Melanie Baker talks about the role of Community Manager at AideRSS

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More and more companies are adding Community Managers to their executive ranks.

Melanie BakerMelanie Baker, joined AideRSS as Community Manager earlier this year. During my recent visit to AideRSS in Waterloo, Melanie talked with me about the Community Manager role.

Melle sees the community manager providing a bridge between the different functions within a company and its community of users. In doing this, her first objective is to help users develop a sense of community with the company and one another. “Having a users base doesn’t necessarily mean you have a community,” Melanie pointed out. “If you can get a community going, then you know you are on the right track.”

Melanie has been impressed with the AideRSS users she’s met so far, “with the amount of passion they have, what they’re willing to do for you, the lengths they’re willing to go to try to make something work.” She notes that such dedicated users are valuable to a company like AideRSS. “You’d have to have an entire Quality Assurance department for that kind of stuff or massive amounts of developers hours to solve some of those things.”

Helping these supportive users also has a reputational benefit to the company. Says Melanie, “If you listen to them, if you try to help them solve a problem or get them up and running … they become passionate. And as soon as they become passionate, they help evangelize for you. … The word of mouth of your friends is the most powerful influence there is. It’s fantastic.”

How does Melle connect with the community? “I have to be one of those early adopters who jumps on everything.” She writes for the AideRSS blog, maintains an AideRSS Facebook page and two Twitter accounts – AideRSS and Melle. She’s also a big fan of Get Satisfaction, where AideRSS maintains an active support forum.  “It’s really effective for connecting with people, whether they have a question, just want to tell us something, or have a problem.”

And as new social apps appear, Melle believes she needs to “try them out, see if people are migrating there, and see if they want to talk to you there. If that’s where people are going to hang out, then that’s where you need to be.”

On a day to day basis, Melle sees different social apps working together in combination. “Twitter is easy for someone to ask me a quick question or mention a problem. Then … it migrates to a different format. It either goes into Get Satisfaction where it is officially logged. Or someone may have a longer question, so they email me. Or we start up an Instant Messenger chat. … That combination of tools is how things realy end up working. It’s important to be on a variety of platforms. It’s also important to be flexible to move between them to whichever format [of communication] is most comfortable for people.”

Other posts about AideRSS

AideRSS’ Journey from Founders’ Dream to Professional Leadership

Ilya Grigorik explains PostRank

AideRSS’ PostRank Measures Engagement

AideRSS at DemoCampToronto14

From Founders' Dream to Professional Leadership: AideRSS' Startup Journey

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Since launching in July 2007, AideRSS has been well reviewed, attracted venture capital and evolved from founders’ dream into a professionally managed company. During my recent visit to the offices of AideRSS, both Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Ilya Grigorik and recently-appointed CEO Carol Leaman sat down to talk with me about the company’s journey from an idea to a venture-funded enterprise.

As I reviewed the recordings of these interviews, I was struck by how different Ilya and Carol are. Ilya is the quintessential techno-enthusiast. His enthusiasm for the original idea and the pursuit of the next innovation is almost palpable. Carol is the rationalist. Polished. Bottom line oriented.

Two very different people. Yet, they complement one another. Hmmm. A smart pairing brought about by smart money?

Ilya GrigorikIlya:

“It all started as a personal project when I started blogging. I wanted to create an analytics engine for myself, defining my own metrics for how people interact with my content, how has one post performed better than another. … One evening it occurred to me that if I’m doing this to track my own performance, why can’t I apply the same idea to outside posts?”

“It’s an amazing experience to wake up in the morning and realizing that you started with something that was just an idea and something you worked on on weekends, and all of a sudden you have a company working around it.”

“We went from an idea to an actual Website launched in July ’07. It was an amazing launch. We received lots of attention from the online community. Everybody loved the idea. It was something that everybody needed. We had articles written in Japanese, Korean, Arabic, English. It was really an amazing experience to see all the feedback. Following up on that, we went out and raised some money to take the idea to the next level.”

Carol LeamanCarol:

“What’s behind the system is highly complex, but people won’t use it unless it’s extremely simple” to use.

AideRSS received its first round of financing in December, only five months after launch and plans to raise a second round “in a few months.”

