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Phil's Blogservations
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Posted by philgomes 6:39 PM
Instructor's Notebook: PROpenMic At Six MonthsCross-posted from Authenticities:
Auburn University's Robert French is to be congratulated for what he's accomplished with PROpenMic. In just six months, the site stacks up quite favorably in every measure to the likes of myragan.com (the closest thing I can compare it to) and even some other well-known PR-focused sites.Technorati Tags: propenmic, auburn, robertfrench, edelmanI'll let Robert's analysis speak for itself. For my part, there are a number of lessons for all PR practitioners here, both new and experienced.
First, no Web 2.0 app has a "sweat equity" plugin. If you're not willing to put some serious hours and effort into building a useful digital watering hole, then it's probably a wasteful exercise.
Second, PROpenMic was a site that truly filled a need — a place where students, faculty, and practitioners can interact on a level playing field. If you don't have that — something either new, highly focused, or dramatically better — then there's not much you can do.
Third, if you want a community like this to be successful, you have to enforce some rules. Robert has been great in terms of making sure that hucksters, fakesters, and poachers are kept in line.
Fourth, you have to roll out the red carpet. It's the rare newcomer that doesn't get a personal welcome from Robert on their profile page. That means Robert has probably written more than 2,300 such welcomes in six months. My Ask Phil group is just north of 120 members and I'll occasionally miss some. (Nothing personal.)
In short, building a successful online community (however you define "success") is not merely a technical issue of plugging one widget into another widget and tagging the blood-vessel-bursting bejeezus out of it. Those that think so richly deserve failure.
So there's a lot that we can all learn from Robert's example. I strongly encourage readers (especially students and faculty) to join PROpenMic and learn from (and through) this resource.
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This site has virtually no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Clicking on a link doesn't automatically send a 1/2-cent donation to UNICEF. You can't buy, sell, auction, swap, find a date, win friends, influence people, cross the chasm, or decode the human genome using this site. You won't get free email. You won't win a free video game console. This site will not end world hunger, foster peace in the Middle East, help you smell better, teach you how to swing dance, or move the global economy from petroleum to hydrogen fuels. You'll learn a lot about this site's master, though, which amounts to a haphazard collection of strange and useless facts that pretty much won't help you at all.
Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil's demented imagination. Hell, to be perfectly honest, even Phil disagrees with what he thinks sometimes.
ABOUT THIS BLOG
This is the blog of Phil Gomes, SVP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL.
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