Web Directions

Laurel Papworth — The business of online communities

• In: Resources
• By:Guy Leech
• September 30, 2006
• Leave a response

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

• MP3 of presentation
• Session descrip­tion
• About Laurel Papworth

Session descrip­tion

It seems that every­one is talk­ing about user gen­er­ated con­tent and online com­mu­ni­ties these days. But how will cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism, user-​​generated con­tent, the Blogosphere, tag­ging, rank­ing, and Wiki knowl­edge reshape brand­ing and your busi­ness? How do you man­age and scale this com­mu­nity and then hand con­trol to your users (and how do you explain to the boss what you’ve just done?). Gain an under­stand­ing that dia­logue is the new con­tent and learn how to max­imise the ben­e­fits (and min­imise the pit­falls) of cre­at­ing online com­mu­ni­ties in this presentation.

About Laurel Papworth

Laurel Papworth runs a consultancy specialising in maximising value from establishing online communities.

Back in the nineties she had key roles in major projects such as NewsPro (digi­tis­ing Fairfax Newspapers in 1994) and Optus Networker (the first WAP prod­uct in Australia in 1999). As part of estab­lish­ing Optus Convergent media, she man­aged optus​.com and optus​.net edi­to­r­ial and tech­ni­cal teams. The last 10 years have been spent out­side Australia, work­ing for such major play­ers as Telkomsel Indonesia, UUNET Europe and Cisco Asia.

Laurel is a lead­ing expert on user gen­er­ated con­tent. She set up an online com­mu­nity for Cisco using user gen­er­ated con­tent from project man­agers to man­age knowl­edge trans­fer across Asia. She’s also been an admin­is­tra­tor for Stratics​.com, a mas­sive MMORPG site that han­dles the offi­cial online news­pa­per, forums etc for Ultima Online and others.

Excited to be back in Australia, her cur­rent projects include con­sult­ing to a major inter­na­tional stu­dio and enter­tain­ment group in prepa­ra­tion of the launch of a children’s TV pro­gram across AsiaPacific that addresses child­hood obe­sity and health com­bin­ing ani­ma­tion with online communities.

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