What started in 2007 as the Tendenci User Conference, was canceled in 2008 due to a very unwelcome hurricane, has now morphed into SchipulCon 2009. Planned by @MagsMac, the conference has a great lineup of speakers including Deirdre Breakenridge, the author of PR 2.0.

The full SchipulCon 2009 Agenda is posted on the site. And registration is here.

And of course a HUGE thanks to our sponsors without which this would not be happening!

"Social Software is Bigger than Search" is something we say around the office a lot when discussing Tendenci.  So I really liked this quote sourced from  Bubble Generation (via Eric "Mr. Snarky" Rice)

Web 2.0 cannot live up to its (enormous) potential to create value that’s
structurally disruptive until and unless technologists understand consumer
dynamics.

Web 2.0 can’t live up to its game-changing potential until and
unless the geeks step outside and think outside their own box of geekery.

and later in the post

…why are these issues so difficult for the geeks to grapple with?

My
answer: because for geeks, marketing, branding, advertising, etc are eeeeevil.

A long time ago I met with a VC on a different project and everything went great.  Until the question of "how are you going to market the product" and my answer was (seriously) "I am going to hire a marketing manager."  Straight faced.  I said that.  For the record – that is officially the WRONG ANSWER.

So ironically if you read the bubble generation post, it was a question by a VC that led me to focus on marketing first.  To obsess on the client’s success.  Using technology yes, but the tech serves the marketing and the sociology.  And the truth is after a while programming isn’t so tough and humans remain interestingly complex creatures worthy of study. So it all works. Sort of.

Some eye candy for those interested in Associations and Organizational dynamics. 

First, I firmly believe that successful online organizations can be identified by looking at three primary characteristics:

1. Distributed Authoring – humans adding content and the wisdom of crowds
2. Strong Subgroups – meaning active committees under 150 people typically
3. Transparency – a level playing field must be in place for all with controls

These were first articulated in "Engaging Your Membership: What Are You Doing and What Should You Be Doing?" and the Distributed Authoring bullet was expanded in "The Concept of Distributed Authoring for Membership Associations – Getting Your Association to “Virtualization”.  And of course everything we program in Tendenci is designed to facilitate these three organizational goals.  But at the end of the day it is up to the association to determine the action and policies it will demonstrate.

Some data.  Here is one graphical snapshot from a randomly selected Tendenci client in aggregate.  I changed the numbers a bit, but in a statistically consistent way so the trends are valid.

This first graph is almost completely useless.  I am just sharing my initial frustration.  With over 10k users on the site, less than 50 are adding content for others to read. 

I filtered out stuff like editing a profile or registering for an event as those are more data entry in my mind.  Authoring means contributing an article for the newsletter or posting an event on the calendar (again this is subjective and my opinion).

Of the members of the sample association adding value to the group as a whole through authoring content, they follow something close to a power curve. 

I did try fitting a logarithmic and an exponential distribution, but the power curve was the closest match despite the divergence as it approaches zero.

This last graph is a pie chart limited to people who actually added content.  Again the data has been changed a bit, but not much, so the trends are consistent with the actual distribution.  Note again that there are two or three super users adding most of the content that is read and absorbed by the entire membership. 

Specifically the top 5 users are adding almost 85% of the content. 

One possible explanation is that someone is functioning in an administrative role (not the security level but the act of functioning administratively) with others emailing articles and society events to post on the site.  This is likely in my opinion based on observing interactions and I made no effort to correct the data for author versus typist.

A possible future post or article should probably look at which articles and events are being read the most.  Something along the lines of what AttentionTrust is interested in as long as it can be done anonymously for the users (nobody likes big brother, especially me!).  Thanks!

From an email link from Lauren to http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-11-22-n58.html I visited VisitorVille web statistics for the first time.  Brilliant.  Not sure how it would scale, but what a cool refreshing new look at understanding social patterns.

What it appears to do well is show you the progression over time of traffic.  What is still missing apparently is an easy method of drawing conclusions about motives based on large amounts of aggregate data without walking through every site path.  That problem I will leave to the Web Analytics Association (disclosure: WAA is a Tendenci client of ours so I am biased.)

I finally got to visit Memphis for the launch of the new Tendenci organization based web site for the Public Relations Society of America Memphis chapter.  The PRSA Memphis web committee did a great job of launching the site on a tight timeline. 

Shout out to Kim Lange on our team for driving this project.  Definitely in the category of "easier said than done" – not that guiding PR professionals is like herding cats, but there are easier tasks in the world.