90p Admin

I think that it make sense to have three different levels of members. Entry: Technical (covers basic troubleshooting and support) (6 month probation) Advanced: Technical plus Sales & Marketing (complete the entry level conditions and another 6 months) Senior: Technical plus Sales & Marketing plus Web Site Listing plus ability to nominate/vote on new members (complete the first two levels) I'm a LOT less concerned about technical members (I'd even argue to throw Sage in there if they wanted) than I would be about exposing our marketing ideas and 90Minds website promotion to a newcomer who we don't know well. I don't think I want to invite a new member who is gung-ho on blogging but provides no other participation ---- and then read posts on 90minds that link back to their blog, etc but never see them contributing in the technical area. As we're setup now ---- that type of membership (jump in and volunteer to blog) could occur unless we have a plan to vet these members well in advance and limit that type of access. What we probably should do is segment future 90Minds membership to travel through this path: 1. Technical (6 months) - move to next membership (sales&marketing) only by nomination 2. Sales & Marketing (only eligible after 6 months and by group nomination) 3. Senior Member (Only after 1 year and after group nomination) If a member firm cannot be participating on a regular basis (at least once a week) then they should not be allowed to maintain membership. I think we should also change our fee structure so that whatever we charge is clearly established as a non-refundable fee. I also think we have every right to charge a lot more money for new members which would be a hurdle for those who might join just to lurk but have no serious intention of participating.

@MarkChinsky @JeffSchwenk @JimWoodhead -- Comments please - tx

Need to think about this. There is a lot here. I always thought that the yahoo resellers and Socialcast were more technically oriented and that 90Minds was more marketing oriented (thus the fee structure). Will post back this PM.

It's my belief that we merged the old Sageresellers to become 90 Minds when we moved to Socialcast -- and grandfathered some people like Dawn who were with CPA firms and Louis who was not a VAR. 90 Minds has different types of members. Some only care about technical. Some only care about marketing. Some just disappear altogether and come back once a year to share something. Going forward we should keep it as a selective 90minds group. I've had significant experience with collaboration efforts amongst VARS and can virtually guarantee that to open up the membership with less restriction will attract the worlds largest pool of lurkers and freeloaders. Everyone thinks collaboration is a great idea --- best thing they've ever heard of ... until it becomes time to participate and openly share then its <crickets chirping>. And , again, the reason this is coming up is that we need a policy going forward on admitting new members. Just vetting someone who has some technical knowledge and throwing them and all their firm into the Socialcast stream isn't a wise move. We will likely see something like a 1 to 10 ratio. For every 10 people we invite and put into a probationary period we'll have one that will actively participate to the 1 year mark. It's important that we don't admit haphazardly and without vetting because if we do that's going to potentially drive out our members who participate regularly. People need to be both vetted and enter a probationary period.

The reason I think we should be able to charge a fee is that new members now have access to thousands of archive posts (and yes some of them aren't even my rants :) ) that during that period they contributed nothing to it.

I think your plan makes sense. If somebody is willing to write decent blog content for 90minds.com (even if it points back to their site) I'd be more than happy with it as we can always use fresh content.

We would also need to remind all members, that anything they really want protected from non 'super members' should get posted in the rants or a new confidential group so we can keep some of the probationary members away from that stuff

I definitely like the idea of having different groups. (Technical / Sales and marketing/ etc) Now that most of us are familiar to the group structure in SC and how it works we will should be able to build around this structure no problem. With that said I still have concerns that some members just don't get how Socialcast works and are lost. (therefore not contributing. ) Do we need some training for those people or write them off? One other observation is that it seems that there is usually only one person from each firm that participates. I may be wrong but I bet that with have already have a large pool of talent that hasn't been tapped. We could build membership just by looking within our individual firms (I know I could). I guess we should ask the question of what is our goals are and decide what need to happen to meet that goal? Some Possible goals 1) To get more participating members 2) To generate more membership fees. 3) T0 get more content for our 90 minds website 4) To build the technical side by bring in non-mas people 5) To work more on practice management stuff 6) to build a kick-ass knowledge base My guess that we need to do some of all these things.

In my mind, it has always been segmented. Yahoo, now Socialcast was a technical oriented volunteer group that you had to know someone to join. The cost for continued membership was participation. Every so often, the list would be culled for the non participants who probably didn't even realize they were kicked out. Yes, we did have some people black balled (Robert Woods comes to mind, as well as one in Oregon by Deb Thomas) but in recent times this hasn't been an issue. And as we have had recent discussions on it, I thought it was decided that new members would just be vetted by the four of us. The 90Minds website was developed as a pay to play and has grown from that base (due mainly to Wayne and Mark). I agree that it should remain a pay to play site. I like Wayne's idea on the tier structure and I agree with Jim regarding goals and how to achieve them. I don't think revenue generation is a primary goal for 90Minds but it certainly should be a carrot/stick for driving participation. We might even stratify the fees based on level of participation. The more you participate with blogs and articles, the less you pay. How to do that is the $64K question. I am up for a conference call some evening to flesh this out more.