So… if you’ve been asking yourself, why I haven’t been blogging here, it’s because I still struggle with what to write about.

This blog has predominantly been about the cross section of technology and people.   Over the last 3 months, I haven’t seen a whole lot that I could say that hasn’t been said by others.  Plus there isn’t a whole lot that new that’s getting my mental neurons working in the way which forces me to run to my computer and write.

I still want to write but just had to find something else to write about.  If you know me, you know that one of my passions is food.  My joke is that “eating is a lifestyle that I take breaks from.”

For me, food has always been something that’s brought parts of my various communities together.   When my family gets together around the dinner table, we will sit around and chat, even hours after all the food has been cleared away.  Some of my favorite times here in DC have been sitting around my dining room table with close friends and a few bottles of wine in the middle of the table.

Food has always been something that I’ve been fascinated by and enjoyed discovering.

I’ve decided that it’d be the subject of my new blog.  The blog is called Justin Loves Food.

This doesn’t mean that I’ll completely stop writing this blog.  I’m sure that I’ll come back to it from time to time.  My day job is still working at a Web startup.  As I run across new things and ideas, I’ll be here to chronicle it for you.

In the mean time, I’m going to chronicle my culinary adventures on Justin Loves Food.  Check it out, I’ve already gotten about 15 posts up.

In some of the posts, I’ll write about very geo-specific things, like a restaurant in a specific part of the country but what I’ll try and do is always impart something that I learned while eating there so that there will always be something for someone.

Send me your feedback – jthorp@gmail.com

Hey guys, a few months ago I had the distinct pleasure of taking an improv class called “In the Moment”, at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington DC under a master teacher Oran Sandel.  It was really an amazing experience and it’s something that I highly recommend to anyone.

You come home after class so psyched because you have all this creative energy running through your veins at a level that you probably never have experienced before.   More importantly, you leave the class having a better understanding of how to live “in the moment” as well as more whole understanding of how to communicate with the people you interact with around you.

Well if you live in the DC area, you really need to sign up for his class which is starting June 8th.  Sign up for this Masters Acting Class at the Shakespeare Theater Company RIGHT NOW.

I’m not getting paid by these guys to write this.  I just really really dig the class.

Here’s the summary…

The art of improvisation is one we all practice every day, whether we are doctors, lawyers, artists or businesspeople. This class is offered as a way to add layers of mindfulness and technique to that skill set, thereby increasing confidence and communication skills, as well as enriching the quality of life. Through improvisational theatre experiences for the mind, body and voice, workshop participants will gain a deeper understanding of the role of imagination, playfulness and creativity in daily life. Anyone wishing to pursue improvisation and theatre performance will also find the skills taught in this class invaluable.

As a community manager, one of the most important things that I learned is that you have to be accessible.  This time, when I talk about being accessible, I’m not talking about making the Web accessible to people with disabilities.  I’m talking about being available and easily reachable.

When I was in college, my major had all these great computer labs with all the latest state of the art equipment.  The guy in charge of the Networking Lab was my Freshmen orientation teacher.   He was telling us about how he was getting ready to select the next set of graduate assistants that would work in the labs and help undergrad students with their home work.

He told us about how he wanted the grad assistants in the labs to be known amongst the undergrads.  He’d post photos and schedules of the grad assistants all over the building.  He wanted to makes sure that if we ever had a question that we knew who we could ask for help.

I talk to a lot of folks who work at companies that want to build these great customer communities but they setup all these walls so that their customers have to jump through hoops in order to get in touch with them.  That is stupid.

You have to be accessible.  You can’t form a relationship with someone… You can’t connect with someone if you can’t find each other.

So…you want users to send you feedback about how you can improve your product but you make them fill out this ominous looking contact form.  It looks like one of those deep whole in the earth that you can’t see the bottom of.  You’re going to put in your message and then never have anyone get in touch with you.

Put your person e-mail address on your Web site.  Spam filters have advanced A LOT in the last few years.  I hardly ever get spam and you’d have to be really bad at using the Web to not be able to find my e-mail address.

There are some companies that even have a phone number on their Web site, where you can call them and talk to a real person.  Shocking…

I put my photo on our company Web site. (click the link and scroll to the bottom of the page)

Travel and go to conferences that your users may be at.  Blog about going there.  Put a note about it in your company newsletter.  When you’re at the conference, Twitter about where you are so that folks can find you easily.

