David Crow

Community

FreshBooks – Community Manager

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Toronto, ON

We want to create the world’s largest, most active and most valued network of freelancers and very small business owners in the world. And we want them to share, network, support, learn and work with each other. If you like enabling and bringing people together… then we’d like to bring you in to be our Community Manager.

With over 800,000 new users since our launch in 2004 FreshBooks has developed one of the largest networks of super smart freelancers and very small business owners. Our customers are professionals who take pride in their work and value customer relationships — and we like’m a heck of a lot. And while we certainly help them enjoy their invoicing… we’d like to help them out a lot more by connecting them with each other so they can share and learn together as a community.

As our Community Manager you will be responsible for having our customers meet with each other online and offline.

We will be successful if:

  • FreshBooks customers:
  • Are sharing and communicating with each other online in droves
  • Are networking and building their businesses together
  • In local markets are self-organizing to meet with each other to collaborate and network
  • You have:
  • Crafted and executed on this plan with minimal supervision, tons of passion and with excellence
  • Enlisted the resources of our most passionate and professional customers to help run the entire thing
  • Extended this network beyond FreshBooks users to attract other freelancers and small business owners
  • Significantly raised the bar for word of mouth referrals even higher
  • Built the largest, most active and most valuable network of freelancers and very small business owners

What you’ll need to have:

  • A proven track record of building self-sustaining customer communities/networks
  • The desire to start from scratch and make it all happen
  • Keen and intuitive passion for helping small businesses help each other
  • The ability to effectively enroll and enlist people in your efforts
  • A love of working with teams
  • A flair for inventiveness combined with a strong ability to organize and execute

If creating outstanding customer experiences and a passion for organizing and bringing communities and people together is what makes you tick send us your resume. Cheers!

Conferences, connections & ecosystems

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lights and crowds

Are conferences broken? Do conferences need to change?

What are the goals of a conference?

  • Communicate
    This can be research results, new products, new design, development or testing techniques, new ideas, etc. It can be about education and learning. It is the main
  • Exchange of Ideas
    To encourage the excitement, simultaneity, and ad-hoc in the halls discussions between people.
  • Connections
    To provide networking, partnership, and collaboration opportunities between the participants, companies, organizers and co-workers that last beyond the conference.
  • Recognition
    To celebrate outstanding work and research of the members of the community. The conference itself may represent the recognition of excellence by acceptance of a talk.

How do these goals compare to the goals of conference attendees?

  1. Evangelize: Conferences are a good place to share information about your company and to brand yourself. They allow you to share your expertise with fellow industry colleagues and potential customers…If you effectively demonstrate your capabilities, your company will benefit by 1- recruiting talent, 2- marketing its services, and 3- generating new business leads.
  2. Bonding with Colleagues: Often times, you have the opportunity to attend a conference with colleagues from work…Try to meet at least once for dinner or drinks and have non-office related conversations.
  3. Networking: One of the key aspects of any conference is meeting people who are normally inaccessible to you. The social media world, in particular, revolves around relationships. Conferences allow you to meet new people and maintain old friendships…Chris Brogan offers great tips on how to meet new people at conferences using social media.
  4. Education: The conferences are increasingly gaining reputations for not offering new knowledge for those who have been in the industry more than a year. However, I am seeing a shift where organizers are pushing for new topics and recruiting a more diverse group speakers. You can also gain valuable insight just by having conversations with various attendees. I really enjoy standing in the hallway of the venue and having random discussions with fellow colleagues about industry-related topics.
  5. Vendors: One of the best parts of conferences is meeting potential vendors face-to-face and learning about what they offer. This allows you to immediately determine if their product/service is applicable to your needs. It helps save time and allows you to go back to your office with some key recommendations of possible partners

Interestingly, I would condense these into:

  • Evangelize/Promotion
  • Communication/Education
  • Connections
  • Exchange of Ideas

The addition of an evangelism/promotion goal for attendees that is separate from the communication and recognition goals of the conference is important. It separates the needs of the conference to establish it’s self as a trusted resource and venue for professional activities from the need of the attendees to self promote and market. Yet it recognizes that there is an opportunity to allow companies and individuals access to a captive audience.

