almost a year ago.  What do you think?  Do you use one or more of these services?  What do you like or hate about them?

Photo credit: cibomahto via Flickr

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A Free eBook for Marketers: Learning in 2010

January 7, 2010

I virtually met Ellen Hoenig Carlson several months ago through Twitter. As I have continued to work on social media initiatives in Rosetta’s Healthcare practice, Ellen’s blog has continually been a tremendous resource to gain insight on the subtle (and often not so subtle) intricacies of marketing in healthcare and pharma. Ellen reached […]

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Social Media in 2010: Getting Smarter

December 22, 2009

It’s that time of year where the pundits predict the death of brands, the trends of new media and the upcoming changes in marketing.  I typically avoid these kinds of posts, but I wanted to weigh in primarily because part of my role at Rosetta next year will be to execute against the predictions.  This […]

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