Most of these helpful folks are well-connected to a large network of people, but they don’t build this network by being selfish and difficult to work with. The people I know who fit this mold are usually generous and “pay it forward” in return for the help they’ve received from other people. Paying it forward is something I’ve tried to achieve in my professional life, and here are a few ways that I do it:

• Career mentoring. While formal mentoring programs work well for other people, they always seem a little forced to me. However, I’m often happy to sit down with people just starting their career or moving into a new one to provide suggestions and ideas for ways to improve. If nothing else, I can share what’s worked for me over the years and hope that they find something useful in it.
• Sounding board. I like to spend time talking to people who are working on interesting, innovative projects. In most cases, I learn something from them while also providing them with some feedback. Providing a fresh perspective and looking at something for the first time can often uncover things you miss when you’re very close to a subject.
• Spontaneous connections. Not everyone asks for help or even knows that they could use some assistance. When I see someone struggling with a project or activity, I’ll try to make a spontaneous connection to someone I think might be able to help. However, this only works if it’s unobtrusive and not too pushy. In these cases, I’ll usually point out that I know someone who has been through something similar, then offer to make an introduction. This leaves it up to them to decide if they want the introduction or want to continue on their own. I know that I’ve been grateful for similar connections in the past.
• Organize events. Organizing in-person events and meetups where people can connect and collaborate is another way to pay it forward. We’ve all attended events organized by other people and a good way to contribute back to the community is by organizing our own events, or helping someone else organize one. This gives other people a place to connect with like-minded people while giving you some additional visibility at the same time.
• Community participation. There are many existing online communities where you can contribute some expertise or be helpful as time permits. Answering questions or providing some other help as part of an online community is a great way for busy people to pay it forward and help others while making fewer commitments that they might not be able to fulfill when time is tight.

How do you pay it forward?

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I’ve been thinking about how community building and events fit together a lot lately, and I wanted to share some suggestions for both attendees and organizers.

Evening Activities

As an organizer, always try to make sure that we have some fun and interesting evening activities for attendees. Just in the past year at events, I’ve toured the Guinness Storehouse and attended a football game (that’s soccer for the Americans) in Dublin, gone on a river dinner cruise in Boston, had a casino night at a resort in Oregon and attended more parties than I can count at SXSW. Here are a few tips for event organizers to maximize community building at evening activities:

• Have food and drinks (free if possible). This encourages people to actually attend rather than skipping out to have dinner in small groups.
• Organize group transportation. This removes one more barrier to attend and encourages people to continue talking to people during the trip. I’ve seen this work as a group walking a few blocks to the event, or in waves of buses.
• Encourage mingling. You want to encourage people to move around and not sit in the same place with the same few people all evening. Some standing tables, activities (like casino nights) that encourage people to move around and having multiple rooms with different things to see and do can all encourage people to talk to more people.
• If budgets are tight, this isn’t the place the skimp. In most cases, you can find a company to sponsor the evening activities if you don’t have enough money in the regular event budget.

For attendees, you should resist the urge to skip the evening activities and go back to the hotel to do “real work.” Remember that meeting people is a goal of your event, and may be even more important than attending sessions; don’t short change yourself by going to the conference and then spending all of your time doing work that you could have done at home. Focus on the conference; you can always do your work on the plane. Here are few tips to help you make the most out of the evening activities as an attendee:

• Resist the urge to sit with people you already know well, or sit with one friend and invite a few people that you don’t know very well to join your table.
• Move around and talk to a few people that you don’t already know.
• If there aren’t any evening activities, make your own. Find something fun to do, and invite a group of people to join you.

Play Games

I’m not talking about those dorky team-building games. Organizers should resist the urge to attempt to force people to play stupid games under the guise of meeting new people. I’m talking about fun games, like Mafia and Werewolf, that can be played by large groups where attendees can meet new people while having a great time. Werewolf is a particularly good game for community building because it gives people something to do and something to talk about while putting everyone on the same level: celebrities, students and executives all play as equals. People who doesn’t know many attendees can play werewolf and meet some new people, and for others, it helps get them out of their little club of friends to meet someone new. I like to make additional decks of Werewolf cards to hand out on the first night to encourage people to play other ad hoc games of Werewolf on future evenings. It’s also a great activity for after some of the more official evening activities.

The beauty of these kinds of games is that anyone can organize a game, since they don’t really require any special equipment and can be easily played with scraps of paper in lieu of printed cards. You don’t need to be a conference organizer, and I encourage conference attendees to organize evening games. If you aren’t a fan of Werewolf, there are plenty of other, similar games.

