Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

My Brazen Experience

Just about a month ago, I got an email from Ryan Paugh, community manager at Brazen Careerist to join their community. It was a great personalised message, telling me how painless it would be to sign up, and that it would be a great place to meet other Gen Y bloggers and that I could always go to him if I had any questions. A great welcoming email.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I saw fellow bloggers Meg Roberts and Corvida Raven and figured it should be pretty cool.

After creating my profile, I submitted a load of stuff and had problems with getting my info saved, so I decided to leave it. Within a couple of days I got an email from Dan Healy letting me know I should update my rss feed so that I could pipe my recent activity to Brazen. So I did. Soon after, I got a blog post featured on the site. Although I’ve been caught up in exams and traveling after that, Brazen has been high on my Google Reader priorities and I try to comment and participate as much as I can.

Why am I blogging about this? Firstly, to share a new connection to a community that I have discovered (or rather, discovered me), which I enjoy very much and more importantly, to tell you why this matters.

One of the links I shared a couple of weeks ago was how to establish a community’s culture, with points like communicating with members, recognising positive contribution as heavily weighted actions that work. If you read my experience with Brazen, you can be sure that these elements were definitely part of it.

If you’re a company hearing lots about this “community” buzzword, learn something from this case study. Community does not equate to sending people mails saying “hi my site is the coolest ever, come join it”. And leaving the site to rot after getting 20,000 people to join it doesn’t make it a success either. If you can’t come to terms with this and aren’t going to be bothered to spend the effort, Don’t bother.

Do you have similar case studies and/or experiences to share? Are you on Brazen Careerist too? Drop me a comment!

Tags: brazen careerist, communicating with members, community manager, corvida raven, dan healy, establish community culture, Gen Y, google reader, meg roberts, personalised invitations, recognizing positive contribution, rss, ryan paugh

Posted in Gen Y, case studies, community | 1 Comment »

Links For The Week: 27th October

Lots of awesome stuff this week, let’s get into it:

Social Media For Beginners
I’m always conscious that everyone’s visit to my site could be a first visit. If you’re looking for a great resource for how to dip your toes into social media’s waters, how about 35 tips for getting started with social media? Very beginner friendly.

Online Influencers
No secret, this is a pet topic of mine. Read Write Web says research suggests influencers are alive and well on social media sites. John Bell of Ogilvy also talks about working with word of mouth influencers and the ethics involved.

RSS
RSS adoption at 11%? I wonder if the numbers are accurate. It would seem lower than that, just from my personal friends.

Research
Two interesting articles on the usage patterns of Africans, particularly with respect to mobile. Might be of interest to the Comm215 Wiki at some point in the future, I suspect.

Community Management
Everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon and hire a community manager. Consider the job hazards of the community manager as told by Jeremiah Owyang before diving head in.

Finally, for education, The Edublogger asks if you’re making your life easier with Google Calendar. Vastly underutilised tool in classrooms and project groups for collaboration and it’s time you get started! Although my online tools have expanded to include reQall and Remember The Milk, I started with Google Calendar (or GooCal, as I affectionately call it), and it’s a great starting point.

As always, do share interesting links you read about this week with me, you can find me on delicious.com/uniquefrequency or simply leave the link in the comments!

Tags: african mobile usage, blogger outreach, community management, community manager, edublogger, google calendar, jeremiah owyang, job hazards of community manager, john bell, online influencers, read write web, rss, rss adoption, social media for beginners, tips for getting started with social media, wom, word of mouth influencers

Posted in Icio | 2 Comments »