The Power of Online Communities: Lessons from the Best of the Consumer & Business Community Managers

Kingsley Jegan Joseph is a web strategist at salesforce.com and creator of the IdeaExchange. The recent winner of Forrester’s Groundswell Awards for excellence in business uses of social technologies, IdeaExchange has changed the face of product development by giving the salesforce.com community a voice in shaping future product releases through an ongoing, live public debate. With the goal of harnessing the power of community to drive business innovation, members of the salesforce.com community submit, vote, and comment on everything from new product features and branding to company strategy.

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Sam leads Kiva’s engineering team and is responsible for the day-to-day operations and ongoing development of the website. He comes to Kiva with almost 10 years of experience working with over a half-dozen technology startups, ranging from self-service kiosks and enterprise systems integration to digital tickets and online video sharing. Sam has traveled extensively through Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America. Sam graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

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Matt is currently Director of Community Management for Yahoo’s Community and Communications Group – supporting products such as Groups, Messenger, Mail, Bix, 360, and Mash. Matt’s team is responsible for community input/advisory panels, product blogs, community events, and engagement programs.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Matt spent 8 years working for eBay. While at eBay, Matt spent 3 years managing several components of eBay’s Community Managment team – input programs, events, and forums

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As the Director of Community at Flickr, Heather Champ oversees member activities for one of the world’s largest and most popular photo sharing communities. She joined the Flickr team in May 2005 and has seen the community grow to more than 23 million members who have shared more than 2 billion photos.

Heather is very much enamored with personal publishing on the Web, having launched her first home page in 1994 while working at the School of Architecture, Princeton University. She is an award-winning Web designer with more than ten years of experience maintaining her own site, hchamp.com, as well as the Mirror Project. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Heather also co-founded JPG Magazine with her husband Derek Powazek.