If you come into an online community and you feel the need to include something like “if the admins think this is spam, please delete” in a post, you should take this as an indication not to post whatever it is that you are about to post.

Here is what the message conveys: I don’t care to take the time to read the guidelines or ask to be sure, I don’t care if I’m pushing said guidelines and, finally, I don’t care if I take up the time of staff members by potentially making them remove this post. This isn’t exactly the good neighbor impression one might want to make.

What should you do instead? First, check the guidelines or rules for the community. They might be linked in the header or footer or made as a sticky thread in the forums. Generally speaking, if they exist, they probably aren’t too hard to find. Can’t find any? No problem. Most active online communities have someone in charge. Whether it be an administrator or moderator, ask them. Send a message to a moderator or administrator or use the contact form on the site.

This way, you won’t have to assume or guess, you are thought of as a thoughtful, caring person and you are treating the community and it’s staff with the appropriate level of respect. Everyone wins!

I wrote a guest post for SmartBlog on Social Media that was published on Monday. It’s called “4 Simple Rules for Generating Traffic from Forums.” That title is pretty descriptive – it’s a simple, straightforward guide for those who want to participate on forums in an effort to drive traffic to their own site. The four steps are:

1. Observe first, act second.

2. Fill out your profile, especially your signature.

3. Want to be there.

4. Don’t mention your website.

The article goes into more detail. If this is something that you are interested in, I hope that you find it useful.

Below, please find the video for Father MC’s 1990 single “Treat Them Like They Want to be Treated,” featuring R&B group Jodeci and a young Sean “Diddy” Combs dancing. The chorus goes: “treat them like they want to be treated… you should treat them right.”

As community managers or administrators or, to break it down further, webmasters and content creators, it’s always important to respect your fellow administrators and creators and treat them with the same respect that you would like to receive.

Do you want people to take posts and articles from your site? Then don’t take theirs. Establish solid quoting practices that limit excerpts, link to sources and encourage content creator benefits.

Do you want people to hotlink images to your server? Then don’t allow your users to randomly hotlink images to servers where they don’t appear to have permission to link.

Do you want people to use their community as a complaint department for yours? Then don’t allow your community to become a complaint department for how other random communities are run.

Do you want people to respect the guidelines on your community? Then respect the guidelines of communities that you participate in.

But, let’s be clear: it’s not just about treating them like you want to be treated. It’s about treating them like they want to be treated. If you allow people to post random links to their own website, don’t expect me to allow you to do so on mine. If you allow people to drop four letter words on your community, don’t expect that you’ll be allowed to do so on mine.

Understand that the rules change when the domain changes. Check the policies of the site you’re entering and check the social norms before you jump in.

In short… treat them like they want to be treated. You should treat them right.

I returned from South by Southwest Interactive (recap coming soon – suffice to say, it was great, and my talk went well, too!) and, eventually, proceeded to visit my communities and process my usual responsibilities and tasks. When I came to SportsForums.net, I found that a post had been removed that featured a link to the website of a weekly print newspaper.

The author of the post was one of the paper’s staff writers and she had linked to a sports article she had written that was published on their site (as part of their blogs). We knew it was her because her name was part of her username and the e-mail address provided was her e-mail address on the paper’s domain.

The post was her first, one and only and it was basically your typical self promotion advertisement. A link with a quick description of it. It was an obvious violation of our User Guidelines, where we generally do not allow people to create threads to bring attention to links that they are in some way affiliated with. Pretty typical, open and shut case of spam. Not that big a deal, in and of itself. People make mistakes. The post was removed and she was politely notified by one of my moderators.

Instead of apologizing or simply not responding, however, she decided to send a reply that was troubling on a few levels.

First, she claimed that she did not receive any credit for the article, even though her name was credited as the author who wrote it. She followed this up by calling the moderator “uptight,” and by slamming our community as a whole, saying that her link was “more valuable than 95 percent of random thoughts/opinions that make up the bulk of the forum.” Her link with a 30 odd word description was more valuable than virtually all of our community throughout it’s 8 plus years of existence. Ouch.

Unhappy with the activity on your community? One way to take matters into your own hands is to start topics on your forums, allowing people who want to participate to add to the activity, rather than having them feel as if they have to create the activity. After you get past the standard sort of threads, you may be wondering: where can I get ideas for new ones? Let’s talk about five of my favorite ways.

