We hope you’ll be able to join Metzger Associates for the next in our Social Media Breakfast series, to be held Friday, August 13, from 7:45-9 a.m. We’re excited to host this event at the new Boulder Digital Arts facility at 1600 Range Street, suite 100, in Boulder (so don’t come to our office!).

Our topic this time will focus on building and maintaining an online community. Our speakers, Holly Hamann and Rustin Banks, are the founders of BlogFrog, which has grown to be the nationʼs largest network of blogs (with 45,000 in the network) in less than a year. Each month, BlogFrog connects more than 3 million blogging moms and their readers.

Holly (a mom, blogger and veteran marketer for tech startups) and Rustin (a lifelong programmer, tech engineer, dad and blogger) will cover a topic critical to anyone interested in social media–the psychology of online communities: how they form, what keeps them cohesive and what makes one successful and another fail.

Send an email to Lisa Metzger (lmetzger@metzger.com) if you’d like to join us. As always, the event is free and open to anyone.

Hope to see you there!

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The event will be co-hosted by Metzger’s Dave Taylor, who manages three blogs, including the popular Ask Dave Taylor blog, and is a national keynote speaker on a variety of technology and social media topics, and Doyle Albee, president and Social Media Practice director at Metzger.

Unlike many social media seminars that simply help attendees set up a Facebook page or a Twitter account, Social Media for Executives presented by Filtrbox has brought together many of the nation’s leading social media experts, each with a specific focus in a key management area — from communications to customer service to human resources — to provide a strategic overview of emerging best practices and strategic management of this important new area.

The day’s speaker line-up includes:

• Paula Berg, manager of Emerging Media for Southwest Airlines.
• Jessica Berlin, Social Media manager for the Resident Shows Division of Cirque du Soleil.
• Deirdre Breakenridge, a 20-year PR and marketing veteran and the author of four books.
• Ari Newman, president and founder of Filtrbox.
• Linda O’Neill, general manager for Customer Operations for EMBARQ.
• Liz Ryan a former Fortune 500 human resources executive and the author of Happy About Online Networking: The Virtual-ly Simple Way to Build Professional Relationships.

The conference is being presented by Filtrbox (www.filtrbox.com).

“Our goal is to present a conference to truly help senior-level executives understand how social media has the potential to impact nearly every area in any company and to discuss the strategies and emerging best practices with industry leaders and their peers,” said Dave Taylor, one of the conference hosts. In order to facilitate interaction with both the speakers and the attendees, space is limited.

For more details or to register, please visit our Web site at www.executivesocialmediabriefing.com.

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Trying to manage an online forum, as my colleague Nate Warren noted earlier this month, is like herding cats. It’s no wonder some marketers still hesitate to recommend social media to clients. Under the cover of anonymity, some people will say unbelievable things.

Years of hosting conversations at the two-decade-old online community The Well have given me some insight. Well members post under their real names, but bad behavior still ranges from low-level cluelessness to shocking verbal abuse.

In 2001, I co-hosted a forum (on The Well they’re called conferences) about the 9/11 attacks. It turned into the personal toxic waste dump of a guy I’ll call Sludge, whose capacity to hate people on the Left made Rush Limbaugh look like Mister Rogers.

It looked to us like he spent the whole day flaming people in dozens, if not hundreds, of topics. He could get as ugly talking chiles in the Cooking conference as he did about terrorist-coddling liberals. If you crossed him, he would track you all over the system and, within minutes, spew venom after everything you posted: weather reports, birthday greetings, the cute thing your baby did.

Whole conferences went silent as people took their discussions private to get away from him.

Sludge held particular contempt for women, so I volunteered to draw his fire in the hopes that he would violate the Terms of Service badly enough to get him kicked out. I deleted something of his and came back to a long screed about “Lisa, the Town Skank.” He finally got booted for using his wife’s account to read women-only conferences, looking for dirt about me.

If you still believe what your mom said about names never hurting you, you’ve never read an email so hateful that your hands shake too much to type for a while.

Because I love online community, I’m a firm believer in active forum moderation to control the jerks and keep the conversation beneficial for the greatest number. Here are some recurring problem posters and what to do about them.

