Building Community

Moderation sets the tone

Tweetcret.com launches as a concept similar to PostSecret, twitter-style. Mashable points out a great point about systems that are developed without proper moderation.

Operating on precisely the model of the celebrated PostSecret blog, Tweetcret, is very elementary new site, evidently created in virtual anonymity, that offers a Twitter-like tablet for which individuals from all [...]

Introducing your Admins

One of the forums I follow regularly had a very activity I wanted to share. In the words of the Nikonians admin who started the thread:
Celebrating our 8th year of Nikonians, jrp and I thought it would be good to let the team members “in the background”, both volunteers and staff, come forward and present [...]

OCRN: 9 Tips for Inspired (and Inspiring) Text Communication

I’m pleased to share that last week published my first whitepaper for the Online Community Research Network: 9 Tips for Inspired (and Inspiring) Text Communication. Here’s the synopsis:

Text is the base language of community interaction and engagement, yet far too many community professionals don’t put the focus on it [...]

The New Journalism

It seems like only yesterday that journalists were laughing at blogs and the idea that blogs might have something to offer the “news” space.
Things have changed a bit today. According to this study, 73% of journalists survey say they “sometimes or always use blogs in their research. The most often cited reason for using blogs [...]

MySpace security makes me twitch

Long ago I grew tired (and mostly annoyed) with MySpace and haven’t been back in some time. Mostly I’ve stayed away because of the site’s horrendous UI, purposely poor design (to drive additional page views), band spam, and the fact that my friends have migrated to twitter and/or Facebook.
But there was also a [...]

Introduction Opportunity

Often the hardest part of starting any relationship is simply getting started. Most of us have been in the situation at some point where we are attracted to someone new and want to introduce ourselves. Since we don’t all have a friend like Barney, crossing a crowded room to make that introduction can scare us [...]

The TSA is blogging

For someone who travels as much as I do, I constantly find myself scratching my head about things like having to remove my shoes, the extra attention paid to 80 year old white women, or the staff of 12 standing around while 3 actually work.
When Matt told me that the TSA had [...]

Community Manager Employement & Employees

Last week I wrote several different posts about community management positions. To make it easy to find them in the future, I thought I’d bundle them all together.
How do I hire a Community Manager?
Looking to hire a community manager but not sure where to start or even what you’re looking for? This is a great [...]

ASK: How do I become a Community Manager? (College Students)

(This is part of Ask the Community Guy, an ongoing series of questions posed by readers for Jake, the Community Guy)
Question: via several college students over the years - “What college courses should I take, and what activities should I do if I’m interested in a career in community development?”
Answer: This question extends the conversation [...]

Follow-up: Hiring a community manager

Earlier this week as part of the Ask the Community Guy feature, I attempted to answer the question “How do you hire a community manager?“. The level of response to this, both publicly and privately, continues to surprise me. Clearly people are looking for smart community people, and hopefully we look back on 2008 as [...]