Steven Milstein’s Blog Onboarding folks onto social software, 10 minutes at a time.

Trial offer to test the Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life

More on infusing community and product management for social software development. Read on and email me at steven@stevenmilstein.com if you want to participate in my free trial offer.

Background
I recently posted How to infuse Social Content 2.0 into your social software lifecycle where I mentioned 38 social software companies reviewed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I then went fishing for Comments by tweeting all those names and more (see tags listed below), with a link to the post. Good, or, bad, almost immediately, three of them left comments plus one sent an email plus another responded with a few tweets. I'm guessing that means their listening for their brands. I'm also guessing that the others may either not be listening, or, are too busy to get engaged - even with the post being resyndicated at Social Computing Magazine the very next day! As a result, I feel its time to stop blogging about it and start delving deeper into my theory.

Definitions

Social Content 2.0: Content derived from the spontaneous, effortless, contagious and insightful use of social software. This content flows independent of the networks, platforms and tools themselves and is solely driven by the interests, concerns, opinions and experiences of the community and their desire to contribute.

Community Product Manager: A new type of product manager whose primary task is to listen, engage and represent the stakeholders outside the software development organization and help communicate this nurtured Social Content 2.0 into the agile development process.

Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life: Harvesting Social Content 2.0 from both the outside and inside of the organization to feed further development and support of it's products and/or services, in turn producing it's next generation.

Tools supplied by Radian6
I'll be using Radian6's social media monitoring solution to harvest the social content.

Free Trial Offer Iterative Process

1. Select social software vendors based upon their interest, ability to assign owner on the inside to collaborate with me and timeliness in replying to my offer
2. Configure Radian6 for social software market place and filter for selected vendors
3. Discover the content and it's contributors for five business days
4. Analyze trends, keywords, level of engagement for five business days
5. Blog about market-level results on my site
6. Blog about vendor and product level results on vendors' extranet, intranet, or some other private space

Service Offering - Post Trial Offer Iterative Process

1. Collaborate with traditional product manager representing outside stakeholders
2. Participate in development process as required
3. Engage with community contributors as required
4. Reflect with respective community contributors

Trial offer
So how pragmatic can a Community Product Manager be? If you're a social software vendor and prepared to collaborate with me, let's measure the fruits of our labour. To be clear, my resources are limited, as I'm sure yours are too, and I cannot possibly agree to help everyone that responds. So if you're as serious about this stuff as I am, then please do not hesitate to respond and lets get going. You can email me at steven@stevenmilstein.com.

SERVaaS - Service as a Service?
If all goes well, then I hope to have a better understanding of the demand for Community Product Managers and the viability of offering the above services. Once I have a few customers in place, then taking it to the next level is already the subject of sleepless nights in Montreal and will have to be saved for another post down the road.

Reflection
What do you think? Are you in development? Do you think there's a place in the software development lifecyle for Community Product Managers? Or, are you a stakeholder on the outside yearning for a(nother) voice on the inside? Either way, please comment, share with a colleague, customer, developer and help get those email requests coming in.

Many thanks to the good folks; Amber Naslund, Cory Hartlen , Marc Whitchurch, Chris Ramsey and Marcel Lebrun at Radian6 for all their time and consideration.

And another Thank You to Alora Chistiakoff over at Social Computing Magazine for reaching out to me and offering my first resyndication.

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 1 Distinction between a Community Manager, Product Manager and a Community...
2. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 3 My outside your firewall, shared listening and engaging Community Product...
3. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 2 The most important pattern that emerged and lesson I learned...
4. How to infuse Social Content 2.0 into your social software lifecycle This is about me taking a traditional role in software...
5. My $0.02 to Dirk’s “Are you using twitter for customer support?” More on how to infuse Social Content 2.0 into your...