I’ll be presenting a case study at Case Camp Toronto 6 next Tuesday, November 20th. My topic will be “Building compelling identity in social media spaces” where I will present my online identity as a case study for how to build audience and brand awareness.

This is a bit different than the average Case Camp presentation because I’ll be talking about how my personal brand mixes with my personal life online. The trick will be to make it relevant for the business audience, and I’ve got a few ideas. I’ll also post my slides up here after the presentation. If anyone in attendance will be taping, please let me know and I’d love to post it here also.

I’m happy to tell you that I’m joining the ConceptShare team as Community Evangelist. We’ve wanted to work together for almost a year now, and finally the stars have aligned. You can read Scott’s update about the ConceptShare team growing too.

This is probably going to be the easiest gig I’ve ever had. Evangelizing and building a community around a web application that people go ga-ga over is a dream for someone like me. People rave about ConceptShare, and they have good reason to. We have a great product that solves a real world problem, and a team of three guys made it happen. Scott Brooks has done an amazing job evangelizing up to today and will continue to do so along with me, but he’s also got a company to keep building!

This is going to be seriously fun. I’m going to get to work with designers of all sorts, creatives, artists, scientists, architects, engineers, worldwide advertising agencies and major league sports - to start. I could tell you how excited I am about this, but it’s hard to understand just how much without the backstory.

Four years ago, in my hometown of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island I was inspired by my super talented friends at silverorange to start my first web services shop. I looked up to them, and wanted to be like them. While I knew that they had the right idea by staying local and doing top notch global projects, I knew I would have to beat the pavement to make it happen for myself. When I moved to Vancouver and co-founded Raincity Studios their model of work and comradery was forefront in my mind. When I moved on from Raincity to join Flock, and from Flock to contract work for the last year, I learned what I wanted from my work was to be part of a small close knit team of people working on something amazing.

I visited ConceptShare HQ last week in Sudbury, and that’s exactly what I found. I’ve decided to move to Sudbury to join the team full time. There are also some other opportunites available to me with online video there, stay tuned for exciting news on that. And don’t worry - I plan to travel to Toronto regularly for commandN! I’ll be posting company news on the ConceptShare blog Thought Balloons too, so keep an eye out there for exciting announcements.

Tags: willpate, conceptshare, design, sudbury

“Obviously, we all want to sell, at least some of the equity. But Mark owns the whole thing and he’s a crazy kid. He doesn’t let us in on his ideas, and all he cares about are the users.”

Valleywag - ‘A crazy kid’

If you’re looking for reasons why Facebook is so successful right now, everything else is secondary. Mark is passionate about his users, to the point of having other people call him crazy. You need to fight for your community. He tells his partners to back off, and let him focus on his community. Mark, if you’re out there: you’re my kind of crazy.

Tags: facebook, markzuckerberg

Telling the truth to your community is very, very important. Otherwise, something like this will happen:

Why did I delete my JPG Magazine account? Cofounders Derek Powazek and Heather Champ have been booted out because they didn’t want to lie.

In one evening, Paul removed issues 1-6 from the JPG website, removed Heather from the About page, and deleted the “Letter from the Editors” that had lived on the site since day one. Paul informed me that we were inventing a new story about how JPG came to be that was all about 8020. He told me not to speak of that walk in Buena Vista, my wife, or anything that came before 8020.

Here’s where the whole “not lying” thing comes in. I just could not agree to this new story. It didn’t, and still doesn’t, make any business sense to me. Good publishing companies embrace their founding editors and community, not erase them. Besides, we’d published six issues with participation from thousands of people. There’s no good reason to be anything but proud of that.

JPG Magazine has now lost its reputation, its much loved cofounders and people are starting to leave and be public about it. Think about that the next time you’re tempted to tell a lie to your community.

The questions I hear most from business about online community are where is the ROI, and how do we measure success? Finally, my colleagues Joe Cothrel and Bill Johnston have gathered public data about online community ROI that helps answer both.

• Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. (AT&T, 2002)
• 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004).
• Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
• In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options. (ASP, 2002)
• Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
• Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
• Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
• 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)
• Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. (Jupiter, 2006)