photo credit:
fallingwater123

Imagine this situation: you are contacted by the wife of a member of your community. The member registered six years ago and has made hundreds of comments. She tells you that this veteran member of your community is dead. He has committed suicide. For any community manager, this is a moment of sadness.

But, you are still the community manager and you probably know that people fake this stuff. So, you do what little research you can, without doing the unthinkable and asking the wife if she is making it all up.

You may not find enough details to be completely satisfied, but you also can’t find anything that makes you think, with absolute conviction, that the wife’s story is anything but true. And you can’t afford to be wrong with that sort of accusation because it is simply too cruel.

photo credit:
Tambako the Jaguar

Recently, a new member on PhotoshopForums.com posted a request where they were looking for someone to take a picture of a paper sign with some girls name on it and then make it look like a guy in a different photo was holding it.

They said that it was for a prank. The way he explained it was that he and his cousin prank each other back and forth and he wanted to get her back for her last prank, which was to go up to him when he was talking to an attractive girl and act like a rude ex-girlfriend.

What he did was create an account (presumably on Facebook, but could it could be any social site) to pretend to be this guy in the photo, who his cousin finds “hot.” In his act of pretending, she asked for him to hold a sign with her name on it to prove that it is really the guy. Hence the request.

That’s a scary thing to me because while I joke around a lot, especially with my brothers and close friends, that’s the type of thing you read about kids committing suicide over. Is it possibly over dramatic for me to leap to that thought? Perhaps. A person can commit suicide over anything – any perceived slight or insult, no matter how meaningless. If it were to happen in this case, however unlikely that is, reasonably, it wouldn’t really be my fault. Even though, if it were picked up in the press, it is possible that I would be scrutinized.

photo credit: outcast104

On PhotoshopForums.com, we don’t allow people to link (outside of their signature) to tutorial sites that they are in some way affiliated with. Even if the tutorial answers a question that has been asked.

To some, this may sound strange. But, for us, it speaks to the intent of participation and the quality of engagement on our community.

If we allowed people to link to their tutorial sites, they would. In massive droves. It’s all our community would be. A mess of people jockeying to post links to their tutorial sites.

Not only do people post their tutorials as answers and as new threads, but they search for threads where their tutorial may be relevant or where it may answer the question and then respond, regardless of how old the thread is. We’ll even have people who will look for questions, specifically so that they want write a tutorial on their site, rather than replying in our forums, and then link to it.

photo credit: rsgranne

I run into people who say that the guidelines for your community don’t need to be anything more than “don’t be a jerk.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t the most efficient use of guidelines and, even if you think it works for you, it likely doesn’t work as well as having a simple, though more defined set of expectations would.

It doesn’t work for the same reasons that the laws of a country aren’t simply “don’t be a jerk,” or the rules at the swimming pool aren’t simply “don’t be a jerk” or the employee handbook at a random company doesn’t consist of “don’t be a jerk.”

It isn’t defined enough to be helpful. It lacks any real meaning.

photo credit: John Drake Flickr

A few nights ago, as I was trying to get over some post-SXSW illness, I stayed up until about 2 AM reading a single forum thread.

It was 22 or so pages in length, but there were many guideline violations and troublesome posts in it and I had to read the thread to clean it up properly and to make sure that I understood the context. After this, I needed to document all violations and contact the members affected.

It took about 4 hours, maybe a little more. That’s what it took to do the job right.

If you think that community manager is a glamour role, where you are a “rock star” and you spend all of your time cheerfully chatting with people on Twitter and Facebook, I am here to tell you that it is not.

photo credit: John Cronin’s Flickr Page

Whenever I can, which is mainly when he is on break, I play “Call of Duty: Black Ops” with my brother, who is a college student.

Since community management is what I do, I often relate things to the practice.

Having spent countless hours playing online multiplayer, there are traits that I often see in players that would not translate well, if those players wanted to work in this field.

I’m going to call these traits the “Call of Duty” test. If you play “Call of Duty,” and you play the game this way, then you may not be cut out to be a community manager.

photo credit: Vivian Chen [陳培雯]

Private forums are meant to be private – the information contained within is supposed to only be for the people who have access to that forum.

But, people don’t always respect this fact and eventually, you may have someone leaking private information to people who shouldn’t have it. The question is: what can you do about it?

The short answer: not very much. It is an incredibly frustrating situation.

Unless you have clear cut evidence on who is leaking the information, the main thing that you need to do is resist the temptation to go crazy and go on a witch hunt. You need to maintain your cool, keep your eyes open and only make decisions based upon good information.

One of the reasons that words matter so much is that different words prompt different emotional reactions from people. If you call someone a spammer, they are more likely to react defensively than if you said that they were advertising. Even though, when it comes to the action, these are the same thing.

Let’s take this post for example. I would be willing to wager that, based on title alone, a good portion of those who open it will be predisposed to disagreeing with me, even before they read what I had to say, simply because I used the word censorship instead of “removing bad content” or “banning members.” Not everyone will have this reaction, but some will.

This post is partially inspired by a survey conducted by The American Assembly at at Columbia University (via Jonathan Bailey via Government Computer News). Spurned on by the SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act) legislation, they asked 2,303 adults in the United States a series of questions.

photo credit: jsmjr

In the United States, today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, in honor of the late civil rights leader.

A few days ago, NBC News released a full episode of “Meet the Press” from March 28, 1965, which featured Dr. King. It is embedded below.

If you watch it, you’ll notice how calm he remains throughout. Despite the very personal nature of the topic and the fact that, at multiple times, he is essentially asked if he is a communist or a hypocrite, he remains calm. This trait was undoubtedly one of Dr. King’s strengths and one of the reasons that he was such an influential leader.

Though his cause was one of vast importance, far more than the management of an average community, a community manager is a leader and leaders of all stripes can learn a great deal from Dr. King.

photo credit: Gord Bell

If you are like me, you have many different social streams of information that you pay attention to.

These streams usually contain information from people that you have subscribed to in some way, whether you call it friending, following or something else.

When we interact via platforms that have some sort of relationship system, where people can add you to the list of people they want to pay attention to, you can add them to your list and we are notified when people add us to their list, there is a personal dynamic.

This is because we all like to have people pay attention to us. When we say, “hey, I want to pay attention to you,” and that person then tells us, “awesome, I want to pay attention to you, too!,” it makes us feel good.