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CommunityBuildrs September Meeting

The meeting was on: September 27th, 2007

At the Rich Media Institute

Meeting Notes:

As always, I want to thank those who were able to attend for coming and sharing your thoughts and experiences with the rest of us. For those of you who couldn't make it this time around, we look forward to seeing you at the next meeting! I also need to give a special thank you to Robert Richman for taking notes during the meeting to help me out with this recap.

One of the positives of Robert's note-taking is that there is actually a roster of the folks in attendance which is great! Please excuse any name mis-spellings they are best-guesses in some cases. Send me a quick message for any corrections. There were also some later arrivals who were able to thereby avoid inclusion on this list. In non-hierarchical order we were fortunate to have:

  • Jonathan Grub

    • Ruby Red programming, developed customer Service site called satisfaction (www.getsatisfaction.com)
    Looking for opps in wireless app programming

  • Kestron Pantera

    • Entertainment, client, learning, support.
    Looking for a Project Management position in web or advertising

  • Sameer

    • Online knowledge community. Pro Profs, Community based with blogs and forums.
    Sells e-learning courseware.
    Looking for people’s design opinions

  • Robert

    • PeopleJam.com – a social network and video site for people who want more in all areas of life.
    Looking for ways to sustain community

  • Crystal

    • American Dinner – talking about politics via food. Families video taping themselves, reality show, sharing their political views. Day1 365 New years day event – a day of resolution, resolving what you’ll do to help community. Helping to mentor people so they can do good.

  • Ross

    • Entrepreneur, sells products online, interested in how community evolved around the product.
    Looking for how community can help product sales.

  • Laroy

    • TheJazzCat.net, radio program host, interviewing different jazz artists, pitching a tv show. A lot of people come to the site, wants to monetize it.
    Looking for how he can monetize his community

  • Peter

    • Looking for volunteers to help with a network around improving LA’s water systems

  • Gus

    • Musician, created a band site, developed a community site for bands. Building a site around Drupal, finding a vibrant community around it. Looking for Drupal developers.

  • Chris

    • Rich media faculty, Adobe products, and Drupal. Runs Adobe user group, a site about nightclubs.
    Looking for a Drupal intern (unpaid)

  • Crystal Williams

    • Drupal Camp, BarCamp4, unconferences,
    Producer at a design agency, just launched sony.com, landed myspace mobile.
    Looking for HTML, CSS coders, and BarCamp volunteers

  • Will

    • Working on gvox – viral adoption of widgets, gifting music. Knows SEO very well. Creating Veniceartwalls.com

Following introductions and a quick exchange of what we are all up to, we had a very informative round-table discussion on utilizing PR to get the word out about a community. There was a lot of information shared during the meeting but some points that were "capturable" in a note were:

  • PR should be both traditional media and non-traditional media (new net media).
  • Some press wire services have been helpful. Mixed results depending on the site with: Prweb, Prleap, Businesswire, Prnewswire.com. (Expensive, but maybe just as good as Prweb)
  • In writing a press release you need good quotes. You need a "hook".
  • To really get noticed have an industry or topic specific hook, and distribute releases appropriately. Select the right channels on the newswire services.
  • A press release should follow a specific format. Lead, 2-3 paragraphs of what it is, boilerplate about you section
  • Find a trend and get yourself hitched to that trend.
  • Publishers need multiple companies to be doing trend stories so provide more than just your own.
  • A personal connection can make the difference. Keep feeding a journalist stories. Work a personal contact
  • If hiring a firm to help, good PR companies have strong relationships and it can be great to have someone else pitch
  • Contacting Bloggers - People are lazy, and if you come to them without anything substantial, if they have to take time thinking up what they need to write about you, or digging up graphics, or anything more than 10 minutes of work, they will not do it. If you make it easy for them. If you write their story for them and hand it to them, with graphics, hooks, “I bet we can get this on Digg.” your odds of coverage increase.
  • Another strategy is to offer someone an exclusive. If you can make someone more credible, you’re doing them a big favor.
  • Constant follow-up with people is required.
  • Be something worth recommending, - hey have you checked out such-and-such

The conversation also entered territory that might be more marketing than PR or perhaps more SEO. In some cases, the boundaries between PR, Marketing, etc. become very blurry. Some points that were raised include:

  • Consistent traffic is better than spikes. Stumble Upon traffic = same number of users everyday. Digg is too much of a spike. Too much at once disrupts the community.
  • Using social network to drive traffic to social networks. If you get into stumbleupon, upcoming, groups on facebook, you have things that grow with those social networks over time.
  • Customer Acquistion is much more expensive than customer retention online as in traditional business.
  • SEO - Sitemaps are important – telling google what you have

There is so much knowledge in the group. I'm already looking forward to the next meeting! Hope to see you all there. I'll be posting the date, etc. once we can confirm the space is available...

Kirk Eisele

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