I've been thinking about issues around user profile, data accessibility (because who wants to "port"), and universal login thelast couple of days as I prepare for a panel discussion about reputation at next week's Community 2.0 conference.

Specifically, I wanted to check in on the state of OpenID support around the social web. It seems there are glimmers of hope out there. Large companies like Yahoo and Microsoft have announced plans to support OpenID in various ways. That's part of the problem: lot's of talk, not much action.

From the TechCrunch artcile "Kevin Rose at FOWA: DIGG Adopts OpenID"

Kevin Rose, speaking here at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, just announced that Digg will adopt the OpenID decentralized digital identity platform. Don’t expect this right away though - adoption will begin “later this year” according to Rose.

That was FOWA 2007... as in February of 2007 (over 18 months ago). Unfortunately, it seems like OpenID gets more lip service than it does development resources for most sites.

AOL received kudos for their OpenID implementation, yet you still can't login in to AOL using an OpenID created by a "3rd Party" (read: not AOL.)

From AOL's login help file.

Can I log in to all AOL sites using my OpenID account?
We have additional work to do to support 3rd Party OpenIDs with the ability to log in and access AOL® Web properties. Once this work is done, you will be able to log in using your 3rd Party OpenID instead of creating an AOL® account. If a property is able to support OpenID you should see a tab with the OpenID logo as a log in option.

Isn't one of the key tenats of OpenID not to have a central authority managing IDs, so, more often than not you will be dealing with "3rd party generated IDs".

I don't claim to be an identity or data portability expert, but it seems there is work to be done both on the advocacy & user education side of OpenID, as well as on the implementation side.

On the positive side, there are several sites that fully support OpenID, and they can be found here:
https://www.myopenid.com/directory

The Online Community Unconference is coming together nicely. We are on for June 18th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I expect about 250 folks to attend, and Kaliya Hamlin is helping us out with facilitation.

Current organizations attending include:

• Autodesk, Inc.
  
• BabyCenter
  
• CafePress
  
• Cisco
  
• Civic Ventures
  
• eBay Research Labs
  
• EdgiLabs
  
• Forrester Research
  
• Google
  
• Jive Software
  
• Link TV
  
• NetApp
  
• Omidyar Network
  
• Social Edge, A Program of the Skoll Foundation
  
• SRI International
  
• Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation

You can see the full list of org and people attending on the conference registration page here:
http://ocu2008.eventbrite.com

We expect the Unconference ot be an action packed day of networking and sharing about issues and best practices in the online community and social media space.

Friend of Forum One Networks, Kaliya Hamlin, is helping organize two important events about online identity and data sharing in May.

If you are thinking about online identity issues or data portability, these sessions will be valuable.

Internet Identity Workshop -
We are going into our 6th Conference it is amazing to see this all happen. With OpenID proliferating and the next generation of tools - card selectors etc. being innovated.
May 12-14 in Mountain View California.

The Data Sharing Summit,
May 15, at the Computer History Museum.
There is a lot of activity in this space - with the buzz around DataPortability.org (who we are collaborating with). Our first event in this space was in September 2007. Our purpose is to provide gathering spaces in which all parties interested in working on the challenge of data sharing can work together. We create the agenda the day it happens. It is about getting things done and figuring out the tough problems – there is no committee deciding who does or does not get to 'present' it is about breaking up and really diving in figuring out the solutions and building the consensus to get adoption.

One of the more interesting things that happened at the Online Community Business Forum last week didn't happen during a particular session, but rather, happened to several participants as the sessions of the first day went on. This is a real shift in behavior for these particular participants, as I generally see them using IRC as a back channel, and a few of them live blogging. Twitter was serving both purposes at the OCBF.

Both the conference back channel as well as the live-blogging mostly shifted to Twitter. You can check out the end result of the "Live Tweeting" here: http://twemes.com/ocbf2008

The main benefit I saw of using Twitter during the sessions was that it allowed (at least in a small way) lots of participants who weren't at the conference to participate.