Finally, institute an open door policy.  I remember we had these in college in our dorm room.  The RA’s wanted us to keep the doors to our rooms open so that folks could stop on by and you’d make more friends.  It sounded silly but it worked.

Have an open door policy at your office.  Encourage folks to stop by and say hi.  It’s easy to know when I am and I’m not at the office.  I love having folks over to the office for lunch.   We keep our beer fridge pretty well stocked.  We have a killer espresso machine.  There’s nothing better then being able to sit down and chat with someone in person.  After a while, you get tired of sending e-mail.

In closing, it’s funny to me about how much folks want to build community and build relationships with their users but they don’t actually want to be close to anyone.  They don’t want to jump in and get their hands dirty.  There is no other way to do it.

Community managers often will compare the trade of building community to dating.  You’re never going to get to kiss the girl, if all you do is just look through the glass.  You have to be willing to go up, say hi, and introduce yourself.

So… go.  Put yourself out there.  Make relationships.  Build community.

Back in college, Facebook was still relatively new on the world stage and folks were still discovering how they could use it the best way possible.  Well, there were a chunk of a that were obsessed with the poke functionality where you could poke someone else.  We had these massive poking wars.

Well, the other day,  I was in Facebook and I got thinking about poking.   While the task may seem inane at first, there is actually something really cool about it.  What you’re saying when you poke someone is “Hey, I’m thinking about you right now and I wanted  you to know about it.”

In Facebook, you see this type of interaction in other ways.  You can “like” something that someone has posted to their Wall.  You can comment on something that somone has posted.  You can post something on someone else’s wall.

When you do one of these things to a person, you’re telling them that you’re thinking about them and that you read their stuff.  They’re special to you.  They’re worth your attention.  You want to stay connected with them.

No one likes the feeling when they post something or share something that they’re posting it into a vacuum and no one will actually read it.  When you get that feedback or that interaction, it makes you feel special because someone to that time out of their day just for you.  It makes you want to share more.

These small interactions… these small touches help you maintain your social capital with your relationships. When you have social capital with someone, if you don’t stay in touch with them, the social capital… the desire to want to go of your way to help that person starts to have a shelf life.  It’s too easy for things to become “out of sight… out of mind.”

When you have a relationship that’s built on trust,  it’s important to do those small things which show the person that you continue to care about them and take interest in them.

It’s not all on Faceebook either.  If you read someone’s blog, take 2 seconds and write a comment like “cool post.” If you travel a lot, pick up a gift from that country for a friend of yours.

How have you been blessed by a small touch, interaction, or poke?

So… about a month ago I bought the Amazon Kindle 2.  Its their e-book reader, which they’ve been touting on their home page for what seems like the last year or so.

Well, I love it.  I have about an hour commute to work everyday and I will use my Kindle to read the day’s Washington Post (just canceled my subscription to the dead tree edition today) or a book.  The best part is, when you’re on the subway, you can read the newspaper with one hand, while using the other hand to clutch a pole or rail if need be.

The only thing I don’t like about the Kindle is that it’s not good at sharing.  (Remember when your mother would tell you that you needed to share that toy with your sibling?)  Well the Kindle just can’t.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m currently about half way through Tara Hunt’s book The Whuffie Factor and it’s great.  I’m really enjoying the book.  I’m enjoying the book so much that I have recommended it to a few friends.

Naturally, my friend asked me “Can I borrow your copy?”  I’m like… oh crap.  The book is on my Kindle.  There is nothing that i can give my friend.  I can’t get the e-book off my Kindle. I’m not giving her my Kindle so that I she could read the book.

Do I love the book enough that I’ll buy a physical copy that I can use to loan to friends?  Maybe.  I don’t feel like I should have to though.

I have had a similar experience when I’ve found a cool article in the Kindle edition of the Washington Post that I’ve wanted to share.  What do I do?  I can’t send them the article through the Kindle, even though the device does have an Internet connection.    I’d have to go to the Web, find the article, and send that URL.  That’s a pain.  I usually just end up forgetting about it.

The lesson is that a good chunk of media consumption is no longer done in private.  It’s done within a community or a network of people who want to share that content amongst themselves.   New devices that are created should take this into consideration.  Creating these great experiences that have these monsterous walls that prevent the content from getting out doesn’t work any more.

Seems like everyday I see new job listings for a social media specialist or hear about the creation of a new media team at some large corporation.  This seems kind of rediculous to me.

Social media is made of tools.  They’re just tools.  Hiring a social media specialist would be like a restaurant hiring a knife handling specialist.