What’s the business model? AideRSS seems to be working toward a “freemium service with a variety of potential services.” AideRSS is still in the early stages of exploring this, but they “hope to launch by the end of the calendar year.”

More about AideRSS

Ilya Grigorik explains PostRank

AideRSS’ PostRank Measures Engagement

AideRSS at DemoCampToronto14

AideRSS' Ilya Grigorik explains PostRank

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AideRSSI visited the AideRSS team the week before the launch of PostRank.com. CEO Carol Leaman, co-founder and chief technologist Ilya Grigorik and Community Manager Melanie Baker took the time to sit down with me to chat.

In today’s interview, Ilya Grigorik explains PostRank and AideRSS’ approach to measuring engagement. Among the highlights:

  • Ilya defines engagement as “any interaction a user can have with a post or an article.” To measure engagement, AideRSS aggregates all the metadata it can find about each post: number of views, the number of times the page has been clicked, how many people have bookmarked the story, how many people people have blogged, twittered, shared it on Pownce or Ma.gnolia.
  • AideRSS uses the metadata it collects to compute an Engagement Score. In doing this, they assign different weights to different types of actions. Viewing a page would be considered a “lightweight” action. A click would be assigned greater weight. A comment requires a greater investment of time and thought. It would be assigned yet greater weight. AideRSS assigns less weight to a Twitter comment. An Engagement Score for a post is calculated using the weighted instances of all of the actions detected for that post. A higher Engagement Score signifies more attention from the community.
  • PostRank is an indicator of the relative Engagement Score of each post on a blog. Thematic PostRank is an indicator of the relative engagement score of a series of posts across a collection of content sources.
  • PostRank is dependent on context. Ranking articles against other articles in a specific blog will yield a different PostRank than ranking articles across a collection of blogs.
  • PostRank scores are computed based on a post’s performance compared to the previous performance of a blog. Thematic PostRank does the same thing for a collection of content from different sources.
  • AideRSS is continually tweaking its algorithms by adding sources like Twitter and Pownce and adjusting the weight assigned to various sources.

More on AideRSS:

AideRSS’ PostRank Measures Engagement

AideRSS at DemoCampToronto14

AideRSS' PostRank measures engagement

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AideRSSAre you interested in a tool that will help you sort through the flood of new posts to find the most interesting and talked about content in your RSS subscriptions?

Are you a writer or content creator who wants to figure out which content others have become most engaged with?

Are you a corporate communicator or marketer who wants to understand which content and authors are having the greatest impact on issues and online conversations that matter to you?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, read on.

A Time Saver for Readers

Since AideRSS first launched just over a year ago, I’ve used it to identify online content that others have also found interesting and engaging. AideRSS provides a simple calculation of what they call PostRank which analyzes the frequency and type of interaction with online content and provides a relative score of how interesting and relevant people have found it to be. By sorting the posts by PostRank, I can easily spot those that seem to be generating the highest levels of engagement.

On days when I’ve let the posts in my FeedReader accumulate, I can spend more than an hour scanning them all (more time than I should invest), delete them all (What if I miss something that really matters to me?) or I can filter them with AideRSS so that I can review only those with the highest PostRank. I’ve installed AideRSS’ Firefox Extension for Google Reader to incorporate PostRank right into my RSS aggregator. A great time saver.

Measuring Engagement

From the outset, I was impressed by AideRSS’ approach to measuring what’s important in social media. It struck me that AideRSS-Co-founder Ilya Grigorik’s PostRank algorithm was a smart way to begin to measure engagement. When AideRSS launched, it wasn’t important whether Ilya had the definitive algorithm. What was important was that he was working toward a holistic calculation that incorporated both offsite and onsite interaction.

AideRSS’ CEO, Carol Leaman, participated in the Toronto Roundtable on Social Media Measurement this past spring.  During the day, she made some thoughtful contributions, both in the things she suggested and, equally importantly, the questions she asked. As I listened to her, it was clear that the folks at AideRSS were also thinking through their place in the social media metrics and measurement puzzle.

I didn’t have to wait very long to see what Carol, Ilya and the AideRSS team were working on.

PostRank: A New Standard?

