Ginevra Kirkland

community whispering as an art form

I'm a Jill-of-all-trades. I'm a community manager, content strategist, and account manager. I've been lucky to work with some of the best and most interesting companies in the world, large and small. Right now, that's Jetpac and Wieden+Kennedy. In the past, it's been Six Apart, Get Satisfaction, Mule Design, IEEE, JustAnswer, Adaptive Path and more. 

I have a BA in public relations with a focus on digital communication from Virginia Tech. I have a strong flair for design, and a love of all things written. You can find me all over the web, but Twitter's a good place to start.

This portfolio's got samples of my writing, as well as interviews I've done for books like the Web Startup Success Guide and World Wide Rave, press about my community management expertise in Slate Magazine and Ogilvy, an interview launching Social Media Champions, and thoughts on community, copy as design, and productivity.

I'd love to hear from you, so please feel free to get in touch.

we should blog more: the lay of the land

Reader beware: huge hunks of my professional career's been spent in the blogiverse. Lest you be tuning in from the distant past, I want to make it clear before we go on that if you're still picking sides on blogging software, you are probably old school and we should just go get drunk together.

"You should blog more," said one of my good friends. I agree. We all should blog more!

I could take the easy way out of explaining why I hesitate to push "publish", with a backlog of posts in draft. I could blame venue-vertisements like Facebook, tools like Twitter, or beat that old dead horse of the CNN scroll for ruining our collective attention spans.

Blogging is different than it used to be. Before I start to sound all "get off my lawn", I think short-form updates have been good for us as writers and for all of us as humans. People are truly unafraid to share snippets of their lives and connect: with former classmates, family, friends, strangers. Twitter's character limit has helped us get funnier. Brevity begat funny. We're more aware that we've got a limited space in which to capture your dwindling attention.

But, what to use to blog these days? As a writer by trade, and a geek second, I've never needed more than a pretty font, a link button, a big enough text area to type in, and a way to put a picture where I want it. Pretty themes? Bonus! Easy-to-install-and-preview themes? Crucial.

Is this a product chopportunity (challenge+opportunity)?

Tumblr: the hipster secondhand store of blogging. I love it. Like decoupage, collage, a bookmark in my favorite place. Like del.icio.us flipped on its head for 99% visual interest. Pintrest without controls. Kickass themes. A place to share the hey-looka-here-at-this-thing. But, if no one's gonna write on their Tumblr, well:

Mlkshk is better at sharing images for the LOLs. Mlkshk is the internet without the bad news.

Movable Type is and shall ever be my first love. As a freelancer, I haven't had a ton of interaction with the guts of it lately. However, I can't count the times I'll jump up during a TV show to declare "THAT is an MT site!" (Baseball that's so inside, it squares the circle: looking back through some old ProNet archives, I realize how many of my nearest and dearest are people I met at Six Apart. Le sigh.)

Wordpress is for work. The interface of WP always makes me roll my eyes a bit, but it IS a powerhouse of features. It's not my fault that I'm right-brained and thus, just want to delete half of the UI.

TypePad is still my favorite thing for blogging long-form, and it's got its quirks leftover from the olden days that I find charming and you probably find maddening. It's like a kickass house my friends built: I know where to step down or watch my head, but you might not. You probably don't and shouldn't. 

So this still begs the question, and the app: if none of these tools are perfect in the Swiss Army Watch way? That makes me excited that maybe, out there, someone's working on something like OmmWriter combined with Instapaper. Something elegant. Something easy. Something to make writers' lives easier. 

Something that means we'll read the whole thing.

social music #WithMaroon5

Probably one of my most interesting experiences working with Wieden+Kennedy was a social media campaign for Coca-Cola and Maroon 5. The band was in a studio in London creating a track with user-generated submissions via Twitter.

Here's the end result. 

Nerd Orleans - what we learned

Storytelling. Networking for good. Hard work and elbow grease and knowing when to say "I need help!" This presentation is an Ingite-style presentation: how to build a non-profit by breaking down the small pieces. (Bonus points if you get the joke on slide 4.)

Nerd Orleans

View more presentations from Ginevra Kirkland

Nerd Orleans

From the bottom of our hearts, from our salty, sassy city: thank you.

At the rate we’re rebuilding New Orleans, we’ll get everyone home in about 14 more years.

Nerd Orleans started back in March of 2010. Our first (but not last, y’all) project was based on one simple concept: wake up and f'ing do SOMETHING. And we did.

For each of you who put a paintbrush in your hand, added a few dimes to the coffer, donated books (thanks, O’Reilly!) or those who offered plain old common sense advice: thank y’all. Thank y’all. Thank y’all a kabillion times a kabillion. 

From the bottom of our salty, sassy city’s heart: thank you.

We did it.

What’d we learn?

more at nerdorleans.org

Social Studies

Oh hai, I made you a lazyweb.

I've been working on a little side project Social Studies, a Tumblog of social web links for a while now, which you can check out here. Mostly, I like to keep tabs on what everyone sends around in email or Twitter, but it's been a useful exercise to make sure I read/scan the most important bits.

Sort've like Slate in Brief, but it's all your social news that's fit to read. Well, mostly fit to read. I'm planning to do a more careful curation with tags and so on moving forward.

 

so, how does community for companies really work?

Community-building with a company isn't just how entertaining their Twitter stream is, or how many people said they'd attend an event on Facebook. Those tactics may work, to a certain point, and they're a useful way to gain insight with customers and a fun way for customers to talk to brands they love.

What's often overlooks is how savvy, spendy consumers choose to not communicate with a company, and why that ennui might be happening to your business.

