Monthly Archives: April 2014

“Community is a discipline”

Community, Tech

“When community is your discipline, the core of your work is focused on understanding and putting into practice the development of communities. You might also understand and apply marketing, support or other practices but they’re traits, not your core discipline.”

David Spinks, as he often does, describes succinctly what I rant about regularly: Community is a discipline, and the more you try to make it a subset of other departments the more it fails. Other departments can adopt community-focused strategies (please!) but it will never make sense to say that the Community team is part of the Marketing team.

Interviews with me

Community, Customer Service, Tech

A few very pleasant folks have interviewed me in the last couple of months, so I figured I’d share those here.

Support-Driven Podcast – Scott Tran interviews me about kicking off a community effort, finding your community niche, and combining customer service & community. Also available on iTunes.

Big Door – I discuss why customer loyalty isn’t marketing, the community management trends I see, and metrics one should look at.

Startup Product Summit – A little bit older, but arguably one of my best and most widely-accessible talks. I cover customer feedback, customer-focused product design, and how to understand when data or customers are misleading you. Slides available here.

Hope you find these helpful, useful, or at least entertaining! 🙂

The future is not #%*&ing smartwatches

Uncategorized

“The Internet carries a surprising lesson for Intellectual Property theory. Despite the prevalence of infringement and the teachings of IP theory, people are creating and distributing more content now than ever before, by at least an order of magnitude.

The future of technology is likely to look quite a bit like the Internet. Lots of people will create lots of designs, code, and biobricks. Other people will use, repurpose, and improve on those things, often without paying.”

–IP in a World Without Scarcity, by Mark A. Lemley

This is one of the most elucidating things I’ve read lately. It’s worth the time investment.

The punchline? The future isn’t #*%&ing wearables. It’s not some neat new social network. It’s literally changing how economics work when suddenly almost everything can be generated at home. It’s people printing replacement body parts and artificial genes at home. It’s about the change in interactions and communities when we no longer have to commute, go to the store, etc. It’s freedom & chaos & community & creativity. And it’s absolutely something you can picture as utopian or distopian…though probably it’ll be somewhere in between. It’s going to be a fascinating century, and smartwatches will be less than a footnote.