Why Community Management is NOT like Parenting

Community Management = Parenting? Really?

There has been a recent upsurge in community management/moderation blog posts comparing the care and nurturing of a community to that of a parent. As both a parent and someone who has helped companies build and moderate successful communities for over ten years, I couldn’t disagree more. Here’s why:

• The best moderators and community managers are passionate about the success of their community in meeting its goals. They are not passionate about or emotionally attached to the individual members.

Think I’m crazy? Look at the photo above. When two members go at each other in a community an emotionally attached community manager will take sides based upon who they feel is more important to the community or worse, based upon their interpretation of what happened. So rather than staying above the fray, they take sides. We’ve seen it time and time again. We work hard with our client teams to understand the downside of this behavior by the manager or moderator. What’s the fall-out from this behavior by the manager/moderator? Simple, it intensifies the problem rather than defusing it. Members want moderators who are impartial to settle disputes. So unlike a parent, the most successful community managers and moderators must remain emotionally detached.

• Getting too close to a member emotionally reduces your credibility as a moderator/manager in the eyes of the other members who aren’t close to you.

It matters what others think, even if incorrect. The most vocal and longest lasting problems in B2C communities that we’ve managed always revolve around the initial problem being compounded by claims of unfair treatment and support for one side over the other.  If you enter into a situation like this, your credibility will suffer in the eyes of many members. For example, at AARP the political action is fast and furious. We’ve seen members attack each other over many issues. (Liberals against Conservatives. Democrats against Republicans. Capitalists against Socialists. Wingnuts against Moonbats. ) Each time our moderators have stepped in, it has been to enforce the terms of service rather than take sides. While we are often accused by someone of taking sides, other members are quick to point out to the community that the moderators take action against them as well. That achieves a certain balance that while fragile is non-partisan. If you are emotionally attached to a member who is attacked, you are likely to over-react and set off a chain reaction. So unlike a parent you must stay above the fight and be partial. (Yes this sounds like a parental ideal, but in practice it’s almost impossible to pull off with your own kids because you are still too emotionally invested and want to settle the fight NOW!)

• The myth of not needing moderation continues to stay alive

This one is really interesting in my opinion. How can you compare community management to parenting and then say that:

“In fact moderation is rarely necessary where an effective community manager runs the community.” – Simon Phillips

Clearly, he’s never dealt with a two year old throwing a tantrum or a member doing the same in a community. As I mentioned in my comments:

“At the early maturity stage of a public community, the community manager must moderate in order to establish the community norms of behavior. That means removing offensive content or language or attacks. It also requires that the community manager contact the members whos content he/she has removed/edited. Otherwise the wrong example is set and the behavioral expectations are going to be harder to realize. If you don’t step in early, the bullies and soapboxers will dominate and reinforce the behavior that you don’t want to see (or that your client doesn’t want to see). Once that happens, your growth in realized value will slow as members join more to fight or spam or advertise rather than to contribute to a meaningful goal.

As the community matures, the need for behavioral moderation remains. Why? Because members don’t want to self-police and if they do, they often go after people they disagree with rather than true violations of the community norms or ToS.”

So here is the bottom line from Impact Interactions’ view of the online community world. In order to succeed in driving the results you want, act like a professional facilitator not a parent. Remain emotionally detached from your members to stay impartial. Focus on the results and in maintaining the norms and behaviors you want in your community rather than on the personalities. And don’t act like a parent, act like a professional.

Here are a few other takes on this idea:

Raising Good Communities – The Community Roundtable

You teach what you accept: As true in parenting as it is in online community management – FreshNetworks

Leading a Community is Like Parenting - Connie Bensen

Please feel free to add your thoughts on this analogy…

Mike Rowland, President

Do You Use Social Media? Guess What…You’re a System Administrator

By Matthew Lees

The New York Times recently ran an informative article by Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb called “The 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now.” It’s about changes that Facebook made last December that affected user privacy, and what you can do about a few key pieces of personal information.

The article got me thinking about a Patricia Seybold Group report I wrote in 2007, entitled (rather cleverly, I thought), “Helping Customers with Self-Control…of Their Own Content.” The discussion and perspective in that report are even truer today than they were a few years ago, with the trend toward user control only increasing.

The upshot of the report was that, whether you blog or spend time on social sites or online communities, you’re doing more than participating in conversations, seeking out people and information, and creating content. You’re probably also deciding (1) who can see what, and (2) what they’re allowed to do with what they can see.