  • Communicate/Educate
    This can be research results, new products, new design, development or testing techniques, new ideas, etc. It can be about education and learning. It is the main
  • Exchange Ideas
    To encourage the excitement, simultaneity, and ad-hoc in the halls discussions between people.
  • Connect
    To provide networking, partnership, and collaboration opportunities between the participants, companies, organizers and co-workers that last beyond the conference.
  • Recognize
    To celebrate outstanding work and research of the members of the community. The conference itself may represent the recognition of excellence by acceptance of a talk.
  • Promote/Evangelize
    Share information about your company and your personal brand. The goal is separate from recognition, because it allows for recruiting, marketing, and lead generation.

The interesting part for me is “that last beyond the duration of the conference”. The ability to distribute content like Mix09, TED, and Mesh Conference allow participants and a community to grow and share the content. Social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Identi.ca make it easier to connect, stay connected and have ongoing conversations. There are tools like Ning, CrowdVine, and EventVue that make it easier to build custom community connection points for conference attendees.

If you could define the perfect conference agenda what would it be? What would be the events? What about the rooms? The layout of the food? What sort of technology? How much would it cost?

Steers, queers and peers

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DSC_0050

I love South by South West, it is a fantastic opportunity to connect with people. They might be old friends, friends of friends, new acquaintances, famous people, people you follow on Twitter, somebody that presented a session, or just a random badge wearer you meet in the hall at the bar, etc. But simply put, it’s an opportunity to connect with people.

Sessions. Panels. Hallways. Breakfasts. Lunches. Dinners. Parties. It’s all an opportunity to connect. It’s an smorgasbord of people from Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Austin, Lubbock, etc. Everybody gathered in Austin, Texas for a festival built around music, film and the technology that makes it happen. You can see the explosion of connections and the evolution of the tools. There’s Twitter, FourSquare, Facebook, imeem, the list goes on and on. The tools are making it easier to connect at the event and stay connected after.

The best part of all it is, you get to go home. Bring the vibes, the connections, the tools, the business, all of it, you get to bring it home.

Brave New World

I’m stoked about what is going on in Toronto and Canada. I’m excited about what is just about to emerge. We’re coming out of our cocoons. We’re finally starting to realize that for it to be a start-up, it must be a business. It was great to see Canadian companies like Freshbooks, Overlay.tv, Raincity Studios, Akoha, iStockPhoto, Thornley Fallis PR, PostRank and Social Media Group. They were all in Austin looking for new clients. This was a marketing event.

“The business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rests are costs.” – Peter Drucker

The good news is that there is room for traditional marketing and the new scary social media marketing. Tradeshow booths, bag swag, and parties co-exist with presenting, participating and engaging with people online and off. Love seeing these people, my friends and acquaintances, and their companies out building their brands. Marketing to the unwashed masses (like me). Then back home to keep on innovating.

And that is the key. These are companies that are building innovating solutions. They are attending conferences like SxSW to build their brands, make people aware of the crazy cool shit they do back at home. It might seem like it’s all bourbon, late nights, and hangovers. But for almost everyone, it’s about being real people with real lives, real companies, real products, real jobs, and the very real need to make money. But it is the conversations and the participation that matters.

What did you bring home?

Let’s home it’s not the dreaded SxSWi sickness.

