DISQUS

Thanks so much for the lovely post, you've just made my day - scrap that, my month! :)

Dan Dan Dan needs to win :)

Is the theme that we're all girls heavily involved in the web? ;)

Fab interview!!! So glad I tweeted now! Thankyou :)

Okay, let me start by saying that I'm not saying Social Media jobs should stay because of my role. Yes, I'm a Communities Manager and yes I consult on Social Media... but there's a reason that I do that, which is I feel it's an essential part of the future of successful businesses.

If you forget the actual term itself and even what's involved at a detailed level... it's about taking customer service to the next level, about listening to what your users actually want and building that into product development.

Whilst not all companies are fortunate enough to afford a dedicated team member of their own, given the right guidance, they can start to shift how they approach this ever changing environment and can start to implement changes to put them steps ahead of their competitors.

I would completely agree with this - as a Community Manager purely focussed on building communities, communicating with our desired audience and watching brand reputation... this is something that comes up at a weekly basis.

Other factors to be considered are the culture of your site, whether the users are behaving in the way that you intended and the general feel amongst the community - which isn't always something that can have a number put to it.

This is the difficulty being faced by larger or more traditional companies. The smaller or newer companies that realise it's not always measurable are more often than not always the ones doing it right, because their intentions are genuine.

Hey Nate,

Such sad news about BricaBox - I loved it!!! I know that you'll go from strength to strength in future projects and I'm excited to see what you come up with next.

Really look forward to reading future blog posts about what contributed to your decision - after all that's how we learn the most right?

Anyway, good luck with everything and well done for having the courage to make what must have been a really tough decision.

Mel :)

Hey Alex! Great post... Just wanted to say that I completely agree with you. Community has to come first - of course with any for-profit business, there's going to be a drive towards becoming profitable. However, I sincerely believe that if you do the right thing by your community, you're benefit ten fold.

Being genuine and wanting to make a difference I believe is transparent - when people can see that you're wanting to do the right thing for the community, the bond is made stronger and so the community grows.

I really hope that things continue to go from strength to stregth at IndyHall (wish that I was there to check it out myself).

Mel :)

No worries, I was only joking with you...

Totally agree with you on all of your points, will be interesting to see how it pans out :)

No problem Paul, was great chatting. If I'd known it was going to end up here, I would have made it far more interesting ;)

I actually ended up finding it a little overwhelming and intrusive when lots of people I didn't know started trying to contact me - but I can see the huge asset it would be to my friends that don't use an IM client.

No problem Paul - was fun chatting - I might have said something more interesting if I'd known it would end up here, lol :)

I'm actually writing a blog post at the moment about the different uses of Twitter. I can't wait for it to hit the mainstream - my use of Twitter is totally different when I'm in the States than when I'm at home.

When I was at SouthBy everyone there uses it, so it's used a lot more to reach out and to arrange meetups. When I'm in the UK, people are a lot more remote, so it's used to push messages mainly about yourself to communicate remotely with my friends in the States.

I think Facebook will have to adapt to embrace Twitter. Twitter rules after all!