I just read Beringer’s blog post on Converge South and he had some great points. This was his first professional conference and he noticed that Elon students were already way ahead of the curve on a lot of this information. When you looked at the average age of the crowd (I’m guessing mid 30’s to mid 50’s with a few young faces sprinkled in?), it does seem mainly age related.
As a 44 year-old going into the program, this was interesting for me to see. If it were just two years earlier, I might have been one of those scratching my head wondering what Pinterest was too. It made me realize how much I’d learned in just a short amount of time. After just 3 months in this intensive program, I know way more than the average person about interactive media and social media. And even though I still often feel I can’t keep up with the more technology savvy younger generation, the conference gave me the sense that I am now way more media literate than my particular generation. And that’s pretty cool.
The first talk I went to was How to Make A Living From Blogging. Despite the title, the main thing I learned was that you can’t really make much of a living off blogging. If you work your ass off, you might be able to make around $20,000. And even that is a long shot. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not stressing myself out to get a masters degree to make $20,000.
It ends up the real way to make money from blogging is through ads that appear on your blog. Unfortunately, that information came towards the end of the presentation and the presenter didn’t really tell us about how to make that happen, and we were out of time.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a shock to me that it’s extremely rare to be able to make a living from blogging. I knew that. I also knew that most of the revenue comes from advertising. But I was hoping to be surprised, or at least learn more about how the advertising process works with blogs. I had been curious about that. But honestly, I didn’t learn much from this presenter.
On the other hand, an example of a really excellent presenter was Rosemary O’Neill, a community manager who runs her own social media company called Social Strata, Inc. O’Neill has that very rare blend of being whip-smart, hilarious and a great teacher. She used her wit and personality to serve the concepts she was teaching, rather than to try to get us to like her. She mentioned from the beginning that after going over a few basic concepts, she wanted to “really get to the meat” of the presentation so we could feel like we really left with something. And that’s exactly what she did.
Community managers create community, of course—but how do they do that? First of all, you have to master that rare trick that O’Neill herself has obviously mastered: You have to have enough personality to engage people, but at the same time let go of your ego. You have to be hands on, but not too hands on. If you’re a community manager, it can’t be all about you. You have to let your members create community. Second, there needs to be a defined point of interest:
“This is usually a passion, a quirk, a bond that makes the members feel kinship with one another. It might be a love of Steampunk. It might be that they are Masters students in Philosophy. It might be the fact that their parents were in the Army when they were young. You didn’t make those things happen, they just are.”
The third factor is creating a sense of authenticity:
“When a community speaks with a common voice, common lingo, common traditions, it’s a beautiful thing. Generally, this type of deep relationship springs from true human connections. That is hard to fake, and very hard for a brand to gin up in the marketing department”
So how do you make that happen?
“Find the community that already exists in your niche, and give them a playroom. Let them name it, play with it, and run it if possible. Then maybe they’ll do you the honor of inviting you in.”
I mainly went to O’Neill’s presentation because she stood out to me from all the speakers at the lunch talks. I didn’t know much about community managers and hadn’t considered that possibly be a career that would interest me. But O’Neill’s talk surprised me—made me consider things I hadn’t before considered. I think that’s what good talks do.