Moleskine Monday: Plans for a Masterpiece

Just kidding. It was a productive weekend, and I did find some time to put on the thinking cap. Here’s a summary of some things that ended up in my notebook.

The Future of Community: A standard interview (or dating!) question is “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”. If you were to have asked my this question 5 years ago, I never would have guessed I’d be a Community Manager. I’d even wager that there was no official title for managing a community 5 years ago.

Where will we be with social media and communities in 5 years? It’s hard to say. I don’t even know what the next big network will be, even though I experiment with them as they come up. Do you know why? Because I’ll be waiting for the community to show me the way. There’s no need to make a jump every time there’s a shiny new network or tool. It’s fun (and important) to experiment, but communities are made up of GROUPS of individuals. While one individual cannot dictate what’s next, a group of individuals that create a critical mass can. Seth Godin talked about this in his post “Guy #3“. I’ll be waiting for guy #3 to make an appearance and help lead the charge for his community – I’ll be right there working with him.

Bilingualism in Social Media: I work for a bilingual brand, and that means that my broadcast communications always need to be in 2 languages. I also need to be prepared to communicate with individuals in their language of choice. It can be a challenge when working on a tight deadline, when I have to rely on others for translated content, or when I’m trying to get someone an answer to their question in a timely fashion. Processes, procedures, style guides and more help keep the tone and manner of our communications consistent, both across various types of content and languages.

On a related note, I’ll be speaking about bilingualism in the digital space as part of stand-out panel at Social Media Week Toronto.  There’s still some space left for any one who is local, and I’ll be posting a summary here for those who aren’t.

It’s Not All Business: That’s right, I actually do things that aren’t related to social media! This weekend it was paintball for a friends birthday. Of course, I started to try and draw some analogies, metaphors and general comparisons between paintball and work, but I was too busy trying not to get hit! It did help me remember that it’s important to always make time for our real-world relationships and interactions, as well as our personal interests. Not everything that’s online is important, and not everything that’s important is online.