Your lurkers are a vital and necessary part of your community and they often make up a majority of your membership but are dismissed as valueless members of the community. Treating your lurkers as if they have no value could be a fatal mistake in managing your community. Many community managers discount the value of lurkers when in fact, they are usually the cornerstone of your community. The panelists will help you understand the measurements you need to use to both understand the value of your community lurkers and how to translate that value back to the business. We will also share ideas on how to keep lurkers engaged and coming back to the community and how they can turn from lurkers into contributors. In this panel, you will learn why your community lurkers are valuable and how to measure their value by understanding how they are contributing to your community, what they are learning from your community, and how they are providing value back to the business. This will be a moderator-lead discussion with plenty of time for Q&A. Learn from a panel with a combined 32 years of community building and management experience.
Heather Strout (@HeatherJStrout), Director, Community Services, Farland Group, has more than 15 years of experience helping companies create better connections with their customers, partners, suppliers, employees, and other stakeholders. Heather’s work across different industries and environments has allowed her to extract the core elements required to create successful, sustainable communities with a shared sense of value and benefit. Her clients have included Alticor, AAA, Environmental Data Resources and IBM. In her role as Director, Community Services at Farland Group, Heather helps clients build and maximize the benefits of online communities and effectively leverage the wide ranging social media tools available to connect with their target audience.
Heather’s previous experience includes working as a Community Consultant at Mzinga where she helped Mzinga's clients build strategies to make their communities a success for themselves, their organization, and their community members. Heather’s professional experience includes client relations, project management and online community building and management. Heather has her undergraduate degree in Communications from Florida State University, and her MBA with a focus on information management from McCombs School of Business, University of Texas, Austin. Heather is a member of The Community Roundtable, a virtual table where social media and community practitioners gather to meet, discuss challenges, celebrate successes, and hear from experts. She is also a regular at Social Media Breakfast Austin and a member of Social Media Club, Austin. Find her on twitter at http://twitter.com/heatherjstrout.
Jim (@jimstorer) is a Co-Founder and Principal at The Community Roundtable. He is an experienced community builder and social media strategist. Over the last ten years he’s built and managed communities and consulted with both start-ups and large enterprises on how to effectively build lasting value with community and social media solutions.
As a social media/community strategist he’s advised a wide range of clients including Aetna, WebEx, Deloitte, EDR, iRise, Amway, Babson College and others. He was an active contributor and editor on two books on the impact of community and social media on traditional business and political practices:
- We Are Smarter Than Me: A collaboration of Wharton, MIT and thousands of business innovators, worldwide. Drawing on their collective “in the trenches” experience, the wearesmarter.org community (and subsequent book) revealed what does and does not work when you bring social networks and communities into your decision-making and business processes.
- Barack Inc.: This book spells out the lessons of the Obama presidential campaign and goes on to illustrate them, citing companies that have used similar techniques to succeed.
Early in his career Jim managed very large communities (100k+) and very small peer networks (150+) that served as great foundation for his consulting and strategy engagements. He blogs occasionally on community, social media, food and craft beer on the sites below.
Mark Wallace is the VP, Digital & Social Media for Environmental Data Resources, Inc. (EDR) and commonground – the global social network for environmental and commercial real estate professionals. Since Wallace has joined EDR, Commonground has received multiple awards including the coveted Forrester Groundswell Award as the Top B2B Supporting Social Networking site in 2009 and multiple Environmental Business Journal Awards for innovation. Prior to joining EDR, Mark was one of the founders of an enterprise social networking software company called Shared Insights which is now known as Mzinga. Mark’s insights into B2B social media are the result of building online communities and social networks for more than 10 years and he has worked with many market leading firms including Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, Amway, and WebEx. He is regularly invited to speak at social media conferences and expositions across the US and his insights have been featured in leading publications including Mashable, Scotsman Guide, CRM Magazine, Pollution & Engineering, & Site Selection.
Mike Pascucci has been managing, developing and enhancing online communities since 1998. Mike managed eBay’s online community for 5 years, including developing and enhancing the features and functionality that eBay’s members had at their disposal (Blogs, Forums, Profiles, Q&A forums, eBay “My World”). Mike also led the charge in incorporating consumer feedback into all aspects of the Product Development Life-cycle by managing the “Voice of the Community” program. During his final hear at eBay, Mike also held the position as International Global Community Manager where he spent his time consulting with all international teams and worked with them to figure out how they could leverage their community in order to increase their bottom line.
After eBay, Mike worked at Shared Insights and Prospero which eventually became part of Mzinga (a White labeled SaaS community platform) and worked with large corporations such as ESPN, ABC News, FOX, and American Express and Liberty Mutual to help them develop strategies to effectively manage their online communities in order to increase their loyal fan-base.
During his last year at Mzinga, Mike managed and led a Community Moderation Business unit, increasing sales (2x) and retention rates to 75%.
Mike has been involved in all aspects of Social Media and Online Community building over the last 12 years, and through his experience has been able to effectively assist clients in developing and implementing successful initiatives to build for success.