Well, guess what. That’s what system administrators do. Did you know you’re a sysadmin?

(Tell your parents. If yours are like mine, they won’t understand what it means, but they’ll be impressed. Actually, if your parents are on Facebook or any other social network, they’re sysadmins, too!)

Of course, professional sysadmins are trained and experienced in the subtleties and ramifications of managing access rights, setting up group/subgroup permissions, and troubleshooting things when problems arise. The rest of us are doing this as amateurs, whether we’re…

• setting permissions on our Flickr photos
• managing the privacy settings in our Facebook accounts
• determining what our public and private LinkedIn accounts look like
• deciding if your blog will accept anonymous comments or if people need to be logged in to comment
• deciding which groups of people (e.g., everyone, friends, or family), if any, can comment on our YouTube videos
• deciding what URLs in del.icio.us to share and what to keep private (for example, I’ll let most of URLs I tag be publicly viewable, but not the ones of my financial accounts)

As the Internet has enabled more and more of us not only to be Content Consumers, but also Content Creators and Publishers (the simplicity of blogging laid a lot the groundwork for this), the natural evolution has been for us to have control over this content as well. And it’s not just the content itself (your blog entries, forum posts, comments, video clips, photos, pictures, animations, etc.), but also the information about you (such as your profile information, both personal and professional).

The advantage of all this is that systems are increasingly giving us more control over both our content and profile information. Some platforms offer impressively – perhaps overwhelmingly – granular control of pretty much everything. This is a great trend, since it’s generally better to give people control over their own stuff.

But the disadvantage is that most of us don’t naturally take to this role or have the time to do it well. It takes attention to think through things and set them up the way we’d really want them to be. Most of us don’t have the bandwidth to do this for one site, let alone all the social sites and communities where we spend time. (Plus, things change over time, as with the Facebook situation above.) Therefore, as inexperienced and part-time sysadmins with a few other things on our plates, we may not be setting things up as well as we could. We typically rely on the defaults, which may or may not be in our best interests.

Why is this important?

• If you’re a technology vendor, you’ve got to figure out how to balance giving users granular control while making things easy for them to use. More tools, capabilities, and control is usually good, as long as you don’t confuse people, and having control over too much stuff can easily become overwhelming. Having an intuitive user interface can certainly help, but product managers have to draw the line somewhere.
• If you’re a social media user (and who isn’t?), you’ve got to decide how much time and brainpower to give the various settings on your content and personal/professional information at all the sites where you have an account. Most likely you’ll rely on the defaults, making changes only when a friend or colleague brings an issue to your attention, or when you come across a relevant article (or blog post!) that prompts your taking action.
• If you’re a community business sponsor, manager, or moderator, you’re looking to generate participation and sharing, while at the same time maintaining a safe and friendly environment. Participation can be enhanced by more open settings – the more people who can view things, the more discussion and collaboration will ensue – but if things are too open, particularly if users don’t realize or understand, conflicts can arise. How you set defaults, and how you communicate privacy and control settings is crucial. (Think about what can arise when a Facebook user doesn’t understand the consequences of giving visibility to Friends of Friends, for example, who you may not know…or trust.)

We haven’t even touched on other, non-sysadmin-related choices social media users have to make, such as how your content looks (control over design and layout; e.g., your blog header and Twitter background), and what people can do with your content (e.g., what license do you select to govern the photos you upload to Flickr?).

Decisions, decisions, decisions. For better or worse, though, in this do-it-yourself, connected, and increasingly social world, we’re all sysadmins now.

2009 Trends — It’s Not All Doom & Gloom

It has been a very busy summer here at Impact Interactions. We’ve added more work with our existing clients like Cisco and SAP, added new clients, added more staff, launched a new small business service (Impact Social Media), and have received many more calls about our services. Taking a step back from the activity to analyze the social media/online community industry, we’re seeing the following trends emerge:

