SVPMA Monthly Event - Web Reputations: Putting Social Media to Work with Randy Farmer, Social Media Strategist October 6, 2010

Organization: SVPMA - Silicon Valley Product Management Association
Topic: Web Reputations: Putting Social Media to Work in Your Products and Product Management Processes
Speaker: Randy Farmer, Social Media Strategist
Date: Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
Time: 6:30pm - 9pm
Location: Network Meeting Center at the TechMart - 5201 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara
Cost: Free for Members. $30 for pre-registered Non-Members. $40 at the door.
More info: http://www.svpma.org/meetings.html

Presentation Summary:
While social media was originally focused on consumers, product managers in every segment are wondering how to deal with this shift to customer interaction and communities of interest. We’re crowd sourcing ideas for our B2B products, putting up community self-support sites, and tweeting our updates. We surf user-generated content on Facebook and LinkedIn. Anonymous posts rate our products against the competition. Customer groups that love us — and hate us — are organizing on their own.

Hidden in social media are problems of web reputation: how to tell good stuff from bad, how to engage and reward contributors, scale up rating systems, and stamp out inappropriate content. Web reputations are a source of social power. As product managers, we need to understand the reputation and reward systems we put in place when we add social networking to our products/services.

This talk will provide you with the sample criteria you must think about when creating a social media strategy for your product. It will identify the five most common mistakes product designers and product managers make when considering adding reputation, ratings and reviews to their applications. It will provide you with intellectual tools needed to avoid these pitfalls as well as teach you how to think effectively about the alternatives. For example, questions like "Is Like always better than Ratings?" "When should I use thumbs-down?" "Can I re-purpose reputation?" will be discussed.

Speaker Biography:
Randy Farmer is a social media strategist and pioneer in online communities. He was Director of Community Strategy at Yahoo! including the architecture for Yahoo Open Strategy and design of Yahoo! 360. He designed and implemented the first virtual world and first avatar at LucasFilms, built the first online marketplace and 3D multi-user gaming platform, and was a line producer of The Sims Online.

His new book “Building Web Reputation Systems” is already in its second printing with O’Reilly. Randy consults on social media strategies and web reputation with online powerhouses from Answers.com to Zynga.