The main downside is that it's really hard to pay attention, be present, and full process a conversation while cramming thoughts in to 140 characters per tweet.

In particular, Shara Karasic of Work.com did an awesome job of live tweeting (wow - did I just write live tweeting?) the event.

Thomas Kriese shares his thoughts about the live tweeting phenomenon here.

Do you Twitter? Follow me @billjohnston

First, apologies for the radio silence on the OC Report blog folks. The Online Community Business Forum was a huge success, but also a massive undertaking, and I took a couple of days to unplug from the socialmediosphere.

The good news? There is a ton of great content about the event online. I'll be posting highlights over the next few days, but I wanted to point folks to several great summaries of our opening sessions.

Two of the highlights of the conference for me were Alan Webber's opening remarks, and Rohit Barghava's session on "Thinking beyond your community site". I've been a huge fan of Alan's since becoming an avid reader of Fast Company in the late 90's. Alan did a great job of setting the tone for the Business Forum with his inspirational remarks about founding Fast Company with Bill Taylor in the early 90s. Alan was followed by Rohit Bhargava, who provided perspective on thinking beyond "your" community site, and gave case studies of community building using an ecosystem approach, including one that covered the launch of his new book "Personality Not Included."

Thomas Kriese of Omidyar Network did a fantastic job of capturing both sessions:

Alan Webber at Online Community Business Forum

Rohit Bhargava speaks at Online Community Business Forum

This was an exceptional two days of content, conversations and networking. Look for more content to follow as we get the presentations and notes added to the wiki. And I haven't even mentioned all the Gorbie sightings!

We are just a few days away from the Online Community Business Forum in Santa Fe, and the final agenda is in place. You will find the speaker and topic lineup below. In addition to the awesome lineup of speakers, we are planning a 1/2 day of Open Space on Tuesday afternoon.

We will be posting highlights from both days on the Online Community Report.

Monday, April 14th

Opening Comments
Alan Webber – Co-founding Editor of Fast Company

Session 1 / Thinking Beyond The Community Website
Sometimes the best thing you can do is to build your community by focusing instead on the ecosystem around it. Using two interactive case studies as a framework, this session will kick off the day by challenging your perceptions about your online community, and getting you to think beyond your own sandbox.
Session Lead: Rohit Bhargava – Senior Vice President Digital Strategy & Marketing, Ogilvy

Session 2 / The Business of Community
Case studies on planning, managing and articulating value from two leading brands.
Session Lead: Rachael Makool – Senior Director, Ebay
Session Lead: Mark Williams – Manager, Support Communities, Apple

Session 3 / Community Metrics & Reporting
An overview of online community metrics models, methodologies and techniques.
Session Lead: Matthew Lees , VP - Patricia Seybold Group
Session Lead: Robert Dell’Imagine, Director of Communities - VMWare

Session 4 / Break Out Sessions -

Breakout: Influencers & Evangelists
Session Lead: Alan Crosby, Director of Global Community Relations - Sony Online Entertainment

Breakout: Community Management Best Practices
Session Lead: Scott Moore, Social Media Strategist
Session Lead: Gail Ann Williams, Director of Communities - Salon.com / The Well

Breakout: Getting Beyond Not “Getting It”
Session Lead: Shara Karasic, Community Manager - Work.com

Session 5 / Real Value from Virtual Worlds
Many organizations and finding real value in virtual worlds. Gain perspective and hear case studies from 2 experts dealing in the business of virtual worlds and virtual goods.
Session Lead: Robin Harper, VP of Marketing and Community Development - Linden Lab
Session Lead: Ravi Mehta, VP, Publishing - Viximo


Tuesday, April 15th

Session 6 / Community Value & Revenue Techniques
A leading VC, and a leading social media expert give perspectives on the dimensions of value of online communities, as well as specific examples of revenue techniques.
Session Lead: David Silver, Author, ‘Smart Start-ups’
Session Lead: Aaron Strout, VP Social Media, Mzinga

Session 7: On the Horizon - Panel Discussion
Moderator: Kellie Parker, Online Community Manager – PC World/Mac Publishing
Panelist : Mary Furlong, CEO - Furlong and Associates
Panelist : Jenna Woodul, Chief Community Officer - LiveWorld

As I mentioned before, we are also going to have a mini Unconference On Tuesday afternoon will likely have about 12 sessions.

