We thank all of you for your interest and support. And, by the way, if you're say, a digital agency or a large company that wants to reach a lot of communications influentials, we would entertain the possibility of a sponsorship.
As some of you know, Robin and I have taken what we've learned here and formed a company called Social Media Today LLC that specializes in building BtoB web properties around particular communities of interest and helping our customers build and expand their influence within those communities. I'm delighted to report that we have an office, employees, furniture, and--most importantly--a couple of marquee customers and several excellent prospects.
One of our revenue-producing sites, MyVenturepad, is a business community for owners and managers of companies with fewer than 500 employees. It is sponsored by SAP and we owe a debt of gratitude to a lot of people there who have helped get our business going. MyVenturepad is growing even faster than SMT and if you blog about small business topics, we encourage you to add your blog to our content flow. You don't have to register again, just log in with your SMT user name and password and set up the Autopost. Your mug shot and profile will follow you.
Our other sponsored site is called The Customer Collective which we built in partnership with Business Week for Oracle Corporation and which is aimed at senior marketing people in large organizations and more traditional sales and marketing oriented than SMT. You can also log into that one with your SMT info and set up your blog, as long as you don't work for SAP. (Sorry, guys; we tried.)
Here's is what we've learned so far. Social media community-building is a learn-by-doing process. We decided from day one not to do strategy because, frankly, the whole social media thing was so new a year ago that nobody really knew for sure what would work. Like ex-KGBs agents reinventing them for the post-Soviet future, every marketing exec in America was (and still is) racing to position themselves as a social media expert. We decided to start by building communities based on what we had learned in more than a combined 40 years of experience in marketing, advertising and big company communications (and my experience in building the most successful classical music community on the web in 2005 before Gartner ever heard of social media) and let the strategy unfold as we learned and developed best practices. For big companies the risk of such an approach is small--for the price of a couple of wasted spreads in Forbes--we'll build and manage a community for you for a year
Beyond the obvious self-serving reasons I'm telling you all this is that I've heard a lot of chatter around here lately about "execution." Maybe even a little smug self-congratulation from certain quarters for having moved beyond the "strategy" phase to the point of actually almost doing something. Welcome, new community builders. Where have you been? Have a cookie.