Check out our coverage of recent community manager hiring news over at Jobwire - our new site tracking completed hires in tech.

Forum One hosts events, offers consulting and publishes in-depth reports about the finer points of community management based on extensive survey data gathered from diverse practitioners.

• We will be promoting Forum One's body of reports to our readers interested in detailed, topical, survey-based advice centered on the community of active community management practitioners.


• Forum One will be promoting our Community Management Guide, an overview of the practice of community management based on interviews, content curation and dynamic discovery of the hottest daily conversations on the topic, to their community. (That's a real honor for us.)


• We will be encouraging community managers in our community to fill out the Forum One 2009 survey on community manager job compensation


• And they'll be sharing the results of that survey with us to report on here. (The findings are always quite interesting.)

Forum One publishes detailed reports on topics like Online Communities: Surviving & Thriving in the Downturn and Online Communities: Platform and Services Satisfaction Report. Those reports are based on surveys, and Forum One reaches inside both large enterprise firms and small startups in their research.

We're proud to get the opportunity to work with these experts in the field and we're excited to get to share with our readers some of the hard numbers that we'll help Forum One collect. We hope this is just the first step in a fruitful collaboration to help foster more effective community management online.

We hope you'll give Forum One's reports a look, as you've been so supportive of ours, and if you're a community manager then we hope you'll fill out the compensation survey as well.

Here's how it works. I keep 100% ownership and control of my blog, which is very important to me. But I get to join a community of quality websites, which has opportunities for network advertising. It also gives my blog wider coverage, especially in the design community. Best of all, the network members help each other out - e.g. I could use some design help and in return I'm happy to give writing advice and tips.

The 9rules community is very strong in web design - there are a lot of beautifully designed websites in the network. I'm hoping to learn a lot from the community in that respect, because to be frank my blog design looks plain in comparison. On the other hand, I pride myself on writing top quality and original content on the topic of Web Technology. So I hope that my content inspires others and that I introduce some of the 9rules community to my niche interests (Web 2.0, Social Media). I think there'll be a lot of quid pro quo.

I've added a 'Recent Readers' widget to R/WW (see sidebar) and I encourage you to add yourself to the Read/WriteWeb community - click here for more details. Let me know in the comments to this post what you think of the idea. Over the past couple of months there have been many active and enjoyable discussions on R/WW, so it'd be great to extend that community a little more using MyBlogLog. Let's see how it goes anyway.

For example just this morning I visited Fred Wilson's blog to read his thoughts on whether startups need to be located in Silicon Valley, as suggested in a NY Times piece (which I saw via Techmeme btw). Fred saw that I had visited his site, via MyBlogLog, and so he joined the R/WW community and left this message:

"richard glad to see your icon on my page just now. i really like mybloglog. it tells me when people like you are visiting my blog. you should try putting the reader roll on your page. it's really great and my readers seem to like it a lot fred"

So I'm encouraged by this kind of blog community interaction and hope to see more of it. Kudos to MyBlogLog for building a system which enables social networking via blogs.

Here is the link again to the Read/WriteWeb community. I'm also interested in your thoughts if you don't like the idea of your face/avatar showing up on blogs.

"Attention Netscape users Your Netscape mail hasn't gone anywhere, you can find it right here! Also, My.Netscape and your Stock Quotes are still online as well."

There appears to be a genuine feeling of betrayal by the (very large) set of users who have had Netscape.com as their homepage for some time. Indeed I've been getting comments on my own posts and even emails from Netscape users, upset about the change to the Digg style.

All of this shows how passionate people can get about their Web homepage - and they're just as much a 'community' as the Digg.com users are. It's just that they like the old-school Web homepage, not the new Digg style. Also what this tells me is that while a lot of us geeks and 2.0 types are addicted to our own technology (and our own voices, to be honest), it's pretty darn obvious that A LOT of people want to stick with the status quo. Plus I've noticed a number of comments on the above Netscape.com stories which equate Netscape (still!) with a browser.

I'm not sure what to think about this, because I really do think Jason Calacanis and his team want to do well by the Netscape community - and change can be hard to take. Even Valleywag seems to support Calacanis! The number of Netscape users seems to be rising, but even so they're encouraging users who like the old style to go to MyNetscape:

"For those of you who are missing the old Netscape format, have you tried My Netscape? You can customize your page any way you see fit."

Unfortunately there are signs that many of the existing Netscape community hate the new Digg style passionately enough that they will jump ship to other more traditional portals like MSN. So is this backlash a sign that Calacanis and his team have misjudged what 'normal' people (i.e. non-geeks) want in a homepage and they could lose their brand value with that set of users? Or is it a necessary 'bitter pill' for the Netscape community to swallow - i.e. this is the New Web, get used to it?