Shared Spaces and Hacker Lounges

When I organize events, I try to make sure that we have some kind of shared space (or hacker lounge for the tech events) where people can hang out together to talk or collaborate on some projects. If there are a lot of people traveling to the event and staying in a hotel, I try to put this lounge in the hotel and keep it open 24 hours, which encourages late night games and people getting together to be social or work together. All you really need is a room and few tables and chairs at the minimum, but to really encourage people to use it, you can add some free snacks, ping pong tables, video games or other social activities. This is a great place for people to get together for late night games; I’ve played many Werewolf games until the wee hours of the morning in these lounges. For single day events or local conferences, a big room with tables and power strips that is dedicated to attendees (no sessions) can fill this need.

If the organizer hasn’t provided some kind of shared space, attendees should make one. Declare one of the hotel lounge areas, lobby or bar as the informal lounge, and encourage people to meet you there.

Interested in learning more about the intersection of real-world and virtual collaboration? Come to our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on December 9.

What are your favorite tips for encouraging community building at events?

Photo by Reggie Suplido used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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Here are 10 ways to really connect with others through social media:

1. Focus, focus, focus. It is so easy to get sucked into the social media vortex, flitting from shiny object to tweet to update to post with a panicky feeling that if you don’t see everything, you might miss something important. Sound familiar? Stop the madness, set strict parameters designating time to review your social media channels, and stick to them. You may miss something, but you will find just what you need to find, especially if you heed the next point.
2. Listen attentively. Set up alerts through services such as Google Alerts, SocialMention and Tweetbeep, or one of the many fee-based monitoring services. Go through your alerts to take care of more pressing conversations where you should be paying attention. Then spend time really listening by reading your streams on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like. You don’t have to read everything but what you do read, give it real consideration and look for ways to move to #3.
3. Respond meaningfully. If you want to make an impact in these channels, make sure your responses to others are thoughtful. The occasional “ditto” or “uh huh” aside, every response you make — especially if out in the public stream- – is an opportunity for greater connection. Ask yourself: Is what I’m saying relevant? Will it resonate with my friends, fans and followers? If not, then why bother?
4. Retweet or share. One of the funny things about us humans is that we love to be recognized. In social media channels, recognition comes in the form of retweets, likes, comments and shares. When any of us publishes something, we want to be noticed. By taking notice and sharing what others have posted, we are giving them kudos. Keep in mind that who you recognize is also a reflection of you.
5. Provide value. In your own quest to be noticed and heard, are you giving people a reason to follow you or otherwise connect with you? So many people try to build their Twitter accounts by following a lot of people thinking “oh, they’ll just follow me back” but they haven’t even thought about why someone would want to follow them back. They aren’t yet tweeting or if they are, it is inconsistent and unfocused. The more value you put out there, the more followers you attract.
6. Ask questions. I find that some of my best connections happen when I ask questions. People love to help. And then once I receive good answers, I share those with my followers as well because I know others out there may be asking the same questions I am.
7. Be transparent. There is always a lot of talk about “transparency in social media,” but what does that really mean? I believe it means starting with honesty and being open; handling even difficult conversations in public as long as the only thing at risk is your own reputation. If you are doing good things, honesty and transparency are not a problem. If not, beware.
8. Take your time. We all seem to be in a rush, rush, rush wanting things now, now, now. Calm down. Slow down. You don’t have to hit 500 Twitter followers in your first month out of the gate. You don’t have to have 1,000 or 10,000 people liking your Facebook Page in three months. Sure, it might happen, but you’ll gain more friends, fans, and followers who really care about you by taking your time to care about them. Success in social media is not about accumulation; it’s about meaningful interactions.
9. Make connections. We have a job to do. We have something to sell. We are keenly focused on our own goals and objectives in business. But when you enter social media channels, the focus needs to be on everyone you’re trying to reach. While some people will tolerate your broadcasts of news, articles and information — and a few may even welcome them — most people are using Twitter, Facebook, and other networks to make connections with people as well as discover useful information. Embrace those connections.
10. Smile. What attracts people? A positive attitude. Even when something goes awry in your Twitterstream or you come across dialogue that feels like a backlash, be positive, thoughtful and look at the situation as an opportunity to showcase your honesty, transparency and caring. Everyone makes mistakes and people are more forgiving of those who own up to their mistakes and to be open to conversations about how to remedy the mistakes. Feel criticized in social media channels? Smile, thank others for their feedback, and think long and hard about what is being said about you or your company. There are lessons to be learned.

Social media channels and tools merely provide us more ways we can connect — they aren’t leading us to entirely new and different things that we’ve never seen before, but they are doing it in interesting, new ways.

How are you really connecting with others through social media?

