Online communities have the potential to bring your customers closer to your company (or constituents closer to your organization if you happen to be a nonprofit). Okay, there’s nothing new in that proposition. Since the web’s infancy, we’ve known about the potential of tearing down geographic barriers and bringing different people together around common causes. But how far have we truly come?

There’s a rather insightful article from CIO dated 2001 that talks about online communities as a way to engage customers so this idea has been around for a while. It’s interesting to see how the case for communities evolved during this decade. For instance, remember when online communities were synonymous with discussion boards? Companies were pursuing stickiness by getting site visitors to interact with other visitors. The assumption was that once a company created such forums, visitors would know what to do and a vibrant community would magically form. And the community would pretty much self-manage itself. Oh, and companies would not need to invest many resources or effort to maintain the community. Did I capture all the assumptions?

We’ve learned much in the past decade about how to most effectively incorporate communities into a company’s online and brand presence. But online communities are still not in the mainstream. I think this could change in the next few years. Not only is the technology improving, but companies are finally beginning to understand that online success means focusing on the social dimension of community.

Here are three questions that come to my mind when thinking about the future of online communities:
1. Will there be widespread adoption among businesses and nonprofit organizations?
2. Will online communities become an integral part of business strategy or continue to serve an ancillary function?
3. Will communities live up to their immense potential or will they serve as mere tools for selling and moving product?

Thoughts? Any other future-focused questions we still need to explore?

Say you’re a nonprofit executive or someone responsible for working with volunteers…do you know the value of the volunteer work being done on your organization’s behalf? Consider all that time spent, all that energy devoted, all that expertise put to service of your mission. Do you have an idea of their true worth?

If your answer is “no” or any variation of “sorta,” don’t worry; it’s actually a rather complex question that’s going to be quite unique to each nonprofit. You might want to bring in a business anthropologist (I do happen to know one) to help you sort through all of the people and policy issues. But there are a few key domains to consider as you mull this question:

Relationship
What kinds of relationships do you want to form with your volunteers? After working with volunteers for nearly 10 years, I’ve come to believe in one certain truth: there is no such thing as “managing” volunteers. Management changes the interpersonal dynamic making volunteerism a transaction rather than a relationship. Plus, your volunteers don’t need or want to be managed.

This raises an inevitable question: how do you get your volunteers to do what you want them to do? It’s actually the wrong question to ask if you’re trying to cultivate strong volunteer engagement. I would suggest this one: How do you guide your volunteers to give their best talents, expertise, and energy in ways that are meaningful to both themselves and the nonprofit? Individuals give most freely when they see and feel the personal connection to their work.

Value
What’s the value of the work being done by your volunteers? Most nonprofits that I’ve worked with don’t have a firm idea of the value of their volunteer work activities. If volunteers put together an event, what would the price be if done by a paid contractor? It’s not a question designed to make you shout, “Wow! Look at all the money we’re saving using free labor!” Instead, take some time to realize that individuals are giving their effort and that it does have an economic value. Then, calculate in the emotional value that comes from the passion behind the effort.

Social Marketing Potential
What kind of word-of-mouth marketing are you getting from your volunteers? Here’s where that emotional value pays off. If your volunteers are emotionally invested in your nonprofit’s cause, they’re going to tell others about their work. They’re going to have stories to share with their friends, family, coworkers, and other folks they see on a daily basis. And these stories can have a significant impact on your organization’s brand, fundraising movements and advocacy appeals. Engage your volunteers in meaningful work and they will spread the word in ways you may never have imagined.

This was just a broad look at volunteer engagement. It really does need some deeper probing. To do this, Aaron Bramley (blog :: twitter) and I are doing an email dialogue exchange over the next week so we can drill down into this topic. When we finish, we’ll post the results so everyone can benefit. Neither of us know what it’ll look like so you’ll just have to subscribe and see what happens. And if you have thoughts or questions, post them below and we’ll weave them into our dialogue.

Chalk it up to the hubbub around SXSW or the challenges of restarting a blog carnival, but I was a little underwhelmed by the entries this week. We received what looked like two or three authentic submissions. The rest of the submissions were sent via carnival submission software which I have come to loath in ways that rival spam blog comments and robo-calls from political candidates around election time. If the whole point of “social media” is that first word, then don’t go doing things that are genuinely anti-social. And particularly not when your host writes a blog focused on building better marketing relationships.

However, as omnipotent host, this gives me the opportunity to deviate a bit from the fare you might normally expect from this carnival. This week, you’ll find great reads from some usual sources but also social media-related entries from the world of human resources and nonprofits. I hope you find them entertaining and informative.