I'm interested in these questions because obviously it can be generalized to the broader base of web 2.0 services across the Web, which have yet to make much impact on the mainstream.

Thirteen candidates have been nominated to fill two "Community Director" Board seats. Among the nominees are several familiar names including Chris Messina, Krishna Sankar, and Joseph Smarr. (For more information on each of these candidates and the other 10 nominees, visit the OpenSocial Foundation.)

Only members of the OpenSocial Foundation are permitted to vote. If you're not currently a member of the Foundation, you may apply for membership. In order to participate in the election, however, your application for membership must be received by 11:59 PM PDT, October 29. The polls for the election close at 11:59 PM PDT on November 3.

The OpenSocial Foundation was created earlier this year through a partnership among Google, News Corp., and Yahoo! with the express purpose of "creating the structure necessary to facilitate open technical development, developing governance and review procedures for maintaining an open source project, protecting and enforcing IP, trademark, and copyrights."

The OpenSocial Foundation has a great deal of potential to influence "the Web that is to be." And the two Community Directors, once elected, will likely have a significant impact on the future direction of this still formative organization. It will be interesting to see who the members of the Foundation choose to guide this development.

You can click here to learn how to purchase the guide or read on for a sample of reviews published around the web so far.

Blogger Reviews

The following reviewers have no financial stake in sales of the report, they just think it's awesome. We appreciate that.

"If you are a business or a brand engaged or planning to engage in social media, you should go buy this report right now, The 70+ page PDF is a mere $299 - a steal for the amount of information it contains."
- Jason Falls, Doe Anderson
ReadWriteWeb's Guide to Online Community Management: A Must-Have For Businesses

"My favorite thing about this report is that it isn't just a PDF document, it comes with a companion site, the Community Management Aggregator, which provides great ongoing resources for people interested in community management...I'm already finding great content that I hadn't yet discovered on my own throughout this companion site."
- Dawn Foster, Community Management Consultant
ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

"This a fantastic model for professional development 2.0 for online community managers."
- Beth Kanter, leading nonprofit technology consultant
Newsmastering for Professional Development 2.0: Online Community Management Aggregator and Report

"Simply put, if you're planning or considering a community effort at your organization, this is a must have...the unrelenting focus on ROI in this report clearly shows how community based engagement can be justified at large organizations...Managing a community is hard work and labor intensive. The report cites detailed case studies on how to beat the odds. What the ReadWriteWeb team has done is brilliantly articulate how you can start and operationalize vibrant communities. And that's what most enterprises are pondering, today."
-Enterprise 2.0 Consultant Sameer Patel
ReadWriteWeb's Guide to Online Community Management: A Valuable Resource for the Enterprise

Thanks a lot, reviewers! We're continuing to make small changes to the Guide based on feedback, but overall the report has been very well received. We hope you'll get a copy today and use it to better engage with online community right away.

The community features will be rolled out to the MarketWatch at large site conservatively via a sidebar widget. The widget will allow any member of the community site to rate, tag, or comment on articles throughout the site. Other new features will only be available via the dedicated community area.

The social networking features of MarketWatch are basic, but solid. Befriending someone lets you keep track of their activity stream on the site -- picks, comments, recommendations (article ratings), all of which can also be subscribed to via RSS. It would be nice if CBS allowed users to communicate with each other more directly to do things like discuss investment strategies or debate the latest Wall Street news. Check out a standard MarketWatch profile here.

So far, the new community features are paying off in terms of upping user engagement with the site, according to MarketWatch. In early tests, 47% of users made a stock pick, while 21% commented on stories. A quick scan of the site this morning reveals that most top stories have at least a handful of comments. "In beta we've experienced increases in user loyalty, satisfaction and length of visits," said Jim Bernard, general manager of MarketWatch.

Adding social features is the en vogue thing to do at mainstream news properties this year. MarketWatch is the latest on a growing list of mainstream news web sites that have added features like commenting, rating, or friending in the past 8 months. It will be interesting to see if these sites can build a cohesive community around their content and increase readership and advertising dollars, which is of course the ultimate goal.

Meebo, the leading "IM in the browser" play, realizes this. And with Community IM, they're hoping to capitalize on it, by incorporating XMPP/Jabber IM into any Web-based community. If early numbers are any indication, they're going to be wildly successful.

So how many users could that long-tail of communities garner for Meebo? Based on comScore Media Metrix, Meebo estimates the potential size of the partner network to have an unduplicated global reach of 72.9 million with more than 26 million of those users in the US.

