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social media 101

Social Media Community Building 101 – The Team

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So you’ve got the basics set, having a general plan ready to go (you did read the first article in this series, right?).  Now it’s time to nail down another important aspect of your little project: the community team.  Again, we’re going to have some choices to make, and each one comes with it’s own set of baggage.

  • Partner – give up equity in your project and pay the team member with an ownership stake.  This helps to properly motivate team members in the beginning, but to keep them involved, your going to need to see some financial success fairly quickly (but that’s a good thing, right?).
  • Hire – The dreaded FTE, which is something a new and unproven business model should avoid at all costs.  You’ll know when its time to get serious and hire people, but pre-launch isn’t the time.
  • Contract – As Charlie Sheen notably said about call girls, “I don’t pay them for the sex, I pay them so they will go home after the sex.” This is the reason I like contract work or freelancers for building sites initially.  The project is scoped, the project is built and eventually, they go home.  No long term commitments, no nasty divorces.
  • Outsource/Third Party – Hire a company or freelancer for a specific task or area of expertise.   
  • Barter – Yup, you can trade your skills for those of other professionals.  The good news is that no cash has to change hands.  The bad news is that you’re going to be doing work for someone else, for free…
  • Intern – There are folks out there who will want to become involved in your site, and they’ll be willing to help, and they’ll do it for free.   Not all of them will work out, but you’ll find over time that looking inwards to a community for help is a great way to make things happen.

You should have a good idea from your business plan where the major areas of work are going to be.  Let’s generally assume:

Social Media Community Building 101 – The Starting Points

(This is part 2 of an on going series of posts on Social Media.  If you didn’t see my first post, in which I define Social Media is, I emplore you to start there  now.  All the posts in this series will be tagged “Social Media 101” so you can find them easily.)

Starting a new community is a fairly daunting task. In this post, I’ll point you to some initial steps that will help you along your way towards building a stable, sustainable and scalable platform that will make growth and success technologically possible.

First off, you have an important technology decision: are you going to roll your own from scratch, assemble pre-packaged systems, or look for a complete system that will fill your needs. Considerations:

  • Roll Your Own (think of custom coded PHP, ASP, Perl, Java, etc. solutions):- You need to be a competent coder.
    – Time to market will be longer.
    – You will have complete control over how your site works.
    – Your feature set at launch will probably be restricted.
    – Less spam issues, as you’re solutions will be one off, hence the packaged spam products will not know how to attack you.