  1. Pay attention to your customers. It’s not mine, borrowed from Tony Hsieh from Zappos. But it starts to define what you as a startup are doing. What problem you’re innovating around? Who pays you for what? Where are they having conversations? Can you find them to engage with them?
  2. Diversity is critical. “Much of what we think of as innovation is just the creative tension between differing viewpoints”. The diversity of people, venues, presentation formats, art, engineering, media, film, venture, and rock-and-roll create a wonderful tension and we need to continue to embrace this tension.
  3. It’s a great time. It is a tough for a lot of people, but the investment world is driven by greed, not fear. Find the thing that your customers desire, the thing that enables their greed.
  4. It’s about the people and the connections. Spend some time in the weeks following up with the folks you met. Turns out you might meet them next year. /me waves from Canada.
  5. Even with all the social media, crap is still crap. Build something that matters. Make it count for your customers. This is where the innovation is key. You need to be faster, cheaper, better than your competition. And trust me you have competition. You can meet them at SxSW.
  6. Take more pictures. I have 2 cameras, 2 smart phones with cameras, I was thinking about buying a Flip. But I don’t think it matters, until I get into the habit of snapping pictures. #FAIL on my part. Time to change personal information capture habits. Feeling like this is going to be painful.

Tucows – Director of Marketing

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Toronto, ON

We’re looking for someone to head up the Marketing Team at Tucows.

Reporting to Ken Schafer (VP Marketing and Product Management), you’ll play an active role in developing the marketing and communication strategies for the company.  Your goal is to energize and enable a marketing team of seven campaign, community, content and communications specialists in order to help them meet all the marketing and communications needs of the company is most of it’s lines of business.

US

At Tucows, we believe the Internet is the greatest agent for positive change the world has ever seen. We know that people find the Internet complex and confusing, so our work is to make things simple and reliable. We’re big on innovation and creativity and believe it is found in every employee, customer and partner we have. And we know that through teamwork we can achieve remarkable things.

Don’t know Tucows? We’re one of Canada’s oldest and most successful Internet companies and our services have customers in over 150 countries.

OpenSRS manages over eight million domain names and millions of email boxes through a reseller network of over 9,000 web hosts and ISPs. Hover is the easiest way for individuals and small businesses to manage their domain names and email addresses. YummyNames owns premium domain names that generate revenue through advertising and resale to marketers and entrepreneurs. Butterscotch.com is an online video network building on the foundation of software and solutions available at tucows.com since 1993.

Our offices in the Liberty Village district of Toronto are home to over 150 passionate and dedicated Tucows’ team members.

You can find out more about us and our brands by visiting our corporate website.

YOU

You are passionate about the Internet – if you aren’t, you won’t like working here.

You’ll bring at least five years experience in Internet marketing management with you and you’ll have a proven ability to drive business forward while continuously improving the value of everything you and your team touches.

Working in a fast-paced team environment won’t scare you. In fact you’d be willing to say “change is my friend” and actually mean it. You present ideas clearly, concisely and always keep an eye on the business benefit of those ideas. You’ll be able to tell us how being self-directed and proactive has been key to your past success and point to ways you’ve been a creative problem-solver and communicator up and down organizational hierarchies.

If you have experience with B2B or channel marketing it will be a strong asset to you in this job.

You could very well have a college diploma or university degree in marketing, communications, or business but you’ve probably learned more from reading and writing blog and Twitter posts than from those degrees.  In fact, if you don’t have an active blog, twitter feed and other social media outlets for your passion for the Internet you’ll have a hard time convincing us you’re right for this gig.

THE GIG

You’re the brain and heart of everything that happens in marketing and communications at Tucows.  You engage with your team to develop goals for and then implement projects in the four key areas we see as essential for marketing this century:

  1. Campaign Marketing including; lead generation (SEM, SEO, email marketing, online ads, webinars, etc.), new reseller sign-up, upsell and retention, sales collateral, etc., as well as data integrity within salesforce.com and ExactTarget databases
  2. Community Building including; community engagement (company blogs, micro-blogs and forums), community outreach via social media, social media monitoring, developing and maintaining an active customer advisory council, etc.
  3. Content Creation including; web site content, screencasts, webcasts, technical documentation, service bulletins (via email, web site, salesforce.com), service status communications (status page, email, twitter, rss, internal war room management), etc.
  4. Communications including; events and tradeshows, corporate media releases, line of business media releases, media outreach, media inquiries, crisis communications, investor relations, etc.

Most importantly, you’ll be happy to roll up your sleeves and do actual work to help move these goals forward.

