Checklist: Thinking about white label social networking?

Via High Touch I came across Jeremiah Owyang’s: A Checklist: Before you select that White Label Social Networking Site

It ought to be required reading for every marketing exec or entrepreneur thinking of starting a “myspace for _____” or “facebook for _______.” (OK, maybe not fair to pick on marketing there - any exec thinking of doing such a thing).

Key questions he provides:

1. What business problem are you trying to fix? What’s broken? What does success look like (without mentioning features)
2. There are different tools for different problems, Are you sure a Social Networking site will fix this?
3. Where are your community/market/users currently?
4. Not sure? Then look again, don’t proceed farther until you find them.
5. Have you considered joining that community before creating your own? You know of the Walmart 10 week fiasco right? Trying to recreate MySpace doesn’t make sense because it already exists.
6. How open/closed to you want your community? Think about long term, does it scale?
7. What incentive are you creating with this SoNet that will drive users to your site and share?
8. How do you plan to kick start your community, you know that just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come
9. Consider joining the Web Strategy Group in Facebook to meet other web decision makers, you’ll be able to ask questions in the forum.
10. Leave a comment below if you’ve suggestions.

OK, so numbers 4, 9, and 10 aren’t really questions, but 1-3 and 5-8 are dead on.

A few I’d add:

11. What is your plan to manage / moderate the community’s activities assuming a large community arises? What terms of service / acceptable behavior guidelines will you rely on, and how will they be enforced / cultivated?
12. How will you involve people outside your organization but from within the target community? What will you do to actively recruit, encourage, and even potentially incent “good” user behavior from your target community?
13. Consider assembling the community on a platform of open source software rather than licensing a commercial package or renting a service. You’ll get the rapid time to market of buying or renting but also the ability to customize in order to create a differentiated experience.

Ok, maybe the last one’s a bit of a pitch . . .

More on Moglen v. O’Reilly

Last week, during the O’Reilly Executive Briefing at OSCON, I blogged about the Moglen O’Reilly interview - “Eben Moglen - Putting the F back in FOSS.”

Although the video hasn’t yet surfaced, some interesting commentaries have.

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Liveblogging like a pro

I’ve written before about the (controversial in some circles) phenomenon of liveblogging: posting notes in near-real-time from a conference.

On Friday, Ethan Zuckerman posted The 5-4-3 double play, or “The Art of Conference Blogging”, including an extensive set of tips on how to do blog from conferences more effectively. As one might expect, it’s a comprehensive list that makes me realize just how underprepared I’ve been in the times I’ve tried to do it.

The highlights:

• The kit: I come to conferences with my beloved Mac, two charged batteries, a power strip, a digital camera and cables, granola bars and a lap desk. . . .
• The location: Bloggers rarely sit in the front row to blog conferences. . . . It’s usually better to sit to a side, near the power plugs. . . .
• Preparation: Conferences usually give you a speaker program ahead of time. Use it. Over breakfast before the day of a conference, I’ll type the names of each speaker and their talk title into a text file. If I’m really good, I’ll do quick Google searches on each of them and link their names to their blogs, research institutions, arrest records, etc. Prepare sufficiently and you’ve got the first paragraph of each post written ahead of time.
• Macros: . . . This is a way of storing pieces of text that you use frequently and linking them to key combinations. . . . Even if you’re composing online, within your blogging platform, or if you don’t feel comfortable setting up macros, it can be a big help to put some useful snippets of text in a text file and cut and paste them into blogposts.
• Keeping Up: I have a hard and fast rule for myself - I complete posts on a conference session within fifteen minutes of the end of that session. . . .
• Hard Talks: . . . Experienced speakers are easy to blog - they follow a narrative path through their talks, speak at a pace the audience can understand, emphasize key points with visuals. . . . It’s much harder to blog inexperienced speakers. . . .
• Use your commenters: Because I’m blogging ten or more talks a day, I get things wrong. Sometimes I get things egregiously wrong. Comments allow other attendees - and sometimes the speakers themselves - to correct me. . . .
• Collaborate: . . . My goal in blogging a conference is not to be the sole, authoritative voice of the blogosphere. It’s to do what I enjoy doing: writing detailed summaries of each sessions. . . . It’s a whole lot more fun to blog these events in groups, even if that means sitting next to someone trying to liveblog at the same time as you are, arguing about how to spell a word the speaker has just uttered.
• Digest: I go to conferences because they give me a wealth of new ideas to wrestle with, sometimes for weeks or months to come. . . . So that I have a chance to wrestle with the big ideas, I’ll often try to write a summary or reactions post a week after a conference. . . .
• Have Fun: Not everyone enjoys blogging at conferences. I have many friends who’ve tried it and discovered that it stresses them out or detracts from their enjoyment. There’s an easy solution to this: don’t do it. Most people don’t keep score at baseball games. That’s okay, as there’s an official scorekeeper, a scoreboard and at least one journalist in the stands. We don’t need everyone to become a conference liveblogger - just a few more of us.