The Online Community Business Forum is coming up in less than 2 weeks. We are holding the event at the lovely Inn & Spa at Loretto, and we have a great lineup of speakers and attendees.

The lineup for both days (april 14th and 15th) is strong.

We just confirmed this afternoon that Rohit Bhargava will be leading the opening session. Rohit is coming to Santa Fe fresh of the launch of his new book Personality Not Included, and will provide insight in to how social media and online communities are transforming business.

We also have great sessions planned, including:

• Community Strategy: Rachael Makool – Senior Director, Ebay
  
• Community Metrics & Reporting - Matthew Lees , VP , Patricia Seybold Group, Robert Dell’Imagine, VMWare
  
• Support Communities - Mark Williams, Apple
  
• Real Value from Virtual Worlds - Robin Harper, Linden Lab, Ravi Mehta, Viximo
  

Other speakers include Mary Furlong of Furlong and Associates, Aaron Strout of Mzinga (the Twitter Mastah!), Tessie Topol of MTV, and David Silver, Author of Smart Startups.

There will be several wine tasting receptions (of course) in and around Santa Fe. We actually had to fight with the Inn & Spa at Loretto to keep the Presidential Suite open, because Michael Gorbechav tried to bump us. No kidding.

And, as icing on the cake, we will have a mini Unconference on the afternoon of April 15th. The two days in Santa Fe promise to be packed with plenty of good session content and plenty of networking all held in a beautiful setting.

We do have a few seats left. If you are up for a last minute trip to lovely Santa Fe, please drop me a line: bjohnston@forumone.com

Research about online community building and growth is central to the mission of Forum One Networks. The Online Community Research Network studies and publishes 6 times a year on topics that matter to those responsible for guiding online community and social media activities in their organization.

The Online Community ROI Models and Reporting research study was initiated in February of 2008. The study was created in order to investigate further into the ROI research that we conducted in the last half of 2007, and to gain insight into specifically how organizations were valuing and reporting on their online communities activities. Further, we wanted to gain insight into who the stakeholders were for ROI metrics, and how the reports were being received.

I will be blogging highlights of the report over the next few weeks. To obtain a full copy, as well as access to all of our other research, and the professional network of online community pros, please consider joining the Online Community Research Network.

We received approximately 150 completed surveys. Participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers and interactive marketing and advertising firms.


Q16: Which of the following quantitative and qualitative metrics are critical for communication ROI at your organization? (question 16 from the study)
The top-ranking metrics are: Traffic patterns & statistics; Community member engagement; Unique number of visitors; New Member Registrations; Member Satisfaction; and Product Feedback / R&D ideation.

The middle-ranking metrics are: Number of referrals to the community by members; WOM generated by community; transition of lurkers into active community members; impact of the community on revenue; organization or brand-mentions on other sites; and ratio of comments per post.

When looking at the data segmented by type of respondent organization, Traffic patterns, member engagement and unique community visitors scored consistently high.


Top-ranking Metrics



Middle-ranking Metrics



Lower-ranking Metrics





Q23: What were the 1-2 compelling sources of value from your community or social media efforts that you constantly communicate?

This question was intended to solicit the “elevator pitch” stats or metrics that community managers and strategists use internally to their organization to evangelize community and social media efforts. Answers ranged from the unique ability of online communities to create value to cost reduction of existing communication channels and corporate functions.

These were all write in answers. The main themes are as follows, with selected quotes inline below. (full report contains all write in data).

1. Community helps problem solve faster and more efficiently than Customer Support, saving our company time and money:
   
   
   
   • "Customers are able to get faster response and answers to their problem utilizing the community over contacting Customer Support."
     