If this sounds like your dream job, cruise on over to our site to read all the details and drop us your application.

Yelp – Community Manager

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From RedCanary.ca via Geoffrey Wiseman at Toronto Technology Jobs (be sure to read the commentary).

As the Yelp Community Manager, you’ll be a full-time Yelp employee doing whatever it takes to grow the community of active yelpers as the Yelp "Mayor" in your city. Working out of your home and anywhere with WiFi, you’ll lead Yelp’s success in your city, and will be an integral member of a team of all-stars in the field receiving direction and support from Yelp Headquarters in San Francisco.

About you

  • Lives to write; writes to live. You know who you are. Pencils down.
  • Has a fire in the belly. Walks through walls. Takes no prisoners. In a word: driven. Even when no one is watching. Especially then.
  • Social connector. You are the hub of your social world. You know everyone. Everyone knows you. You are the Mayor. The fun one. Diplomatic, too.
  • Have more than a few years of post-graduate professional experience (existing Yelp community managers have 5 to 15 years).

About the job

  • Writing. Write locally compelling newsletters weekly and inspiring reviews daily. Persuasive pitches to venue owners and marketing partners.
  • Event planning. Conceptualize, negotiate, wrangle, plan and execute cool, fun and buzz-worthy (big wow factor!) events/parties.
  • Marketing outreach. Connect with the right local organizations, barter weekly newsletter sponsorships for promotion of Yelp.
  • Socializing and adventuring. Meet up with yelpers. Attend civic events. See and be seen. In the scene. Be the Mayor. Always on.
  • Communication. Be accountable with stellar communication to your peers and those who support you at Yelp HQ.

If you’re interested, please submit the following:

  1. Cover letter/note showcasing your writing skills and general personality and style
  2. Resume showcasing your relevant experience
  3. A link to your (full and interesting) Yelp profile

Apply

 

A web without windows

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moz_design_challenge_logoCan’t help but love the shot at Microsoft in the latest Mozilla Labs Design Challenge post. Nice.

No windows, no unnecessary trappings.

I’m sure that this was not intentionally aimed at Microsoft’s IE8 RC1 announcement. But it made me laugh. It’s hard to imagine the world without the trappings of the personal computer. This is one of the unique challenges presented by August de los Reyes about Predicting the Past. I’ve been thinking more about personal health data, and thinking about how to build solutions aimed at informing and altering behaviour. Not on the scale of transformation that the Office Labs and MSR teams did with Future of personal health concept.  The video storyboards used in the Aurora Concept and the MSR Future of Healthcare videos are a great medium for students to express the complexity of the environment and the changes they see in predicting the future.

The question posed by the Mozilla Labs team is about extending the interpretation of the web. What does a user experience look like if the web is ubiquitous?

The Design Challenge is a series of events to encourage innovation, and experimentation in user interface design for the Web. Our aim is to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

It’s an interesting outreach to inspire and engage members of the Web community. It builds on the work that Mozilla did with Adaptive Path on the Aurora Concept exploring the future directions and ideas for Mozilla as a browser. The Design Challenge Spring 2009 asks 20 students to answer the following questions:

“What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web.”

It’s an interesting question and it provokes a series of other questions:

  • What does the Web really mean?
  • What does the Web mean in the context of a device? Does the device have local storage? local computation?
  • What assumptions as designers are we making about bandwidth? latency? interaction? behaviour?

The question of what is the Web and how individuals and groups interact, communicate and collaborate is really interesting. I hope that design students will document their assumptions about the hardware, software, networking infrastructure, carriers and to make their visions real.

As the Web becomes even more ubiquitous, we’ll never have to leave it. Whether it’s on touch tables, giant wall-sized screens, mobile devices, or just our computers, exploring the interactions for browsing a windowless Web will become ever-more important in the next couple of years.

Great opportunity for 20 design students to design a vision for the future. Plus they’ll get to work with Beltzner, Madhava, Aza, Alex and the rest of the team at Mozilla.