Although I’m reading these points after OSCON, not before it, I think my approach was much closer to what Zuckerman describes than my own previous liveblogging from Enterprise 2.0.

In a few sessions I took some live notes (see posts tagged OSCON), but in most sessions I just felt like trying to liveblog was getting in the way of enjoyment for me. I posted a few key notes to twitter (as when the OSI announced approval of the CPAL) but didn’t try to keep up with any of the other OSCON twitterers in terms of detail or frequency.

But I did have fun.

Look for some digest / summary / follow up posts over the next few months.

So Many Conferences, So Little Time

Lots of great conferences going on right now - wish I could be at all of them.

This weekend is WordCamp, in San Francisco. Chz and Tofu from ICanHasCheezburger, one of my favorite blogs, will be there. (Yes, I have a doctoral degree in English and ICanHasCheezburger is one of my favorite blogs. Deal with it.)

The full schedule is online, and it many folks will use trackback to add their blogging about sessions they attended to the session’s page in the schedule.

Some sessions which look to me like highlights I will be sorry to miss:

• Getting Involved with WordPress, by Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith
• Kicking Ass Content Connections, with Lorelle VanFossen
• Blogs vs. Journalism, with John Dvorak and Om Malik
• Blogs at the New York Times, with Jeremy Zilar
• Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing, with Dave Winer
• State of the Word, with Matt Mullenweg

Definitely a high powered set of speakers and in a relatively intimate forum. I’ll definitely add WordCamp 2008 to my “hopefully attend list.”

Starting this morning is Ubuntu Live, which runs this morning through Tuesday in Portland. Their schedule is also online and also impressive.

(A Sunday morning keynote trifecta with Mark Shuttleworth, Stephen O’Grady, and Jeff Waugh, as the first session of teh conference? Impressive. In fact, O’Grady’s already posted his slides and script.)

Finally, the rest of the week will be OSCON 2007, which I will be attending.

As usual, OSCON is enormous (check out the schedule - there are literally 15 parallel tracks much of Wed and Thurs), and that’s just the official sessions, not to mention the parties and events.

Drop me a line if you’ll be in Portland next week too.

Corporate Blogging, Comment Seeding, and Controversy

Jerry Bowles at Enterprise Web 2.0 posted a fairly scathing indictment of Deb Weil and the GlaxoSmithKline corporate blog (clog?) for Alli: Deborah Weil and the Art of the Fake
. Bowles argues:

Deborah Weil has been around the block a couple of times and she must have known when GlaxoSmithKline’s agency approached her to consult on a new flog for its Alli weight-loss product that it was a dishonest, insincere attempt to cash in on the social media craze and that the parameters set for it doomed it to failure.

He’s referring to Weil’s post where she requested of her readers:

head on over to GlaxoSmithKline’s official corporate blog for alli, the first FDA approved, OTC (over the counter) weight loss product. Take a peek and, if you’re inspired, leave a Comment.

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