So, without further ado, I present nine blogposts that meet the high quality and fine standards of both the Social Media Blog Carnival and Gravit8 Social Marketing:

My Boss Doesn’t Get It: Championing Social Media to the Man from Jordan Viator and Connection Cafe.
This is a recap of a Friday SXSW session called My Boss Doesn’t Get it: Championing Social Media to the Man. If you’re trying to figure out how to pitch social media to your boss or your boss’s boss, the recommendations here are well worth reading.

100 Best Blogs for Young Entrepreneurs from Online College Degree.
Many of the blogs listed in this post are new to me. Even though many of them are geared toward young entrepreneurs, there are several that will appeal to entrepreneurs of all ages.

Even with a vibrant community you can still fail from Francois Gossieaux and Social Media Today.
I was a membership director in the association world for nearly a decade and am familiar with the ins and outs of cultivating communities. This post discusses two of the biggest challenges to continued success with any online community.

Recruiting, Social Media, and Candidate Evaluation from Laurie Ruettimann and Punk Rock HR.
We all know the pitfalls that befall all of us in this age of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter: we can inadvertently reveal personal details or secrets that probably won’t go over well with potential employers. This post offers a caution to hiring managers and HR professionals to not believe everything you see when it comes to evaluating a potential job candidate.

Resources for the other 77% from Steve Boese’s HR Technology.
A high number of HR executives consider skills in “new media” to be vitally important but don’t offer training to bolster these skills inside their own organizations. This post offers HR staff an annotated listing of useful suggestions and resource links.

5 People Who Broke the Rules of Social Media and Succeeded from David Spark and Mashable
This post received a lot of attention among fellow Twitterers this week for good reason. Listen, if someone tells you how social media should work or proclaims there are rules that should be followed, you should call them a hack and proceed to do your own thing. There really are no set rules. The beauty of social media is that it is experiment friendly so feel free to go out and follow your intuition. If it works, that’s fantastic learning; if it doesn’t work, that’s also fantastic learning.

How to “Friend” Someone on Facebook & Hide It From Your Status Updates from Tim Watson and MakeUseOf.
We all have people in our lives who we know and yet still don’t want them to know everything we do. If you’re connected to a mom, dad, grandma, boss, or other individual who really doesn’t need to see your latest status update about being hungover after too many margaritas, then this might be a good tip to follow.

Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere? from Brian Solis and Techcrunch
Whether or not you still think Technorati is still a relevant source of determining blogging authority (personally, I think Technorati’s importance declined years ago), Solis asks a pertinent question: Will we need a separate Technorati-type index for measuring the authority of content publishers on Twitter and other micro-media in their own right?

Who Had the Better Media Strategy? CareerBuilder vs. Monster from Anthony Young and Advertising Age.
A well-considered and thorough assessment of how the two online job posting giants fare in categories such as online advertising, Super Bowl strategy, and organic search. Note the comments made to their respective responses to the recession.

So, was there a winner this week? I’m going to exert my omnipotent hosting privileges and declare it a nine-way tie. But don’t let my ambivalence get in the way of you determining a champion. Do you have favorites from above? Did we miss a great post from last week? Be social and post a comment below.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed briefly by BusinessWeek for an article on people affected by the current economic situation. I’m one of the individuals they call a “Rebounder” or someone who decides to start their own venture rather than just looking for another job.

You can read the full article After Layoffs, Starting a Business from Scratch or skip ahead to my profile The Rebounders: Chris Bailey.

It’s a nice write-up and I appreciate the additional exposure for new solopreneur venture: Chris Bailey Consulting Works. Think of it as the action-oriented business that envelopes the ideas discussed here at Bailey WorkPlay and at Gravit8 Social Marketing.

If there’s one thing I wish the folks at BusinessWeek had highlighted, it was my work with JobAngels. I spent a quarter of the interview talking about this aspect of my solo work, but it didn’t make the profile. Oh well.

Read the profiles of other Rebounders. If you’ve been laid off or sense that it’s coming around the corner, know that it doesn’t have to be an end. It can be a beginning, too. As Patti Tower, one of the Rebounders interviewed, noted: “I feel set free rather than laid off.”

Creating policies for blogging, social media, and the like is a murky area for most organizations. And let’s face it: most of us don’t actually enjoy writing this stuff (or maybe that’s just me). This is why it’s always nice to find a list of good policy examples from which we can swipe and alter for our own purposes. Enjoy!

http://123socialmedia.com/2009/01/23/social-media-policy-examples/

[Note: This is my latest post at Gravit8 Social Marketing. Because JobAngels really does mix both the social media and marketing focus of Gravit8 with the careers and work focus of WorkPlay, I'll likely cross-post articles like this occasionally. But seriously...you should really subscribe to both blogs anyway. Now, back to our regularly scheduled post.]