   • “Knowledge share, and hence problem solving, is more efficient due to the community model.”
     
   • “Using WebBoard is more efficient then email, telephones or fax. It saves us time and money and increases our ability to service the consumers in our sector.”
     
   • “The ROI on employee time devoted to the forums far exceeds the returns on the usual support methods.” [Thus saving our organization time and money.]
     
   
   
   
2. Availability of information and content for specific areas of interest:
   
   
   
   • “Expanded resources & knowledge for specific areas of interest and centralized resources.”
     
   • “Niche communities, focused on specific areas of interest. Market leaders on-line and in print with high cross over traffic.”
     
   • “You won't find this content anywhere else - written by our members to raise best practice within vendors.”
     
   
   
   
3. Increases site traffic / more engaged relationship with us:
   
   
   
   • “The more we invest into community, the more organic traffic we get.”
     
   • “Our members consume 49% more average page views per session every month than non-members.”
     
   • “Our community sites get more than 3 times the engagement for solutions, capabilities and use case content than our traditional sites.”
     
   • “Our forum generates more page views than the site itself.”
     
   • “Our community traffic by far exceeds traffic to all traditional product areas.”
     
   • “Increasing site traffic proves that there is an interest and demand from our customers to have a more open and engaged in relationship with us.”
     
   • “Our programs on average engage participants for 45 minutes each time they visit.”
     
   • “Time spent on the site is higher on forums pages than anywhere else on the site, indicating that community members are more engaged.”
     
   • “Views of photo albums remain the most popular area of the community. Members may not wish to participate in discussions, but they do want to see photos of their events.”
     
   • “An online discussion moderated by subject matter experts that followed an in-person event with the same moderators achieved the most participation of any attempts to engage our users.”
     
   • “Our social media content generates more content and discussions off site, increasing our reach.”
     
   • “The ability of our blogs to drive customer engagement and PR activity.”
     
   
   
   
4. Idea Creation / What we learn from members of the community:
   
   
   
   • “Ideas for our books.”
     
   • “It's all about what we learn from the developers through our community interactions.”
     
   • “We will have the opportunity to get first hand feedback on products and ideas for improvements and enhancements.”
     
   • “We discovered some problem areas in usage and service adoption that caused us to change our materials and strategy.”
     
   • “We have been able to gather more than a thousand best practices/lessons learned in two years use.”
     
   
   
   
5. Lead Generation / Conversion:
   
   
   
   • “Converting contacts, acquaintances, and other informal relationships into donor relationships.”
     
   • “Converting contacts into activists and issue leaders.”
     
   • “When we enlist our community members to represent us physically or virtually, our reach and conversion metrics dramatically increase.”
     
   
   
   
6. People are saving time / building skills by using our site:
   
   
   
   • “In our Sourcing Professional Forum, procurement professionals are constantly sharing templates and best practices across organizations, bootstrapping their RFP effort, saving time and increasing value."
     
   • “People creating and building productive relationships with people that help them improve their practice or do their work better.”
     
   • “The National Board of Certified Teachers can share best teaching practices with ease never before possible.”
     
   • "In our premium areas, customers are using online training and certification to manage global implementations, knocking down traditional barriers to skill building in an online, social learning setting."
     
   • “Our users have access to every single college coach in the country. This is something no other site offers. Our site is always free to the users and they will never be charged. All of our competitors charge users to use their recruiting website.”
     
   • “Our community members credit participation in our community with their increased skills in using our products.”
     
   
   
   
7. Build customer loyalty:
   
   
   
   • “Anecdotal stories of knowledge sharing, connections made for business purposes and special access created through connecting members.”
     
   • “Community members are more likely to volunteer their time, services, advice, and financial support than non-members.”
     
   • “Employees who belong to the community almost never 'turn over'. They are consistently the best performers out in the stores.”
     
   • “Offering a community to your clients where they can speak to you and each other significantly increases customer loyalty.”
     
   • “More connected members spread the word and come back frequently.”
     