First image by stock.xchng user cobrasoft

Second image by stock.xchng user hoefi

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• Once I clicked through to try Buzz, there was no way to opt back out.
• Buzz auto-followed some of my clients and my accountant; people that I email frequently, but that I have private business relationships with, not public ones.
• There was no documentation where I could learn more about exactly what it was doing and find a way to stop it.
• There was no link where I could change my settings.

In my case, it was a minor inconvenience, but for other people it was a major business issue and even a matter of personal safety: venture capitalists, journalists and their sources, human rights advocates, and people with past abusive relationships are all example of people for whom this could have been a major problem. I was finally able to find a configuration that I could live with, but it wasn’t easy — the means to do so were spread out over Google Buzz and my Google Profile.

The point of writing this, though, is not to bash Google. Yes, the Buzz team made mistakes, but they heard the complaints and responded very quickly to people’s concerns. They are working to resolve them, and Google is doing a great job of damage control.

Most of the concerns that I mentioned above came out on Wednesday, and by Thursday, Google had made major improvements to Buzz:

• Making the option to display or not display your followers more visible in the user interface
• Adding a block feature for followers
• More clarity over what information is visible to others and what is not

The Google Buzz team continued to work hard over the weekend on even more improvements that are in progress:

• Moving from an auto-follow model to an auto-suggest model
• Not auto-connecting Picasa and Google Reader to Buzz
• Adding easier access to settings, including an option to disable Buzz completely

Yes, Google made some big mistakes with Buzz, but it is listening to its community of users and is working hard to respond quickly with improvements that its users need. I wish more companies would take the time to listen to their community and respond this quickly to make changes to their product. Companies are made up of people, and we all make mistakes. Great companies acknowledge their mistakes and work quickly to resolve the issues and make their customers happy again.

What are your favorite examples of companies who have responded well (or not so well) to public criticism?

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Community management is one of those web worker roles that can be done from almost anywhere, and many of you are community managers in some form. It is such an important role that I did a whole series of posts about community management last year, about online community manager jobs; what community managers actually do; what skills are required to be successful in the role; and the dark side of community management.

Community management can be a tough profession, since so much of what community managers do every day goes unnoticed by most people, which is why it is so important to recognize the community managers that you work with as a manager, coworker, customer or community member. Jeremiah Owyang has a few suggestions for recognizing community managers:

Community Manager Appreciation Day is supported by Bill Johnston, Connie Benson, Rachel Happe, Jake McKee, Sean O’Driscoll, Lane Becker, Dawn Foster, Thor Muller, Amy Muller and Jeremiah Owyang.

How are you planning to thank your community manager?

Photo courtesy TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³.

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Twitter lists

I’ve spent the last few years working with online communities and collaboration technologies, and have come to expect to be able to collaborate with people when using online social tools. As a result, I wish that Twitter lists were more collaborative. Right now, Twitter lists and accounts have a one-to-one relationship. I create a list, and I’m the only person who can edit it. I started thinking about this limitation when Rael Dornfest created his Portland Food Cart list. I’m a huge fan of the Portland food cart scene, so I decided to follow his list instead of creating yet another one. The downside was that as there were some food carts missing from his list, I needed to send @replies to Rael to get him to add them — I couldn’t just add them myself.

The collaboration features that I propose would allow the owner of each list to open them up to allow collaboration/editing from other people. The list owner could always make tweaks, revert changes and have the final say on changes made by other users.

My wish list for Twitter lists includes:

• Open lists: These lists would be open for anyone to edit, and would be a great way for people to add themselves to, say, a conference attendee list or to collaborate on lists of industry experts. To cut down on spam edits, moderation features would be a nice addition.
• Lists open to the people I follow: Anyone that I follow could contribute to my list. This is probably the option that I would use most often. Since I only follow people that I already know, this would be a great way to collaborate while automatically reducing the amount of spam entries added to a list.
• Specific people can edit a list: In the case of the food cart list, Rael could open it up to a few specific people who are passionate about the Portland food cart culture and have those people help him maintain it.
• Copying/cloning: This would be similar to how Yahoo Pipes lets you clone another user’s pipe as a starting point for something that you’ll repurpose for your needs. If someone has the start of a great list, but with a few things that I don’t like, I’d want to be able to copy it and add or delete people from it as necessary.

I’ve focused my wish list around community and collaboration features. What’s on your wish list for Twitter lists?