1. While enterprise level organizations are being very careful about spending money, there is a lot of interest in the social media area. We are seeing budgets freeing up, new projects starting and excitement about using social media to market products and services.
2. Enterprise online communities continue to launch at an amazing rate. We haven’t seen this type of growth in corporate sponsored B2B communities since 2000 when the concept was very new. The difference is that now there are third party sites like Twitter and YouTube to integrate into the communities.
3. Every one wants to avoid making mistakes, placing real best practices at a premium for enterprise companies. While there is always some learning by mistakes made in any venture, the companies we are dealing with always tell us that they want to avoid making the basic mistakes that others have made.
4. Analytics are at a premium, but not understood very well by some marketers running communities. We continue to see interest in base level metrics around traffic and basic engagement, but less understanding of value. Part of this is due to the over-reliance on Google Analytics as the main tool instead of a more powerful solution like Omniture. Google Analytics is a basic tool not a true enterprise level analytics tool in our opinion and experience.
5. In conjunction with number 4, we also see clients and prospects changing platforms in part due to poor reporting and administrative control pages. Many vendors seem to put reporting and analytics into their platform as an afterthought. Platform providers moving sharply ahead of the field in providing reporting and analytics for their software are Telligent, Lithium, and Jive to a certain degree.
6. Outsourced providers of social media expertise and management in areas such as moderation, social media monitoring, reporting, and integration are gaining more interest among enterprise level companies. With headcounts frozen or worse, organizations are looking outside their company for experienced help at an reasonable cost.
7. Lastly, the social media consulting industry remains very fractured. There are simply too many small businesses, individual consultants, and former software personnel chasing deals resulting in lower pricing and no concentration of expertise in a meaningful way. In other words, this industry is ripe for a consolidation play. This is what Jeff Dachis of the Dachis Corporation in Austin is slowly building towards. We think that there are multiple opportunities for consolidation and are actively looking for non-software companies to acquire or align with to gain a larger share of this growing market. (It’s only a matter of time before the big guys like Accenture, IBM, or big advertising agencies buy up the industry’s expertise to consolidate their market share.)

So far, 2009 has been far from the doom and gloom year that most were predicting in our industry. Certainly there has been some shakeout, but overall 2009 is shaping up as a really good year overall for social media and online community service companies.

Do you agree with these trends we’re seeing? What else are you seeing in our industry? Please share your comments below.

Mike Rowland, President

Online Community – Understanding the Myths

Are You Blindly Following the “Wisdom of the Crowds” ?

Last year, we presented this topic at the Online Community Unconference in NYC to a standing room only crowd. It’s a fun topic, albeit one that elicits strong opinions and discussions. Whether you are an industry veteran or someone who is new to online communities and social media, this presentation can help you understand and avoid some of the classic mistakes being sold by the blogosphere and ‘gurus’ every day online. It’s available in our Social Media Resources area as a pdf that you can download.

For this month’s Online Community Unconference (June 10th in Mountain View, CA0, we are updating the presentation to cover even more myths that continue to gain a following despite impacting the results of communities and their teams. For example, are you using B2C thinking in your B2B community? Are you sure you need to be on third party platforms like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others? What about metrics, are you confusing traffic with value? What role should volunteers play in your community?

These and other topics will be discussed in our talk. We hope that you’ll join us.

The New Reality – What It Takes To Get Hired In Social Media

The economy is tough, but social media keeps growing. Impact Interactions is growing this year and once again is adding staff. We’re also trying to help those impacted by the economy and those coming right out of school to understand what working in social media is really like.

From our experience, here is what it takes to get hired:

• A focus on business skills like written communications, presentations, and statistics
• Understanding of how businesses operate from a financial perspective
• A basic understanding of Marketing, eCommerce, Advertising, and Sales
• Experience as a team member who’s used the power of collaboration to help everyone succeed
• A positive attitude
• A “relaxed” professional appearance (you know what business casual means)

Did you expect that?

Notice what’s missing?

That’s right, you do not have to be a Facebook addict or have 2,000 followers on Twitter or 500 connections on LinkedIn. You don’t have to know how to build a widget to update a user for when the top 20 members are on the site. If you use Tweetdeck, great. If you have no idea what it is, no problem.

Yet, when we give career talks, advice to job seekers, and interview our own candidates they focus on their Facebook or MySpace skill, the number of followers they have on Twitter, or what online community they use. What are we focused on? Simple, can the candidate learn our business while building strong relationships with our clients? Can the candidate make the client look good while understanding that he or she will be in the background?