A couple weeks ago, AideRSS launched PostRank on a its own site, PostRank.com. The site highlights PostRank’s utility for measuring online engagement. It also offers a set of APIs to encourage developers to incorporate PostRank in their own Web Apps. At the same time PostRank.com was launched, AideRSS also introduced Thematic PostRank to enable the PostRank calculation to be applied to any collection of content assembled from a variety of feeds and sources (not just blogs, but Twitter and others services.)

AideRSS is attempting to promote PostRank as a standard measurement of online engagement. And to date, the AideRSS approach to measuring engagement is the best I’ve found.

Have you used AideRSS or PostRank? What do you think of them?

More on AideRSS and PostRank

TechVibes: AideRSS -Now it Gets Interesting

Video of AideRSS co-founders Ilya Grigorik and Kevin Thomason demonstrating AideRSS at DemoCampToronto14.

Overlay.tv: It's about creating community in video

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When Overlay.tv launched in Beta on February 15, it was widely and positively viewed as a potential building block in the future of online video and advertising.

I’m told that Overlay.tv is making good progress toward a full release. As I write this, a new Beta is days away from release. And the folks at Overlay.tv are saying that release will be a minor step and won’t last long.

Rob Lane, the CEO of Overlay.tv, has been notching up the profile of Overlay.tv in advance of its release, with recent appearances at Social Media Breakfasts in both Boston and Ottawa.

I’ve created a four minute video of the parts of Rob’s presentation in Ottawa in which he describes overlay.tv, how it can be used to add relevant content and product information to any video.

Some of the things he said that caught my attention:

“If you look at video today, essentially it’s a passive experience. You put a video up. You sit there. You watch it. You may turn away and do something else. … What we’re trying to do at Overlay is to create a deeper interaction. And that interaction can be everything from hot spots to conversation in video to building community around video itself … It’s all about transforming what is a passive lean-back experience into an engaged experience.”

“If you create a video that people are interested in, they are more likely to want to interact with that video. … [Your choice of overlays is] all about relevance. [to the content of the video]”

“It’s about creating community in video.”

If you’re interested in knowing more about Overlay.tv, I’d recommend that you follow @roblane and @bitpakkit (a.k.a. Ben Watson, Overlay.tv’s Vice President of Marketing) on Twitter. Both Rob and Ben maintain an active presence on Twitter. Overlay.tv does have a blog. However, it has not been updated since April 25. (Come on guys. I’m sure you have lots of great content you could share. How about an “overlay of the day” to start with? 😉 )

Also, Mark Blevis blogs and podcasts his take on Rob Lane’s appearance at Social Media Breakfast Ottawa

How I spent my summer vacation – in Charlottetown with PlanetEye

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St. Dunstan's Basilica

I just spent four days in Charlottetown , Prince Edward Island. A beautiful place that is famous for its ocean vistas, rolling red farmland (yep, the oxidizing iron turns the soil red), Confederation Centre of the Arts (the stage production of Anne of Green Gables is in its 40th year), endless red sand beaches and historic sites (Canada was born here when the Fathers of Confederation met in 1864 at Province House.)

North Rustico Harbour

So, what did I do when I was relaxing there? I created user generated content. Not the kind that I usually create here (words followed by more words.) While I was in Charlottetown, I put PlanetEye ‘s picture uploader and geotag features through their paces.

I uploaded about 100 pictures of the attractions and historic areas of Charlottetown, North Rustico Harbour (the epitome of a Canadian east coast village), the beaches and cliffs of Prince Edward Island Park (look for the picture of the fox that trotted right up to our car while holding a rabbit in its mouth) and, of course, Green Gables (if you’re the parent of a girl, you’ll know what that is.)

I uploaded photos from my flickr page directly to PlanetEye. It was simple. Took about 2 minutes for each batch of 20 to 25 pictures. And then the geotagging worked perfectly. I simply dragged and dropped my photos onto a map in the location where I’d taken them.

If you’re interested in an unspoiled place for a summer vacation, take a look at Charlottetown on PlanetEye or at my Charlottetown photo set on Flickr .

Enjoy.

Fox by the roadside in Prince Edward Island National Park

EndlessRedSandBeaches

What social media topics do you want to hear about at the conferences you attend this year?

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I try never to give the same presentation twice. The real world of social media is changing and developing rapidly. And my presentations should reflect those changes. So, what was new last year may be old this year.

If you’re like me, I’m sure that you scrutinize conference agendas closely so that you can pick the topics and sessions that will offer you the greatest opportunity to learn about and discuss issues that matter to you.

