The 10 Rules of Building Community

The blog was resurrected yesterday and already I'm dropping bombs!  Today I'm providing the ten rules of Building Community which I included in my Community Manager pitch to talkto!  Enough of the dramatics andon to the value added info:

Community Manager is the buzz term for Social Media Marketers.  A firm's community manager is responsible for engaging customers through social networks with the following goals:

1. Coddle prospective users
2. Gain user feedback
3. Mitigate criticism  
4. Spread the Message

These goals are all aligned with the principles of Inbound Marketing which is the gospel of Hubspot (note they've been voted the best place to work in Boston...cough...cough...look over here).  I don't need to preach the benefits of social media or Inbound Marketing (their blog and book cover it thoroughly) but can interject on the subject of Community Building.  Community isn't something you can build overnight.  It also isn't something you can buy or expect to produce immediate benefits.  Your community efforts can fail miserably if your only interest is to find sales.  Here are my ten rule rules for building community:

1. The user is always right
2. Go where they are
3. Always be fresh
4. Be Responsive 
5. Foster Relationships
6. Encourage your evangelists
7. Amplify your supporters 
8. Address your detractors
9. Get outside voices
10. Be Patient

By no means is this an exhaustive list of best practices for building community but it is a good start.  Looking forward to comments and will elaborate on each of these rules over a few upcoming posts.

No Banjo, you can't choose my friends.

A contact introduced me to Banjo the other day and I downloaded the app ASAP.  The UI and features look great and I'm already over the stalker/sketchiness factor of being able to see everyone checked-in around me whether they are using Foursquare, Quipster (My new favorite Twitter friend...even if they don't have a Droid app), Gowalla, Loopt, Google Latitude, Facebook Places, etc.  What I can't get over is the permissions I have to grant Banjo in order to link my Twitter account and fully utilize the app:

1. read tweets from your timeline...Standard
2. see who you follow, and follow new people...ok
3. update your profile...WTF?
4. post tweets for you...Standard

I don't always read the permissions when I download a new app but 2 and 3 stuck out as unusual compared to my other apps.  Why does Banjo need to follow new people but even stranger update my profile?  If the reason is to allow user edits through their interface than it should be explained in some form of privacy document or warning.  Am I paranoid in assuming that Banjo could start manipulating my account or is this a poor example of user education/outreach?  My guess is most people don't read the permissions and hopefully we can trust developers to enhance our social lives rather than hijack our social graphs.

Summary of The Business of Big Data Workshop

I just attended The Business of Big Data workshop which was organized by General Assembly in the Flatiron district of Manhattan.  * GA told me not to attend because the event had sold out but luckily they let it slide when I showed up at the beginning of the presentation (how could they turn away another $20?).  The presentation was by Ben Siscovick and Andrew Cove of IA Ventures which is a dedicated Big Data venture fund located in NYC.  Here is a summary of my notes from the event which was interrupted three times by a faulty smoke alarm: