I recently partook in a discussion among some fellow community managers on the best ways to learn about the industry and how to train its future generations. When the conversation reached the point where we all shared the “training” we went through ourselves, the answers began getting interesting.

“I studied marketing in college.”

“I studied communications and the art of rhetoric.”

“The job I’ve had that contributed most to the development of my community management skills was being a community manager.”

“My social life and interactions with others have been one of the biggest contributors to my professional skill set.”

It’s no secret that there just isn’t a degree to be earned in social media or community management. In fact, I graduated college one short year ago, and never even knew that this extensive professional field existed until I was thrown into it.

The reality is, this isn’t only the case for community management. It’s the case for SEO. It’s the case for entrepreneurship. It’s the case for social advertising and Internet marketing. We’re living in the transition phase from analog to digital; from broadcasting to social conversing.

How, then, can we find the proper education and training to become experts in these fields? Though there’s not one training program fit for everyone, there is one thing we can all do: learn how to learn.

Following this conversation, I was inspired to start a new journey for myself: I’m going to learn to learn. Whether this means learning how to learn or learning for the sake of learning I’m not sure. Maybe it’s both. What I do know is that both of those goals are extremely important today and I’m sure there will be great value to be found in the process.

Step 1: Get a Notebook. Or Three.

Call me old fashioned, but I love to write things down. There’s a mental reaction in our brains when we write things down with a pen that simply can’t happen from typing things out. It helps us better process information and remember it, and makes it easier to go back and reference.

What’s my “notebook strategy,” you may ask?

-One large legal pad for outlining tactical things I learn and can put to use immediately.
-One smaller notebook for To-Do lists and short-form notes.
-And, most importantly, one pocket-sized notebook that can be taken anywhere and everywhere, because you never know who you’re going to talk to. This notebook is already halfway filled with random tidbits, names of authors to explore, short pieces of advice, etc.

In the coming weeks (months, even), I hope to go through at least five or six rounds of these notebooks as I continue my mission to learn to learn.

Until next week! If you could learn about anything, what would it be? Let me know in the comments.

Ally Greer is the Community Manager for Scoop.it. For great content on social media, community building, and random nerdisms, follow her on Twitter (@allygreer).

The ubiquitous internet meme comes in many forms — from iterations on top of iterations of a viral video to a random picture of a cute animals with an ironic white Impact caption. They also seem to proliferate like one of those animals with an ironic white Impact caption, if you know what I mean.

The internet meme often gets a bad rap. It gets called a waste of time, a waste of energy, and a waste of brain bandwidth.. really just more noise in an already cacophonous environment. But is this really true? Is meme only a waste of time or is there significantly more to the humble internet meme?

A case for meme

“Culture” is defined as “the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties, especially by education.” Culture varies significantly across the world, just as significantly as the moral and intellectual faculties between people vary, and grows strong in places that foster education between people of like-mind and similar values.

By this definition, the internet is becoming its own global culture. There are (of course) differences, but in essence, the internet is allowing people to come together and develop their intellectual (consider communities like Quora, topic-based communities, etc) and moral (consider the group Anonymous or the internationally-adopted web blackout in protest of the US SOPA bill) faculties. It is difficult to associate any major internet movement with a particular people or existing unique culture. The internet and the spread of cultural artifacts through its many channels are as diverse as all the people in the world — and through this diversity there is unity forming around similar values (freedom, democracy and expression).

Meme, by definition, is “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Meme is not necessarily specific to the internet — it simply became a household name through the Cheezburger Network. We could define many important cultural evolutions as “meme,” such as 3D imaging in modern film or technology in the classroom. These — now commonplace —  ideas have spread from person to person inside of a unique culture.

I propose that internet meme is the currency of a blooming global culture. Internet meme can, and does, educate morality (consider the macings at UC Davis and the massive adoption that meme saw) as well as intellectual pursuits (consider the Advice Mallard), and while there is a ton of crap in the world of internet meme, the same can be said for most more traditionally accepted cultural mediums (has anyone seen this Nic Cage film?!).

The internet is irrevocably changing the way we interact with traditional media that define what “culture” is for us. What is art in this new environment? Do you have to be a classically-trained musician to create culturally-significant music?  How is cinema, food, and literature changing due to advances in internet technology? What ultimately count as legitimate “cultural” artifacts and what doesn’t?

While the internet is creating its own culture in cyber space, there is invariably spill over to the real world. People reference internet memes in casual conversation around dinner, share meme experiences with friends and loved ones, and use meme as illustrations of concepts among their peers. They use meme to make points in arguments, to create conversations, to shame, to uplift, and to showcase triumphs and defeats. This, to me, bears greater cultural significance than simple entertainment on the interwebs™. Internet meme is most assuredly spreading ideas, behaviors, and styles between people — locally and virtually.

What do you think? Does meme count as culture in the greater global evolution of human culture? Let’s hear some opinions!

Clair Byrd is the Director of Content and Community for Scoop.it. For musings on social tech, writing, and cute owl pictures, follow her on Twitter (@theclairbyrd).

If you aren’t engaging your customers online, your business is missing out on a huge opportunity to generate sales and gain valuable new customers. Creating and maintaining an online presence isn’t easy. You can quickly become overwhelmed or waste money on unsuccessful outreach if you don’t approach it in an informed, strategic manner.

Establish Your Customer Profile

Zeroing in on your online customer profile is the first step in establishing your online presence. Your customer profile provides you with information about your average customer – age, income, purchase history, etc – that you use to inform your sales, inventory, and marketing decisions. You can even segment your customer profile into several different groups in order to create more effective email marketing campaigns and other advertising strategies.

Use your customer profile in order to best determine how to focus your online presence. However, be aware that your online customer may vary greatly from the average person who walks into your storefront.

• For example, although your average customer is age 55, you may find that the older 50% of your customer base does not go online. In that event, your online customer profile will be significantly younger than your overall audience. You will have to gear your online marketing towards that specific segment of your demographic rather than the whole.

Research Online Communities

In order to successfully engage your customers online, you need to go where they go – be it your website, social media, or niche online communities. Although these destinations seem very similar on the surface, they are populated by vastly different groups whose response to your involvement in their community can range from positive to lukewarm to negative.

• Focus on designing your website so that its colors, graphics, and content appeal to your target audience. Just as marketers use color theory and psychology research to design effective direct mailings and billboards, so too should you apply that knowledge to your website design.

• When it comes to social media, do your homework. Each platform has different age, gender, and income ratios in its population. For example, the average age of Facebook users is 40.5 and increasing, while the average age of Twitter users is 37.3 and dropping (Royal Pingdom). These different demographics will affect how users engage with your company on each platform.

• Look for message boards and forums that cater to your customers. By participating in these small niche communities and branding yourself as an expert in your field, you can establish your online authority as well as find potential clients, customers, and business partners.

Decide on an Engagement Strategy

Trying to create and maintain a presence on every single online platform takes significant time and energy. Whether you decide to go at every community at once, or limit yourself to just a few, you need to develop a strategy in order to prevent becoming quickly overwhelmed in comments, mentions, and posts.

• The use of social media automation tools can simplify this process by streaming all of your engagement efforts into a single dashboard. A small business owner can use a tool to keep an eye on their social engagement. Larger companies can use social media software integration tools to help call center representatives address customer service issues over multiple platforms.

Remember to keep your efforts focused. It’s better to be fully engaged over one platform than to put minimal effort into several different ones.

Online engagement is becoming an increasingly important element of every business’s marketing strategy. You can make your online presence work for you by researching your customer base, matching it to the right online platforms, and using the right tools to keep your strategy going.

Megan Webb-Morgan is a startup and small business blogger for B2B marketing company Resource Nation. You can follow Resource Nation on Facebook and Twitter!

One of the hardest things about becoming the “voice” of an organization is figuring out what in the world to say. Do you promote your group endlessly? Do you send out fun links you think your constituents will enjoy? Do you talk to your fans and figure out what they want? Well, the answer is yes to all the above. However, it’s very easy to fall into the trap many other organizations do and either promote the heck out of your mission or refuse to talk about yourself at all. Both tactics can result in you missing out on customers, constituents or funding and even chase your current followers away. So how do you find a good balance?

Trial and Error

Let’s face it: you’re probably going to make some mistakes out of the gate. No matter if you’re new to social media and PR or you’ve been around forever you’re going to stumble a bit. Starting off with a new organizational voice just takes a while to adjust to.

One issue is you don’t quite know what your audience wants. They might actually like a little more promotion (as long as it benefits them in some way). Alternatively, they might like less promotion and more fun talk like you’re one of their pals. There’s almost no way of knowing what they’ll take to until you give it a shot. Start off with a nice balance between “business” and “casual.” Eventually you’ll figure out what people like and don’t like by what they respond to and what they retweet/share or comment on. The final result may even surprise you. You could have what you perceive as a very serious business but your fans just want to have fun chats with you about what you do. The worst thing you can do in this scenario is to fight it – just go with the flow.

Conversation is Key

One of the most important things you can remember when starting your social media/PR efforts is you’re in it to talk to constituents or customers. An obvious point, right? It’s something you can keep in mind the first day…but the 700th day it might become something of a lost point. That’s why you should remind yourself this is the ultimate goal.

You want your conversation to be meaningful, deep, and moving the major conversation forward in some way. It doesn’t have to be leaps and bounds, but if you can advance your industry or even your local community by focusing on a certain aspect, then go for it. So before you post that fourth update regarding your website or how awesome your organization is, ask yourself if it’s something your clients and the industry at large really care about. If not, rethink what you’re posting every day – and how often.

One last piece of advice is to use a service like Hootsuite or Social Engage to post your Twitter/Facebook/blog etc. This way you can better track what the response is to each of your posts and how well you’re doing over a certain period of time.

This guest post is brought to you by Jennifer Dunn and WePay – the easiest way to accept credit cards online. Follow them on Twitter at @JennEscalona and @WePay.

Here in the US, the Dow recently tumbled almost 150 points in a “flash crash” caused by widespread digital panic. What was the cause of this panic? Twitter.

The bigger story is that someone hacked the official AP Twitter handle and tweeted a false report of a terrorist attack on the White House, which claimed that the President had been injured in said attack. This is significant in the grander scheme because the Dow essentially measures the health of the US economy and a hit of this magnitude means lots of people (deserving or otherwise) needlessly lost a lot of money in nanoseconds.

There are claims that nearly 70% of trading is done via “high frequency trading” or “HFT,” which employs a trading algorithm that crawls reputable news sources (and social media) and executes auto-trades based on what the crawl produces. In layman’s terms, a robot is reading the news and if it doesn’t like what it reads, it hits the “sell” button. Something like a Twitter hack causing a flurry of selling is a dangerous game to play, especially when most traders don’t have access to social media during the trading day and can’t keep up/compete/compensate for the robo-trades.

The intersection of social media, web content, and the real world has been on the edges of our notice for years now, but we’ve been able to keep this information deluge at bay by denying the gravity of the social information ecosystem or writing things off as being “just trends in social media.” But with the advances in technology which allow robots to make decisions directly based on information they find in our digital world, decisions which impact the entire world’s economic health, social media is being very quickly legitimized in a big way. We should probably start paying closer attention to what we share, who we share it with, and the importance of accessing these networks. I recently wrote a post touching on how the security of your social media accounts was of tantamount importance to your brand reputation online. This example of a Twitter hack taking the Dow down 150 points is a not-funny-at-all example of how serious social media is getting in the real world.

I also feel very strongly that as a community of digital pioneers, we must work to knock down the walls of censorship within corporate organizations, if for no other reason than to protect our own interests. Social media and global trends are becoming just as important as major media. Computers are using web content to manage people’s fortunes. People in decision-making positions should logically have access to this firehose of information to make the best, most well-informed decisions they possibly can, regardless of how much HR considers this “time wasting.” This may be radical, and the enterprises with 5000 employees may think that I’m crazy, but I whole-heartedly believe that social media can help inform and make better decisions from entry-level to executive. Not only inform better decisions, but support the learning and growth of employees and professionals without any monetary or resource contribution by the company. Twitter was recently named the #1 learning tool for professionals in 2012. How much innovation and creativity are we missing out on because social media is blocked in many professional environments? How many opportunities are we missing? Think about it.

Regardless of whether you agree with the above or not, the reality is that social media and web content are influencing real-life, real-time decisions–and can have major impact on very important, life-changing things. Social isn’t just for sharing cat pictures anymore. People (and robots) are beginning to trust what happens and is shared on social media as a completely legitimate source of data. While this is a sign of respect for the social ecosystem and the people in it, we have to remember that with great power also comes great responsibility.

So what do you think? Should social media be allowed in corporate environments? Do you think the people making decisions in your life would make better ones when supported with data and different perspectives from social media? Argue it out in the comments!

NOTE: Eric is talking about the non-profit sector, but these rules apply seamlessly to for-profit operations, personal brands, and enthusiasts.

There are currently around 1.5 million non-profits registered in the US alone, with total contributions amounting to just under $300 billion. But while many charitable organizations do spend more than 66% of a donation on their actual mission, it is a rare case. Perhaps more importantly, donors have very little control over their money and how it gets used, or to what end. This paints a simple picture of a society at large that does care a great deal about changing the world and making it a better place. But it seems that there is something broken in this system both as inefficient, and as non-sustainable from a member engagement standpoint. I think the answer to this problem lies somewhere in the current tech startup buzzword of “community”.

There is some sort of magic in community if it is utilized correctly. Especially around passionate projects, a strong community can create more sustained momentum and impact. But most people and companies have a poor understanding of what makes community tick, let alone how to measure or track its success.

Typically, Community Managers look for engagement of some sort, and this metric changes for each community. But there is always a specific type of behavior that a Community Manager/Organizer is attempting to boost up which has an impact on a bottom line business KPI (Key Performance Indicator). So let’s establish a few criteria for what makes an effective community that motivates its constituents towards any desired behavior.

1. Education
Community Managers are often distanced from content strategy. This is a terrible mistake; content still remains king. A community can be viewed as marketing behavior as opposed to marketing product. People will only engage with what stimulates their interest and passion over time. For this to happen, the content put in front of the member must be expert and educational in nature and requires some dedicated resources and continual sustained work!

2. Participation
Once members find value in the content (and not really before), the job of the Organizer is to gently move them into active participation. This can be volunteering, posting, asking questions, answering questions, etc. But this behavior is what really creates a psychological feeling of belonging and loyalty.

3. Influence
The final piece of a truly successful community is for members to start being able to impact the direction of the community at large. This is the stage where a community can take on a life of it’s own and have huge impact on the world around it.

Successful non-profits do in fact exhibit some of these characteristics, but not on a large enough scale to be considered strong communities. They provide an abundance of education and content to the masses, as well as targeted information campaigns about specific missions and causes. They also manage to inspire a volunteer force. But this is where the problems begin to show up. The vast majority of active “members” in these non-profit communities are simply financial donors. And even with a huge volunteer army, this will always represent a tiny contingent of the overall base. Meanwhile, those backers have very little incentive to actively participate. They have fulfilled the “good feeling” requirement of helping.

More importantly, almost none of these people, volunteers or backers, have any influence. When backers who only have one mode of participation cannot even impact where and how their dollars get spent, they will stop being as actively engaged as a strong community requires. The same occurs with volunteers where only the dedicated few (who usually do feel they are making an impact and have influence) actually stick around, while the majority burnout.

So let’s take the model of a strong community and apply it to a specific socially impactful project: Urbsly, which is attempting to create an alternative option for farmers and gardeners caught in the vicious dependency loop created by Monsanto and big agriculture. The vision is that when all the disparate seed data on varieties and traits becomes centralized in an open and accessible free dataset / market, consumers and growers alike can easily access other options besides those promoted by Monsanto.

My current company openfi.re creates a platform that applies these principles of community to helping these projects be successful. Here is our approach which you can apply to your own community driven endeavors. In order to build a community around Urbsly, we first need to educate potential “members” on the issue. This requires a place to start educating users from, a PR engine, and most importantly a way to keep users up to date on progress, answer questions, etc to keep the knowledge incentive growing. As stated before, this requires some dedicated resources, true domain expertise, and an influential media contact base.

Secondly, there needs to be a way for members to participate with the project. People need to be encouraged and enabled to contribute in some way. Just like any good non-profit has taught us, the most basic level of interaction is funding. By doing this on a crowd-funding platform, we begin to leverage other interactions for people passionate about where control of seeds and food ends up, like sharing, checking in, and gamification and rewards. But more importantly, if a community is actually going to sustain itself, there needs to be ways for people to utilize their other skills, integrating code via github into an API and other apps, promoting stories to press contacts in the industry, helping with legal services, and donor matching to name a few . The more that these participatory events and activities become formalized and promoted, the more valuable the community will become in helping Urbsly grow.

The trickiest part of this community is how to give members the ability to actually influence the project. On the most basic level, crowdfunding towards small, achievable goals like an open seed catalog allows for backers to be confident in how their money is being used, and for exactly what purpose, creating a feeling of ownership unique to this model. Those same members also must be provided the ability to be involved in deciding the trajectory of the next set of goals. Finally those members who are the most involved can become part of the project team, contributing time, resources, and ideas beyond the scope any large organization currently enables.

I believe that a well thought-out community driven approach to social problems can create a whole new paradigm for the way progress happens, and what can and should be expected from social entrepreneurs and visionaries. While openfi.re is just getting started on this venture, and has built a platform to accomplish some of this, the long term vision remains intact for all of the above. Please check it out, and help us support and join in the community we are building around Urbsly here: http://openfi.re/projects/urbsly.

Eric Shaw is the co-founder of openfi.re, a community building and crowdfunding platform for long term socially valuable projects. Follow him @shawea for tech ramblings, interesting social projects, and rants on frisbee and philosophy.

Presentations and slideshows have been historically one of the most boring and standard corporate media currently available to employees and management. They are meant to purely educational or purely for selling — they are very rarely anything but a pitch or a corporate update. But with the rise of Slideshare as a platform for sharing a new kind of presentation, a lean, value-adding, and stand-alone type of presentation, and its proof as a viable option for driving traffic, the “corporate presentation” can be leveraged for more than its functional purpose and optimized to spread the company or personal message via social media.

Twitter, in particular, is a great social media platform to leverage when planning and creating corporate (or external) presentations. The ability to group together thoughts via #hashtags and cultivate awesome, topical conversations with your audience around real-time internal actions and content is an incredible way to build community; these types of conversations give your audience a sense of ownership of your brand, encourages them to actively participate in conversation, and gives your audience the confidence that you are actually doing stuff! The prevalence of live-tweeting and conference/presentation-based Tweetchats are testament to the power of this medium.

Even if you are in middle-management at a big corporation, the content you produce as a normal part of your job could be leveraged by the people running your social media and generate engagement — with the right set of tools. This is a quick list of tips to help you optimize your presentations for Twitter.

1. Think in sound-bytes.

A huge source of content on Twitter is powered by quoting people, either live or otherwise. Tap into this natural tendency to quote people’s words by thinking in sound-bytes. Every good politician keeps a bunch of great “one liners” up their sleeve; you can think like this also. Distill your message into a few quotables that would make sense in the Twitterverse. Decide on the things you’d like your audience to take away and make sure you have at least one quote for each idea.

2. Focus your ideas to one thought per slide.

Pictures are worth 1000 words and images play a huge role in Twitter. 58.4 million photos were shared on Twitter in December 2012 alone. Use your slides as images! You can share your message in visual format as well as text. Make sure each idea you present is on its own slide to allow maximum impact of the concept you are trying to convey. Pair an image with a “quotable” from above for the most leverage of your content.

3. Promote!

Many people and brands don’t understand why their social properties don’t show engagement. The #1 reason for this is because no one knows you exist! Spread your social handles far and wide; slap them on newsletters, content, blogs, business cards; everything you can get your hands on. Power users on Twitter often schedule their participation in Tweetchats as part of their work day, so if you don’t tell anyone your live tweet or Tweetchat exists, it makes sense that no one is participating. Leverage other methods to let your audience know you are live-tweeting a presentation. Use email to segment your list to social users and let them know when and why you are hosting your Tweetchat. People will come.

4. Don’t be boring.

This is the great killer of the potential for great content from most presentations. Death by boredom. Don’t feel constrained to keep your presentation 100% “by the book.” If you are bored presenting your material, most likely the people listening (and in our case, tweeting) about it are also bored, and that’s got bad news written all over it. People don’t share boring content. They share content with passion, purpose, and value. You can create this vision by simply letting the leash off a little — allow your personality to shine. Avoid using bullets. Be a little bit creative! It’ll be paid back by the engagement you will see in the social sphere with your re-purposed content.

In the end, you can recycle any type of content into any other type of content. Use this flexibility to your advantage and scale your content efforts through creative distribution, slicing and dicing, and lean thinking.

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