A challenge for every online community is getting users to engage and participate. Many sites see an incredibly high churn rate for new users. A common response is to go back and add more features, change the layout, or edit the messaging in an effort to create more “hooks” to participation. But I contend that while all of these things may have an impact, the deciding factor of if a user will engage is the context in which they enter the site. If a user enters a site through an online advertisement, radio ad, spam, or some other blatant promotional effort, they don’t value...

I’m going to be in NYC for the Search Engine Strategies conference from Tues the 10th until Thurs the 12th. I will then be heading to San Fran, Saturday the 14th until Tuesday the 17th for some Web 2.0 expo fun. If any of you are going to be at these conferences or in the area and would like to meet up, email me; brian [at] socialdegree.com

We have finally launched the new public version of ZoomInfo. This was the first major project at zoom that I have been involved with. I wanted to go over the significant changes that we have made, in addition to addressing what I still think is missing. This list only cracks the surface. For the amount of work that was put in on the user side, there was probably ten times more work done on the backend. But this should give you a good idea of what you can expect to find on the new ZoomInfo. Background For those of you that don’t know what ZoomInfo is, we are a business information...