One of the most exciting things about the Unconference format is the fact that there are so many sessions running simultaneously. This can also be on of the most frustrating, as it is impossible to be everywhere at once. Thankfully, participants generally try to take thorought notes of their sessions to share back with the group.

We had over 50 sessions at the Online Community Unconference, and notes for most are captured on the Unconference wiki. The wiki is now open for public reading (editing and commenting are reserved for Unconference attendees).

The Online Community Unconference wiki can be found here: http://www.socialtext.net/ocu2009

A few highlights from the session notes include:

Managing the Mob: What to do when things go wrong Melissa Daniels of Yahoo! convened this session to discuss how to integrate your community into the organization's decision making process, even when the community mood is dark.

Social CRM : Mapping Social ID's, Behavioral Targeting & Common Profiles A session about managing customer relationships across multiple domains, convened by Ajay Ramachandran of SourceN.

Using Community in Strategy Development Nilofer Merchant of Rubicon Consulting convened this session to explore how companies can use communities as a strategic tool and integrate feedback and learning from communities into product development and company strategy.

Community Driven Product Design - Collecting Feedback from your Community Siko Bouterse of hi5 convened this session to explore the best ways to build feedback systems.

B2B Communities - What works, Best Practices Mike Rowland of Impact Interactions led a session sharing community management best practices based on his firm's experience over the last 10 years.

What is Community Leadership? Scott Moore convened this session to explore the attributes of leadership in communities.

Social Network Analysis (in excel!) Marc Smith of Telligent led a session on social network mapping and analysis, and offered a demo of NodeXL, a free, excel-based tool.

Mission Aligned Twittering Jill Finlayson of Social Edge led a discussion on a holistic approach to Twittering: figure out how the whole organization can get value.

Are we a Community Too? Ways Community Practitioners Stay Connected. What's next? Gail Williams of Salon Media Group and Scott Moore explore the concept of a community manager and strategists "tribe".

Please feel free to share the link to the wiki, or to link to the source session notes from your blogs / tweets.

Cardiff Characters took the city by storm at it's 2008 exhibition in the Hayes. Now Dan Green has an even bigger vision. NativeHQ has been working with Dan to develop his web presence. Big Little City is just starting.

A number of brands have fallen foul of social media over the last few years, either due to lack of understanding of how information spreads online, or by attempting to manipulate the system and getting caught out. I've listed ten examples of companies who have suffered PR nightmares online, in most cases the bad publicity has come via social media sites...Frontier Airlines As Meghan Keane explains in this post, Frontier Airlines has failed to monitor and respond to what has been said about the company on social media sites, and specifically, the complaints made by Andrew Hyde. The result is more negative comments appearing online about the airline. Ryanair After a blogger criticised a flaw in the airline's online booking process, staff from the airline left several childish and insulting comments in response to the post. To make matters worse, after the episode was publicised around the web, the company issued a statement saying that 'it is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.' Domino's The video showing Domino's employees adding various unsavoury embellishments to the food they were preparing went viral on YouTube, and was a PR nightmare for the company. The company did what it could by posting a video response on YouTube, though some found the delivery by President Patrick Doyle less than perfect. Belkin A Belkin employee was caught red handed offering to pay other Amazon Mechanical Turk users to write positive reviews of one of its products on the site. These reviews were especially unconvincing given the fact that the router in question had several bad reviews already, making the positives stick out like a sore thumb. The paid reviews have since been removed. Whole Foods Whole Foods CEO John Mackey left a bunch of anonymous postings about rival company Wild Oats before being rumbled, causing a great deal of embarrassment for him and his company. Mackey apologised to shareholders afterwards, but the damage was done. Wal-Mart The company was outed in 2006 after a blog chronicling a duo's travels across America while camping in Wal-Mart car parks turned out to have been the work of PR firm Edelman.

Amazon After removing books with adult content, including Brokeback Mountain and Lady Chatterly's Lover, from its bestseller lists, Amazon was subjected to a torrent of bad publicity on Twitter and elsewhere. The company blamed a glitch but didn't directly respond on Twitter. ExxonMobil An example of why companies should own their social media profiles, and monitor sites like Twitter comes from ExxonMobil. Someone calling herself Janet set up an account on the site in the company's name and managed to fool plenty of people before the account was taken down. Kodak Kodak recently decided to charge an annual fee for storing photos in its online Gallery, and though it claimed to have emailed everyone concerned, some were clearly surprised when their photos started to vanish. Cue lots of bad publicity for the company on Twitter. Target US retailer Target got itself some bad publicity in the New York Times last year after dismissing a complaint from a blogger about one of its ads with the phrase: 'we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets'. Just months before, the company was outed for encouraging Facebook users, who were receiving various freebies, to praise the company on the site.

Slideshare is a fantastic resource for sharing presentations, so you can enjoy and learn from smart people even if you cannot attend the conferences and events they often speak at. Some slideshows lose a lot of meaning if you dont have the author walking and talking you through them, but others are excellent, and there's a kind of brevity associated with the best presentations / slides, which helps to drill home the message. I have recently been browsing a number of quality social media presentations on Slideshare and thought I'd collate some of the best ones for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!Introduction to Social Media

What The F**K is Social Media?

Social Media

Branding 2.0 & Social Media

Social Media Strategy

Social Media Measurement

Social Media ROI

Social Media Optimization: An Easy Guide to Marketing and Promoting Your Blog

Social Media Relations

How Obama Won Using Digital and Social Media

Shared by Tom

Here's a real useful article - the top three social networks in each of the major networked countries. Italian PR professional and former Microsoft Italy marketer Vincenzo Cosenza sent us an interesting visualization today. Below is a map of the world, showing the most popular social networks by country. The map was built using Alexa and Google Trends for Website traffic data in June 2009 and we think it shows some interesting trends. After all, our world is becoming smaller and it's good to know what services our friends on the other side of the globe are using to connect with each other.

