"Join the conversation your customers are having without you." My new mantra.

This is good. Take a read.

As I mentioned in my blog post yesterday the next phase of websites will be all about aggregating data. Facebook announced it wants to make member data portable but wont' say when or how. This is a bit fishy to me. Do you really get to say "yah, I want to do right by my customers, I just can't say when." Ummm, no.

This is the next generation consumer. They want to own their stuff and use it how they see fit. As my mother always told me "give it away and it will come back to you in spades." And if you don't believe me think about a little start up that based their entire business model on this theory. Starts with a G and has some oo in the middle.

I mentioned on Monday about my love for our new Windows Live Photo Gallery. You can download for free here. It was announced today that Photo Gallery will now allow you to upload directly to Flickr! Who doesn't love that. Seamless, streamline. The next wave of dot com sites will definitely be all about aggregating services and this is a perfect example of how that benefits the users.

As I mentioned a few days ago I'm working on a community plan for Windows Live. The broad community that is out there is vast and daunting when you begin to break it down. Are you talking about bloggers, influentials, communities that pop up on 3rd party sites, branded communities that companies spin up on their own? For my purposes I needed to boil the focus down a bit and wanted to create something that would help articulate the cause and effect going on. Here is my cut at a Community Eco-System

To define a few terms;

i-citizens; anybody who is motivated to participate by something they see online. Ex; someone who rates a digital camera on a website, or writes a review on Amazon. They are part of the internet universe because they chose to participate. 

Influencer; An influencer could be formal, ex; press, analysts and celebrities or it could be the PTA president if that person is seen as an influencer in his network. Influencers set direction, they are people others listen to.

Reach/pre sales marketing; traditional ways of motivating customers to engage with the brand. It is a one way conversation from the brand to the consumer and is broad reaching in nature. Brand control is dominated by the brand and there is little to no connection between reach and the next stage, involvement.

Involvement; this can still be broad reaching in numbers but relies on a level of involvement from the consumer. There is participation required to make the experience valuable.

Engagement; if involvement is steady and strong it will drive others to discus it in a 1:1 or 1:few relationship which will feed the funnel back and build involvement. Brand is built, owned  and shared by the community in collaboration with the corporate brand.

I would love to hear if others have similar ideas. Or if I'm missing something. Or if thinking about it this way makes sense to people.

One other thing I forgot to mention about Photo Gallery is the kickin' cool feature called 'Stitching.' You can take multiple panoramic shots of something and stitch it together into one long panoramic shot. No more saying not everyone can fit in the shot, just take multiple and stitch it together. Here's an example of a few shots my friend Michael took.

This is my new favorite product. And the best part of it is it's free! I highly recommend anyone and everyone who uses a digital camera and wants to share photos with your peeps to try the Windows Live Photo Gallery beta. I used it yesterday after we got back from a great day at the pumpkin patch. I plugged in my camera to my laptop and photo gallery did the rest. I had forgotten that I had other photos on the camera that I didn't want uploaded and it was so simple because photo gallery showed me a list of all the images on my camera organized by the date I took them. I could uncheck any group that I didn't want uploaded. Once they were uploaded, I cropped a few photos and uploaded them directly to my Space without opening any windows or even launching my browser. Easy breasy! 

Super exciting around here today. Today we  launched the much anticipated Windows Live Events. It will be rolling out over the next 24 hours depending on where you are. The best description is here.  Local news coverage here. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

I'm working on a new project that focuses on empowering the Windows Live community. Community means many things to different people. Through my journey at Microsoft working with community people I recently met Sean  O'Driscoll. He runs the MVP program here at Microsoft, is a long time Microsoftee and has some interesting perspectives on social media. Take a look at his 5 P's of Social Media.

Check out the new Spiderman blog! You may have noticed the Spiderman theme I've got going.  Feeling silly today.