Friday Funnies: Al Gore to Trademark Internet

by crbrowning on July 3, 2009

In a Constructing Social exclusive, we have received word from our Kentucky affiliate that Senator Al Gore has filed for trademark protection of the term ‘Internet’.  Following this week’s announcement that Twitter(TM)’s co-founder’s Biz Stone is trademarking the term Tweet, the former  Presidential candidate and well known founder of the Internet is capitalizing on what is sure to be a growing trend throughout the high technology industry.

Spokesperson for Mr. Gore’s technology initiatives, Jon O’Heard provided the following detail:

Senator Gore’s contribution to the infrastructure that we all take for granted every day should be more broadly recognized.  While we have no intention of going after companies that are using our term, frankly, we are very excited by the revenue prospects of suing their pants off!  Similar to Twitter, we have been searching for a source of revenue and this seems like an easy goldmine!

While details of Senator Gore’s plans are still emerging reported conversations with all major PC manufactures, Apple, and Microsoft have already begun.

Happy Friday!

-colin

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Community Engagement Modeling

by crbrowning on July 1, 2009

Over the past 4 years I have been thinking about how to get individuals involved with and participating within a community. It is not an easy thing to get a group of individuals comfortable with your site and each other to the point of participating and caring when they become a true community. While I will continue to learn, I wanted to share what I see as the phases to the development into a community and their participation.

community_eng_model

Community Engagement Model

The core concept of the model is pretty simple.  People need to build their trust and loyalty with a community before they will actively engage and care about it.  This model proceeds through phases building on trust where interactions gradually increase in their threshold of interactivity.

The five stages of the community engagement model are:

Launch: Starting well is critical.  Seeding the community with starter content that provides that social proof to incentivize participation is critically important at the beginning.

Awareness: How is your target market hearing of your community?  On a daily basis, I am working on outreach programs for clients to influential bloggers, or connecting via  Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn to individuals in target markets to let them know about community initiatives.  This can also be as simple as ensuring that it is easy to subscribe to your community – either through RSS or e-mail.  These are just a few of many techniques to get your market aware of your community.

Interaction: Once members are aware of a community, you want to ease them into participation; provide many options for how they can contribute.  For many, contributing a unique post that your peers will all be reading (and judging/critiquing) is a threatening thing.  By providing simple and guided ways for visitors to interact with the site such as ratings, polls, or even answers to simple survey questions; participation is limited and not free-form, less threatening, and more inviting.

Participation: When participants are ready to contribute fully, provide a wide range of options while rewarding their behavior appropriately with levels or points.  Ranges of participation options include ideasharing, video/photo uploads, profile building, friending and more.  Acts of participation that you want to encourage in your community should be rewarded with an appropriate recognition system so that members are encouraged to repeat the behaviour (post again) and that others see their recognition and are also encouraged.

Advocates: Advocates in a community help to promote your site and can even help you to manage the community.  Advocate behavior can be encouraged through providing badges that can be displayed on blogs, connections to Facebook pages and other ways for members to connect to external communities.  As with Participation, these are behaviors that should be rewarded through a recognition system.

Moving a community from general awareness through to advocacy is challenging and complex – I have simplified this and in posts over the next few weeks I will review each component.  I also encourage you to read Rachel Happe’s Community Maturity model to think of this in a broader perspective within the organization.

So what has helped you in engaging communities and moving from a group of individuals to true advocates?  I look forward to your comments.

Special thanks to LaSandra Brill for redesigning my model for me! It looks a million times better after she got through with it.

/colin

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FART Passage is Silent; Deadly Impact

June 26, 2009

June 26th, 2009: In a Constructing Social exclusive, we have blown the covers off of the silent passage late Monday of the Future America Re-Investment in Technology Act (FART).  In an extreme abuse of power, several large and powerful congressmen pushed FART through late at night.  The nocturnal passage was alarming and not a single [...]

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New Social Media ROI and Statics Resources added

June 25, 2009

On the planning tab above I keep an active list of great resources for anyone that needs to additional information to justify a new marketing or social media program or for general research purposes. I have made some new updates to the list that I think are pretty interesting:
SOCIAL MEDIA ROI RESOURCES

Dell’s $3million on [...]

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Friday Funnies: NML’s Extreme Social Makeover

June 19, 2009

Canton, MA:  Chris Brogan’s New Marketing Lab’s (NML) officially announced today the details of its long rumoured Extreme Social Makeover program.  The program capitalizes on the new vanity trend that Facebook reinforced last week with its vanity URL program.  The NML Extreme Social Makeover program reports to take this make over to an entire new [...]

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Blogging Constipation Cured!

June 17, 2009

Image by davekellam via Flickr

I confess, blogging has been an irregular activity for me. While I enjoy it, like most people, it has not been my top priority and I simply can’t produce the volume of Chris Brogan.
A few weeks back I was thinking of a way that I could commit to 2 posts [...]

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Friday Funnies: Twitter’s Rise Linked to Paranormal

June 12, 2009

Cambridge, MA: Hubspot this week released their state of the Twittersphere report. While the information was eagerly awaited by many, the data analytics team of Constructing Social quickly went to work and overlayed our complex demographic and pyschographic map.
The results are startling: Twitter’s meteoric rise has been caused by ghosts that are trying to communicate with [...]

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Social Proof Your Community

June 11, 2009

I recently finished reading Robert Ciadini’s Yes: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive.  This book never once mentions social media or marketing but its principles are gold to anyone who has anything to do with social media.
The principle that I think that everyone can gain value from is social proof.  At a very high [...]

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Friday Funnies: BirdBrained Brogan

June 5, 2009

Breaking news: The Constructing Social news team has just received word that Chris Brogan, also known as the Major of Twitter, has been the first successful recipient of Twitter’s first implant product: The BirdBrain.
The BirdBrain(tm) allows individuals to transmit tweets simply by thinking them, without the annoying interference of keyboards or phones.  With minor [...]

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Friday Funniness: Digestive System Song

May 29, 2009

I wanted to share a song that my daughter wrote with a few classmates and that she is singing here with her sister.  I hope that you smile and perhaps even learn something from, “The Digestive System”.
Enjoy! – Colin

 
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