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Top 3 Social Networking Sites by Country:

Australia: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter

Canada: Facebook, MySpace, Flickr

India: Facebook, Orkut, Hi5 (Twitter is a close fourth)

France: Facebook, Skyrock, MySpace,

China: QQ, Xiaonei, 51

Germany: Facebook, StudiVZ, MySpace

Italy: Facebook, Netlog, Badoo

Russia: V Kontakte, Odnoklassniki, LiveJournal

Spain: Facebook, Tuenti, Fotolog

United Kingdom: Facebook, Bebo, MySpace

United States: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter

Patterns:

Cosenza also noticed some visible patterns that are worth sharing. I've added my own notes in parenthesis:

• Facebook has almost colonized Europe and it's extending its domination with more than 200 millions users
• QQ, leader in China, is the largest social network of the world (300 million active accounts)
• MySpace lost its leadership everywhere (except in Guam)
• V Kontakte is the most popular in Russian territories (looks a lot like Facebook)
• Orkut is strong in India and Brazil (this one was a little scary because it already knew my name)
• Hi5 is still leading in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and other scattered countries such as Portugal, Mongolia, Romania (Hi5 is a San Francisco based Company)
• Odnoklassniki is strong in some former territories of the Soviet Union
• Maktoob is the most important Arab community/portal

Social Networks in Other Countries:

Finally, let's see what services our friends in these other countries are using to network with each other. Check out this list of social networking services that you may not be aware of:

• Iwiw in Hungary
• Nasza-klasa in Poland
• Cyworld in South Korea
• Friendster in Philippines
• Hives in Netherlands
• Lidé in Czech Republic
• Mixi in Japan
• One in Latvia and Lithuania
• Wretch in Taiwan
• Zing in Vietnam

Be sure to check out Vincos Blog and while you're at it, listen to his Last.fm playlist and read his thoughts about Facebook.
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tombeardshaw

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Here are some very common misconceptions about social media marketing.

National Theatre Wales has a new online community website - by NativeHQ

Presentation given to Primary Care Conference 2009, Birmingham, UK, 21 May 2009

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My presentation outlines 5 steps for establishing metrics for a successful online community. I also outline the quantitative & qualitative information that should be reported on a regular basis. This is also translated into who it should be directed to and how it is useful.

With so many resources spent on social media marketing these days, the job of analyzing its effectiveness in the overall marketing mix is becoming more important. If you're using Google Analytics to track your site's visitors and revenue, you'll notice that by default you can analyze traffic mediums such as direct, organic etc, but what about social networks as a standalone traffic medium? To achieve this level of reporting in Google Analytics and to basically tweak Google Analytics to create this traffic medium, you've got two options.Option 1: Create a standalone Google Analytics social networks traffic profile1. Under 'Add Website Profile' in the main Google Analytics screen create a new website profile and name it 'social networks' (always keep your original profile intact) 2. Head to 'Filter Manager' in your profile to group all the different social networks to one new medium by applying the following filter   Filter Name - social networks trafficFilter Type - custom filter then advancedField A -> Extract A - under campaign source add your social networks (for example, I’ve used digg|aim|friendfeed|econsultancy|blinklist|fark|furl|misterwongs|wikipedia|stumbleupon|netvibes|bloglines|linkedin|facebook|del.icio.us|feedburner|twitter|technorati|faves.com|newsgator|PRweb|msplinks|myspace|bit.ly|tr.im|cli.gs|zi.ma|poprl|tinyurl) Field B -> Extract B - noneOutput To -> Constructor - campaign medium and name it social networksField A Required - yesField B Required - noOverride Output Field - yesCase Sensitive - noResult - now under traffic sources > medium you’ll find a handy ’social networks’ traffic medium source which includes all the social websites previously grouped together 3. Create another filter which will exclude other traffic sources Filter Name - exclude other traffic sourcesFilter Type - custom filter then excludeFilter field - campaign mediumFilter Pattern - type organic|(none)|direct|cpc|imageCase Sensitive - no4. Create another filter to show the full referral path by applying the following filterFilter Name - full referral pathFilter Type - custom filter then advancedField A -> Extract A - choose referral and type (.*)Field B -> Extract B - noneOutput To -> Constructor - choose user defined and type $A1Field A Required - yesField B Required - noOverride Output Field - yesCase Sensitive - noResult - now under visitors > user defined you'll find the precise profile or URL which is generating your trafficUse this method to schedule a handy automated email so you'll get the full picture every morning Option 2: Use advanced segment in Google Analytics1. Head to 'Advanced Segments' in your main Google Analytics profile

1. Create a new segment and drag the 'source' box which under 'Traffic sources' to 'dimension or metric' window3. Open the 'Condition' drop down and under '' paste the following sources: digg|aim|friendfeed|econsultancy|blinklist|fark|furl|misterwongs|wikipedia|stumbleupon|netvibes|bloglines|linkedin|facebook|del.icio.us|feedburner|twitter|technorati|faves.com|newsgator|PRweb|msplinks|myspace|bit.ly|tr.im|cli.gs|zi.ma|poprl|tinyurl (this field is limited to 256 characters)
2. Now you can start segmenting the data and compare your social networks traffic medium Vs. other traffic sources which are already segmented such as direct and organic trafficYou can use this method to compare your social networks traffic against other traffic sources by average basket size, conversion rate and much more. .

Interesting views on marketing on the social web from Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.