kevinmic.com

Last Friday, October 31st, was my 37th birthday. It turned out to be my best birthday yet!

Two offers

The night before my birthday, I received another job offer. This means I started the day with two offers in hand, from Dimdim and from Mzinga.

Patrick Moran (@patrickmoran ), CMO at Mzinga, made me an offer for a Web Director role. Mzinga has great technology and people and I could easily see myself working for Patrick. I even had the opportunity last week to meet with Barry Libert, Chairman, and Rick Fault , President & CEO. They both seem to work very well together. In the end, I called Patrick Friday morning to thank him for the offer, but to decline. I feel the new role at Dimdim is where I need to be right now. It was tough coming to my decision, the offer was competitive, the challenges interesting, and Mzinga has some great people.

Later that morning, I spoke with Steve Chazin, CMO of Dimdim to let him know I would like to be the next employee at Dimdim. I accepted the offer for the Community Manager role at Dimdim because it gives me the opportunity to focus my attention more directly on building relationships with customers and participating the broader online conversation. Dimdim also has an excellent team and I’m sure I will be constantly learning new things. Steve has a great set of experiences and insights. (see his blog, MarketingApple .) I’m looking forward to working directly with him.

We’ll be sorting out the start date this week, but it was very nice to accept the offer on my birthday.

Many good wishes

The web rocks! I’ve believe this for about 15 years, but I love being reminded. I’m a fairly social kind of person and over the past few years I’ve connected, reconnected, and met many new people through the web. This year I was amazed when birthday wishes came pouring in via a number of mediums. I received 4 traditional cards via postal mail. (I’ll be the first to admit I try hard to remember birthdays but I’m terrible at getting birthday cards in the mail, so I’m not complaining) Here’s the breakdown of my birthday wishes this year:

• 24 via Facebook
• 14 ecards/emails
• 6 over Geni
• 4 calls
• 5 via twitter
• 3 via IM
• 1 SMS
• 2 automated emails (from DCU and webmaster-talk.com, and the best part was they only wished me a happy birthday, no other messaging or ads)

A few people even wished me a happy birthday through more than one medium. For me, it doesn’t get any better than having people wish you a happy birthday from across the US, UK, Spain, and Germany.

Conversation among customers has grown online and marketers realize they need to be part of it.  That’s great, but one thing bugs me — why aren’t more people talking about engaging in a way that can be sustained?

I’m not seeing enough conversations on making sure the efforts are sustainable. There’s a post from Sean O’Driscoll called Nuggets form Social Media workshops where he talks about participating in the conversation (section #8). It’s the best advice I’ve heard so far:

Take the time to step back and do the analysis work to understand where the conversations are taking place, how do you categorize them, who are the influencers, what should the internal accountability model be for taking action, ensure you are trained/ready to participate, determine what are you trying to accomplish and how will you sustain the participation.  Nothing like deeply listening before you start talking to help ensure what you are doing is “joining the community.”  (“Nuggets from Social Media workshops as of late” by Sean O’Driscoll)

Sean is absolutely right. Of course you want to engage in the conversation, but you need to do it in a way that gives you the greatest impact and you can sustain.

I don’t know about you, but for me there is nothing worse than a company jumping into the conversation, then suddenly disappearing.  Customers will read into it — and their first reaction won’t be “it’s a shame company x doesn’t have enough people able to participate in this great conversation.”

I’d love to continue this discussion with more specific examples you’ve seen (good or bad).  Please share in the comments.

-k

Lee Lefever has posted another video, Social Media in Plain English on the Common Craft blog.

It takes a look at the different perspective needed for social media — “for the people, by the people.”

-k