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In communities, people help each other without asking anything in return. By helping other people solve problems or helping them get ahead, you also increase your social capital, and it becomes more likely that people will help you out at some future point. The catch is that you have to be willing to help people first without any specific expectation that they will return the favor. This is the basic idea behind whuffie, a concept first introduced in fiction by Cory Doctorow in “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,” but applied to today’s communities in Tara Hunt’s “The Whuffie Factor.” If you haven’t read these books, I recommend both of them. I’m currently reading the latter, so whuffie has been on my mind lately.

While the concept of whuffie applies to everyone, it is particularly important for freelancers and other web workers. Those of us working alone need to support and help each other, since we don’t have the same resources as people working on-site at large corporations.

Portland is a town with a large population of freelancers, consultants and telecommuters, and many of these people offer services similar to my own. The natural instinct from some people would be to retreat from these potential competitors in case you might be up for the same job at some point in the future. I encourage you to take an alternate view: focus on cooperation, instead of competition. By helping each other, we make the entire community stronger and more vibrant, thus raising opportunities for the community as a whole.

Here are a few of the things that I do to support my community:

• Be available. I attend a lot of local events, and I am always happy to help people. I give people Yahoo Pipes demos, answer their questions about corporate blogging or other social media, provide advice about finding community manager jobs, and more. Just catch me at a local event, like Beer and Blog, and I’ll always do my best to answer questions or point you to someone else who can.
• Give back. Find ways to give back to your community. A few years ago, I noticed that while Portland had an amazing user group community, we didn’t have enough events that brought people together across technologies. Rather than complain or wait for someone else to organize some new events, I stepped up to help organize events like BarCamp and Ignite Portland. If you attend local events, offer to help out in some way or start a meetup of your own to bring like-minded folks together.
• Share the link love. I read so many amazing blog posts and articles that shape the way that I think about things in more ways than I can possibly count. As a result, I like to share them with other people even when these links go to my direct competitors. I have a couple of ways that I share links with people. I start by bookmarking them in Delicious, and in a weekly blog post, I pick five to ten of those links to share with my readers. I also do a monthly newsletter, and I always include a section for interesting articles written by other people.
• Help promote your community. I try to help other people promote projects that are interesting to me. This often takes the form of a retweet to share some interesting new event, link, or project with the people who follow me on Twitter. Sometimes it turns into a blog post if it’s something that requires a little more explanation.

These are just a few of the more visible ways that I support my community, and they don’t include the one-offs that come in via email or that happen face-to-face. I help people because it’s the right thing to do; the increase in whuffie is a nice side effect for me.

How is your whuffie? What do you do to support your community?

Photo by Aaron Hockley of Hockley Photography, used with permission from the photographer.

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According to some new Twitter research published on the Harvard Business Blog, my usage is unusual:

A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.

To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue — Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

I suspect than many of us fit into that top 10 percent of users who contribute the majority of the content, but I’m a bit concerned about the conclusion that Twitter might be more of a one-to-many publishing platform rather than a community of peers interacting with each other. I’m not sure that the data shown in the blog post leads to that conclusion. I do worry about all of the brands jumping on Twitter to broadcast their marketing messages and tell people about their products and services without really engaging in the conversation. However, there are also many people and companies who engage effectively in the conversation by becoming a part of the community. @replies and retweets are part of the community-focused culture of sharing content that is also a part of Twitter.

As a freelance consultant, clients often ask me about using Twitter, and it can be difficult to get them to understand the conversational nature of Twitter to shift them from thinking of Twitter as a broadcast medium to Twitter as a community of people holding conversations. It’s also important to remember that most people are not likely to be using Twitter as obsessively as I do, which makes techniques for mining and monitoring Twitter even more important for the average Twitter user.

(As an aside, the Harvard Business blog post also contains some interesting observations about gender and Twitter usage that are outside of the scope of this post, but are definitely worth a read.)

What are your thoughts about Twitter as a conversation vs. a way to broadcast content?

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In her spare time, Schweber serves on the Mayor’s Economic Recovery Cabinet and chairs the Small Business Development Workgroup of the City of Portland’s Small Business Advisory Council. She also sits on the City Club of Portland’s Research Board and in June 2007 was appointed by Governor Ted Kulongowski to serve on Oregon’s Commission for Voluntary Action and Service. Her blog is her attempt to reconcile her ever-growing interest in small business with her wonkish tendencies.

WWD: Why did you decide to open a coworking space in Portland?

Schweber: Those are actually two separate questions. Why did we decide to open a co-working space, and why Portland?  The coworking idea came from experiences David and I had as freelancers and the logistical and social challenges we faced. We had also heard many of the same complaints from our colleagues. We saw that there were no options in Portland for freelancers wanting occasional work space outside their home, a private meeting space or a meeting space that could accommodate more than a couple of people. So we decided to fill that niche.

