As the Best Practices Manager for Lithium Technologies and the community manager for the Lithosphere, I am excited to let you know that the public launch of the Lithosphere is just days away

To prepare for the launch, we are placing this blog in read-only mode while we retool some of the workings behind the scenes. So while you can still access previous blog articles, new articles and comments will be turned off until the site launches. Look for updates and announcements in the coming days!

Until then, here's some sneak previews of the new site to hold you over:

• Read the User Guidelines and Employee Guidelines. Be sure to review and follow these guidelines as we want to make sure that you set a good example for all others to follow.
• Register an account. When the community is announced internally be sure to visit the site and register. Be sure to use the correct naming convention for all employees' accounts, if applicable.
• Get promoted. Let your community manager know when you've registered via email or private message and they can promote you to any appropriate employee roles.
• Participate. There are lots of ways you can contribute on the community! Here are some ideas to get you started:
  • Tag content on the community.
  • Kudo great content.
  • Welcome new members and let them know when they've asked good questions or said interesting things.
  • Post in the employee private area to engage with your peers
  • Join other relevant communities and comment on other blogs to find out what members may be talking about outside your community
  • Share your favorite, applicable RSS feeds, Friendfeeds, del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr streams, twitter feeds and follows, etc. and let the community manager know where they are! Content outside the community can be used many ways to enhance the whole community experience, and the first step is sharing it with others.
• Provide feedback. Let us know if you have suggestions or comments about the community, but please keep them in the private employee area or through private channels. We want to leave the public areas for our customers and other members, and present a unified front for the company to the world.
• Let everyone know. If you talk with customers, ask them if they've been to the community and what they think. If the community is going to be available to the public, invite others you know who are interested in the topics there. Spread the word!

For an emerging practice like online community building, the most useful and practical knowledge isn't found in books or whitepapers or articles or blog posts.   Instead, it is widely distributed among the growing number of practitioners, spread among hundreds or thousand of companies, who are doing the work of community building every day.    

I meet lots of community practitioners in my work at Lithium, but I still value the peer interaction I get at some key conferences every year.  Here are a few I'm attending this fall: 

Online Community Summit, October 9-10, Sonoma California

Since the demise of the International Conference on Virtual Communities (and yes, I miss those annual trips to London), the Summit is now the granddaddy of all community conferences, running annually since 2002.  One of the unique things about this event is that it attracts experienced folks from companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay, but also community builders from large non-commercial organizations like the World Bank and the Gates Foundation.  If you're responsible for communities in your organization, click on the link about and ask Jim to add you to the invitation list. 

The Communities Exchange Summit, October 14-15, San Jose

This is a new event this year so I don't know much about it, but the agenda features some real pros from organizations like Intuit, EMC, Dell (again) and Intel.  Given that, as well as the location, I know this will attract a large group of knowledgeable practitioners.  I'll be there too. 

SSPA Services Leadership, October 20-22, Las Vegas, Nevada

As you may have heard, "support is the new marketing" -- or, as Sean O'Driscoll likes to say, "post-sale is pre-sale."   The Service & Support Professionals Association is on the leading edge of the transformation of support and services organizations and, by extension, the transformation of companies as a whole into customer-centric organizations.  SSPA's Spring Best Practices event usually has an entire track devoted to communities -- this year it featured Cisco, Salesforce.com, and David Kay.  The fall event is somewhat lighter on community content, but our customer Dell is keynoting and I'll be there presenting on 10/21. 

Marketing and Online Communities, November 5, New York

Like the Online Community Summit in Sonoma, this event is run by Forum One Communications.  Unlike the Summit, this conference focuses on a marketing audience.   Here you'll find a good representation of community practitioners from the East Coast as well as agencies that are most active in helping companies create effective marketing programs using online communities and social media. 

Defrag, November 3-4, Las Vegas

Defrag focuses on the data side of communities, social media, and other emerging technologies.   As a SaaS provider, we're way into data here at Lithium, and I expect to come away with a good reading on the state of the art in this still-new area.   The agenda's a little scattershot -- there are some speakers I'd like to hear from on other topics, some topics I'd like to hear about from other speakers -- but I don't doubt it will be a useful two days.  

Looking into next year, Community 2.0 in May is a must-attend -- and it's in the Bay Area this year, so there should be quite a turnout.  On the academic side, the bi-annual Communities & Technologies conference is at Penn State in June 2009.  No doubt we'll also see more Community Next events in 2009 too.