Online Community Unconference 2008 - Updates

As promised, some notes from the  Online Community Unconference East 2008 . The main purpose of the conference was to gather online communities/social networks practitioners to discuss current trends and challenges, and share experience and ideas. According to the registration sheets, conference was attended by over a hundred people, and audience make-up was very diverse, including web start-ups, media and marketing research companies, non-profit organizations, and some retail companies. Sessions covered topics of a wide range, from how to build a social network from scratch to success metrics and ROI to marketing to online communities. As a metric guy, I found especially interesting sessions on "Community Analytics" and "Influencer Programs". From attending the former session I learned that most of online communities/social networks are still stuck with the "analytics 1.0", with most of metrics limited to unique and returning visitors counts, ad clicks, and other frequency statistics. Just a couple of people mentioned more avanced analytics, like behavioral measures of engagement, structural signatures, and data/text mining. I also enjoyed the second session, led by former director of one of Microsoft projects, Sean O'Driscoll. Sean told us about his involvement with a Microsoft division that was responsible for identifying and engaging online "brand advocates", people that volunteer on various online forums and discussion boards, answering questions, providing feedback and other support for MS products.

Finally, I had an opportunity to meet organizers of the conference, representatives of Online Community Research Network (OCRN). Check out OCRN web site for some free research reports on online communities, like Online Community Metrics Survey 2007