1. Social Bookmarking and News Sites

My favorite way to find interesting and/or funny content that I can share is on social news sites. My two favorites for this purpose are Digg (add me) and Mixx (me). The quickest way to do it is to visit the site and open up the main category pages or the categories that most interest you and scan the top stories. Share the ones that you feel are the most interesting and appropriate for your community.

There are plenty of other ones, like StumbleUpon (me), Yahoo! Buzz (me), Propeller (me), reddit (me) and Kirtsy (me). There are also niche sites dedicated to specific topics that may be even more helpful, such as Tip’d for financial news and Sphinn (me) for online marketing news.

2. News Aggregators

These sites allow you to see the biggest news stories of the day, from a very wide array of publications, from just a single site, which can save you time. The ones that I recommend are Google News and Yahoo! News. The sites are pretty straightforward.

But, perhaps even a bigger benefit is the ability to search for news related to your community’s niche in one place. So, for example, if your forums were about the Jonas Brothers, you could run a search for “Jonas Brothers” on Google News. You would then be able to see all related headlines and you can even sort them by date to find the most recent ones, if you need to. Or if your community was about or was interested in breastfeeding, you could monitor that.

A cool way to monitor these sources is with an RSS reader. For example, here’s the RSS feed for the Google News search “Jonas Brothers.” You can also subscribe to e-mail news alerts.

At my communities, we are proactive when it comes to defending the rights of others, in fairly clear cut matters. There are people out there who are tickled to allow hotlinking, mass copying and pasting of copyrighted articles and blog posts and unbelievable piracy, just as long as no one calls them on it. When they are called on it, they act. But, until then, they are happy to have the traffic. Not me.

One good example of this is our handling of hotlinked or direct linked images. I use hotlinking as an umbrella for when someone embeds or directly links (such as posting the link http://www.ifroggy.com/image.jpg) without permission from the person who is hosting the photo.

We make a reasonable effort to ensure that the person is using a free file host that allows it, a website that has permitted it or their own web space. One site that pops up, from time to time, is Flickr. Flickr’s community guidelines are clear. You can link or embed an image on their server, but you must link to the actual image page on Flickr, as well. So, for example, if you post a link to or embed http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3126/2588974860_9e53e85043.jpg, you must link to http://www.flickr.com/photos/65547304@N00/2588974860/. A common and acceptable way to do this is like this:

As you can see, I have embedded the image here from Flickr’s servers. When you click it, it goes to their photo page. Another way to do this is simply to provide a “photo source” link below the photo. Either way, you are accomplishing the objective and respecting Flickr’s wishes and requirements.

We had a person sign up for one of my sites just the other day and start posting multiple links to images on Flickr’s servers, apparently to photos on his account. Not embedding them, but linking directly to the .jpgs. No big deal, we’ve seen it before, many times. Post removed, documented in our staff area and a kind and polite private message (PM), explaining the problem, is dispatched.

The next day, the guy does it again and adds a question, why was his other thread deleted? (Which, of course, violates our guidelines as referencing administrative decisions). So, again, it was removed and a kind and polite PM was sent, explaining the situation once again.

Now, my moderator – the moderator who handled all of this – did a wonderful job and is a super nice person (as all of my moderators are). With that in mind, here is what the member sends back (note: this isn’t the exact PM, but it is basically a rephrasing of what he said, except with better grammar):

Look,

I linked to Flickr. http://www.flickr.com. Flickr is a FREE host of pictures and videos that allows you to upload your pictures and videos for their blogs and websites. Again, FREE. So you know, Flickr is very large and tons of people use it for direct linking of pictures on their blogs. There’s nothing illegal about it. [Editor’s note: no one told him it was illegal]. Furthermore, the pictures are MINE. I downloaded from them Google and I uploaded them to Flickr MYSELF. You got it now? If not, go to Flickr. http://www.flickr.com. Actually, here are their guidelines: http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne.

Thanks for your NICE message. PERIOD.

So, basically, he was a jerk to my moderator. But, this message is pretty funny and the actual one killed me. He probably violated Flickr’s TOS by downloading images from Google and uploading them to their server. That’s nothing to be bragging about.

But, the real gold is in the fact that he linked to Flickr’s guidelines. If you go to the page, you will see that they clearly state:

Do link back to Flickr when you post your Flickr content elsewhere.
The Flickr service makes it possible to post content hosted on Flickr to outside web sites. However, pages on other web sites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr.

My moderator sent him back a very nice message, showing him this excerpt and I ended up banning the fellow. But, that message was just too good not to share. There’s a certain hilarity when someone like this links to the page that shows that he is, in fact, mistaken.

In September, I went to the Blog World & New Media Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada and spoke on a pair of panels (Blog World Expo 2008 recap). The final panel that I spoke on was called “Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media.” Here’s the panel description:

This panel will discuss how not to approach social media for people looking to promote themselves and/or their companies through blogs, forums, social networking sites and other types of communities online. We’ll highlight and discuss strategies and tactics that can damage you and your brand, such as introtisements and adverquestions (veiled advertisements), lying about your affiliations, never giving anything of value, being ignorant of your surroundings and much more. The end result will be a better understanding of how to utilize the social web to get the word out about yourself and/or your organization. We learn not only from best practices, but from poor practices. Who you want to be, directly relates to who you don’t want to be.

I was joined on the panel by Lee LeFever (Principal, Common Craft), Jason Falls (Social Media Explorer, Doe-Anderson and Blogger, SocialMediaExplorer.com) and Darren Rowse (Owner, ProBlogger.net; Co-Founder, Sixfigureblogging.com; Co-Founder and VP Training, b5media and Co-Author, “ProBlogger: The Book“).

The panel went really well and I was really proud of it and how it all came together, from organization to finish. The only thing that I regret is that I didn’t switch out the battery on my camcorder before going in the session, as my camera died and we lost probably 15 minutes of questions which kills me because the questions were the best part and there was a funny moment or two in there. Hopefully, the Blog World Expo folks taped the questions segment and will release it at some point.

Thank you to my friend Chrispian who did an excellent job manning the camera.

No further description needed, here is the video. After viewing, please let me know what you thought! Thank you for watching.

Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media Panel at Blog World Expo from ManagingCommunities.com on Vimeo.

In addition to Vimeo, the video is also on YouTube (parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5).

On last night’s episode of SuccessfoolTV, I came on to talk about online community, forums, social media, the book and more. I thought it went really well and that it was really informative, so I wanted to share it. You can check it out below.

Live TV by Ustream

Thank you to Alejandro for having me and to everyone who stopped in, helped to spread the word through Twitter and had kind words to say, during and after. I really appreciate it.

During the “Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media” panel at Blog World Expo, Ricardo Bueno asked about outreach, specifically tied to promoting a blog, and how aggressive you can be, with that outreach. Check out the video below of the question and answer, care of Lynn Terry.

My answer was, basically, that I feel that where outreach crosses a line is when you use a space that is not yours to use. As an example, I mentioned a blog or a forum where you post a comment or create a new thread and you mention your website.

My friend Jason Falls, the panel’s moderator, deferred to me because I had reached out to him when I was promoting my book, to ask him if he’d like a review copy. I didn’t go to Jason’s blog and post a comment. I contacted him directly. I introduced myself in a respectful, professional manner and I asked him if he’d be willing to allow me to send a copy of the book. And that’s it, really. He could have said no, and he never would have heard from me again. But, he said yes and I sent him one and we got to know each other through that, through me taking the initiative to contact him.

Outreach is fine, but outreach can turn into spamming real fast if you don’t respect who you are speaking to and who the owners of a given space – whether that be a social networking site, a forum, a blog or something else. Outreach should be delicate and considered. You have to be aware of what your surroundings are and who holds the keys.

If someone doesn’t want you, they don’t want you. If they say no, accept it and move on. If you don’t ask and they don’t want it, they’ll shut you down, anyway, and you can gain a poor reputation. At least, if you ask, you’ll be showing them respect, which they’ll appreciate and, you never know, they might actually help you, where they might not have, had you just attempted to abuse their community.

On October 21, I presented at a Social Media Club Louisville meeting via live video. It was actually the first time that I’ve ever done anything like this (I’ve given presentations, but never without actually being at the venue), but I thought it went well. The talk didn’t really have a title… but, I’m going to give it one now. I’ll call it “The Value of Online Forums and How to Approach Them as a Marketer.”

A big thank you to my friend Jason Falls who set it all up and emceed it. He recorded the video and posted it on the Social Media Club Louisville website, so I wanted to share it here. Please let me know what you think.