Small World Labs

I'm just recovering from our successful webinar, Top Community Killers: Decisions that destroy community and how to avoid them. It was followed by a lively Q & A session that demonstrated how sophisticated our audience was. Missed the event? Keep watching this space and I'll post the recording of the event in the coming week.

Here's what I learned yesterday in our polls of the audience...

-43% of all attendees are currently running a community
-Only 13% of attendees thought "Technology-centric Focus" was their #1 community killer, even though it is our #1 with a bullet

On Oct.1st at 1pm Central, Small World Labs is hunting down the top decisions that kill communities and talking about ways to avoid them in a free webinar. Join our VP of Community Solutions, Miles Sims, as he pinpoints key moments that can impact a community using examples from the real world to give you the knowledge to create vibrant and passionate communities.

RSVP to attend the free webinar here- http://www.smallworldlabs.com/webinar

I don't know about Miles but my top 3 are:

1- Lack of compelling relevance.
2- Feature overload.
3- Campaign mentality.

Is it really that time of year again? It seems like only yesterday that we were navigating the hallways of the Austin Convention Center in a daze caused by lack of sleep! We had such a good response to our "Managing Communities that Work" panel that we decided to propose another one "Measuring the Health of Your Online Community: Metrics That Don't Suck". Want to see it happen? Vote here before August 29th:

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1416

It is going to be a good week! Want to know why I think that? It has everything to do with the first blog posts of the week. Here are my two favorites from this morning:

Jake @ Community Guy highlights Pete Blackshaw's 6 drivers of brand credibility.

and

We're happy to announce that Small World Labs has sponsored Aberdeen Group's Customer 2.0: The Business Implications of Social Media report. It is a comprehensive and interesting look at how social media is being employed to impact customer experience. The is available for free through the link below:

http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?spid=30411305&cid=5195

I'm heading out to SF for the Social Networking Conference http://www.socialnetworkingconference.com/ July 10-11th. If you are in town and want an expo pass email me (seder at smallworldlabs dot com) and I'll get one for you. We are in Booth 205.

Michael Wilson will be speaking on the 10th at 2:30pm in a presentation called "What you need to know about Web 2.0- Top 5 Social Media Myths Debunked." in Breakout Room 1. He is also speaking on the Social Software panel on June 11th at 11am.

For those of you who can't make it... I'll fill you in during the event.

-Sam

If you're in Austin this Thursday, June 19, check out the Interactive Austin 2008: Putting Social Commerce to Work conference. Most of the participants in the panels and keynotes are from the Austin area (which bodes well for the growth of the social media industry here) as well as folks from GigaOm, Sun Microsystems, AMD, Walmart, and BusinessWire.

After a long travel day I came into the office re-invigorated by the activity at the Enterprise 2.0 show and the amazing people we met. There are 3 big take aways I came up with during the E2.

- Enterprises are much further down the road than most of us assumed when it comes to the level of sophistication in which they understand social media. That being said, I the cultural barriers to adoption might be a more significant obstacle than any of us anticipated. Can we make Now is Gone and Groundswell and manditory read for anyone VP level and up at all Fortune 1000 companies?

On Wednesday, June 11, Small World Labs and Telligent will be co-hosting a white label social media software debate at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Participants will include Michael Wilson, CEO of Small World Labs; Rob Howard, CEO of Telligent; Aaron Strout, Vice President of New Media of Mzinga; and Sam Lawrence, CMO of Jive Software.

Earlier this week, Forrester analyst and social media man-about-town, Jeremiah Owyang, offered commenters a chance to get free pases to a conference for their thoughts on the future of White Label Social Networks (like the kind we build) on his blog. Some 3 days and 28 comments later now, and one of the shocking revelations now was that many comments focuses around the idea that white social networks are doomed to fail, subsumed by larger platforms.