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Third Thursday: Taking the Conversation Offline

Why community?  That's the topic at tonight's edition of Third Thursday, a monthly Silicon Valley meet-up for PR and marketing professionals.  We're interviewing folks from SAP Labs, Linden Lab (Second Life) and Vyatta for a talk about why businesses are so keen on communities.  In short, it's a little thing called "wisdom of crowds" -- the increasingly well-known fact that when you have a freely organizing and sizeable community, all sorts of good things can happen.  In business terms, we're talking about things like staff autonomy, business efficiencies, and "open brands."  But building a community ain't easy.  We'll look at the challenges that businesses face when attempting to build online communities -- political, organizational, budgetary. 

There's one other thing we'll look at:  online communities may be the place where we're seeing lots of innovation, but offline communities are getting a second look.  In fact, we're seeing more and more interest in offline communities, and some of the innovative ideas from the online world are being replicated in the offline world.  I think Third Thursday is a good example of this.  For more than a year, many people in the PR world have been bumping, meeting and sometimes collaborating in the blogosphere.  Then one day, a few of us (Mike Manuel, Jeremy Pepper and Phil Gomes) got together and decided to the conversation offline (literally).  And yes, we're experiencing some of the challenges that all groups face when building a community (political, organizational, and budgetary).  But we're already experiencing the benefits from the wisdom of the crowd that has been gathering each third Thursday at Fanny & Alexander in Palo Alto.  Hope to see you there.

Gotta Do It

Third Thursday -- a Silicon Valley monthly meet-up on social media -- kicked into high gear last night with a panel talk on corporate blogging. PR reps from Cisco, Network Appliance and Ingres spoke what it takes to run a successful blog program inside a corporation today.

We knew this already from our own experience with SV clients, but last night provided ample evidence: smart businesses are not only blogging, but are already innovating. No way to learn but to do, and these three companies among many others are doing it.

We're co-organizers of this meetup, and next month it's our turn to play host. The theme is still under construction, but the general focus is a subject that's near and dear to the Eastwick practice: community.

Corporate Blogs Unplugged

That's the title of the upcoming Third Thursday (May 18), the monthly PR meetup that I'm co-organizing with Mike Manuel, Jeremy Pepper and Phil Gomes.  Jeremy will be MC for this event (we're taking turns), and he'll be interviewing bloggers from Cisco, Network Appliance and Ingres. 

Really looking forward to this one -- practically everyone I speak to these days has accepted the fact they should do a corporate blog -- and about half a dozen Eastwick clients have accepted the challenge -- but the questions still abound (what, how, who).  Hear it straight from three people who are doing it.  To sign up, go here.

Arrington: "PR People Are Great"

The first Third Thursday -- the new social media networking meetup -- went really well.  We're guessing 80-plus people showed up on the back porch of Fanny & Alexander, to meet, mix and hear Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) talk about blogging, the media scene, and yes, PR. 

Co-organizer Mike Manuel was an excellent host, ably interviewing Arrington for about 30-40 minutes.  I was fighting a severe sinus infection, but glad I dragged myself to the event. Arrington was a great speaker.   Key highlights:

--Arrington launched his blog last June, but already he is getting more than 100,000 "uniques" a day (gulp). 

--He thinks he can get bigger than Wired, if only he had a "few more people."

--When asked if it's OK for a PR person to pitch him on behalf of a client, or if the PR person should get out of the way, he said he's fine with PR people pitching him -- they have a job to do, and that job is the same whether they are contacting a journalist or contacting a blogger.  "PR people are great," he added, bringing a smile to half the faces in the audience (and a smirk to more than a few).  But the comment that stole the evening was the one about Wired, which Valleywag promptly translated like this.  FYI -- the guest wag for Valleywag was one of my other Third Thursday co-organizers, Jeremy Pepper.