Being a social media strategist at Microsoft, by way of Projectline, involves much more than just tweeting and maintaining a Facebook page. It’s about building community. Our product, one in the educational sector, requires a lot of online networking. I work hard to establish and build trust with educators around the world. Microsoft is a behemoth of a company and while you’d think the MSFT name would give you a shoe-in to any community – it simply doesn’t.

Teachers want to know that you are just as passionate about education as you are about the product you are marketing. To show them this, I usually sign my name at the end of my tweets to help give them a personal touch. Many social strategists and community managers sign only with their initials in this fashion:  ^EB. I go the extra mile and sign: -eric. On Facebook, I will send them personal e-mails and comments with my own profile (Eric Burgess) as well with my Mouse Mischief profile. It’s absolutely crucial to be as reachable as possible to your customers. The old ways of conducting customer service through 800 numbers and expensive CMS e-mail software are on their way out. People want immediate access to you, so why not give it to them? It’s all a part of the community building I mentioned earlier. How can you build a community without making you and your product as transparent as possible? You can’t. Below are some important things to consider as you work to build your community.

1. Are you Tony Hsieh’ing it?

Tony Hsieh is the founder and CEO of Zappos.com. Hsieh inspired me to get into social media. He was one of the first people I followed on Twitter and I was completely blown away by the amount of time he spent tweeting. He was so passionate about his customers that I consider him a social media pioneer: He used it to grow his business. And, he was reachable to everyone. I actually received a message from him when I responded to one of his tweets. What CEO does that? How could an online shoe business have nearly 1.7 million followers? Hsieh worked hard at growing his community. You’ve got to Hsieh it to stay in it. Read more…

I spent half of my March trying to convince journalists, thought leaders and academics in Boston, New York, and Washington that “something was in the air” on our end of the country.  It’s a hard sell in a region that has so many powerful, rich, entrenched institutions (from the media capital, to the federal seat of power, to the Route 128 Corridor).  As someone who built my career in the northeast, I always had the sense that they had it “figured out.”

But the digital media revolution, combined with the Great Recession has turned a lot of what we once considered self-evident, upside down.  What was once bedrock has been shaken to the point of crumbling — old business models of mass media, faith in Wall Street’s unbridled approach to capitalism, impregnable university endowments.  Suddenly, as an ambassador of a self-sustaining graduate program within a state-funded university, far, far away from the corridor of power, I had an opening.  I spoke of my own transformation from corporate media journalist to independent storyteller, of how we were partnering private and public entities in our region with our students to produce groundbreaking work (which we call “community scholarship”) and how we were pioneering collaborative methods of education through a re-imagination of the classroom (the “Media Space” — we have a name for everything).

And I spoke of our desire to embody what we stand for in our upcoming event, TEDx Seattle.  I’ve always wanted to position our MCDM program at the heart of our community, and its values.  I was recently inspired by a blog post by the founder of Seattle startup Knowledge Mosaic, who said:

The most interesting and vital businesses understand and embrace the idea that where they come from determines who they are.

Read more…

After turning off all site comments on Tuesday, AOL-owned Engadget today flipped the comment switch back on, ending a two-day hiatus resulting from its editors seeing too many comments that were “mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations.”

Engadget columnist Michael Gartenberg expressed his discontent with the comments that followed his recent iPad editorial in a Tweet: “Amused. Bash me on @Engadget column. Suggest my parents were not married prior to birth, suggest I be fruitful & multiply. enclose your CV.”

With traditional news outlets declining and enthusiast blogs like Engadget on the rise, the implications of closing comments reflect how the stampede of online discourse can sometimes be too much for even mature, full-time blogs to endure. According to Alexa, Engadget today ranks 195 in the nation and 384 in the world for Internet traffic. It recently launched mobile applications for iPhone and Blackberry. It produces its own weekly podcasts and monthly TV shows (Edited per Zack’s comment). This is a full-time media company in all respects and an influential one at that – The AFP wrote a story on Engadget’s comment disabling.

Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky explains why things got out of hand in a Tweet: “I don’t think it’s about the class of the readership, it’s about scale.”

Scale is certainly an issue, but it shouldn’t excuse community behavior. Especially for a technology site like Engadget, you’d think that its die-hard community would be populated by primarily educated (either by trade or academically) and at least civil readers. Surely most are, but what caused Engadget to call “time-out” demonstrates how online media-enabled free speech can unveil the worst in us. Read more…

In December 2007, Jim Manis founded the Bellevue-based Mobile Giving Foundation to establish an infrastructure for mobile charitable giving. After the earthquake in Haiti, the Mobile Giving Foundation worked to support more than 20 nonprofit organizations and helped set up high-profile campaigns for Wyclef Jean’s Yéle Foundation and the Clinton Foundation Haiti Relief Fund.

Why do you think the appeal to donate to Haiti by texting has been so successful?

It was a powerful message replicated across all communication platforms for the benefit of major charities. Texting provides an immediate way for a person to respond. It’s a powerful medium to take action.

Its success builds on a few factors. Mobile giving reaches an addressable audience of 260 million cell phone users. As a country, we send billions of text messages a year. The technology has become ubiquitous. Because of the work we’ve been doing, the infrastructure and technology were in place when the earthquake struck Haiti, and agreements were pre-negotiated with the carriers. And the billing aspect is appealing because it doesn’t require the use of a credit card.

Hasn’t this technology been around for a while? What has changed since the tsunami in 2004?

When the Asian tsunami hit, two things were relatively new: Read more…

Watch the video of my entire Seattle Town Hall talk on January 13, 2010 (we’ll post the high-res version later). Here is my slide deck with notes (cross-posted from The Storyteller Uprising blog).  Special thanks to MCDM’er Jay Al-Hashal who provided the design concept for the deck and advised me on structure.  We covered everything last night — Iran, the Haiti Earthquake, Google’s stunning Chinese censorship decision, and as always, the future of journalism and the danger of echo chambers:

Here are my slides from our December 2 2009 info meeting.

CNN published an article about the next big social media thing…Foursquare. Claiming to be a “highly addictive” application, Foursquare rivals competitors like Loopt, but offers a “virtual game in which participants earn badges for checking in at various locations.” But why, with so many social media applications out there do people predict this will be the next big thing? First, it’s developers have already gained success making and selling apps to Google, and founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey has invested, which is sure to strengthen a partnership rather than competition. By predicting this to be the next big thing gets Foursquare’s story in front of people, but what do you think? With 18 million Twitter users proposed by the end of this year, are people ready for yet another app?

Image from "This" Magazine

If this past summer’s controversial presidential election in Iran was any indication, Twitter has fast become a major platform for political discussion and grassroots organization on the global stage.  Social media, particularly the micro-blogging service Twitter, flexed its muscles during the opposition protests of the Iranian election results, and, at least for a month or two, it seemed that a global on-line conversation about democracy in Iran might actually help change the political climate of that country.  While it appears that the government of Iran eventually succeeded in squelching the unrest and cracking down on protests, it has become pretty clear that the nation of Iran will never be the same – and Twitter is partially to thank for that.  Considering the case of Facebook use in Iran, once you’ve got a taste of that sort of social freedom, it’s difficult to turn back. Read more…