Community managers' survey

Kommein is currently holding a Community Manager's survey to build a picture of the role across different organisations around the world.

To quote their request,

Are you a community manager? If so, we’re interested in learning about your experience. We’ve put together a survey for community managers that will tell us a little something about community managers salaries, who they report to, job challenges and more. And yes, we’ll post the results here.

Please note, we’re not asking for names and don’t need to know who you are. Feel free to speak openly and candidly about the issues facing you as a community manager.

Please access the community manager survey here. We’d be doubly appreciative if you could pass this around to other community managers in your network.

In case your organisation wants to better understand this type of role, the results of this survey will be published online.

And if your role could be described as a Community Manager, please complete the survey.

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Citizen 2.0 - how would a government department address this marketing nightmare?

Over the last week US media has been buzzing with the story of Canadian musician Dave Carroll, whose US$3,500 Taylor guitar was broken on a flight on United Airlines.

Carroll reported that people on the plane had watched with horror as United baggage handlers had roughly handled and thrown his and other guitars while putting them onto the plane.

However, despite nine months of discussion with United, following all the instructions they gave him, the airline finally disavowed any responsibility and refused to pay the US$1,200 required to repair the guitar.

Carroll told the United airlines representative who finally said 'No' that he would write and produce three songs about his experience and publish them to Youtube.

On Monday 6 July the first of these songs was released, soaring to over 1.6 million views in under a week. The story has received coverage on CNN, across major daily papers and across regional and local TV and radio in the US and Canada.

Within a day of the song going live United was on the phone to Carroll, promising to 'make right' the situation. Carroll has directed United to give the money to a charity of their choice and will release the next two songs in the series aimed at United.

How would a government department react if a similar event occurred to them?
Citizens today have many avenues for raising public awareness of perceived mistakes or incompetence, bypassing the traditional government complaints and resolution processes.

All it takes is a single citizen to take their complaint in an engaging manner to an online channel such as YouTube and an issue can become very public very quickly.

Do government departments have a plan for handling these types of events?


Here's the video clip for those who have not yet seen it.

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Does Australia need Safer Social Networking Principles?

Around the world governments are struggling to understand and address some of the age-old issues that have been accelerated by the intranet.

One attracting particularly high attention is the protection of young people from illegal and inappropriate material, cyberstalking, cyberbullying and, sometimes, themselves.

Various governments are attempting different approaches to address these issues, with the European Union using a balance of approaches including new law enforcement initiatives, legislative change, parent and carer education, young people education and industry self-regulation in consultation with government.

I have been reviewing the Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU (PDF), released in February this year, which clearly defines the unacceptable range of practices,

As with many products and services, the misuse of these technologies can present an element of potential risk to children and young people. SNS [CT: Social Network Service] providers must assess if and how these potential risks apply to their own services. Potential online risks to children and young people fall into four categories:

• ‘Illegal content’, such as images of child abuse and unlawful hate speech

• ‘Age-inappropriate content’, such as pornography or sexual content, violence, or other content with adult themes which may be inappropriate for young people.

• ‘Contact’, which relates to inappropriate contact from adults with a sexual interest in children or by young people who solicit other young people.

• ‘Conduct’, which relates to how young people behave online. This includes bullying or victimisation (behaviours such as spreading rumours, excluding peers from one’s social group, and withdrawing friendship or acceptance) and potentially risky behaviours (which may include for example, divulging personal information, posting sexually provocative photographs, lying about real age or arranging to meet face-to-face with people only ever previously met online).

With the interactivity that web 2.0 technologies enable, it is also important to remember that in addition to being victims young people can also initiate or participate in anti-social or criminal activities.

The principles make acceptable and unacceptable conduct very clear and have become a benchmark for parents, educators and governments to judge companies against.

A number of Social Network Service providers have signed these principles and taken steps to make their services compliant and supportive of the principles.

I wonder whether Australia should look at a similar approach.

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Government 2.0 personality types

Steve Radick has published an insightful post regarding different Government 2.0 personality types.

Can you recognise yourself in one (or more) of these type?

The amended post is at What’s Your Government 2.0 Personality Type? and a copy with other comments is visible at Govloop.

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Social media now more popular than personal email - Neilsen

In their Global Faces and Networked Places report (PDF), Neilsen has found that social networks and blogs (Member Communities) are now the 4th most popular online category - ahead of personal email.

In December 2008 Neilsen found that 59% of online Australians used social networks and blogs, compared to 80% in Brazil, 69% in the UK and 67% in the US and France and only 51% in Germany.

In the UK people spent 17.4% of their online time at social networks and blogs, whereas Australians only spent 10.9%, or one in ten minutes. Based on previous reports that online Australians spend 16 hours a week online, this would mean online Australians spend at least an hour and a half each week on social networks.

Over the year from December 2007 to December 2008, total internet use grew by 18%, whereas Facebook use grew by 556%, with its greatest growth coming from 35-49 year olds.

Emphasising that high social media use is not restricted to the young, a quarter of Facebook users globally are aged over 50 and a third are aged between 35 and 49.

Neilsen said that the Social Media Communities area is growing at more than twice the rate of the other top 4 categories.

In an unrelated report, covered by Mashable, Forrester estimated that within the United States, US$716 million will be spent on the social marketing medium in 2009, growing to $3.1 billion in 2014. At that point social media will overtake email and mobile advertising, but will remain just 10% of the spend on search advertising (US$31.6B).

Traditional advertising approaches remain challenged when applied to social media.

The Neilsen report discussed above found that in December 2008, 38% of Australians online considered advertising on social networking sites to be an intrusion compared to 29% the year before. Forrester's report indicated that 'False' remains the word most identified with advertising.

Few organisations today would consider doing without email. How many would consider doing without social media communities?

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