Online Trends from the 2010 Online Community Unconference West

Forum One hosted the 2010 Online Community Unconference "West" at the Computer Museum in Mountain View, CA, on June 9. We had a great collection of people from Zynga (the Mafia Wars folks!), LinkedIn, Wikia, Walmart, Google, Kaboodle, Blurb, Family Violence Prevention Fund, Pew Health, and others.

The video below captures some of our team's quick impressions from the #ocu10, which include:

• Community management and the audiences: All about understanding your audience — their interests, motivations, connections with you and with each other, etc.
• Women and online community: Some unique trends related to how women use online community services, such as using Esty.com chat tools to stay in touch with fellow crafters while they simultaneously work away on their own crafts.
• Authentication problems? See Facebook: Authentication had always been a challenge for organizations seeking to provide interactive/community features on their web site. Such orgs need to have it, need to have people identify who they are, but want to keep it as unobtrusive as possible. For many organizations, the easy answer today is to use Facebook to engage with their audience, because much of your audience is already there, authenticated, identified, and spending time on Facebook.
• Philanthropy and online community: Some innovative approaches to improving the impact of philanthropies through online tools include using community to engage key audiences (i.e., grantees) to share information. Another innovation is book publishing for charities using online services such as Blurb.

For other reflections on the OCU event, check out this post by Ray Eisenberg of Autodesk.

Also, check out some tweets from the event.