First up there’s Tom Ewing, yes theTom Ewing who created quite a stir at this year’s Research ‘08 conference. Back in 2000, Tom created the ILX (I love music) message board as a personal endeavour and it grew viraly. At the time of recording Tom was in a marketing role at Research International. But soon after, parent Kantar had the sense to make him a social media adviser.

Next there’s Matt Rhodes of FreshNetworks, the online community-building part of the award-winning FreshMinds. Matt’s an active blogger and recently revealed that FreshNetworks had won a £5m ($7.5m) interest-free loan as part of an entrepreneur competition – quite a nice prize in the (economic) circumstances.

Hoping, as always, you find this useful.

 STARRING 

• Matt Rhodes, Head of Client Services, FreshNetworks
• Tom Ewing, Social Media expert, Kantar Operations

Timeline [24:39]
00:00 Intro.
00:40 Why bother with communities?
02:07 Dealing with representativity.
04:23 How Tom developed the ILX community.
06:19 Optimising participation ratios.
09:00 Should senior clients actively participate in their own communities?
10:06 Stages in a community (infancy, toddler, adolescence).
11:48 Community types: social vs. business, marketing vs. research (Tremor).
13:59 KPIs/success criteria.
14:59 The value of crowdsourcing.
15:41 RoI: Beeline Labs – Tribalisation of Business study.
17:25 How well is Dell’s Ideastorm community performing?
19:27 Worked example of developing a community (aims, strategy, platform, logistics, beta stage).
23:24 The client ‘wow’ moment.

Notable Mentions
BBC Talking Points community.
Beeline Labs.
Communispace.
Community Server.
Community.
Drupal.
Engagement.
Forums.
Ideastorm (Dell).
Jooma.
Passion.
Sampling.
Starbucks.
Tremor (P&G).
Trip Advisor.
Watercooler moments.
Wikipedia.

Thanks to freelance media and marketing journalist Jo Bowman for the use of her dulcet tones in the outro

Music Theatrimus from the PMN

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