JewishBoston.com

Facebook, Twitter, Websites and Online Video: Join us on Feb 10

 
CJP is thrilled to be partnering with the Synagogue Council of Massachusetts on their 2010 Management Symposium, taking place on February 10th starting at 5:00 pm at Temple Aliyah in Needham.

If you're a Jewish communal professional or a volunteer working to manage your organization's communication and social media strategy, this is the event you've been waiting for.  Join us for a practical, strategic, and useful evening of conversation.  All organizations are welcome!

Opening Keynote with Lisa Colton

Social media is catalyzing a communications and marketing revolution.  Join Lisa Colton, founder  of the Virginia-based Darim Online, for a journey from the conceptual through the strategic and all the way to the practical nuts and bolts of planning and executing a social media strategy for your Jewish organization
 
Breakout I - "Staffing Your Social Media Strategy"

Join Lisa Colton to examine case studies from a few Jewish organizations using social media well. Learn how to choose the right tool, and how to staff your social media strategy - from skills and culture to policies and balancing the personal and professional activities online.

Breakout II - "The 2010 Web Site: How to Make the Most of Your Site, and Take It To the Next Level"

While social media is redefining the online landscape, your web site is still your home base, and critically important for your success.  Join Mike Kanarick, President of Jvillage Network, to learn how your Web Site fits into a comprehensive online strategy, how to make the most of what you've got, and how to add important features to your site.

Breakout III - "Maximizing JewishBoston.com for your organization"

Patty Jacobson, CJP's CIO and Director of JewishBoston.com will explain how CJP's new community website, JewishBoston.com, can help your organization reach more people.  Launching March 1, JewishBoston will offer all organizations free event registration tools, e-commerce, blogs, and organizational directory services.  

Schedule, Location, and Registration

5:00-5:30 - Registration, Technology Booths

5:30-9:15 pm - Dinner, Keynote & Breakout Groups

Host - Temple Aliyah, 1664 Central Avenue, Needham, MA

Cost - $75 per person
Sign up - Online, by check, or by calling 617-244-6506, ext. 19.

Note:  I will also be leading the FIRST training session on how to use JewishBoston.com for your organization from 3:00 to 5:00 pm.  Sorry, this one's just for Syngagogues, but we'll be announcing more dates soon.  To reserve your spot, send Liz an email at Lizw@cjp.org.   Don't forget to register for the main symposium as well.

Website metrics and knowledge management

One of the things that can be mind-numbing about websites is just how much data they generate. 

How many visitors did you have today?  Did they just wave or did they stay and talk?  Did they start to do something - register for an event and then change their mind? 

Making sense of these the options reminds me of the knowledge management graphic that that we used during my Notes consulting days. I still like it.

[See Wikipedia for more about the DIKW model.]
 

40 great resources for developing a community management strategy

A straight up shout out to the Venessa Miemis of emergent by design for this great list.

Thank you!

Blogs and civility - building both into JewishBoston.com

As we dive deeper into design, Cantina has asked me and Liz to define the blog moderation guidelines for the community.  It's been interesting and rewarded to think about this as Yom Kippur approaches.

We're imaging that JewishBoston has many opportunities for different types of people to blog.  For example, organizations will have blogs attached to their profiles and be able to share news, announcements, and posts of interest to their supporters and the community at larger.  For JewishBoston, we're beginning to sort out what overarching community blogs we want. Perhaps one for people with young kids, or folks new to the area, etc.  Also, the platform we're exploring, Community Engine, lets any registered user blog.

Technology is one thing, people are another.  It's relatively easy to implement the blogging tools but, boy, is it hard to create an online community that is active, civil, and where things don't get out of hand.

One site that I've been following is Ann Arbor's efforts to create an online newspaper.  It's a great site from a design perspective, very clean, elegant.  Check out this thread on their moderation policy. To me, their policy seems straightfoward and reasonable.  But to a small group of very active bloggers, it feels like big brother is not only watching but also being irrationally controlling.  

But we know we need to create strong policies for the community to work.  Here are just a few of the policies that we're considering:

1.  Do you have to be registered to comment on a post?

2.  Are usernames okay or should people use their real name or something close to their real name (e.g. Patty J, Watertown, MA)

3. Are comments approved before they are made public or is moderation done after the fact?

4. If we delete comments, how do we show what's been deleted?

Complicated, eh?  We'll keep you "posted" on developments; if you have any suggestions, we'd welcome your input.   

Learning from Bing

One of the things that a great site really needs to have is a great search tool. So we've been spending time looking at different search techniques and playing with Microsoft's new search engine Bing.

Bing is a new product powered by Microsoft, it is a search product that is being branded by Microsoft as a "decision engine" as opposed to a search engine. Although I have always used Google for my searching, Bing has some great features that I would love to apply to JewishBoston.com. 

For example...

Search history is a function that I'd love to have. What have I already searched for? This adds a personalization touch that I appreciate.

Bing also outperforms Google when doing a local search.  With each local listing, such as a kosher restaurant, you instantly see a review, photos, a map, directions with real time traffic information, the menu and more from your one search. That's a lot of information from a search!

