Rudy Thurston, COO, Omnifuse

MM
One of the things that we’ve understood now from the cognitive research and cognitive science of community building is that almost always, it entails communication, interaction and collaboration among peers. There’s no kind of authority by which to intimidate people.

It develops a kind of common vocabulary and a common way of relating. Thereby reinforcing a ritualized way of communicating, interacting and collaborating. Does that make sense?

RT
I agree with that. Yes.

MM
Would that include blogs and wikis? Take me through some of the tools that a client might provide a sponsor.

RT
Yes. Blogs, forms and groups are the three primary places where they can interact.

MM
For the context of this interview, could you explain the difference between a forum and a group?

Sure. A forum is what we call a site with a monitored topic. We’ll give special permissions to actually moderate a forum. They’ll create the forum and the topics for the forum. Then members will interact with the topics, the descriptions and the conversation about that topic.

MM
Essentially, a moderated special-interest group.

RT
Yes. And a group is really more member-driven. A member can create a group around a specific topic, and they can be the center or focal point of that group. It’s more free-form, and not as shaped of a conversation as a moderated forum.

MM
The content of a group is on the site? Or is it circulated by e-mail?

RT
It’s all on the site. Yes. It’s contained within the site. And groups can be private so you have to have special invitation to be a member of that group. Forums are always public.
MM
How else would you see that downline affiliate relationship working? Obviously, that would accelerate the propagation of another client for you. Right?

RT
Sure. Again, one of our key strategy plays is to help our clients determine and look at all of the different ways that they can do that. Specifically, other people who are vested in the content that you’re providing. And helping us at the level of providing that content that’s going to drive the community by putting them in the place where they can provide the content, themselves. Or link into the content, and embed the content within the community.

The other really great thing about a platform is that we can read in digg, del.icio.us, RSS from many different places-and allow the community to consume those, as well. That gives them the ability to repurpose content.

MM
Now, as the digg or del.icio.us community starts doing its social bookmarking around some of your content-they’re just basically out there, and you’re not part of any kind of revenue share. Is that right?

RT
That’s right.

But what makes the more compelling story is… If someone were marking a specific type of content, we know what kind of content they were bookmarking. We can go find it for them.

Specifically, what we try to do is work with our clients, to identify the type of social media content-usually a social bookmarking, to identify the media categories that these people are trying to consume-and provide that for them, dynamically.

MM
So in a digg or del.icio.us group, you add additional tags for them?

RT
Yes. We just catalogue the tags ourselves, too. We have to pass the information on anyway. So we just capture it-and we make sure we know what they’re looking for. In that case, we can actually be proactive in finding content for them that they may be specifically interested in.

We’re really trying to drive the content that’s specific to the content that our clients want their social media and networking people looking at. So they’re shaping it more around their brand and product offering. Specifically, a community that’s built around Yamaha Outdoors-that’s using a version or a platform that allows members to create social things like digg and del.icio.us. Using social bookmarking to create bookmarks around sports fishermen-different types of sports fishermen. Yahoo’s infinitely interested in that, because they sponsor 16 of the top bass pros. We’re trying to drive their bass pro content, because they’re already offering it up and they’re already invested in producing that content. We’re trying to demonstrate the ability to get more people to see that content that they’ve already created.

MM
That Yamaha content that they generated live at Yahoo?

RT
No. It lives within the community that we created for them.

But it’s bookmarked, and it’s part of digg and del.icio.us. So other people can find it from many different sources. What we’re doing is using those captured bookmarks to push more of their specifics.

So if somebody were on our community looking for comments about a particular flywheel for a particular rod, we could send them content specifically from one of the bass pro sponsors that Yamaha Outdoors is sponsoring. Obviously, they’re going to be promoting the flywheel from the Yamaha line.

MM
This clearly would be a good segue into using more like user-generated video and professionally-generated video.

Yes.

MM
As I understand it, you had-within Omnifuse-a media-production group-and you’ve begun to look for ways of outsourcing parts of that video-processing.

RT
Absolutely.

In the earlier versions of our platform, using some of the industry-standard tools out there, we created a mechanism to take video and convert it on the fly to Flash. But it was just a real nightmare of a support scenario, where we were always having to keep the codices up to date, and go through the whole process of maintaining the software updates that creates the video-processing engine.

It just became a little bit overwhelming. We’re not specifically video-processing engineers, although we have some experience in it. That’s not what we do full-time. We’re social-networking guys.

We immediately started trying to identify partners that could help us with the video-processing, in particular. Especially video-processing to mobile, video-processing to Flash-video processing to all of the particular elements for that consumable media part that we were looking for.

MM
What criteria did you use in selecting a video service provider?

RT
Really, there were two primary things. The first thing we were looking for was a tried-and-tested video-processing engine that was maintained by that specific 3rd party. Meaning they were vested in making sure the codices were always up to date. And making sure that the software stayed current with the technology that was out there.

The second thing was somebody who had a world-class delivery network that could deliver this content in an extremely reliable fashion-anywhere in the world.