The Debate Club President: This person loves a good argument and doesn’t mind a bad one. They sometimes will take a contradictory position that they personally don’t believe, just for sport.
The Problem: Skilled Debate Clubbers keep conversations lively, but clumsy or overtalkative ones can kill a discussion, especially if they turn into Bomb-Throwers or Broken Records (see below).
Manage by: Hosting online discussion like you would a cocktail party, circulating to make sure everyone’s drink is topped off and no one feels left out. If forum participants are used to the moderator chiming in, you will be able to control topic drift or those who monopolize the conversation without looking heavy-handed. As longtime Well host David Gans – who made his bones wrangling Deadheads, never the easiest cats to herd – told me when I started, just be a good host. Create a pleasant space to hang out. Refill the pretzels and empty the ashtrays. Make sure people know you’re there and a lot of little issues will work themselves out.

The Bomb-Thrower: Will lob something incendiary into a discussion just for the fun of it. Truly virulent Bomb-Throwers will slam “breeders” on a parenting forum, refer to prayer on a Christian website as “talking to your invisible friends,” or rant about idiot Boulder liberals on the Daily Camera’s comment threads. They’re like trolls, only they come out from under the bridge more often.
The Problem: Bomb-Throwers are often the first to scream “Censorship!” when moderators try to mitigate the damage they do to a conversation. Classic control freaks, they divert attention by attempting to make you the problem.
Manage by: Setting rules and expectations up front, and enforcing them publicly and fairly. This give you the track record and tools you need to shut these guys down. Start with zero tolerance for name-calling, attacks or slurs, and an eagle eye for topic drift. For the sake of a healthy online community, you may have to remove posts or block users. Brace yourself for the inevitable abuse and just do it. Your rational readers will thank you.

The World’s Foremost Expert on Everything: There’s one of these in every crowd, isn’t there?
The Problem: They’re all on the Internet now, spreading misinformation. Worse: boring.
Manage by: Correct important errors of fact and let your users take care of the rest by either challenging or bozofiltering the World’s Foremost Expert. Some Bozos never understand why people don’t respond anymore. They just keep talking … to nobody. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

The Broken Record: You’ll be talking about rose gardening until somebody announces that illegal immigrants take all the landscaping jobs. They pop up in a thread about stomach flu at a summer camp to posit that illegal immigrants in the kitchen spread disease. Talking about cars? They’re right there griping about Mexican drivers. It gets old.
Note the similarities between Bomb-Throwers and Broken Records. Every topic on the Internet, from laundry to astrophysics, becomes a referendum on their pet subject.
Manage them by: Routing around them. Turn that eagle eye on drift into a firm rein. “Back to roses, is anybody else having trouble with Japanese beetles?” Again, your clued-in users will reinforce the message by refusing to take the bait.

The Bully: You’ll recognize this guy the first time he responds to someone with, “Shut your piehole, you fat Irish moron.” They snark and call names, and that’s just to warm up. More toxic bullies will dig up personal info about people or stalk them – online and even in person.
The Problem: Testosterone. Anger management. Childhood abandonment issues. Whatever. You’re just an online host, not a psychotherapist.
Manage by: This is the place for heavy-handed hosting. Delete, suspend and ban. In extreme cases like Sludge, who was practiced at skating just inside the lines, you may have to provoke the Bully into violating the user agreement. It makes for an unpleasant couple of days, but it works. Call the police if the bullying moves into meatspace. Life is too short.

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Posted by Elaine Ellis

I attended the first Chicks Who Click in January in Boulder having no idea what to expect.  I wanted to support Denise, our event planner at Metzger. I ended up being blown away by the women who attended.

 I finally got to meet Aimee Greeblemonkey, a business women and Mommy blogger extraordinaire. Now someone I consider a good friend. I got to hang with Tara Anderson, a crowd favorite and one of the first people to do community outreach for a tech company (Lijit!). Now someone I got to go wedding dress shopping with (hers, not mine!). I met Amber Johnson of Crazy Bloggin Canuck and Mile High Mamas, a blogger I’d been “stalking” for a long time. I meet Amy Turn Sharp aka dooblehvay, who brought out masks for the after party and has one sharp wit. To me, Chicks Who Click enabled me to meet and be inspired by amazing women I already knew or might get to know through social media.  