For example: I'm happy to interact with Virgin America, Mad Mimi, Zappos, or my credit union for one simple reason: I've got the expectation that my experience will be a good one. I won't mind interacting with them and in fact (gasp! horror!) I may very well enjoy it.

I'm a loyal, brand-aware customer. I tip well, don't complain without reason, and dutifully check in, bookmark, recommend. I have been known to drop off hand-written notes to great restaurants and recommend the hell out of brands I'm passionate enough about to spend my money with. Hence, I don't often complain to a company, even when there really is a good reason.

Why? Empathy, maybe. I'm busy, certainly. I'm gonna mix a metaphor or four to try to illustrate my point.

Community management in the modern age

A community manager isn't your community. No more so than an apartment manager is your apartment.

 

"Community management is a refreshingly simple concept: it’s how you communicate with the people who buy/use/think about whatever it is your organisation produces. And that makes it more than just a marketing channel. It makes it an airway, or a major artery."

- Rob Hinchcliffe, Think Vitamin

 

I'm participating in a panel at Tribecon next week about the State of Community, (say it aloud! In a Very Important Voice!) and I keep noodling around in my head with these somewhat-related points:

• Web communities are growing by leaps and bounds, meaning that...
• There's more new people. Exponentially more. Every. Single. Day.
• How's that influx/population gain impacting the web itself
• Community. How do we define it, or can we, when everyone's here and not just a few of us?

 

In other words, like it or not, your grandmomma's on Facebook, and so are your kids, your boss, and your neighbor. It's past "here comes everybody" now that everyone's at the party. Everyone's here.

Now what?

The way people interact with the world around them is changing because of the everyday use of the social web. I'd love to see the numbers on people who don't even know they've got a Facebook account.

To keep chasing this rabbit down the hole: is Facebook a community in and of itself, or a platform with many loosely-joined communities? Both? Neither? I know that I've been in touch with people I wouldn't still know otherwise, and I see things all the time that make me wince and think: "I'd never say that online." And I used to say everything online.

So here we are, struggling to use and understand this new-to-most technology, to make room for everyone while maintaining what we know. Like a band that only we used to know, it's not only ubiquitously in our attention, but/and connects us now to family, friends, acquaintances and businesses. On the fly, we're redefining what a "friend" means in this particularly peculiar context. Businesses are learning that dubbing a social section of your website a "community" doesn't immediately conjure said community feelings up from the ether.

How does your understanding of good manners work with your grandmomma's understanding of the web? (And how do you stop her from posting every day? And why don't you write to her more?) One part social mores and expectations, another part experience and savvy on the part of you and your connections, and a good dose of alchemy to feel our way through this new way to talk.

How do we determine manners for the web? Damned if even I know sometimes, and I've been participating, watching, and facilitating online interaction for a long time. I'll still shake my head and declare that people were raised in a barn.

There's this amazing chance, then, to still connect in smaller communities while helping everyone be aware that the web itself is a community, too. This whole new set of people need us community pros to figure it out with them, instead of for them. We can't tell them they're a community, instead, we have to remember to demonstrate that we care about it. 

You don't have to be a dork about it. Unless you want to be. If you've been around the web a while, and you're feeling curmudgeonly that there's only inane/insane blather? Be more selective in your reading. Blow up your RSS reader and start afresh. Whinging that no one blogs anymore? Lead by example and show by your trail of faves, likes, comments, photos, and yes! Posts! With words!

Show us what you think the web's about. Reveal your hand a bit.

We can do better, I think, by seeking out more than just our clique. Metafilter, Salon, and yes, even that evil stepchild Gawker are still good starting points for exploration. Get beyond your routine, if you have one. If you don't, build one. Find people whose writing, photos, or whatever they have to share is something you like. Hopefully, something you love. Just find something you'd never known you'd liked all along.

Or, hey, you tell me, smartypants person still reading this far who obviously gets a cookie: what can you do, today, now, to make a small shift, something you'll do that'll make the web better?

 

(Inside baseball and proper thanks to LauraGlu for the link, and Anil for reminding me to blog.)

Community Management 101

Here's a webcast Amy and I did with Get Satisfaction on the basics of community management.

TeuxDeux

Freelancing full-time, moving to a new city, and running a volunteer project means there's a lot of tasks to juggle. That's why I'm glad I found TeuxDeux, a lightweight, lovely task-management tool from Tina Roth Eisenberg (the fabulous designer and blogger swissmiss) and Fictive Kin.

The design of both the web app and the iPhone app are crisp, pretty, and perhaps most importantly, intuitive. There's a grace to great design that I seem to notice much more when I have to switch to something that's inelegant.

There's also a helpful and hiliarious FAQ, demonstrating their appreciation for copy-as-interface.

• Is it true that TeuxDeux is the 16th greatest invention of all time?

  Yes.

• What are the other 15 greatest inventions?

  We can’t go into detail, but we can say that #6 is Nutella.

• How much does TeuxDeux cost?

  TeuxDeux is free. We sell an iPhone app for the basement bargain price of $2.99. We also talk a big game about releasing a premium version in the near future, but who really knows. All that matters is that this TeuxDeux, in all its minimalistic glory, is now and will always be free. (We do, however, accept cookie donations for our daily studio Cookie O'clock!)

 

Along with a Pomodoro timer, this is how I keep all the stuff I'm (quite happily) juggling balanced.

Watch their clever video demo:

TeuxDeux Demo from TeuxDeux on Vimeo.

 

Case Study | Social Business

The Challenge
“South Park Stylist” is a great example of a social business built from the ground up by our team. South Park Stylist’s founder and proprietor, Alison, gives a great haircut and even offers to travel to client’s homes, making her an ideal candidate for getting new clients via social media channels.