I should be shaping my conference presentations to cover the issues that interest the participants. So, I thought I’d ask you, the readers of my blog, what social media topics you’d like to hear about at the conferences you attend this year.

To prime the discussion, here’s a topic for a presentation that I submitted to a conference organizer earlier this week:

Measuring Social Media : Social media gives individuals the power to switch instantly from reader to author. And this has transformed the Internet into a web of communities of interest. Organizations are changing their communications to be part of the communities that matter to their customers, clients and stakeholders. But how do they measure what they are achieving through this effort?

In this session you will learn:

What to measure in social media;

What tools will help you measure social media;

The basic building blocks of a measurement dashboard for community managers.

Would you find a session on this topic useful?

What are the social media topics that you would to hear about at the next conference you attend?

BlogOrlando is one conference that's worth attending

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BlogOrlandoOne conference I plan to attend this year is BlogOrlando .

This will be the third year that Josh Hallett has organized BlogOrlando. The conference reflects Josh’s personality and approach to social media. He maintains a community-first atmosphere that encourages people to mix, make new friends and give generously of what they know. He leavens that with some great after hours activities. Last year, for example, participants had a chance to have a backstage tour of the Kennedy Space Centre, an evening out at Universal City Centre, a party after the close of the conference and, for those who could spend an extra day in Orlando, a bloggers day together at Disney World.

Josh Hallett, Founder of BlogOrlandoBecause Josh is both a heck of a nice guy and one of the social media early adopters, a top flight set of speakers and experts answer his call for session leaders. Last year, for example, speakers and session leaders included  Shel Israel , Tom Biro , Chris Heuer , Geoff Livingston , Laurie Mayers , Jake McKee , Annie Heckenberger , David Parmet , and David Coustan .

Josh emphasizes that the sessions should be discussions involving all of the participants. And in my experience, every session leader brings a good thought starter presentation to kick off that discussion.

Josh has opened registration for this year’s BlogOrlando and begun to announce the speakers and session leaders .

So, if you are interested in a great conversation about social media with a chance to grab a few days vacation in Orlando before or after the conference, BlogOrlando promises to be well worth attending. If you can make it there, I encourage you to do so. Register for BlogOrlando and when you arrive, grab me and let’s spend some time talking.

…

Want to know more about BlogOrlando?

Debbie Weil’s Q&A with Josh Hallett, Founder of BlogOrlando

David Parmet says he’ll be talking about how social media is affecting education at this year’s conference

Twitter comments on BlogOrlando

BlogOrlando – the Social Media Conference

BlogOrlando demonstrates the culture of generosity

Now Serving – Social Media Breakfast in Canada

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Since Bryan Person organized the first Social Media Breakfast in Boston last year, the concept has caught on and been introduced in cities across the United States.

Now, the Social Media Breakfast concept has been brought to Ottawa, Canada’s capital, by Rob Lane, Ryan Anderson and Simon Chen.

The first Social Media Breakfast in Ottawa was a great success, drawing a standing room only crowd. Mark Blevis , Melany Gallant , Stacey , and Simon Chen covered it in posts and pictures .

The second Social Media Breakfast Ottawa will be held on July 15. The guest speaker (and host) will be Rob Lane, founder and President of Overlay.tv . (If you’re interested in attending this event, register on Eventbrite .)

SMB Ottawa co-founder Simon Chen sat down with me to talk about the Social Media Breakfasts – what they are, the upcoming event with Rob Lane and who attends these events. By the way, I thought it was interesting that Simon got the idea to bring the Social Media Breakfast concept to Ottawa while he was following the Twitter stream discussing the Boston Social Media Breakfasts.

Watch the complete videoof my discussion with Simon Chen below.

Centre for Excellence in Communications Workshop on Social Media

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On June 27, I’m offering a workshop in Best Practices in Social Media at the Centre for Excellence in Communications . It’s tailored to the interests and concerns of government, not-for-profits and associations.

If you’re interested in a solid introduction to social media, the way that people are using them and how organizations can successfully make social media part of the way that you relate to the people who care about you, then you’ll find what you’re looking for at this workshop.

As I write this, there are five places left for this session. If you want to attend, you can register online at the CEC’s Website.