BestBuy to Host Social Media Conversations – Things are Happening in Minneapolis
Social Media Breakfast Twin Cities and Social Media Club of Minnesota have aligned for selected events in order to push forward the digital community discussions and connections here in the Twin Cities. Better things happen when you come together. This coming Friday at 8AM, BestBuy continues their openness to discussions on new media and social media with local practitioners in Minneapolis by hosting a breakfast in their main auditorium. Rick Mahn, founder of the local chapter of Social Media Breakfast, is leading the charge and has brought together a great lineup. Julio Ojeda-Zapata, journalist for Pioneer Press (main paper in the Twin Cities) will talk about his upcoming book “Twitter Means Business - How microblogging can help or hurt your company.” Julio opened up live-writing on a chapter to the new book on Twitter before the event and he will share some of the collections at BestBuy on Friday.
Also at the event, there will be a live remote update from Noah Kunin of TheUptake.org from the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, CO. Noah will be demonstrating how social media, specifically mobile video, is being used for citizen journalism. You are able to watch remotely via the Mogulus video channel on Mogulus: www.mogulus.com/smbmsp. Attendance to the SMB/SMC events has been steadily growing, and the goal is to keep attendees around 80-100 simply because real interactive discussions can’t take place as the numbers get too large. The goal is to keep it interactive.
After BestBuy, the following three events in September and October are in the planning phase and will be hosted at Minneapolis Fortune 500s. Minneapolis is special because of the large business that exist here, including 3M, BestBuy, Target, General Mills, United Health Group, and Medtronic. These companies are big slow ships, but hey they are massive behemoths that are making strides to incorporate social media and build communities internally and for their customers. Some have had a few bumps along the road but at least they are willing to discuss it. Back in May, BestBuy’s Gary Koelling (Blue Shirt Nation) sat on the panel hosted by Social Media Club and MIMA and brought some fresh air to the conversation on who controls social media in the enterprise. More news will be coming out of Minneapolis as these large companies are developing and putting into practice new services for massive amounts of customers and employees.
Be sure to tune in on Friday August 22nd at 8AM Central.
More details: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/991607/?ps=6 -
Social Media Club of Minneapolis
Social Media Club Formalizes Nationally
Social Media Club, co-founded by Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells, has announced an interim board to help establish guidelines for the association.
While the interim board will focus on charting the organization’s future direction, our core mission will remain the same: promotion of media literacy; support of industry standards efforts such as Creative Commons licensing, Microformats, Data Portability and OpenID; discussion and promotion of ethical behavior; and sharing our knowledge among our members and the industry community at large.
The formation of the board will help bring some structure to the local chapters/teams that are being formed in the U.S. and also internationally. To date their are 16 local established teams and 30 teams that are currently in the works. Once the guidelines are established and local teams grow, SMC will gain more momentum on a national level, especially with corporations and other institutions looking to bring social media into their organization.
This loose board of practitioners will be a steering committee for something seen as new today but as the standard tomorrow. I am glad to be on the board, since my goal of helping create the local chapter in Minneapolis is to bring national conversations local and local conversations national. Minnesota has many digital communities already established and collectively these groups, consultants and enterprise practitioners will help lead the charge. Locally Connie Benson, Rick Mahn, Graeme Thickens, and Greg Swann are part of the SMB/SMC committee.
Some other links to today’s announcement:
Summize.com/search?q=social+media+club
Social Media Practitioners of Minnesota
Last month, Jeremiah Owyang created an ongoing list of Social Computing Strategists, Community Managers, and Social Media Researchers in the Enterprise. The extensive list Jeremiah put together helps to bring structure to an evolving work force that so many companies define differently. Do these positions fall under strategy, product management, PR, marketing, interactive? In May, I helped co-produce the event DualityReality - Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise here in Minneapolis. The event was the largest weekly event hosted by MIMA - a co-production of Social Media Club of Minnesota. I believe the large turnout was due to the simple question of “where is this all going “especially with large enterprises in Minnesota. General Mills, Target, Fingerhut, and BestBuy were part of the panel. I tried to recruit Scott Heimes from United Health Group and Scott Mark from Medtronic. Both were interested by had to drop out due to internal commitments.
