Update: MyCancerHub Launch and What’s Next

Last month on May 20, we launched MyCancerHub to the public and to a test group simultaneously.  We had returned from the Community 2.0 conference In Las Vegas only a few days prior to launch day, so we had a lot of new community management ideas in addition to the strategies we already had in place.  One month later, we have a lot of content, but are facing a few common difficulties and problems.

Community 2.0 Recap Part II: Measuring Engagement

At the Community 2.0 conference, I noticed there were many attendees who were in the very preliminary stages of community development – some were sent to investigate potential applications for the company, some were in the middle of their planning process, and in our case, our first community, MyCancerHub, was launching the following week on May 19, 2008.  For this audience, there was a wealth of information and presentations, but Shannon and I were just as interested in learning how to actually measure the success of our community once it was launched.

Just as publishing was the “1.0″ predecessor to participation in “2.0″, statistics like page views and unique visitors in communities should take the backseat to measurements like engagement, sentiment (which I am covering next week), and social technographics.  To understand social technographics, I highly recommended reading Charlene Li’s post on “Forrester’s new Social Technographics report.”

Finding Inspiration in Blogs

I’ve been reading lots of cancer-related blogs lately, and it’s really amazing how open and transparent they can be.  It really creates a lot of inspiration, but it also allows you to get a more personal view of the hardships, busy schedule, and stress that comes with cancer.  Here are some that I find the most inspirational:

Asher’s Journey with Brain Cancer

Redheaded Bald Chic

Kicking Cancer’s Arse

True Beauty Never Hurries

Freddy’s Cancer Blog

Radiation Daze

Chemopalooza

Miss Melanoma

Another great site is I’m Too Young For This, which has a lot of resources and support for young adults who are affected by cancer.  They also run The Stupid Cancer Blog, which covers cancer-related news and does a really great job of injecting humor into almost every post.  You can read some interesting interviews with the founder, Matthew Zachary, here and here.

Community 2.0 Recap Part I: Choosing Your Technology

Last month from May 12 to 15, Shannon and I attended the Community 2.0 conference in Las Vegas.  We made a lot of really valuable connections and gained new insights into community building, launch, and management.  However, we weren’t able to really debrief and share our takeaways until much later, as the new MyCancerHub launched the following Tuesday, May 20 (which we’ll cover in a new post later this week).

After sharing our knowledge and thoughts on the workshops, presentations, discussions, and networking, here is the first of our biggest takeaways:

Define Your Goals and Needs Before Selecting Your Technology

This may seem obvious to some, but when juggling a lot of different projects and roles, simple rules like this are easy to forget for community managers and owners.  It’s easy to think that you need blogs, discussions, tags, groups, friends, wikis, etc. for any community to benchmark against the latest social networking technologies. 

The Value of Twitter

First Thoughts

Like most, my first impression of Twitter wasn’t exactly positive. I first checked into it about a year and a half ago, and a few thoughts immediately came to mind:

It’s exactly like status updates on Facebook.

Who cares what other people are doing all the time?

Isn’t this just a way for the Web 2.0 revolution to make internet users even more egocentric?

Don’t worry, I don’t normally sound that pessimistic. Unfortunately, anyone that tried to explain Twitter to me wasn’t using it for the right reasons, and mostly had messages like the following (yes, I made these up):

This obviously didn’t help to improve the image of Twitter in my mind.

First Post and Progress Update

First posts on a new blog are always the hardest to write, but introductions are usually a good start: I’m Reed Smidebush, the Associate Product Manager for Online Communities at OptumHealth in Minneapolis, MN. The MyCancerHub blog tracks the progress of development, release, and ongoing happenings with MyCancerHub.com, the first of many online communities that we’re building here at Optum. More importantly, we would like to share the lessons we learn and mistakes we make along the way, as well as share any interesting links or events that relate to social networking and media.

MyCancerHub runs on Jive Software’s Clearspace Community software, which is very comprehensive and includes full features for discussions, blogs, documents, tags, and a lot more.

Progress Updates tend to be a bit dry, but hopefully this first one will put everything in context:

We just got back from a relaxing weekend and it’s been a busy day with brainstorming meetings and resolving a lot of issues that came out of left field this afternoon. Technical and security-related delays have pushed back the launch of our first online community here at OptumHealth, so as of now, our public launch is planned for May 20, 2008. We will have an initial test group using the site for the first three weeks, but registration will be open to all who stumble upon MyCancerHub.com. We should begin online marketing in early June, but we’re doing a push of some viral and social network marketing in the meantime.

We’ll have a lot more interesting things to share just about every day, and you can also keep up with Reed and Shannon on Twitter.