Afterall, Social Media for all its wonderful claims of revolutionizing the world is really just another set of tools to increase the efficiency of business in meeting their goals. Direct mail, robo-calls, telemarketing, advertorials, infomercials, email campaigns, listservs, click-to-chat, click-to-call, and other marketing tactics helped businesses gain efficiency in their marketing efforts. Social Media is doing the same thing. The underlying principle is to use the correct tool set to engage your customers in a way that benefits both sides of the relationship. (It really is that simple.)

But you have to understand and like business for business sake. Because Social Media is not all about playing with the latest cool technology, it’s about getting results. No results equals no budget.

The great push right now is to find employees who can help companies understand social media and measure the results of their efforts. Think about every online community, web 2.0, or social media conference you’ve attended or read about… what is the one area that is always a topic of interest? Measurement and monetization.

Success in Social Media requires a focus on results, thinking strategically and executing tactics that achieve tangible results like additional sales, reduced marketing costs, faster velocity of sales, reduced lead generation costs, reduced support costs, etc. There are so many people who want to work in Social Media today, but few are willing to demonstrate their business acumen to get the position. We saw this in the late 1990s in the online community world, again in around 2003 with the blogosphere, and yet again in 2005 with the early social network companies. And here we are almost ten years later with the same issues.

So do you want to work in Social Media? My advice to you is brush up on your business skills first. Worry about your number of followers on Twitter later.

What do you think? What skills do you think it takes to work in Social Media?

Mike

Welcome to our new site!

I’d like to welcome you to Impact Interactions’ new web site. Please take a tour around our site and let us know what you think. We’ve consolidated our blog and company information for clients, prospects, and visitors (frenemies too!) trying to learn more about Social Media and/or Online Communities.

We’ve added a new section Social Media Resources to give you quick access to our presentations from conferences and meetings. You’ll find our presentations from Community Unconferences, Business Forums, Internet Strategy Forum Meetings, as well as presentations we’ve delivered to companies wanting to learn more about using Social Media to excel.

We’re also adding a link to our Twitter Account(@ImpactInteract) for those who want to follow our Social Media and Online Community ideas and work issues. For those of you who have been following me at MRowland602 on Twitter, that account will now become my personal account rather than the voice of Impact Interactions. So please consider following @ImpactInteract instead to stay up to date with us.

We’ve also added a link to our facebook account where we’ll add interesting photos from our office and employees as well as additional commentary that runs more to the fun side of running online communities and social networks.

As part of the change, our Blogger account will no longer be updated. All content from our previous blog going all the way back to 2004 has been moved to our blog here. We’ve categorized and tagged the content to make it easier for you to find the information you’re looking for.

Of course, we also have our marketing information as well. If you are looking for an experienced firm with the credentials to make your project (and you) successful, please contact us to continue on your path to success!

Thanks again for visiting, we hope you like the site.

Mike Rowland, President & Founder

Online Community Unconference East 2009: The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

At last week’s unconference, I noticed that many of the questions asked throughout the day repeated one another. Veterans in the online community world noted that the questions we are asking ourselves today seem to be the same ones that we have been asking for the last 10 years. One woman who had attended last year’s Online Community Unconference brought up an old expression to describe it, saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” I find this to be very true of the knowledge base in the online community industry. Even though communities and other social media are relatively new, their core elements are not so new at all. Online communities are just a new platform that allows people to build relationships and interact with each other, just like people have been doing since the dawn of time.

In order to really understand social media, you need to understand the social part of it. And while some people may tell you that the social part means just letting all of your members do whatever they want, I believe it is much deeper than that. It is about using our knowledge of human desires, feelings and behaviors in order to build a community in the truest sense. Successful “real world” communities don’t allow their members to do whatever they want, do they? To be successful, whether IRL (in real life) or online, communities need to have a specific purpose with regulations that help people to fulfill that purpose. Governments, school systems, the workplace, family, and friend groups all have specific functions and have guidelines (explicit or implied) that are built around fulfilling those functions. Prosperous online communities are no different. The people involved in online communities are the same people involved in outside communities. These people need structure, guidance, and freedom all balanced perfectly in order to make online communities as valuable as other communities and to make people want to be a part of them.