 I can’t exactly put a finger on it, but the atmosphere changes when the majority of attendees are women.  It’s not that we’re not welcome at other social media or tech events, we are. But the atmosphere is so much more supportive when it’s women.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re starting at ground zero or if you’ve been a blogger for years. No one mocks or ridicules.

 So I begged Denise and Doyle to go Chicks Who Click Kansas City. Again, I left awed and inspired by the women I met. I loved how Rita Arens and Jennifer Bruenjes (aka Scout Finch) have this take the bull by the horns attitude. These women are no pushovers. I loved the vivacious trio from EMBARQ (a client) of Maria Fogliasso, Victoria Soares and Zena Weist. Zena is a personal hero of mine. If there is a women who is someone to aspire to be, it’s Zena. Celeste Lindell and Kate McKinney gave Tara and I a tour of the city of fountains. Every visitor to KC should be so lucky. 

I can’t attend Chicks Who Click Vancouver on June 27 because I’ll be in SLC for a wedding, but if you have the opportunity, I highly recommend you go. The women you’ll meet will ferment your passion in social media and inspire you in real life. 

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If space is your forte, you don’t want to miss this!  Experts will be discussing how space technology translates to entrepreneurial ventures.

The panel  lineup includes: Burke Fort, director of the 8th Continent Project; Gene Branch,  partner at  Townsend and Townsend and Crew’s Denver office; Steve Murchie, director of the Keiretsu Forum’s Denver chapter; and Paul Jerde, executive director of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business.

For more informaiton visit www.rockiesventureclub.org.

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My kids do homework and forget to hand it in. This, to me, is inexcusable. In my day, when we blew schoolwork off, we blew it off properly, flagged down a pal with a car, turned the radio all the way up and went to Dairy Queen for a Hot Fudge Brownie Delight. To complete an assignment and then add it to the compost pile in your backpack seems a waste by my ancient standards of slacking.

Photo by carbonNYC via Flickr.com, CC 2.0

But then, we had fewer things to do instead of homework: three channels of TV and a handful of radio stations. Teens shared one phone with everybody in the house and got the hairy eyeball from parents if we yakked too long. Hanging out was done in person; messages arrived via notebook paper folded into tiny squares and passed behind the teacher’s back. Games came on boards or in cards. You could only play Scrabble for so long before your math homework looked interesting by comparison.

The other night my son was on his bed with Monty Python sketches from YouTube playing on his laptop, iPod earbuds installed, Nintendo DS in one hand running Pokemon Platinum, and the pencil with which he was allegedly writing down algebra problems in the other. My daughter was reading her history textbook on the couch downstairs while watching “Phineas and Ferb.”

Not only do my kids forget to hand things in, I hear from parents of their friends that smart kids are failing their favorite subjects because they’re not doing the work. Then teachers forget to grade things and parents forget to check the online gradebook, or don’t see the email from the teacher because it’s buried in their inboxes with the other 20,000 things they’re either doing or forgetting to do.

Right now I have nine applications running on my MacBook, not counting the Finder. Eight mail windows are open, plus 11 tabs in Firefox alone. Papers, sticky notes and two phones are spread across my desk, I can hear two conversations and Taj Mahal is playing on the Sonos. Who am I to talk?

It’s not just multitasking, it’s overtasking. It is an epidemic, and it’s not limited to kids.

New York Times science columnist John Tierney devoted his May 5 column to the science of concentration. “Is there any realistic refuge anymore from the Age of Distraction?” he writes.

Readers think not. The comment threads read like a collective cry for help – why am I so frazzled and yet unable to get anything done?

Winifred Gallagher, author of “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life” (Penguin, 2009), says it takes conscious effort to override the brain’s impulse to pay attention to the newest, shiniest object. She took up the subject after a cancer episode, taking her text from William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She carries earplugs to create her own “stimulus shelter” from intrusive sounds, and advocates working on your most important task for the first 90 minutes of your day. Then take a break for email, phone calls or coffee, because it takes your brain 20 minutes to reboot after an interruption.