Slated to launch this fall, the movie site Flixster will be the first out of the gates on the platform.

And that's just the beginning. With the types of communities Meebo is targeting, there's a great deal more room to grow once the service is launched to the public:

"If you have an online community with over 20K daily users, Meebo can add IM to your website. Users will be able to chat with other community members as well as buddies outside your network, directly from your site."

Perhaps even more impressive is Meebo's foresight to build its solution on an open foundation. Running on a XMPP/Jabber backbone, Meebo Community IM will be able to connect directly with other popular IM networks. AIM, MSN, Google Talk, and Yahoo! will all be available options. What's more, XMPP will enable them to federate relationships across the various partners, so that a user from one community will be able to communicate with users on another community.

Needless to say, the combination of the extensible technology and the sheer volume of online communities that could choose to adopt this solution translate into a great deal of potential for Meebo.

It's no wonder Meebo's valuation sits north of $200 million.

All in all, Meebo is projecting huge numbers, already. And the estimates of the potential could get astronomical. But, it's also evident that a yet-to-be-launched solution can be met with any amount of skepticism. So where does that put us?

Rest assured, this isn't the first time Meebo has been saddled with "it can't be done." After more than three years of proving their detractors wrong, we remain convinced that Meebo is going to succeed.

This morning I attended a presentation by Matt Mullenweg, the Founder of WordPress, on 'Scaling Your Community.' Matt started by defining scaling your community as "being as useful to the last 100k people as you are to the first 100k." He talked about the four steps a community goes through as they scale.

The steps he laid out for leaders of a community were:

1. Build a Good Foundation
2. Bootstrap
3. Let Go
4. Personalize

Step 1: Principals for Building a Good Foundation

The principals that Matt emphasized to build a solid foundation all revolved around taking a simple idea and articulating it clearly. Also he said that once you, as a leader, commit to a set of simple principals, it is essential to make sure all of the product development is consistent with that vision. Matt made the point that while this is very straight forward, it is often difficult to execute on. For example, at Word Press they have committed to "all free features will always be free". Unfortunately, this has proven difficult at some points because users have leveraged the system in ways they never expected (such as unique ways to track their blog's activity). Because of their commitment, they have decided to continue offering those features for free.

Matt encouraged leaders to do three things during the 'bootstrapping' phase of community development:

• Be your most passionate user;
• Talk to people (like an earlier panel, he pointed to the Flickr example);
• Finally, he admitted that while somewhat controversial, he encouraged leaders to 'pre-moderate'. He explained that "there is a point in every community where the signal to noise ratio degrades ... you need to pre-moderate before comments are publicly available to protect the community from this degradation."

Step 3: Let Go

Once you have an active community, he explained that one of the most difficult things to do is give the community over to its members. He talked about how he has recently done this with WordPress Ideas, a website that allows people to enter their ideas for new Word Press Platform features and allow the community to vote on them (think Digg for features). So far the site has received over 487 ideas. He encouraged other open source project leaders to let go, because Open Source "is more than just providing software and source code" - explaining that it was also about opening up processes and decisions.

Step 4: Personalization

Finally, communities need to encourage their users to express themselves as individuals. Websites need to to treat "every tag and click [as] sacred." He discussed how interacting with a personalized site can build stronger affinity. He pointed to a recent article from The Onion about the effectiveness of Amazon's Recommendation Engine. Matt explained that systems like this really help encourage your community to spend more time interacting with your site. As an example, he relayed a story where he spent 8 hours on the phone with Amazon trying to merge all his accounts together.

Conclusion

Obviously, this is something Matt knows a lot about - having built a very active open source development community for the Word Press Platform. He also has helped create a destination site that hosts 3/4 of a million free blogs (wordpress.com) which have more than 35 million unique visitors a month.

Each of these four steps are critical as your community evolves. Hopefully, you're able to diagnose where your community is and have identified a few techniques to help you get to the next level.

Says Maser to the community, "The success of this system depends on your participation and feedback, as it will help advertisers to create the best possible experience for the Digg community. Our goal with Digg Ads is to encourage advertisers to create content as compelling as organic Digg stories, and to give you more control over which ads you see on Digg.

It will be interesting to see which advertisers attempt to game the system by digging their own ads, and how fast these ads will be buried. The official June announcement of the Digg ad program received more than 400 comments within the community, and surprisingly many of them are very positive. While critics argue that the ads will simply be buried and advertisers will stop paying for placement, others called this "marketing democracy." A few commenters pointed to the fact that they already use Adblock - a Firefox extension that allows users to filter out advertising content. Nevertheless, others chastise Adblock users for not supporting the community they enjoy. In a community as opinionated as Digg's, it will be interesting to see how the first users react to this new play for revenue.

