Question: How do you focus on building an audience on Facebook or Twitter and scaling it?

Bonin Bough: Community organizing is hard work.  I guess if you do it well you can become president.  But, I think community building is hard work, and I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned from some of the early pioneers like Guy Kawasaki building a community around  - I still... I was like... I used to go to Mac user groups, but him building a community around email, around an email newsletter... or what the video game guys have done with building a community around video games – communities that are so vibrant that they can drop a video game into it and turn it into a billion-dollar blockbuster because they know who the alpha dogs are there.  I think that that's the same kind of thing that you face when going into Facebook and Twitter.

On the fact of scale, I think that it's an interesting combination between using media dollars or techniques that are gonna get you reach in terms of eyeballs on your communities as well as finding what the right participation in that community or with that community is.  It doesn't have to be conversation.  I think that we as marketers right now are so nervous—or communicators—are so nervous about these channels that we haven't gone to experimentation, like … Some of the things that we've been talking about are just better giveaways on Twitter, or more promotion inside of our Facebook communities, a combination of digital...  There's so much experimentation that we can do, and I think we have done a good job at that on some of our platforms, and on scaling I think there's a lot of other folks that have done really good jobs at that.  I think the Starbucks folks, who are good friends of ours, have done a really great job at just wide-scale experimentation in the community – also tracking and measuring it.

So I think that's the other thing that we are dong well is that we look at “What's organic growth look like?  What does fall-off look like?  When we do X, Y, and Z how much of a burst does it have?”  I think it's a combo... it's care and feeding, but you also need to have people who are dedicated to it because those are the people who learn how the community ebbs and flows.  And who are the folks that are the major contributors.  That's the skill set that I think still organizations – this community management thing – still organizations are just at the beginning of learning.  Dell has, I think, done a really good on the forefront of doing that.  We announced 'Mission Control,' which is the Gatorade mission control room – a glass room in the center of the marketing floor that tracks real-time data visualizations of conversation.  But more importantly than that is that is there's a team of people in there that are dedicated to building these communities and learning how these communities operate and move.  I think that's how you bring it to scale.