a potted history of online community management

The past few days, I've been working on a presentation for the Vircomm Summit, a gathering of the online community management industry, which will take place in London this Thursday.

Rather than showing a whole bunch of industry folk stuff they already know – strategies, models and case studies – I've decided to deliver what can best be described as a Potted History of Online Community Management.

In the presentation, I'll cover the:

  • pre-internet days of dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs)
  • wild frontier of usenet and IRC
  • walled gardens of the mid-90's
  • early days – and challenges – for audience interactivity at the BBC
  •  launch of the BBC's web chat service
  • investing in community management training and roll out at the BBC
  • the first (??) multi-domain community management platform we developed at G-Wizz.net
  • what "twitter" looked like in 2001
  • BBCi chat studio at Bush House and the professionalisation of online community management at the Corporation
  • expansion by the BBC into building engagement on third party social networkign and content sharing services
  • the state of the industry today – grown up strategies, approaches, platforms and measurement frameworks
  • my thoughts on the source(s) of competition to the online community industry in the future

Although my narrative and most of the screenshots are in place, I've yet to tidy up the visual presentation – stay tuned, I'll post the slides as soon as I can after presenting them at Vircomm on Thursday.