Here is Dan's comment, with some great advice for big media companies using web 2.0 technologies...

"The top concern many media companies had initially when venturing into web 2.0 was moderation of conversation features such as comments. The truth is you can’t grow a community without it but with some clever thinking the hurdles were overcome. Take the New York Times for example, they have now embraced it and as result have shifted into a gear that enables them to grow.

I think moderation of community and content are the biggest factors in stopping media companies in taking social media a step further; they are frightened of the unpredictability of the medium but they have the resources to do it. It’s great to see CNN take the social web seriously.

One suggestion in resolving the accuracy problem is a self policing community – where the community governs the content via voting on whether or not it is appropriate and accurate. Slashdot.com did this even before web 2.0 was a popular term. It worked extremely well ensuring quality content. It’s simple features like this which can save a lot of resources and hassle."

Great points Dan. For everyone else, be sure to comment (or trackback) tomorrow to be in to win a $30 Amazon gift voucher - we're giving one away every day for the next month.

Karen Leavitt, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Mzinga, told us that one of the main demographics being served by their enterprise customers is baby boomers. With many of these older employees about to retire, companies are faced with a dilemma: how to retain that outgoing knowledge. Mzinga uses corporate communities and e-learning to extract and preserve that knowledge. By using social media tools that younger workers are already familiar with, Leavitt told us, Mzinga's approach helps to assure continuity during periods of turnover in the workplace.

Prospero, on the other hand, which was founded in 2000, is a leading provider of consumer-facing community solutions. Among Prospero's clients are every major US television network, ESPN, Amazon.com, iVillage, Hallmark, BusinessWeek, and Major League Baseball.

The presentation that Mzinga and Prospero showed us seemed to be very Prospero-heavy, and we can't blame them. Prospero's work is just sexier. While Mzinga was nearly profitable out of the gate providing social networks to corporations, and the combined company expects to see over $30 million in revenue in 2008, Prospero's portfolio makes better eye candy.

We also got the impression that going forward, Prospero's community platform will take the lead at Mzinga for social media, while Mzinga will continue providing its e-learning suite focused on corporate deployments. Prospero's platform consists of six main component applications: social networking, message boards, article commenting, live chats, ratings and reviews, and blogs. Each can be deployed via templates (i.e., built directly into an exist page's layout), widgets, or an API.

The two Massachusetts-based companies seem to be a good fit, and combined they'll have 125 enterprise customers, reaching 27 million unique users. The acquisition also adds 150 new employees to Mzinga's workforce.

The site now features tips and trick by members of the community, as well as Microsoft staff. Users can rate the contributions by other members on a five-point scale. In order to prevent abuse, content needs to be voted on by at least three community members before it is featured on the main community page, which Microsoft has dubbed the "Clubhouse," and which is only accessible by using a Windows Live ID. This content is also featured on the homepages for the individual applications that make up the Windows Live brand, though interestingly, some applications like Live Calendar and OneCare are not featured on the site.

Especially good content will also be pushed to the Windowslive.com front page by the editors. Microsoft assured us that it would allow negative posts to be featured on the site as well and that it would not censor any valid opinions - assuming that the users abide by all the terms of service for WindowsLive.com.

The Clubhouse

As of now, the central hub for creating and sharing most of the content for Windowslive.com is Live Spaces. In order for post from there to appear in the clubhouse, a user has to tag them with 'Clubhouse' and the name of at least one Live application. Indeed, it seems tags are the main glue that hold the Clubhouse together, as Microsoft also uses them to determine a list of possibly related posts. For now, the Clubhouse is only open to a select few member of the Windows community, but Microsoft will open it up for everybody in the coming weeks.

In the next iteration, Microsoft will also allow importing items from other platforms like WordPress and Blogger, Marty Collins told us.

In terms of the overall design, the Clubhouse is quite well done. One nice feature are the user profiles, which are pulled from Live Spaces. These profiles also lists a user's other posts and their ratings. In the Clubhouse, users can see all the latest posts tagged with 'clubhouse,' as well as the most highly rated posts.

It is interesting to see that Microsoft is willing to experiment in this area. On WindowsLive, it allows Microsoft generated content to stand next to user generated content, which could potentially open Microsoft up for some embarrassments. At the same time though, if Microsoft holds true to its promise of not censoring legitimate content, then this represents an important step forward in how Microsoft interacts with its customers.