Instead of thinking about the tools, think about what they’re used for.  They’re used for reaching new users and communicating with your existing ones.

Or… as Tara Hunt put’s it in her new book, it’s all about whuffie.  Not whoopee… whuffie.   It’s a term that’s used in a science fiction book to describe and measure someone’s reputation.  I think of it as social capital.

Do people trust you?  Do they respect you?  Are they a friend?  This is social capital.  Once you are those things… Once you have social capital, how do you maintain it?  How do you maintain those connections with your community and not fade into irrelevance?

You can manage your social capital using social media tools.

Your social capital… your repuation is SOOOOO important.  People spend so much time studying and practicing accounting.  Those people grow up to become the Chief Financial Officers (CFO) for companies and track financial capital of a company.  What about the social capital?  It’s just as imporant.

If you’re too big for your CEO to do this that’s when you hire a community manager.  Yes that’s me.  I’m a community manager and I manage the social capital for my company.  I spend most of my day making new friends and keeping the ones that we already have.

Making friends… that probably sounds super trivial but it’s actually pretty complicated and SUPER important.  If folks don’t trust you, they’ll tell their friends about it or the sheer act of no one talking about you at all will affect your bottom line.  You’ll lose financial capital because you were bad at managing your social capital.

Let’s assemble some examples of social capital situations.  What’s a comapny that you’ve lost respect for because of something they’ve done?  What’s a company that you’ve gained respect for because of something they’ve done?

At work this week, we had a few customers that were frustrated by/didn’t completely get how to setup our products. They expressed that frustration over the Web. I was able to respond to their concerns in a quick manner, solve their problems, and show them how much we appreciate them as customers.

The whole experience reminded me of a talk that I had heard many many years ago.  I was at a Promise Keepers event and the group’s founder Bill McCartney was speaking about his experiences when he was head football coach at the then national champion University of Colorado Buffalos.

He talked about how when he was head coach that he would take each player aside and show the player that he loved him.   I can’t imagine that he went up to each of them and was like “I love you man!”  People experience love in different ways, whether it’s taking someone out for a beer or writing them a quick e-mail telling them how much you appreciate them.

I think if you’re running a company and responsible for managing your employees or you’re a community manager like me and responsible for managing/growing your customer base, the number one thing that you have to do is learn to show love to every single member of your community.

By showing your community your appreciation… by doing what my friend Mike McDerment says “execute on extraordinary experiences everyday”, you’ll not only win yourself customers & users.  You’ll win yourself people that are passionate about your cause and who’ll help you get where you want to go.

Over Easter break, I was in Indianapolis to visit my sister and brother-in-law.  During my few days there, we went and hung out with a friend of theirs that runs a welding company where he makes these really rad custom handmade belt buckles.  Now I had heard about him before but  it didn’t make a big impression with me.  By him taking time to hang out and show us more about what he does, it allowed me to make more of personal connection with him and thus more willing/excited to talk about him with others.

Another prime example of this happened to me in February when I was at the after party for the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami’s South Beach.  Internet celebrity and host of Wine Library TV Gary Vaynerchuk was there.  Now him and I had met on numerous occasions but he meets hundreds of people a day so I didn’t expect him to remember me at all.

Well, I was talking with some others around a table and all of a sudden I feel someone rubbing my shoulders.  I turn around and it was Gary Vaynerchuk.    Now the interaction was maybe all of 30 seconds but it was meaningful.  He could have spent the entire time at the party with the throngs of folks that would have happily kissed his ass all night but he went out of his way to come over and say hi.    It meant a lot.

Wanna have a strong community of people that stand behind you,  your company or your product?  I firmly believe that to do that you have to do exactly what Bill McCartney said.  You have to tell each and every person in their own little way, “I love you man.”

Have you had this experience?  What’s the last time someone went out of their way in a way that you didn’t expect to show you how much they appreciate and love you?  When’s the last time that you did it for someone else?

One of the awesome yet potentially scary byproducts of us as a culture using technology and the Web especially as a medium for consuming media is that we generate TONS and TONS of data which gets fed back to massive central computers and is stored forever.

Think about all the different online tools that you use on an online basis.   I buy a book of Amazon.  There’s data there.  I review a restaurant on Yelp.  There’s data.  I do a Google search.  There LOTS and LOTS of data there.

Every time we do anything online we allow people to pick, probe, and analyze our beviors that would have never been otherwise possible.

