Web Strategy by Jeremiah

Here’s where to find me in the coming weeks:

Monday, March 17 I’ll be in NYC at the API Conference as a guest of Stephanie Agresta.

Tuesday Morning, March 25 I’ll be speaking in Mountain View
Social Networking Half Day Conference: Business Applications of Social Networking on March 25th in Mountain View. Readers of my blog get a discount use the code SNC325. I’ll be presenting my presentation on “Online Community Best Practices” (I presented it twice today, one full version and one small version for clients and their customers).

Tuesday Afternoon, March 25th, SF
I’ll be at the SNAP Summit in San Francisco on a panel

Tuesday Night, March 25th, SF
We’re having a blogger dinner, stay tuned for details

March 27, 2008, UC Berkeley,
I’m waiting for more details, but it’s the Online Community Keynote

If you’re not familiar with OpenSocial, it’s a protocol lead by Google to allow widgets and applications to be portable to any social network or website that part of the alliance. If you’re not familiar read “Explaining OpenSocial to your Executives” to get started, I explain it in pure business terms.

I’m conducting research right now for an upcoming report on OpenSocial, I’ve already interviewed David Glazer and Kevin Marks from Google, and have interviewed Joseph Smarr from Plaxo, Nick O’Neill from All Facebook, and will be talking to David Recordon from Six Apart next week.

I just asked my twitter network, (and received about 20 responses) about which white label social networks are open social compliant, and received quite a few responses. I frequently use social media tools for research ‘discovery’ to quickly find out a multitude of answers, but of course, it’s no substitute for analysis. I’d guess that I use social media tools for 10-20% of all my research, asking, reading, linking, or leaving comments.

The reason why I limit this list for 2008, as I’m pretty sure it will be most of the industry that adopts this standard

‘White Label’ (you can rebrand them) social networks that have adopted or agreed to offer the OpenSocial Protocol

Orkut (of course, since they’re owned by Google)
KickApps (read more)
Ning (OpenSocial Directory)
Pluck (read more)
Flux (read more)

So why is this significant?
Soon, corporate websites with social networks will start to host popular applications for other websites, this makes the web distributed. Soon, corporate websites will stop being irrelevant. Development time will be reduced, applications can quickly be rehashed and other opportunities that I’ve found will be in the report.

I expect this list to get quite a bit longer by the end of this year, if you know of others, please leave a comment.

Len Devanna is a Web Strategist at EMC I was able to get his precious time in SF recently, and he shared with me how to get organizations to adopt social media.

Learn how to change and move a large culture, how to demonstrate there is value (vs being a time waster) and convincing management.

Listen in at the very end, Len shares his one bit of advice (from being in the trenches) on what to always remember.

I write for the web strategist (web decision makers at companies) and was really pleased that we got a top notch professional here at named Michelle Frost here at Forrester Research.

A few weeks ago, I announced that Forrester is seeking a Community Manager, and wow did we get a response, over 20 resumes!

I offered her the opportunity to guest post, and she’s decided to take me up on the offer, she shares her experience building the right team, esp in the world of social media

Guest Post from Michelle Frost, Director, Web Marketing at Forrester Research

The custody battle is over! After much debate, I’m thrilled to say that Forrester’s newly created position of Online Community Manager will be part of the Web Marketing team. We’re plugged into the business and work online, so it’s a solid starting point.

With Jeremiah’s input, we drafted a job description and spread the word. Now comes the hard part: We need to hire.

My first hiring experience was my worst: It came to a crashing conclusion with my new employee leaving the office via a stretcher within two weeks. She left behind extensive literature on how to collect workers compensation. Lesson learned.

My methods have since improved, which is lucky for me, my employer, and my new employees. Recent new hires have even been quoted as saying that their job matches the job description outlined during the hiring process. Progress.

But with this newly created Online Community Manager hire, I feel like I’m starting from the beginning. During my agency days at Critical Mass, I developed, sold, and managed community projects. But my team and clients majored in something else and minored in community “things.”

Everything is different in this 2.0 pond. How do you quantify Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections? The personal and professional line is blurred on candidates’ sites and I end up knowing more than I should (or care to) about candidates’ positions on religion, gay marriage, reproductive rights, and music.

Later today, I meet with Forrester’s recruiter: We’ll see how current hiring and legal counsel from Strategic Growth maps with the times.

Fingers crossed.

For those that applied, this is a good example of how we’re trying to be transparent, we’re real live people, as we expect you to demonstrate to our customers and clients.

And I can promise you, we’ll do everything we can to make sure no one leaves on a stretcher!