   • "If you want to understand your stakeholders and develop the relationships, you have to think in communities."
     
   • “Online dialogue creates a more open environment that deepens trust and team work throughout the organization.”
     
   • “Our community has one of the highest net promoter scores for our brand of any corporate offering.”
     
   • “Our members say that they like the site and related services - direct comprehension of value, esp. during account meetings.”
     
   • “Research shows that customers in a community can have a sense of involvement with the company as long as we make sure they are heard and that involvement can lead to great loyalty.”
     
   • “Our community members are actively engaged with the brand and don't hesitate to tell us what they like, and don't like. They feel a real sense of ownership of the brand.”
     
   • “Our ability to personally communicate with future users of our product substantially influences their perception of our company.”
     
   • “Increasing site traffic proves that there is an interest and demand from our customers to have a more open and engaged in relationship with us.”
     
   
   
   
8. Online community is growing our membership base:
   
   
   
   • “In a climate where professional associations, and especially manufacturer associations, have struggled to maintain members, we have consistently and significantly increased in membership year-over-year for the past 5 years. This growth directly coincides with our implementation of online community services. Over 85% of our members find our member-only e-mail discussion groups alone to be worth the price of annual membership.”
     
   • “95% of our members would recommend membership in our online community to other parents raising children with food allergies.”
     
   • “Our blog has increased community participation by 80% over the past year.”
     
   • “We boast membership in 125+ countries.”
     
   • “We have 8000 registered members across 95% of local authorities.”
     
   • “We have doubled the size of our community membership in the last 6 months. 2 years ago, only 34% of our Company's upsells and renewals were also members of the Community. In 2007, 75% of our upsells and renewals were Community members.”
     
   • “We have the largest active user community in the marketplace.”
     
   
   

Again, to get access to the full report, as well as other research and the professional online community network, please check out the OCRN site.

I just made the wiki for the Mobile Communities Unconference live.

http://www.socialtext.net/mcu2008


Some folks are still in the process of uploading their session notes.

In particular, I thought the session about Mobile Social UX Design was particularly good:
http://www.socialtext.net/mcu2008/index.cgi?mobile_user_experience_design

Also, you can see a photostream from the event here:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=mcu2008&w=all

We still have a few seats available for the Mobile Communities Unconference, this Thursday, March 20th in Palo Alto.

Want to join the conversation? Register here:

http://mcu2008.eventbrite.com

Groups coming include:
3jam, Active Path Solutions, AdMob, AOL, Cisco,Digital Chocolate, FunMobility, Google, HP, Intel, Lithium, LiveWorld, Microsoft, Mixer Labs, MobiHand, MobileLife Inc., NextNow, Nokia, Omega Mobile, Inc., Quest Software, Ribbit, SAP, VMWare, Yahoo!, You Tube

Questions? Call me @ 415.299.9638

We had a fantastic group of people at the Online Community Roundtable Wednesday (3/12) evening on Microsoft campus in Redmond.

Bob Rebholz of the Windows Live team was our host, and we scored space in the MS conference center (which rivals SAP Labs as the nicest space we have Rountabled in).

We had folks from Microsoft, Forum One, Intel, Full Circle Associates, OCLC, The Gates Foundation, Telligent, Trusera, VML and the University of Washington.



A few highlights from the evening:

User Experience: Categories vs. Folksonomies
The folks from the OCLC were struggling with the issue of wanting to introduce folksonomical content structures in to their site, and how to either compliment or replace hierarchical category structures.

Invitation and Community Growth
Trusera asked questions around growing community membership via "invitation". Specifically, they are struggling with balancing growth velocity and member quality. The invitation process ensures quality by inviting "known" potential members and assuming members of their network are trustworthy. The problem is that this i generally a slow way to grow a network (gmail is an obvious exception to this statement).

