In this post, I thought I would take a moment to let you know a little more of the story of my background and how while my career has taken me all over, the lessons learned from one industry to another carry over:

Years ago I ran my own promotions company (Emerging Sounds) for the music industry. My focus was creating a methodology for success in helping bands get noticed and get signed, it was all about grass roots marketing.

This was around the time when e-groups was bought out by Yahoo, so we created groups for our bands that we supported. In addition, we would take thousands of pictures of our bands so while we traveled from show to show, city to city, we had images to capture their essence. This was before digital cameras were affordable and as mainstream as the are today. So we would have to go to CVS or another photo development place, as for the pictures not only in print, but on floppy disk. Those were the “glory days”.

We were the “gardeners” of the Mid-Atlantic Music Scene and we were happy to do it. Why? Because we believed in our product: The bands we selected to promote. This just wasn’t any old band of the street, but ones we felt we knew and could get to know better as people. We became a family with them and in turn, we’re able to put 1000% efforts in to pushing them out to the rest of the world and record labels. This was the beginning of a new era for the music industry as MP3′s on the web were a way of getting your music into the hands of fans. I was working with industry reps giving them the inside scoop of what fans in our area were listening to and who we wanted to see on MTV (they were still playing some videos) and the short-lived Television show “Farmclub“. To me, this is as close to a point when I can remember a user-generated web beginning to form. Before we started calling it “Web 2.0″.

If you take a look at the bands listed on the Mid-Atlantic Music Scene page, you might see names of bands that you still know of today. Some had regional success, some even more national an world exposure (Remember Sev’s Pepsi Blue commercial), and some well are dating world famous socialites.

Sev – Pespi Blue (Same Old Song)

Now to my point of this blog post title. This was all grassroots work. Done by those who loved what they did and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t their “official” job or even if they were getting paid for it. It was for the love of the game. This is what I see happening with social media tool adoption with the communities I am involved.

Just as I took an initiative to create a company for recognizing and promoting the talent in a music industry that was on the verge of a technological change, I wanted to do the same for my organization. I believe I started using Wiki’s in 2005, with Confluence and at least in May 2006 with Wikipedia (when I finally decided to get a user account).

In early 2007, I became the first ever paid Intellipedian. My job as lead wiki gardener (a position I have since passed on to other colleagues) was to maintain the wiki and other social web tools for the Intelligence Community. I used my position to mentor and shape the “edit swarms” that have helped Intellipedia grow into what it is today. I have to believe a lot of my mentoring and efforts in shaping Intellipedia come directly from my experience in managing a music promotions community, all grassroots.

If you were at Fastforward2008 this past February, you might have heard Professor Andrew McAfee mention the story above as a part of his keynote.

So this grassroots term is now being referred to as groundswell, when it comes to the growth of any social web tool. For Intellipedia, it has been a wonderful ride as to see my suggestions to the gardeners who I have mentored use their “spare-cycles” with managerial buy-in. Their work has been to me the great success of the wiki, as we are not only capturing knowledge, but organizing it in a robust way.

I used to use the term “Community Manager” to define my role, however I never felt manager was the right term, I believe myself to be more of an advocate. A “Community Advocate“. I have shaped the term and role from past experience to what I have learned from the likes of Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jeremiah Owyang, and others in the world of social media. I am an advocate not only for the tools, but for the people on both sides of the application, the developers and the users. I have walked in both sets of shoes in my life and that experience helps me make the communication flow between the two parties. Then there is marketing… you know the fun stuff. The stuff that drove me to want to do more when I was in the music scene. I believe those skills I have sharpened over the years, so I can tell what potential users, listeners would probably want to hear and see to get them to use their tool or buy their music or go to a show.

I hope that in all my work, in all the talks, in all the blog posts, and online chats: inside the community, my company, and beyond; that my work inspires others to be community leaders. I would love my grassroots work to make the groundswell happen within these “families” to take-off and build bigger and brighter things. And I know they do, I see the work of others and I am proud to call them a colleague.