So what about here in Minnesota? Who are some of the social media practitioners in large enterprises? I would like to add more to this list as people submit their comments.
Social Media Strategist:
- Gary Koelling, - Sr Mgr Social Technology, Best Buy
- Steve Bendt - Sr. Manager of Social Technology, Best Buy
- Jim Cuene - Director- Interactive Marketing, General Mills
Community Managers:
- Lee Aase - Communications Manager, Mayo Clinic
Social Media Researchers and Social Media Product Managers
- Scott Mark - Enterprise Application Architect, Medtronic, Inc.
As you can see, many of the titles come from disparate areas. Each company approaches SM differently which is the reason there should be an internal panel developed within large enterprises that discuss the approach, results, and alignment of social media within such massive organizations.
Definitions of these three groups from Jeremiah:
Social Media Strategist:
“Social Media Strategist, whose job is to lead the internal charge, develops the program, gains resources, convinces management, and measures success.”
Community Managers:
“The Community Manager, who’s job is to primarily be a community advocate is a social media user, and is externally focused, they are primarily the face to the online community. Primarily an externally (customer/community) facing role.”
Social Media Researchers and Social Media Product Managers:
“Analyzing online behavior or creating specs for future products. Expect large enterprise software companies to offer these features in their product suites in the coming future. Researching or building social media products that will be brought to market.”
Minnesota Digital Communities
Minnesota is full of individuals and groups who are highly fluent in the conversation of community. When I had the idea a while back to start a chapter of The Social Media Club in the Twin Cities, many thought it was a crowded field. From the list below, you can see the numerous groups located here (MIMA being the largest at 900 members). So why Social Media Club? To connect our local conversations from all the below organizations with the other SMC chapters in the US including SFO, Boston, Austin, and DC.
The idea of Social Media Club is to have smaller round table discussions on the future of social media and how it relates to our world, business, or organization.
- MIMA
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8068740823 - Twin Cities Interactive Group
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6078590807&ref=ts - Social Media Breakfast - Twin Cities
http://smbmsp.ning.com/ - UofM - Institute for Research in Marketing
http://www.csom.umn.edu/Page6247.aspx - AIGA Minnesota
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=11442198714&ref=mf - Ad Fed MN / AD2
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10420781509 - Minnov8
http://minnov8.com/ - BarCamp-MinneBar
http://barcamp.org/MinneBar - Likemind MIN
http://likemindmin.ning.com/ - Minnesota Chapter of the American Marketing Association
http://www.mnama.org - MNteractive
http://mnteractive.com - Twin Cities IA/UX Meetup
http://mnteractive.com
del.icio.us bookmarks for June 16th through July 2nd
These are my links for May 16th through July 2nd:
- Startup2Startup - Startup2Startup is a group of Silicon Valley geeks, entrepreneurs, & investors dedicated to educating and helping the next generation of internet startups. We meet monthly over dinner to discuss relevant topics in technology & entrepreneurship, connect wi
- Google to Offer a Tool To Measure Web Hits - WSJ.com - Service poses a major threat to the Web measurement services that are available now, ad executives say. The two main players in the business — comScore and Nielsen Online. Google’s new offering will be based mostly on data from Web servers.
- MIT/Stanford Venture Lab - Cloud Computing: Creating Value for Web 2.0 Apps- Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 6:00pm - What are the ramifications of democratization? How are entrepreneurs exploiting cloud computing and leveraging Web 2.0? What challenges do these entrepreneurs face?
- Agency Bootcamp Chicago May 21st - Does Your Agency Understand Social Media?
- Online Community Unconference Wednesday, June 18, 2008 8:30 am - The Online Community Unconference is a gathering of online community practitioners - managers, developers, business people, tool providers, investors - to discuss experience and strategies in the development and growth of online communities.