Internal Usage Adoption
How do you incentivize internal staff and organization members to use new social tools? This question was posed by a non-profit foundation that is trying to roll out a new collaboration toolset, and is trying to asses the best path forward. Feedback from the roundtable group was: start small, test & get feedback (but pay attention to what they do as well as what they say), and ensure that the tools actually facilitate and enhance existing workflow, not disrupt or add overhead to it.

Qualifying and Representing "Activity"
The last session started as a conversation on incenting users, but to me, one of the most interesting dimensions was around tracking, qualifying and representing activity in a social system. The example given was tracking what help and training content someone read on a community, and then representing this as a level of "knowledge" via a widget on that persons profile on various social systems.

After every roundtable (including this one) I'm always struck by the caliber of folks working in this space, the level of real-world knowledge they posses, and they generous nature and willingness to share.

My notes are short, but we had two superstar notetakers (one was also a super-tweeter) in the room. For a play by play (and thanks to both Nancy and Teresa), please check out:

Notes from the Seattle Online Community Meetup - Nancy White

A Vertitable Online Community Smörgåsbord - Teresa Valdez Klein

Would you like to be invited to the next roundtable, or are you interested in hosting? Please drop me a note.

Want to keep up with Roundtable activities? Join the Facebook group.

I've had a couple of questions about why we (Forum One) are putting on the Mobile Communities Unconference.

In a word? Growth. Analysts are predicting revenue from mobile social networks to climb from US $1.5 billion in 2006 to as much as $52billion dollars a year by 2012. The following graphic is a chart from Christine Perey's report on Mobile Social Networking.


Another? Scale. The number of mobile handsets in use just dwarfs the number of PCs.

Another? Experience. You can take it (your network) with you. With the user experience that advanced handheld devices like the iphone bring, you no longer signifignanty compromise your online experience when using a handset.

And last but not least: Location. Locative experiences and media are going to explode soon. I got a taste of this when I worked at Autodesk, but just the simple fact of knowing where you are geographically, and where friends, family and potential contacts are relative to your position adds a whole new layer of meaning and experience to social networking.

Want to join the conversation? We have an AWESOME group of folks lined up to discuss this next Thursday, March 20th in Palo Alto.

Groups coming include:
3jam
Active Path Solutions
AdMob
AOL
Cisco
Digital Chocolate
FunMobility
Google
HP
Intel
Lithium
LiveWorld
Microsoft
Mixer Labs
MobiHand
MobileLife Inc.
NextNow Collaboratory
Nokia
Omega Mobile, Inc.
Quest Software
SAP
VMWare
Yahoo!
You Tube

and more.

Want to join the conversation? Register here:

http://mcu2008.eventbrite.com

The New York Times had a great story today on the state of mobile social networks. The bad news for the US? Most of the fun is currently happening overseas.

Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone

The prize, as these start-ups see it, is the 3.3 billion cellphone subscribers, a number that far surpasses the total of Internet users. The advantage over computer-based communities, they believe, is the ability to know where a cellphone is, thanks to global positioning satellites and related technologies.

I was chatting with the wicked-smart analyst Christine Perey earlier this week, who wrote a very thorough report on Mobile Social Networks. One of the most interesting things she shared with me was that by her estiamtes there were 100MM unique users of Mobile Social Networks today. Based on her predictive models, we could see grow to 200 to 300 million by 2009.

What is clear from speaking with Christine and from the NYT article:
- We are poised for explosive growth in this space
- The US is way behind Europe and Asia, and the domestic carriers are slow to upgrade, standardize and offer new services
- The US carriers are holding back potentially billions of dollars in unrealized market value by not allowing 3rd party data access, applications (natively) and not upgrading service (speed)

I will be blogging more about Christine's report when I receive the executive summary.

We will be discussing Mobile Social Networks in great detail at the Mobile Communities Unconference 3/20 in Palo Alto. Early bird registration ends today (3/7/08).
http://mcu2008.eventbrite.com/

The LeFever's (Lee and Sachi) of commoncraft have done it again. Check out "Twitter in Plain English"



Do you tweet? Follow me on twitter, and I'll follow you back:
http://twitter.com/redplasticmonke