thought his five skills were equally significant viewed through the lens of the future "community manager". I should say as a preface that I think the term "community manager" completely sucks - but, as of right now, it's the one that seems to be sticking in describing the role of someone in charge of listening on behalf of an organization to the social web, analyzing what they hear, and providing strategic direction based on that information. etc), who does it, is I found another really awesome blog - Chief Marketing Technologist , written by Scott Brinker ( @chiefmartec ). He

Joining Twitter with a good chunk of my social/professional community was definitely a boon. For me, this has primarily meant that I have a casual channel to share and query my professional community on. Skeptics take note - I agree with you that Twitter , the " microblogging " service that your friends are pressuring you to join, appears to be the ultimate synthesis of vanity and wasted time. All of that potential is there, and, worse, the service seems to advertise those traits as its raison d'etre.

My colleague Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web gave me a sneak peak at their Guide to Online Community Management Report and Aggregator.   The report condenses and summarizes the best thinking about online community management from a cadre of experts - those are online community manager practitioners and gurus.   If you're new to the topic, it is a great way to get up to speed and will would definitely help you inform This is a premium service and it well worth the investment. The other half of the guide is an online component to help you keep up to date. 

Photo by ferricide It's been a big month for Online Community Management in my circles. haven't read the report, but people I respect who have are speaking highly of it. Do you run an online community? The definition is pretty sketchy, ranging from a blog with active commenters to, say, America Online . I attended a session at the Nonprofit Technology Conference on the subject; then, a few weeks later, ReadWriteWeb released a detailed report on the topic . I

Yesterday, I checked out the session “Community organizing and online organizing: can they go together?” The session covered interesting points on the debate between community and online organizers and ways to overcome the resistance within an organization. Charles started out with a comprehensive definition of community organizing: Community organizing is a process by which people living in proximity to each other are brought together in an organization Thanks to NTEN for sharing live webinars of the NTC sessions for those of us that couldn’t make the actual conference.

Submitted by Susan Tenby, publisher of Online Communities for Social Change Today I had several discovery moments of serendipitous learning via Twitter. It definitely changes the way we are perceiving what is current and the way that we are receiving information. Today, one of the hundreds of time i was obsessing on TweetDeck , my lens of choice, to see who was saying what and who was talking or I am noticing lately, that I am hearing all my news before it even hits the web, let alone TV, via Twitter.

Blueberries = the members/supporters/community How important would volunteers be without any organization or community to support?  How do we shift the definition of “organization” to include everything that is vital to a cause? Tags: culture shift community organizations issues chang I’ve been thinking about words lately and finding that there are far too many that we use that either are too vague they don’t really mean anything or are so frequently used that they no longer mean anything.  That doesn’t help us communicate very

Today was the last day of month-long and very intense workshop on online community and facilitation skills from Nancy White at Full Circle . One of my learning goals was to go deeper into the question around blogging communities and the question, "Can blogging communities be facilitated?" Nancy shared an excellent post from Steve Shu that provides a simple and clear definition of community blogs and blogs communities. I'm sad because it was a fantastic experience due to Nancy's incredible skill and energy as an online facilitator and my fellow workshop participants on who logged in from around the world.

Facebook), as well as their own hosted social networking communities. Some definitions they used in the study: " House Social Network " refers to a socialnetworking community built on a nonprofit's own web site.  " Commercial Social Network " An online community platform owned and operated by a corporation such as Facebook. Strategy: Nonprofits prefer to use more traditional communications and marketing tactics to promote their social network presence – prioritizing web site, email During the NTC, ThePort Network, Inc , NTEN , and Common Knowledge released results of a survey that examines the use of social networking as a marketing and fundraising tool. 

via Nancy White Nancy White, John Smith , and Etienne Wenger are working a report about use of technology tools for Communities of Practice. There is a section in the report that describes the role of the Community Technology Steward and Nancy was reflecting that last week . I asked her a few questions because the concept is important to nonprofits. John, Etienne and Nancy batted it around and came up with a definition: Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs.