90p Admin

Spoke to the Yammer sales guy today. Sounds like he would give us non-profit pricing if we were to move that way. My guess is about 20% off ($60 per year per person is the full rate) but we'd probably need to confirm. He would bill annually so we could collect one amount each year. Any trial people who came in during the year can be added for the part year. One thing we might want to consider is to build in 3 accounts per 90 Minds member so that incents individual members to add in additional people from their company. I think we have an untapped market of existing member employees who probably could benefit greatly from participating here -- whether it's support, marketing, administrative. With a Yammer paid account he said we would not all need the same domain account to login. Basically I see Yammer as a better solution primarily for the ability to add in external networks, better mobile clients (support for multiple Yammer accounts for those of us with company accounts as well). I think we should not consider Yammer/Socialcast type systems as our primary KB but instead should add to an external KB with data pulled from our communications system.

Can we port the Socialcast information over?

How much activity will Yammer see if the KB is in a different vehicle? Who comes here to socialize vs who comes here to get solutions to problems?

Unfortunately no. I am not sold we need to though. I think the real value is in the conversation. I would much rather find a different KB software and begin posting the technical info so we can access it in our individual offices. I know when we left Yahoo Groups it seemed like we left a lot behind but I can't remember searching that very much at all. I like the concept of assigning every member 3 user accounts though in an effort to bring in more users to the group from member firms. Under this concept we'd probably take new trial members for $250 (roughly 3 user times $60 ) . I think encouraging every member to bring three people to collaborate (including themselves) is something we should strongly consider.

I think now most of our discussion is around immediate issues and questions - I'm not sold we would give up a lot if we had to vacate. Most of the value is around having what I think is a virtual office where we can communicate with others.

Well this will cause people to have skin in the game that for sure. I am all for it!!

If you think about it --- which would we rather have tying up a region? A member with one person who contributes once a week or a member with three people who contribute one a week each (yeah that might be optimistic that all 3 contribute). One big un-tapped market for participation (from people we trust) is our own firms.

How about this: partners co-exist peacefully within a region and learn to call each other before picking up new clients? Then the region thing becomes a non-issue and we can focus on creating the strongest allegiance possible with exisitng members? Is that a pipe dream?

You been smokin' a pipe, @PeterWolf. You get together and commit to do that and then it never happens whether it's because you're being sneaky or because the client doesn't want their current reseller to know and the new reseller doesn't want to rock the boat.

I'm good with the move to yammer with paid accounts.

It's a great concept but as we've seen with recent proposed members -- it's not largely workable. We certainly have regions and partners where it does work but you're always going to have partners that are going to be objectionable. I don't think that we could blindly admit new members without some type of pre-vetting. What happens if I admit a major competitor to DSD? Then suddenly we lose participation from Jim and gain maybe a competitor who doesn't even wind up contributing. We are also constantly fighting the 80/20 rule on members. Of the 100% we have at any one time only 20% are active. Our ratio might be better than 80/20 but I'm betting on new member admissions that the ratio is not any better than 80/20. I like the idea of charging new members and I like the idea of admitting three people from each organization - perhaps it should become three sub-categories: a. Marketing/Sales b. Consulting c. Owners Or some such variation

I think most of the ideas in this thread and other discussions related to the future of the group have a chance of making things overly complicated. That's ok as long as someone is going to step in and police the rules. Regarding the geography issue, I think all of the Sage partners should be more concerned about the landscape completely shifting out from under them and less worried about how their ""competitor"" is keeping upright. Maybe I need to relax...

Relax Peter. You're both right and wrong at the same time. You're right, they're fighting the wrong battle. Where you're wrong is when you reach out to your competitors they have to reach back the same distance and it almost never works that way.

Perhaps the happy medium (concerning geographic competition) is that there are some groups totally open - such as collaboration around technical support issues. Then there are subgroups which are invite only such as we have now (private) and which would be around marketing, etc. Then we primarily vet folks for: 1. Are they reputable 2. Are they really too close for comfort I'm a big believer in working well with local competitors (Mark Kotyla) as well as realizing that there are also local competitors who you'd rather not hear from or deal with in any way.

@RobertWood - I hear you. But I refuse to relax. It's not my style.