I found it very interesting when Scott Moore hosted a session called Psychology For The Community Manager. He took psychology principals on human behavior and analyzed them, explaining how these principles relate to behaviors in online communities as well. One example he gave was the Bystander Effect. This principle states that people are less willing to offer help to someone when others are present. This is because people tend to feel like someone else should be the one to do it, or because they fear that they will be judged on their actions and instead do nothing. Applied to online communities, Scott gave an example of how the degree of community moderator involvement can greatly affect the extent to which members help each other. If members feel like the moderators are ever-present and that they will do everything, then members are not as willing to solve their own or other people’s problems. The lesson here was that while your moderators are essential to communities, managers need to be aware of their impact on the member engagement and shape the community norms so that members will help each other to a reasonable extent and turn to moderators in advanced cases.

I am surprised that more people don’t connect the world’s knowledge of psychology and sociology to online community development. Oftentimes people who build online communities take the stance that social media is brand spanking new and that everybody is experimenting and learning everything from scratch. While there are aspects of social media which are a definite departure from many traditional corporate viewpoints, there is no need to start with a blank slate. That’s one of the reasons why people are always asking the same questions year after year. Instead, follow Newton’s lead and innovate by standing on the shoulders of giants. Utilize existing resources and tap into the knowledge of those who have been there before you. Then you’ll be years ahead of everyone else.

Jeremy Latimer

Community Myth Busting – OCUE2009 Presentation Notes

This entry is a summary of a presentation we made at last week’s Online Community Unconference East meeting in NY. The session was attended by roughly 20-25 members and lead by our president, Mike Rowland.

The idea of the session was to drive discussions regarding many of the common ideas around community that have been published/promoted/blogged about as if they were absolutes rather than the experiences of a few. The topics covered the following:

1. 90-9-1 Rule- Comes from concept of Participation by Jakob Nielson. Worked pretty well in early 1990s when published. Major impacts on this idea have been adoption of online communities since 1990, broadband adoption, social networks, etc. We find that the numbers don’t hold and should not be relied upon in selling a project to management or in goal setting due to the wide variances we’ve measured with over 40 communities over the past eight years.
   - At Participate.com, we modified the rule to use as an outreach rule of thumb.
   - At Impact Interactions, our clients have ratios all over the map
   - It’s more important to measure the quality of interactions as it relates to your objectives instead of trying to work towards a specific ratio
2. Self-Policing Communities – Using volunteers to moderate and report violations is a hot trend for organizations to buy into right now. But it’s been that way since at least 2000 when we spoke of hyper-affiliates and enthusiasts. Our experience has shown that most community members cannot be relied upon to keep the community moving forward.
   - Volunteers will catch some violations, but mostly report content that they don’t agree with. This forces community team to review content twice or more which is inefficient
   - Volunteers are good at defensive work (spam, porn, etc.) but do not align with your organization’s objectives in most cases and won’t faciliate most B2C communities (B2B support communities, they usually will keep the conversations moving forward towards a resolution.)
   - Data in our presentation that we’ve been tracking each year for clients shows that members generally report about 20-30% of all violations in any given month. You still need moderation…
   - Our surveys of multiple community members (both B2B and B2C) over time shows that members don’t want to be classified as a tattle tail, nor do they believe it is their responsibility to keep the community free of junk, nor do they want to handle being attacked for removing or editing members’ content for violations.
3. Personas – There are strong feelings around this topic. The term authenticity comes up quite a bit when discussing personas when what is really meant is transparency.
   Great conversations on this one, with no conclusion reached about using personas or not.
   - Most personas get blown by members because the host creating the persona doesn’t think through the process and character, misuse the persona to cheerlead the organization and its products, is so unbelievable (master of health issues, political issues, computer technology, astrology, etc.), or is used to sell in the community. All of these are wrong and should be avoided.
   - Where personas work well is very, very limited. In new communities, personas can help seed conversational content and help demonstrate norms. In a flame war, they can help diffuse the situation (especially in the case of unjust attacks). Over time, as the community grows, the role of the persona should diminish.
4. Volunteers/Hyper-Affiliates as Good Guys – Beware the myth that your top people will always love and support your community.
   - The more volunteers/hyper-affiliates you have is not always a good metric
   - They don’t always follow the rules and have no objectivity
   - When a volunteer or hyper-affiliate turns against you, the result is a much larger confrontation than you might think.
   - Once enabled, it is very difficult to make changes to your site/community without a large time commitment to deal with the criticism of your volunteer network.
   - Letting volunteers and hyper-affiliates run the community demonstrates favoritism on the part of the host organization in the eyes of many non-recognized members. It is a double edged sword which if not carefully managed can have very negative consequences on your community’s conversion and engagement ratios.
5. Community ROI cannot be measured – Everyone is familiar with the cost avoidance argument to measure ROI. But after that, the conversation usually stops because the thought is that it is too hard to show the economic value of the community.
   - Don’t confuse value with ROI… they are not the same!
   - You can measure the economic value generated by your community using multiple data sources and methods. We’ve measured the online community ROI for sales (influence on purchase & intent), Marketing (awareness and loyalty), lead generation (development and qualify leads faster), and e-learning (higher achievement and registrations). They all require certain data that doesn’t come just from the community’s metrics.