When an opportunity to make a positive and revolutionary change in the world lands in your lap, you just have to leap on it and grab hold with both hands. For me, this opportunity takes the form of JobAngels. It all started with just one tweet from Mark Stelzner who asked what would happen if one person would help just one other person find work. In less than 140 characters, it simplified what is the most critical issue facing millions of people.

Not that the answer to this pressing problem is simple. Finding work at any time can be a frustrating experience; add a crappy economy to the mix and it can be an excruciating, soul-devouring exercise. I witness this happening to the handful of people I’m working with currently as a JobAngel. Our identity is often intertwined with our working persona so when we lose our job, we don’t quite know how to cope with the change. It’s an emotional rollercoaster ride where you really don’t know how far down you’ll go.

What does this have to do with social media? As it turns out…EVERYTHING. When you lost your job and a part of your identity, the worst thing you can do is become a hermit. This is a time when your social network is a gift. You need to know what there are caring people out there who do give a damn about you, who will lend you support when you need it, who will connect you to others who can help. Of course these aren’t new things, but social media increases the potential for widening and deepening personal relationships in new – and extraordinary – ways.

Back to JobAngels…I’m the Chief Technical Officer, which is really just a fancy way of saying that I’m the person who makes sure all the technology works well. The soon-to-be launched community site that I’m developing will hopefully incorporate the best of what makes social media special. We want for folks to have the ability to build meaningful relationships with others, share resources and information, and ultimately connect them to work that matches their talents and passions. Plus, here’s my personal hope that will be the cherry on top of it all: that we demonstrate the potential that social media has to make this world a better place.

There will be much more to come as I offer some experiential lessons on how this online community continues to take shape. I think there will be many ideas and practices that you’ll be able to incorporate into your organization’s own community strategy. Oh, and if you’re willing to be a JobAngel (or especially if you need help finding work), reach out to me or connect with our team. We’re at Twitter (@jobangels and #jobangels), LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Involved with social media? Want to expand your reach and amplify your voice? Then, it’s carnival time, baby! The good folks at New Media Lab are raising the carnival from the dead. Hosting this week is fellow Austinite Jack Leblond. There’s still time to get in on the fun. Nominate your post (or even someone else’s post) by this Sunday to be a part of the first round.

Next week it’s my turn to host. Let’s see what social media goodness is out there.

When an opportunity to make a positive and revolutionary change in the world lands in your lap, you just have to leap on it and grab hold with both hands. For me, this opportunity takes the form of JobAngels. It all started with just one tweet from Mark Stelzner who asked what would happen if one person would help just one other person find work. In less than 140 characters, it simplified what is the most critical issue facing millions of people.

Not that the answer to this pressing problem is simple. Finding work at any time can be a frustrating experience; add a crappy economy to the mix and it can be an excruciating, soul-devouring exercise. I witness this happening to the handful of people I’m working with currently as a JobAngel. Our identity is often intertwined with our working persona so when we lose our job, we don’t quite know how to cope with the change. It’s an emotional rollercoaster ride where you really don’t know how far down you’ll go.

What does this have to do with social media? As it turns out…EVERYTHING. When you lost your job and a part of your identity, the worst thing you can do is become a hermit. This is a time when your social network is a gift. You need to know what there are caring people out there who do give a damn about you, who will lend you support when you need it, who will connect you to others who can help. Of course these aren’t new things, but social media increases the potential for widening and deepening personal relationships in new – and extraordinary – ways.

Back to JobAngels…I’m the Chief Technical Officer, which is really just a fancy way of saying that I’m the person who makes sure all the technology works well. The soon-to-be launched community site that I’m developing will hopefully incorporate the best of what makes social media special. We want for folks to have the ability to build meaningful relationships with others, share resources and information, and ultimately connect them to work that matches their talents and passions. Plus, here’s my personal hope that will be the cherry on top of it all: that we demonstrate the potential that social media has to make this world a better place.

There will be much more to come as I offer some experiential lessons on how this online community continues to take shape. I think there will be many ideas and practices that you’ll be able to incorporate into your organization’s own community strategy. Oh, and if you’re willing to be a JobAngel (or especially if you need help finding work), reach out to me or connect with our team. We’re at Twitter (@jobangels and #jobangels), LinkedIn, and Facebook.