We are big Teligent users at Dell and have invested a great deal in building our communities. Was interesting to see this synopsis of a whitepaper authored by Teligent pop-up on Mashable. Lots of good points and learnings – many which we have institutionalizes. These two are critical:

• Highlight Influential Members: Influential members in a community have a direct impact on the behavior of other users in the community. By engaging and highlighting your biggest fans, you’ll empower them to help shape and grow your community.

• Reward Members in Pixels, Not Pennies: If Foursquare has taught us anything, it’s that people will do a lot for a little digital recognition. Making a leader board, developing badges, or another effort to reward participation with recognition in the community will be an important component of a world-class community.

One point implied in their paper but not called out explicitly is that for great online communities to thrive the proprietor, in our case – Dell, has to recognize that it isn’t their community. The community belongs to the members. At best you get to curate content and be a great custodian.

Thanks to the FM Blog for the pointer. Great look at marketing stats from 2010. Worth noting for benchmarking.

• Kristen says her lunch at Soleil was great. New York Times seems to agree. Will give it a try soon.
• Had Ceviche from TacoShack today – thanks Bryan! – was outstanding. Small but spicy and fresh. Yum!
• Listening to my Kiwi friends complain about American coffee, I often wonder where they get their coffee when in the US. In Austin, I highly recommend (and my standards are ridiculously high):
  • Mellow Johnny’s bike shop – owned by none other than Lance Armstrong – has a terrific coffee bar – Juan Pelota’s Cafe. And get this, they even have a Kiwi Blend developed for a couple of the mechanics in the shop from NZ.
  • Houndstooth is fantastic. They know how to brew it and make it. With the added twist it is a short skip from one of Austin’s finest Sushi joints, Uchiko.
  • Down the road from me in Westlake is Lola Savannah – very good coffee and normally prepared well.

• Fun site for discovering what people have in their bag… great idea
• Improve your productivity using the Pomodoro technique
• All kinds of Pomodoro timers for your computer
• France predicts NZ World Cup win… heard that before…
• The Cloud is not a Contract… if there is one sport we all enjoy, its a little Magic Quadrant bashing…

I’m obsessed with pipeline creation. Every marketer should. And this is a brilliant tool for doing funnel calculations. Love it.