When companies have more data, they can more effectively test against what technique reaches you more effectively.  Is layout #1 or layout #2 going to give me a higher conversion rate on my Web site?  This is really great.  No longer do we have to make our decisions based on hunches or poorly made assumptions.

Think about all the great things that Google Analytics (GA) has allowed us to do.  I launched a Web site for my church here in DC back in November.   GA has been so good to me.  As we look to phase 2, I now know which pages people like, which we need to double down on, and which we need to completely rethink.

But what about other mediums?

I was at Social Web Foo Camp last weekend.  In one of the sessions, we were talking about the future of the social book.  We got into talking about the Amazon Kindle.   I hadn’t thought about how, by turning the book into a digital medium, you’re making it possible to grab all kinds of attention and engagement data about how people read books.

If you were an author, how cool would it be if you could know how far your reader got in your book, how many times folks had to flip back pages, what words people looked up, or how long people were staying actively engaged with the book.  Technically, you could gather that data with the Kindle and I’d be shocked if they weren’t.  “Well… only 23% got all the way to page 400.”  Maybe, when you write the second edition of the book,  you need to beef up right around page 400 because most folks are getting lost.

Also… with more data, you’re able to give your users more customized and more personal experiences.   The obvious examples are things like Amazon or Pandora, which give me recommended items based on my previous transaction history.

A cool example that I hadn’t thought of is the Firefox plug-in Ambient News.  Some really smart guys at Mozilla were trying to solve the problem of how can we create an RSS reader for our users with out them having to go through the crude process of manually subscribing to an RSS feed.  They made a plug-in which looks at the data around which sites you go to (they call this the ambient layer) and automatically put together a page of news feeds setup just for you.  It’s just magically there with all of your favorite sites.

But, so… we’re getting all of this rich data and these rich experiences because of the rich data that we’re generating for it.  What do we give up in the process?

Are we going to get to a point that all these services offer us such rich benefits but you first have to sell them your life… sell them your soul?  That’s one of the message that I took away from the movie We Live in Public, which you should all see and I want to write about later.

What do you think?

Wikipedia describes a muse to be the “goddesses or spirits who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge, related orally for centuries in the ancient culture, that was contained in poetic lyrics and myths.”

Well as some of you have noticed, I have taken a small break from blogging.  I felt like I had lost my muse.   I didn’t know what to write about.  A lot of things that I was writing about and thinking about was boring myself so I decided to withdraw, reconnect with what’s happening in the world, and start up again.  This is me starting up again.

It’s funny because it all started right around when I listened to the audio of Merlin Mann and John Gruber’s talk from SXSW about how to be a better blogger.  They asked the question, “what are you obsessed with?

After thinking about it, I found this question increasingly hard to answer.   Do I want to be the guy who blogs about social media? Not really.  Do I want to be the guy who writes about a new CSS problem?  Not really.  Do I want to be the guy who reposts the random thing that I find on Digg or Google Reader?  Only if I can really add something to the convo.

I needed to figure out where I could focus my intellectual fire power, which led to me thinking more about where generally my passions lie.

I love what I do… commnity management. I love serving people.  I love helping people connect together. I love helping communities form, especially when it’s in a way that may not have happened otherwise. These are the things that I’m obsessed with.

I do love technology but for me it really is just a means to an end and not the end.   It absolutely doesn’t matter to me whether or not community is built using technology.  All too often I feel like we lean on technology too hard and end up missing out on the great memories that could be made with offline community.

This is the stuff that I want to write about.  This is the stuff that I think about all the time.  It’s what I’m obsessed with.

So… expect more cool things coming from this blog soon.

As we all know, sharing is at the center of how we discover new and interesting things.  Our friends say “Hey, you need to check this out.”  Because you trust that person,  you check it out.

Here at Clearspring, we’re always looking at new ways that we can help to speed up the process of sharing, viral spread, and discovery of new content.  This includes finding ways to incentivize sharing.

Well, one way this had worked really well is through contests.   Because Clearspring has a really rad analytics platform, we can track when and how a widget gets shared around the Web.  If you can bind a widget installation to a person, you can tell which users are driving the most shares.

Then… just give a prize to whomever drives the most shares of a widget and you’ve got a recipe for something that has the potential to go crazy viral.

This is exactly what was done for the widget for Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction’s NIN|JA tour widget.  Register on the widget, share it with your friends, and you could win tickets to see them along with a bunch of other prizes.