Online Community & Monetization

It’s back to work here in Southern Oregon. Summer is coming to an end and it’s time to buckle down and embark into the next four months of focus. On my list of things to accomplish are the following.

Over the next four months I will be working in several areas of online community management and marketing. This will include writing an online community management manual as well as working to develop monetization plans and presentation materials for our professional social network FMTown.com.

This should be fun as I have quite long list of notes and experience on both topics so it’s time to put it all together and make some use out of this knowledge. One of my hopes is that once this work has been completed I will be adding it as modules into our online training center.

Currently I am running three different online communities. One community has more than 8000 members with the other two each at around 800. Running online communities takes some special skills and you also have to make money. Unfortunately most online communities can require quite a bit of time investment with little to no payback. This monetization model also directly applies to hyperlocal marketing in which you are trying to provide the most relevance to the end user.

Finally I’ll be working on adding in ongoing great content into the Hyperlocal Training Center. I know it’s kinda a bit disorganized right now but hang in there… My attention has returned and things will be ready to go soon.

Other brief updates: I just rolled out issue 46 of LocalsGuide Hyperlocal newspaper. This issue turned out pretty good with my favorite article being with a local bowling alley. My son had the idea we should do an interview with them. It turned out great! See it here.

Finally the 7th annual Free Ice Cream Social went off with a blast. We had about 300 or more people show up and consume about 1000 free ice creams.
I’ve posted some pics and a cool video of the social which you can see here: Hyperlocal Event Success!!

Best Regards,
Shields Bialasik

PS: Other thoughts on my mind:
This photo of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab Android tablet was very inspiring to me and reminded me of the interview I did with Geodelic and how users can create and note “Experiences” which other users will have access to as they navigate through environments.

You can read more about the article here!