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

The antidotes suggested by commenters ranged from techno music and the “Getting Things Done” method to Ritalin or getting your thyroid checked. Each person’s brain is wired uniquely, so experiment with different ways of working until you find one that lets you tune out everything but the task at hand.

I hope to get a chance to work on that next week sometime.

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Dave Taylor and I are doing a session called “Social Media for Skeptics: The Care and Feeding of Bloggers” May 19 in Broomfield. TechCrunch, one of the nation’s leading technology blogs, has taken notice and you can read their post here. 

For information on how to join the session, click here.

Hope to see you there!

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Coming up in January, our agency is co-sponsoring a special new media workshop, but this one is aimed at a purely female audience.  On January 9, “Chicks Who Click” http://www.chickswhoclick.com/ is bringing together women from all over who have their own businesses selling products and services for a day of skiing (and liquid-fueled networking) followed by a day under the tutelage of well-qualified pros who will direct hands-on workshops about the proper use of social media to establish your brand.

Questions abound about the marketing uses of social Web sites.  An article on Dec. 5 in eMarketer discusses the dilemma with intelligence http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006775.  The subhead of the eMarketer piece is pretty telling: “Users want to communicate with each other, not necessarily with brands.”  They say that more than one-half of the US population surveyed uses social networking sites, but the huge traffic numbers do not translate into ad dollars. 

 The piece quotes an IDC research report that found that 75% of social network site users logged in at least once a week, and 57% logged in daily with 61% of those users spending more than 30 minutes per session and 38% staying for an hour or more.  IDC reports that only 57% of social network site users clicked on an ad in the past year, compared with 79% of all Internet consumers.

But I don’t think the women who will attend “Chicks Who Click” are planning to initiate ad buys on MySpace.  So, if not advertising – what?  Those in the know say there are user-sanctioned ways to use social media to market your wares.  Just exactly how is something that will be revealed at “Chicks Who Click” on Jan. 9th and 10th …. so they tell me.  I may wear a disguise and try to learn a few trade secrets.

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I’ll be sitting in on a panel at this year’s BlogWorld, to be held this weekend in Las Vegas. I’m looking forward to meeting many people that I “know” through Twitter or blogs, but have never meet in person (or IRL, as we often say).

The panel I’ll be on, which takes place Friday at 2 p.m., is called “The Balancing Act: How to Build Credibility in the Social Media World.” We’ll be discussing how to work in a world where just about anyone can post just about anything — how can a person or a company establish credibility?

I’ll be sharing the panel with others and am looking forward to a great discussion. If you’re attending BlogWorld, I hope you’ll drop by.

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Dean Rizzuto of Metzger Associates and Zena Weist of EMBARQ did a great job of outlining an underutilized application by marketers – the mobile phone.

The most salient point of the presentation to me was that sometimes simple marketing using SMS is the most poignant way to reach people. After two separate unsuccessful trips to Cherry Creek Mall to pick up the iPhone (I mean really? Four hours in line for something that will still be available in a week?), it’s hard not to get caught up in the hype that the iPhone is the only device that matters. The iPhone (or Guy Phone as Dean referred to it) is a highly touted option but represents a limited sample of the 86 percent of the US population 13 and older who own a mobile device.

It was also great to hear from Zena how EMBARQ is using Twitter as a customer service tool to stay on top of customer feedback as it’s happening. If you’re unsure about Twitter, Gwen Bell had a great point to use Twitter first as a person before you use it as a CEO or company. You get a better handle on the lingo and that @ is a way to reply to someone and  # is put before a location. Two other companies who are doing a great job with Twitter are Comcast and Zappos.

Global mobile ad marketing spend will be $16 billion by 2011, so in three short years marketers need to have a solid handle on effective mobile marketing. Dean and Zena clearly outlined the three ways that mobile marketers need to incorporate to be successful.

1. Permission (opt-in)
2. A clear way to opt-out
3. Designed to offer the consumer more choices/more convenient means

The recent launch of Loopt, a location based device on the iPhone that notifies your friends of your GPS locale clearly brings these three elements home. Loopt is quickly racking up criticism where people feel they haven’t opted in, are getting spammed for invites and can’t figure out how to opt out.  To avoid major snafus like Loopt, the Mobile Marketing Association is a great site to check out if you’re getting started in this space.

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