Arbeiten und Lieben and the Cloud
Work, love, and the cloud. Sounds like a bad 80’s Tom Hanks movie. Arbeiten and lieben comes from Freud and was mentioned in a recent Economist article entitled “Nomads at Last” describing some of the sociological changes taking place within our society through the abundance of technology and connectivity. Before we had the technology tools, but some of the ingredients were missing in the recipe including ubiquitous (l like that word) Internet service to mobile devices, phones, and computers. Recently the FCC auctioned some of the most important pieces of the sky to AT&T. The spectrum was the old UHF airwaves that we watched our 6 channels of TV on during the 70’s and early 80’s. This type of spectrum is essential in today’s fuel mixture to make the engine run. For example, the Kindle device from Amazon allows you to order books without a wired connection making book purchasing very simple. Even better, before you board an airline, just download a few books and check all your bags (if you trust your airline with them), and carry on the Kindle. Paul Saffo in the Economist article compared the elimination of cords and cables to the astronaut and the hermit crab.
Astronauts must bring what they need, including oxygen, because they cannot rely on their environment to provide it. They are both defined and limited by their gear and supplies. Around the turn of the century, as some astronauts, typically executive road warriors, got smarter about packing light, says Mr Saffo, they graduated to an intermediate stage, becoming hermit crabs. These are crustaceans that survive by dragging around a cast-off mollusc shell for protection and shelter. In the metaphorical sense, the shell might be a “carry-on” bag on wheels, stuffed full of cables, discs, dongles, batteries, plugs and paper documents (just in case of disc failure). These hermit crabs strike fear into the hearts of seated airline passengers whenever they board, because their shells invariably bang into innocent shins all the way to their seat. They carry less than astronauts-and are thus more mobile-but are still quite heavily laden with gear, mostly as a safeguard against disasters.
OK now that we can all connect with these devices seamlessly and without all the cables and cords using smaller computing machines like the Mac Air , the AsusEEE or the new Dell Vostro Machine , our computers become low power, highly portable terminals that connect us to our data living on the Internet rather than on our devices.
Cloud computing by definition is not new for most enterprises and large organizations. Employees connect to Intranet services using Oracle, BEA , or Microsoft tools that allows them to share data, see directories, coordinate teams and projects, and view shared calendars. The shift that we will see out there is not changes by large companies moving to the cloud, it is with mid-sized businesses, small companies, organizations, and families who are all becoming more nomadic and connected with small, always on machines. Why buy desktop software to manage your communications when you can do it for free with close to free tools. Working within these tools also helps users to connect socially (Google Sites - WIKI or Docs with comments). There is always the argument of security and supplying all your data to one provider is not wise. I guess that is why we place money in banks.
Last year I moved my personal domain to GoogleApps and got my wife to use the gmail tools to manage her mail and calendar. She indicated computing off of Google rather than on local software was a huge improvement. Next steps is the transition to GoogleDocs rather than Word. This may take a while since it requires a mental shift and discards old embedded ways of productivity.
Many older people will strain to recognize themselves in the behavior patterns described in this report, and indeed may never adopt them. But the lesson of history is that what the geeks and early adopters do today, the rest of us will probably end up doing tomorrow or the day after. It is the pioneers that set the direction; the mainstream will follow in time.
Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.
Once the new iPhone comes out in June, business users will connect to their GoogleApps and Exchange Services and many will leave their Blackberry’s behind. Why? The Internet experience on the iPhone is just more enjoyable and visual. Apple shows again that design fuels innovation and adoption. 2 years from now I wonder if the number of adopters of the iPhone, if opened up to all networks besides AT&T, will match the same numbers of PC vs Apple users in the marketplace. Will PC users cling to Blackberrys? The interesting part of the future adoption of cell phone services is it is not limited to first world countries. According to the Economist, half the world’s population now subscribes to a mobile phone service. My seven year old son asked yesterday at what age he would be allowed to buy one. Here it comes.<