My other favorite Bing function is the additional information you get when you hover over the right hand side of the search results. Information is displayed such as teaser text plus what else you can find on that given page. 

Imagine if you came to JewishBoston.com and searched for 'families'. Once the search results came up, you could then hover over the results for snippits of more information that could also point you to related events, programs or organizations. Or choose an event and get more information about directions, nearby restaurants and transportation. Wouldn't that make your search more helpful? More in-depth? More useful?

I know that those features make it easier for me to find exactly what I am looking for and that seemingly simple task is sometimes frustrating on community websites.

How do you want to search? What are your favorite search add-ons that make you less frustrated about finding what you need?

Playing with maps

In preparation for rolling out JewishBoston.com, I’ve been compiling information about the resources in our community - the agencies, synagogues, organizations, schools and even kosher bakeries. This is the start of the master list of Jewish Organizations in the Boston metropolitan area that the site will include. As Patty mentioned last week, there are about 500 organization. 504 according to my list to be exact (good guess Patty)!

Once JewishBoston.com is up, it will have built in maps and the ability to search by geography and distance.  But just for fun, I wanted to see what I could build now and create a google map mashup of these organizations. Luckily, there are tools out there to help create custom maps, especially for someone like me who has a love for technology and is web savvy, but is certainly not a programmer.

So here’s what I found.

The easiest way to create a simple map would be to do it in MyMaps in the Google system. This process would require data entry. They have an import option, but the files they ask for are quite a bit more obscure than your standard excel spreadsheet. Definitely not as easy as it should be.

As I searched for easier options, I realized that the first step was to Geocode the organizational spreadsheet. After some failed attempts, I found the BatchGeocode site.  Definitely the right tool. It’s impressively fast and accurate.   Now my spreadsheet had longitudes and latitudes for each location.

This done, I went to MapBuilder and imported the information. (Note: Mapbuilder says it can Geocode for you in the import, but I couldn’t get it to work.) Once I had latitude and longitude coded into my spreadsheet, it literally took minutes to create a map.

Once the map is built, it is really easy to add photos and descriptive information about every location. I haven’t had the opportunity to do this, but what a great tool this could be for any organization who wants to map out their community.

It was fun testing out these tools. With the right information, you don’t have to be a programmer to create and build your own maps.

I'd love to hear some recommendations from you about other helpful mapping tools – or if this information was useful to you.

Click the MyMaps button below to take a look at my map.

The Twitter advantage

The world of social media has grown leaps and bounds in the last few years. More people are adopting these tools and many even say social media is in some ways replacing other more traditional ways of communicating. Though others say it is not.

I will be the first to admit that I have personally fully embraced Twitter, for so many reasons. To communicate with friends, to celebrate my (and my son's) accomplishments, to share ideas with colleagues, to comment on current events and much more.

But it is a good idea for JewishBoston to use Twitter? As an early adopter of the service, my simple answer is yes.

Twitter is a great way for people to get excited about what you are doing. New followers and retweets can extend your communication base and increase your traffic. The trick is to be mindful of your twitter account. Twitter is not a 'set it up and forget it' kind of tool (no social media tool is, in my opinion.. keyword: social), you need to broadcast, follow others and respond and retweet information you believe is of interest to others. Twitter is a conversation, not a soapbox.

Twitter itself has a great guide for getting started as a business on Twitter and there are many other resources out there as well discussing best practices for businesses, community outreach and customer service.

We are just getting our feet wet on Twitter right now, but plan to provide useful information and have great conversation with you there, in addition to the interaction on JewishBoston.com and in person. Click here to follow us on Twitter.

What TagCloud has to say about the JewishBoston.com RFP

We're in the midst of hearing from potential partners who have responded to the RFP.  One of the folks we met with today started off their presentations with a tag cloud of the words in the RFP.  I was impressed with the concept and did a little google search to find an application that can generate the tags.  Here 'tis, from TagCloud:

Note that the one presented today was much better designed than this! Still, graphics are always a wonderful way to present concepts, and this web-generated image does show a clear sense of the RFP. 

What was old is new again

What is the largest social network? What was the first social network?

Did you say Facebook was the largest? Did you claim Friendster, Tribes or bulletin boards were the first? The answer may surprise you.

The answer to both questions... is Email.

One of my Favorite bloggers, Jeremiah Owyang, waxes poetically about this subject but I think there are more questions out there about how we, as consumers and those who choose to opt-in to email newsletters, want to receive our email.

There are many email vendors out there and more than that, an overabundance of companies, non-profits and communities using email as a marketing tool.  In my opinion, the oversaturation of this opt-in marketing tool is causing a yearly decline in open rates. HubSpot offers a good example for these downward trends.

What makes ME open email that I have subscribed to? Personalization. If I can choose what I want to receive, how often I want to receive it and really tailor the contents to my personality, my lifestyle and my geography, I am MUCH more likely to open the email. Otherwise, I just tend to delete them as they arrive and eventually unsubscribe.

How do YOU handle your inbox overload? What do you actually open up and read?