Why Portland? Portland is a small town masquerading as a medium-sized city. No one is more than one or two degrees from everyone else, so communities connect organically. Since we wanted to create a workspace community that was independent of industry or sector, Portland was the natural place for us.

WWD: How do you think that the coworking market in Portland is different than or similar to other cities, like New York and San Francisco?

Schweber: It depends on the type of coworking space. The idea for CubeSpace’s undedicated workspaces came from a New York Times article about a writer’s coworking space in New York. Given the expensive housing market and tiny apartments in New York, a workspace outside one’s home is almost a necessity. People there literally have their home office in a closet. A coworking space would be a huge benefit to newcomers who freelance or telecommute. It would provide an entry point for making connections, a critical need in a city that size.

There are some really successful coworking spaces in San Francisco who cluster around industry. Maybe that is because the dot-com era brought a lot of tech folks into the region and they are naturally drawn to each other.  Several San Francisco to Portland transplants have told me that San Francisco is a very competitive city that inhibits the formation of communities. I can see that being both a help and a hindrance to the San Francisco coworking market.

WWD: What are your biggest challenges during these tough economic times and what have you been doing to mitigate your risk as a coworking business?

Schweber: For better or worse we began to see the economic downturn very early on.  Microbusinesses and startups often lack the cushion necessary to sustain themselves in a down market.  But the early warning signal gave us time to diversify our revenue stream.

When adding additional services or resources, we have always taken the lead from the community. We had seen the challenges that our community face with client management, fee structures, invoicing, etc. and had been offering assistance on an ad hoc basis. As we saw more folks laid off and looking for work, and more work being contracted out, we formalized contract and project management services. These services give customers who are not members incentives to spend more time at CubeSpace, which also strengthens community ties.

WWD: What is your vision for the coworking industry over the next 5-10 years? How do you think the industry will change?

Schweber: We are still in the early days of coworking, and it remains a foreign concept to many.  People who work in tech have become comfortable with non-traditional work spaces because the dot-com era changed the office paradigm. That is why we have seen tech workers on the leading edge of coworking. The economic downturn has made people much more price-sensitive. The high unemployment rate is creating more business startups whose owners are desperately seeking support and community. Those two elements combined are strong incentives for people to look beyond what they are familiar with and venture into coworking spaces. The industry will have to evolve to meet the needs of these new populations, but it is hard to predict exactly what will change.

There will likely be more traditionally “professional looking” coworking spaces.  The shortage of jobs for recent college graduates will produce more young entrepreneurs who are looking for the mentorship that used to come from their employers.  The range of services coworking spaces offer will increase as the coworking population diversifies.

How do you see the coworking movement evolving over the next 5-10 years?

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Previously on WebWorkerDaily, I talked about the differences in they way that the community conferences are organized and posted an interview with Audrey Eschright, a BarCamp and unconference organizer. This time I was interested in differences in content between traditional conferences and community-organized events.

Since anyone can propose a session at BarCamp, you tend to get more crazy ideas and niche sessions with great information that would never have an audience broad enough to justify a session at most traditional commercial conferences. You also get some terrible sessions and ideas that just don’t make much sense, but the beauty of BarCamp is that you can wander in and out of sessions pretty easily.

Some examples of interesting sessions at BarCampAustin included: How to start an online bacon business in a month, half-baked entrepreneurial theater (where people come up with crazy business ideas), air ships and more.

I wanted to get a second opinion on the content, so I asked Selena Deckelmann, an unconference organizer currently working on a community-organized, open-source event in Portland, about the future of community-organized events vs. more traditional conferences. Here’s her take on the differences:

“I think community-organized/grassroots events are the only way effective conferences focused on learning and getting work done will be organized in the future. I don’t think companies dedicated to conference management can keep up with and offer the technical depth and 1:1 networking opportunities that a focused, community-driven event can.

Photo by Kirrily Robert

The smaller, more focused and more local you can make events, the better educational, personal and professional development opportunities people get.

There’s a point of diminishing returns when it comes to a 10k-person event. Sure, it’s exciting to be with that many people, and interesting to see what kinds of entertaining spectacles companies come up with to draw in a crowd in an expo. But, for me, I get way more out of a 1:1, a 10-15 person group discussion. If the goal is education and learning, you need smaller, focused groups.”

Many people underestimate the value of small group discussions as an opportunity to learn about new ideas. Being able to participate in a small group discussion where each person can ask more questions and interact on a personal basis, rather than the traditional presentation and panel model at most commercial conferences, can be a great learning experience.

What types of conferences do you prefer? What are your experiences with the content differences between traditional conferences and community-organized events?

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