SpiceCorps are a great way to get to meet people in your local area and we found out how much fun they can be with a pepper costume when we popped down to a Goth pub after.

You can checkout all the photos here.

Thanks stefuk for a great event. It was a good afternoon and was great to meet some new faces and say hi to people I had met before, and yes I did get lost trying to find my car after the event…

Hopefully we will continue to have meetings in Nottingham and around the UK to keep track of when and where the next one is pop into the SpiceCorps Of United Kingdom Group on the community.

After many hours of revision, they have come up with something simple with a Spiceworks- twist. Check out the screenshots below!

The new logo appears on the SpiceCorps Group page and soon in the how to start a SpiceCorps documentation.

I will also be have also robbing it shortly it for the Unofficial Spiceworks SpiceCorps Twitter (unless Spiceworks don’t want me to)

Now that you’ve got a SpiceCorps up and running, you’ll be needing to schedule meetings. If you are the SpicePioneer (or admin for the SpiceCorps group), you can send out an invitation to everyone who is a member of your SpiceCorps group. This will let you know how many people to expect and easily pass important information along to them.

For more information on starting a SpiceCorps, please visit this page.

The new feature lets SpicePioneers setup meetings quick and also automatically PM invitations to all members allowing them to RSVP.

When the meeting is over the SpicePioneer can put up meeting notes and the real attendance. Once the notes and attendance are done, points will be awarded both for attendance and for the meeting organizer.

The points system will give 100 points for attendees (up to 4 meetings a year).

Read more

SpiceCorps Golden Horseshoe finally have a date. Sorry for the short notice, can’t be helped.

We are still looking for a great venue (looking for a conference room either at a SpiceWorks’ users’ office or maybe at a sponsor’s office like CDW or someone like that?)

So the date is 18th December 2009. The place, Greater Toronto. The time, 6:30pm.

Read more on the community

The ups and downs of working with social media my experiences with Spiceworks

First off… This isn’t really all Spiceworks related but just had the idea for a post along these lines and Spiceworks-News is about the only place I could put it. It is however all based on my experience with Spiceworks.

So everyone knows what social media is now days? And that big buzz word of “web 2.0” and companies like Spiceworks are starting to exploit it to market there products and IT conferences like Spiceworld. Places like Skype, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg and Ustream are regularly used.

So what do I think are the advantages and disadvantages of Social media and networking…

The ups (Advantages)

There are many pro’s to social media and well they do outweigh the downs.

A great example of this was at Spiceworld 2009 Austin, I (akp982) was about to receive a Spicies award when Justin Dorfman (from Frugal IT) had the idea of using Skype to allow me to give my acceptance speech. I ran around and got a microphone ready and he ran off to the Spiceworks Staff to hand him his laptop which got pushed onto stage. This was great, I was watching the live stream though Ustream and also talking live to the presenters. It was a very weird feeling I was in the UK and talking and watching people in the US. Without the Ustream chat to get me on skype with Justin and without skype for allowing us to make a “call” it would not have been possible. It was organised so quick the presenters were shocked to hear that I was ready to talk to them.

Social media mainly things like twitter can really help promote your products very quickly by telling lots of people instantly. When Spiceworks 4.1 was released it was mentioned by over 100 people on twitter and Spiceworks are expecting more people to spread 4.5 when it comes out. From this people will quickly write reviews to jump on the back off this and give their blog or website a boost in traffic and hope for some regular readers. Frugal IT is and example of a site that did well at this with there Spiceworld 2009 coverage (http://fr.ugal.it/spiceworld-2009) they were able to get multiple people to tweet, blog and just share their link. With this link spread all over the world, people would then visit the site pickup on the ads and information around the Spiceworld page and may then come back in the future. I know we (Spiceworks-News) jump on even the oddest of things. We often pickup on blog posts about or mentioning Spiceworks and re post the first paragraph in hope for a ping back. Posts like (Getting IT spicey at your church) got a ping backs out there and we may have got another 1/2 visitors (they all add up over time to now around 300 people looking at Spiceworks-News on a daily basis according to Google analytics… if only some of them posted comments).

If you get a good social media and build up your presence with something like the Spiceworks community forums you will find people will want to help you out. The Spiceworks community brings all sorts of people together from all over the world. A lot of these people are willing to help Spiceworks out in there spare time, things like the Spiceworld 2009 poster contest, there were around loads of good designs and the winner is shown on the right designed by Denise Parrish. Companies like Experts Exchange (BOO HISSSS) and the Spiceworks community (well recommended lets make it bigger than experts exchange…) have managed to grab onto the fact that people in IT are often willing to help out others with IT problems. In my case this is mainly because its better than doing my normal job. This gives the helpers a good feeling that they are doing something with there time and the people being helped managed to get the job done quicker.

This brings a very wide range of people who have many different skill sets into one place doing this brings community, sharing, and connecting. I have used the Spiceworks Spicecorps to meet new people in my area that work in IT and Spiceworld London will help me expand my network of offline friends.

Building up social networks you can give you great feedback on your products. Just look at the Spiceworks community, the 4.5 and feature request sections all the Spiceheads have given feedback on the latest beta version to help make it better and there are 100’s of feature requests of things people want to see in Spiceworks all peppered up (voted for) by the people who use it. Spiceworks have harnessed this power and on many occasions got feedback on there ideas like the HTML emails they just added. They have also managed to get ideas from the community like a dummies guide to Spiceworks in which the community will start to build over the next few months. The community has proven to be a very powerful tool and lots of companies have there own community. Like the smoothwall forums. Spiceworks has managed to grab the market by making a multivendor forum where any question can be asked no matter what its about or how complex someone will be around to help from either the community of the vendors themselves. Microsoft, IBM, CDW and many more have active members of their staff in the community.

The downs (Disadvantages)

The main downside and the reason for writing this post is that news is easily leaked before you want it to be known publicly. My example of this is when Myshell was going to leave. Spiceworks-News managed to get wind of this and got it up on twitter and our wordpress blog around a month before Spiceworks wanted to announce it. Needless to say we quickly got moan at for this has had to delete it. For larger companies multiple sources can leak the information and it becomes hard to stop rumours being made and make covering up a difficult job. (Was a sad day when the famous Myshell (Spiceworks community manager) moved on and left Spiceworks, she did a great job and it does appear from time to time Spiceworks are still finding it hard to fill her boots.)

Information and pictures were published before the release of both the iPhone and the Blackberry Storm, both apple and Blackberry then found it hard to stop people reposting these leaked images even setting up websites about the leaked information. From there people will start rumours about what features the phones will have, this can damage the company if the end product does not have x feature that everyone was getting so excited about. Then again this can help with marketing, I remember stories about when Windows7 was first leaked people believe that Microsoft did this on purpose to get feedback and start all the excitement about the product around a year before it was going to be released. This allowed them to get a wider base of “testers” with different hardware even if they didn’t know they were testing it for them.

Anonymity… well there always has to be one or two people who want to ruin a company. Anyone can setup a website very quickly and with new sites allowing you to register domains without giving your details out to the public you can become even more invisible. This makes it easy for people to moan about products and services of a company without feeling as under threat. Finding people who want to be anonymous can be hard and companies will normally give up trying to hunt down the producers.

With websites so easy to make and publish we can end up with a information overload, it because hard to keep track on the information you want to. Say you want to keep a eye on Spiceworks there are loads of people to follow on twitter… @spiceworks, @spiceworksnews, @jdorfman, @dscammell etc etc etc then you want to follow windows 7 stuff you have to follow loads more people. This distracts from your real job and offline life. You always want to be in the know, for me its so that I can do this sort of thing and repost about 4.5 releases or the latest Spiceworld information even though I wasn’t there. So ok after writing that one I can see positives and negatives…

Social media can however be time consuming, its a Saturday at 14:03 and I’m writing this… I was up till 11 last night watching and taking part in Spiceworld and often find myself being distracted at work by the Spiceworks community all my lunches are taken up by it. If I don’t go out I’m on the community. On the right you can see my Spiceworks Community stats, 3000 odd contributions (these are not all my posts, you get 1 contribution per topic you post in or create) and 6000 odd posts. Ive spent time and written 6 how-tos and 5 plugins for the members off the community. All time I could have spent doing something else like walking the dogs or being in the outdoors enjoying the sun rather than the light bulb above me while sat in a room on my own on my laptop, or even just playing cod4… *must get ring of death on xbox fixed*

Things like twitter and sky player are coming to devices like the xbox making it easier for companies to share information with users in all sorts of forms but this brings another problem for companies that they may not care about us much… their real life morals, is it really right to give people ways to just write 120 words to each other? My anglish isn’t the best as you have probably noticed already and I don’t just blame myself, using word for spell checking and social media where people don’t always mind if you get it wrong. The community allows me to post words that are stupidly wrong and no one seems to care. Its just a fact of life on forums. This is not always something that companies need to care about either, people should have more control and if they don’t do it someone else will so I can’t blame them.

Most of the downs for social media are out of the control for companies like Spiceworks, even if they didn’t take part people would still post the information, but being in the know about what’s being posted can help you can control the impact it has on your products and or services.

That’s it…

Not the most interesting post I know but was mainly posted for the downsides… the big one being the Myshell leaving being announced before Spiceworks told everyone.

Social media does have its up’s and downs but I would suggest any company try to use social media. It doesn’t cost much if anything, but does take up your time.

Hope this helps someone? ok maybe not but hay it was nice to do my first real article the rest of my posts are normally very short and not very sweet.

Sorry about the spealing or grammer’s mistakse, I’m not the best.

And please leave a comment and let me know what you think

I hope Spiceworks don’t mind me using them as examples

Feel free to quote from the above if your going to link back

Again any comments would be lovely

Don’t know what Spiceworks is?

Spiceworks is the complete network monitoring and managment system, it includes a helpdesk, PC inventory, software and hardware reporting and a network map. Its the solution to manage everything IT in  small and medium businesses.

SpiceCorpsLA (Los Angeles) is hosting there second event tonight, make sure you join in!

SpiceCorps LA will be hosted by: PC-Whiz (Robert Netzel) at: Platinum Group of Companies in Chatsworth
There will be WI-FI so bring your laptops (not required) if you want to connect.
There is an agenda but we probably won’t be sticking to it because we are geeks and rarely RTFM.
So tell your boss you’re leaving early because you have to handle some business.

• Official Netvibes Page: http://bit.ly/SpiceCorpsLA
• - flickr Tag is: spicecorpsla
• - The Twitter Hash Tag is: #SpiceCorpsLA

The Event will be Broadcast LIVE via Ustream.tv for those who are not in the LA area, the URL is TBA

Add to Calendar: Click Here
Add to Google Calendar: Click Here

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SpiceCorps LA will be hosted by: PC-Whiz (Robert Netzel) at: Platinum Group of Companies in Chatsworth
There will be WI-FI so bring your laptops (not required) if you want to connect.
There is an agenda but we probably won’t be sticking to it because we are geeks and rarely RTFM.
So tell your boss you’re leaving early because you have to handle some business.

• Official Netvibes Page: http://bit.ly/SpiceCorpsLA
• - flickr Tag is: spicecorpsla
• - The Twitter Hash Tag is: #SpiceCorpsLA

The Event will be Broadcast LIVE via Ustream.tv for those who are not in the LA area, the URL is TBA

Add to Calendar: Click Here
Add to Google Calendar: Click Here

Read more

Are you going?

First things First: What is SpiceCorps?

Jen Slaski (Spiceworks marketing maven) has written the following: “SpiceCorps are local Spiceworks user groups aimed at connecting you with your Spiceworks-using IT neighbors! The goal of SpiceCorps is to bring local Spiceworks users together in-person so you can help each other use Spiceworks, swap ideas and resources & expand your local IT network.”

Second: Does your City already has a SpiceCorps group?

Here is a list of the official SpiceCorps Spiceworks User Groups (as of 7-26-09):

USA:

• Boston
• Denver
• Central Florida
• New York
• Upsate NY
• Houston
• Los Angeles

United Kingdom:

• London
• Manchester

Third: Make an official (That is If you don’t see you City):

Generate Local Interest: Get other local users involved by posting in your Location group and asking other members if they’d be interested in a local meet-up.

• Contact Spiceworks: Once at least 5 people have responded to your posting & expressed interest in attending let Myshell know via a PM (Private Message) so they can start the wheels in motion.
• Pick a Date & Time: Post a meeting date, time and location for your first meeting in your new SpiceCorps group. You can choose this on your own or solicit user-feedback.
• Choose a Venue/Location: When choosing a venue/location you’ll want to find a venue that ideally has adequate space for your members, wireless access, is easy to get to, and has sufficient parking. Company meeting rooms are often a good (and free!) location if you or one of your members can get access & permission!
• Let Spiceworks Help You Promote It: Contact Myshell once you’ve posted the date & time and we’ll help you let others in your area know about the event by creating ads and sending emails on your behalf.

Scott Alan Miller asking other members if they'd be interested in a local meet-up.

You may be wondering who is this MyShell?  Michelle (aka MyShell) is the Community Manager at Spiceworks and she will be your new best friend while setting up your first SpiceCorps event.  This is what you need to get from her:

• Spiceworks Swag (Shirts, Cup Holders, Pens, etc.)
• SpiceCorps Kick Off Meeting  90 Minute Agenda Guide (word document)
• Spiceworks Logos (Zip File)
• Feedback on any flyers, ads or icons that you or someone make.

Fourth: Design a flyer & Icon with the theme of your choice.

For our fliers, I choose the Buildings of Downtown LA because locals can identify with that landmark. For example if your from Las Vegas you might want to incorporate the famous vegas sign (picture).  What ever you choose to do keep it consistent so SpiceHeads don’t get confused.  For our icon I choose to modify the “L.A. Dodgers” logo. FYI I used Adobe Photoshop but you can use any image manipulation program like GIMP.

SpiceCorps LA Icon

SpiceCorps LA 300x250 Ad for community.spiceworks.com

Fifth: set up a landing page using some sort of social media platform.

When choosing a landing page for your event make sure it is free of cost, fast and easy to set up and reliable. This will allow you to centralize all of the info for your event and possibly reach people who don’t already know what Spiceworks is all about (we had two guys come out to our event that found about our Event via Twitter!) Here is a list of landing page ideas:

• Netvibes Universe
• Tumblr
• WordPress.com
• Blogger.com
• Facebook Page/Group
• Spiceworks Forums

I chose Netvibes because they offer so many great tools/widgets that let me set up a great landing page in the matter of minutes.  Once you have your landing page go to TinyURL and customize a URL (ie: http://tinyurl.com/spicecorps-la-info) that way you and everyone else doesn’t have to remember something like: http://www.social-media-hosting.com/foo/bar/meh/spice-corps-my-city/pebkac.htm?forward=true&sid=010001111100100010101101010&you-get=the-point?

Sixth: Get Social.

If you have a Twitter account great, pick a #HashTag so you can pin point who is talking about your event. If you don’t have a Twitter account, get one, reach as many IT pros as you can.  Choose a flickr tag so you can find photos of your event. Provide RSS feeds so SpiceHeads can have the content you generate delivered to them. I am sure by doing this you will find a SpiceHead who is heavy into Social Media just like I did. I was fortunate to find Paul Wirtz (aka Paul_Maxim, @mogrith) who helped me test out the Ustream.tv feed, came early to help set up and went over the agenda to see if anything was meeting.

Seventh: Show Time.

The morning of the event you must pray to the ‘IT Gods’ that your Exchange, SQL, DC’s do not fail because you have an event to host! After that you need to get to work. Here is a list of what needs to be done (assuming you’re at the venue):

• Test your Video Stream (ie Test 1, Test 2)
• “Event is Here!” signs. (Add your Phone Number just in SpiceHeads can’t find the Venue.)
• Wi-Fi SSID & Password
• Name Tags (I added Avatars so we could put Faces to the Handles)
• Sign in Sheet for MyShell (So she can give attendees their SpiceCorps Badge)
• Cold Water
• Check  AC/Fans (want to make sure everyone is comfortable)
• Trash Cans
• Digital Camera (for Flickr/TwitPic)

And that is that.  Let me know how your event goes.

Regards,

Justin Dorfman
http://fr.ugal.it | http://blog.justindorfman.com

]]> http://www.unofficialspiceworks.com/2009/07/host-spicecorps-event/feed/ 20 http://www.unofficialspiceworks.com/2009/07/first-guest-writer/ http://www.unofficialspiceworks.com/2009/07/first-guest-writer/#comments Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:41:17 +0000 akp982 http://www.unofficialspiceworks.com/2009/07/first-guest-writer/ Spiceworks-News has its first guest writer, Justin Dorfman (Jdorfman on the community)

You may have already seen him around he has provided me with information in the past as well as leaving a couple of comments.

He will shortly be writing a post about “How to Host a SpiceCorps Event”

I would personally like to welcome him along and thank him for providing Spiceworks-News with a great article.

Wow guys we had a fantastic turn out! 20 people made it to our first SpiceCorps meeting. I was not so sure the SAM question would be answered as we all were given Scott Alan Miller name-tags upon arrival, but the man himself soon arrived. By the way, SAM and Talon63 are definitely two different people!

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