My first social media experience came over the AM sports talk radio air waves. It was my junior year of high school that I discovered The Jim Rome Show (wikipedia) and I am still listening. Sure radio is old news, old media and loses out to my iPod or even CDs most of the time. Yet the lessons I learned from Jim Rome and my fellow Clones from The Jungle continue to help me in my online marketing job today.

Lesson #1: Ask your customers to “Have a Take”.

I consider The Jim Rome Show social media because of the participation he asks from the Clones (the show’s listeners). The show is an amazing example of co-creation. Rome asks his listeners that call in to “Have a Take”, meaning have an opinion and purpose when you call in. This contribution and the enforcement by Jim is unlike any other AM talk show I have encountered. It showed me that I can ask my customers to contribute. The open source software market in which I work asks it’s customers and users to contribute in many ways that are extremely important to business and software development. Not all customers need to contribute, but why not ask more of those that are willing to do so? People like to participate and be a part of something. Social Media makes this contribution and participation easier for customers to do and easier for companies to facilitate. Find ways to use it and use it to improve your business.

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I’m thrilled to announce that several of the authors featured on the Conversations Matter blog will be speaking at the upcoming BlogWorld 2008. Joining me on September 20 from 11:00am - 12:00noon for what I’m certain will be a fascinating discussion on corporate social media will be Michael Brito of Intel, Tac Anderson from Hewlett-Packard, Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations, and Anne Plese from Cisco.

Ever wonder how successful social media marketing programs really are when executed in the real world? As members of this panel we will discuss our successful and not-so-successful social media marketing and PR programs. Titled Beyond Blogging: Stories & Social Media Lessons Learned in the Real World our fun panel of everyday experts is bound to be both entertaining and enlightening.

Rumor has it there are discounts available for those interested in attending. Tac Anderson has a code listed on his site anyway. So he must know. Be sure to let us know if you plan to attend. We’d love for you to join us for a shot of tequila.

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There’s a new facebook group trying to influence Barack Obama’s choice of Vice President. The story here is that in the old days, there really wasn’t any way for Barack Obama to get real time polling information outside of a few hundred poll calls and there certainly wasn’t an effective way for a community to quickly ban together to influence such a decision.

But now there’s an outside chance 100k people might directly influence his VP pick – in real time. That’s awesome – that’s the power of Web 2.0. Other than physically assembling thousands of people for a riot or march or standing in front of Lucky’s collecting signatures – how else can this number of people collectively have a voice in such a short time frame? This isn’t a petition – it’s a near real time shout. These aren’t just signatures, they’re virtual profiles that carry all the weight of an individual’s identity.

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It’s been nearly a month since the launch of the Cadence user community. Summers are generally slower in terms of traffic for many online communities, as folks tend to take vacations, so I was somewhat concerned about getting the necessary momentum to ensure success.

At the Online Community Unconference in June, one of the tracks was called “Community Year One,” hosted by Joe Cothrel, a pioneer in the online community space. Joe was instrumental in helping me get the discussion forums on the right track for the Symantec Technology Network, which I launched in 2007. The gist of his recent presentation focused on ways of ensuring that your new user community is successful within the first year of launch. Since his advice worked the first time around for me at Symantec, I attended his presentation as a refresher.

Joe started by introducing a couple of key “rules”: the 90-9-1 rule and the 30-10-10 rule. The first is that 90 percent of visitors will browse the forums; 9 percent will participate casually; and 1 percent will account for most content. And, within any 30-day period, 10 percent of people who see an invitation will come, and 10 percent of those will post. Joe calls these “planning assumptions” rather than predictions. You may do better than this, but don’t plan on it.

In other words, community is a numbers game. Get the numbers right, and you’ll be successful. Get them wrong, and you’ll struggle.

Now you might think that this news bodes ill for a company like Cadence, which like many successful business-to-business companies isn’t exactly a household name, and doesn’t have millions of eager customers – just many thousands. So how did we do?

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