Social Business Community Blog
By ,
June 13, 2011 - 11:45 AM
Good Monday, today we have an interview with one of our presenters from our Social Business Conference which is being held completely online this September 8, 2011. I asked Steve Ressler, the founder of GovLoop.com to give our AIIM community a teaser of what he will be presenting on that day. Here is what he had to say:
What are you going to speak about at the Social Business virtual conference Sept 8th?
I will be talking about the story of GovLoop.com, an online community currently connecting over 45,000+ federal, state, and local government employees. Basically will share the story of how I took an idea from 0 to 45k members and the trials and tribulations along the way.
What will the attendees learn from your presentation?
Attendees will learn how to grow an online community. I think too often we hear theoretically about the power of online communities and how great they are. While I agree, I think we fail to talk enough about how to make it really happen. It takes a lot of hard work, real skills, and there's lots of ups and downs. I'll provide a frank conversation on how we made it happen at govloop.com and would love to have an interactive Q&A where I answer any questions of participants.
What do you think is the next for Social Business?
I think the next phase of social media is really the change from "just doing it" to "doing it well." Much like any discipline like email marketing to web design and optimization, there is a huge difference in doing social media well. It is a huge skill and I think the first couple years of social media, it was often presented as super easy and this extremely cheap, easy solution. After a couple years, I think most people realize the hard part isn't setting up a Facebook page, Twitter account, online tech platform. The hard part is how do you build an audience and how do you engage that audience.
What else should we know about you?
I launched Govloop.com in June 2008 so I've been at it almost 3 years now. Before that I created Young Government Leaders, the leading young professional organization for federal employees with over 10 chapters across the U.S. and over 2,000 members. At YGL, I created our first website, email list, and ran our MySpace and LinkedIn groups. It was while managing these aspects that I realized the need for an online community dedicated to government. Having a group on MySpace or LinkedIn was just not cutting it as couldn't have robust discussion or get into long blogs and articles.
Any last thoughts?
I always tell people with social media to have fun. One of our core missions is to highlight government innovation and to fight the common misconception that government employees are lazy, incompetent, and somehow not like the average citizen. Thus, we hosted a "Government Doesn't Suck" rally during the Colbert/Stewart rally that hundreds of people attended and got coverage from NPR to Fox News and 100+ blogs. Additionally, we have swag like a "Government Rockstar" t-shirt and lanyards that say "Not your average bureaucrat."
Sneak Peek at other Social Business Virtual Conference speakers' sessions:
Ming Kwan: Share to Connect
Gayle Weiswasser: How Discovery Engages with their Audience
Jacob Morgan: The Business Impact of Collaboration
Jesse Wilkins: Developing a Twitter Policy
Dianne Kelley: Aligning Strategy and Governance with Business Requirements
Please join Steve for his presentation and Q&A immediately following on September 8, 2011 at 3:30 pm Eastern Time.
Rate Post
You need to log in to rate blog posts.
Click here to login.
This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International