We’ve uploaded the presentation as a pdf on our web site in our Social Media Resource Center.

Hey! Who’s driving this thing?: Online Community Unconference East 2009

At the Online Community Unconference East, there was a broad range of conversations from ROI and community benchmarks to the psychology behind using online communities. Throughout these sessions I noticed a common theme brought up several times was super user engagement and incentive programs. That in itself is a topic that I was not surprised to hear about. Engaging and encouraging your hyper-affiliated members to contribute regularly drives better content, activity, and engagement throughout the community. Asking these members for feedback, to help out other users when they can, and highlighting them as role models for community behavior is a standard best practice. Where this conversation ventured off path was when I heard the question (I’m paraphrasing here) “My team does not have the time to deal with all of the violations in our community and in this economic climate we just can’t bring more staff on board. Can I get my super users to take on this responsibility?” Simple answer to this one. No.

Giving members of the community the ability to flag content and users that violate the community rules is a valuable tool that allows moderators to identify problems and act more quickly. This is a function that is built in to the majority of community platforms today. But giving members the administrative power to make actionable decisions on the behalf of your organization begins to border on the edges of shirking your own responsibilities and will inevitably leave you asking yourself “Hey, who’s driving this thing?”

No matter how much your members love your product, your brand, your cause; they are not there for your company. They have their own reason for participating in your online community and that reason is often not to uphold all rules and requirements set out by the sponsoring organization. You will find some volunteers that have a great helper mentality and want to do all that they can for the community but can you risk your brand reputation on hoping that one of these members won’t steer the company into oncoming traffic? Remember that these highly active users already have a tremendous sway over the conversation in your community because they are very visible and have built up a reputation to where other members will follow their lead. Handing over administrative tools will only amplify this power.

The level of freedom that you give your members will obviously depend on the type of community and the audience but the ultimate responsibility for running the community needs to lie in the hands of the organization. Volunteer super users cannot take the place of a dedicated and objective moderation team. In our experience of moderating an online community with over 50,000 users and many members that have been deeply involved with the organization online for over 10 years, we find many members that are active in reporting objectionable activities. Despite this, we still see that on average 75% of the terms of service violations are being reported by our moderation team where only 25% of violations are noted by members.

When the internal resources in an organization are stretched too thin to bear the brunt of moderating their communities, contracted moderation services become a viable and cost effective alternative to the expense of hiring additional staff.

If your organization needs help handling the moderation load or are looking for proven moderation best practices, leave us a comment here or Contact Us.

Jen Graziani

Impact Interactions Goes to Online Community Unconference East

Impact Interactions will be attending the Online Community Unconference East tomorrow, Feb. 11th in New York City. Hosted by Forum One, the unconference will be a great chance to find out what other online community professionals are thinking about the direction of the industry and how they’re applying it in real life. I expect that there will be many informative presentations and some great conversation surrounding the future of online community and social media in this economic downturn.

Sure, it’s useful to find a general consensus on social media topics by simply scanning through blog posts and comments in your feed reader but it’s another thing to collaborate and share experiences in person. I think that those of us who interact in online communities and through social media on a daily basis have will welcome the opportunity to actually meet that person that you follow on Twitter or someone who left a comment on your blog.

The real gem of the Online Community Unconference East will be in the knowledge exchange. Social Media is still evolving and many organizations are just now getting into it. There is a lot that can be learned by listening to others tell their stories on successes and failures with social media. Impact Interactions has 9 years of experience in helping organizations like AARP, Cisco, and SAP to build and execute community strategy, manage online interactions, and provide measureable business results. I look forward to using my experiences at Impact Interactions to collaborate on fresh online community and social media ideas and provide insights where I can.

Jen Graziani