photo credit: !efatima

My mind is in a certain place today.

Communities are about people and people, unlike databases and forum posts, have a finite existence on Earth.

One of the hardest things we will deal with in our life is death. When a person dies, their death impacts everyone who cared for them, from family and close friends to admirers. So, it makes sense that one of the toughest things that a community manager will deal with is the death of a beloved member of your community.

It can be difficult to decide what to do when someone dies. We search for guidance and we ask for help. I suspect that, one day, a community manager looking for advice on this topic may run across this article. Who knows, it may even be me.

photo credit: Sean MacEntee

Sooner or later, some sort of technical issue will affect your community over an extended period of time.

Your account will be suspended by your host, you will experience an impractically high level of load for the server you are on, a hard drive will crash or, perhaps, you’ll have some good old fashioned downtime.

It’ll happen. Don’t doubt me on this. Over the last 11 years of managing multiple online communities, I have seen numerous issues crop up that weren’t fixed in an hour or two. This experience has helped me to understand what a community manager can do to limit the impact of these issues and get things back on track.

photo credit: @boetter

Support forums exist for seemingly every form of popular technology and even for most forms of less popular and mainstream technology. They can be dedicated to specific trades or areas of knowledge, to specific brands and products and more.

From web hosting to consumer electronics, from official communities to unofficial ones, support forums often represent the greatest collection of concentrated knowledge aimed at whatever it is that they cover.

I’ve participated, at various levels, in a number of them over the years and have run phpBBHacks.com for 10 and a half years and PhotoshopForums.com for 8 and a half. My experience has led me to believe that truly great support forums often share 3 specific principles.

photo credit: jsheehan200

Josh Barraza asked: “How [do you] transition [a] community after an acquisition?”

Online communities, like any website, can be very valuable. They take a great deal of time to run and manage and, in that light, can be looked at like any other venture or full time job.

Everything must eventually come to an end and there will come a time to close the community, to pass it off to someone else or to sell it.

But, they can also be quite delicate. In most cases, a portion of their value is tied to current activity and, if you go in with the wrong mentality, you could erode a substantial amount of value by making unfavorable changes or lacking the proper sensitivity when you first enter the community.

photo credit: jurvetson

I’ve been hearing the word influencer a lot lately. People (companies) want other people, with big audiences, to talk about their stuff. There is nothing wrong with that.

Just don’t confuse your pursuit of influencers with community building. There is some overlap, sure, but if you focus on “influencers” at the cost of “normal” people, you are not building community. That’s PR – that’s outreach. It’s a crucial, important difference.

Some people want to convince themselves into thinking that if they email the person with the most followers who talks about their industry the most, they are building community. But, they aren’t.

photo credit: anemoneprojectors
(no internet at the moment)

ren asked: “What [do you] do when you ban someone for defamation (not of you) and impersonation and they use social networks to bad mouth your forum and organization?”

I’ve banned a lot of people. The vast majority of them were simple spammers or the like. But, some of them were members that had contributed something. If you have guidelines that you fairly and evenly apply to your community, you will have to ban people. It’s the nature of the beast.

Some of those people will speak poorly of you and your community in public spaces. I find that a reasonable portion of these people, in my case, claim that I banned them because I disagree with them or because I am mad with power. Those are particularly popular reasons.

I love Amazon.com. Love. They have great prices and selection and wonderful customer service that has yet to let me down and I’ve been a customer for almost 10 years. I regularly recommend people buy products there. In some cases, they are the first and only place I go to buy something. That’s the built up capital that they have with me.

I have spent a countless amount of money buying things from them. I use the Subscribe & Save feature to get particular items delivered regularly. I am an Amazon Prime subscriber and have been for years. I have an Amazon.com Visa card. I like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter. I am a long term Amazon.com shareholder.

Unfortunately, though, I believe that Amazon has a real problem on their hands with the Customer Reviews feature and, eventually, they are going to have to face it. Specifically, the Amazon.com Community Team is going to have to face it.

I am one of the co-hosts on the SitePoint Podcast, a weekly podcast from SitePoint, one of the largest web development communities in the world.

Recently, I led a community management roundtable that spanned two episodes and featured Matthew Haughey, creator of MetaFilter; Sarah Hawk, Community Manager for SitePoint and Venessa Paech, Lead Community Manager for Community Engine, former Community Manager for Lonely Planet and co-organizer of Swarm Sydney, an upcoming community management conference.

The idea for the roundtable (as well as the selection of the people that would join me) came from SitePoint Program Director Lisa Lang.

We discussed topics like the evolving community manager job title, why forums matter, integrating various social media platforms with your standalone community, the gender diversity of the profession, the danger of community metrics and more. You can listen to the shows and read the transcripts on SitePoint, published as episodes 119 and 121.

photo credit: Danny Nicholson

There is a certain train of thought that suggests that as a member becomes well established on your community, that you should give them more rope when it comes to your guidelines and greater flexibility regarding them. In fact, it’s more than a train of thought, it’s a pressure.

As someone becomes more of a presence on your community, garners greater influence and becomes someone that you hopefully like a lot, the relationship can become more complicated than it was at the start, when they were new.

In May, at WordCamp Raleigh, I ran into Ray Mitchell, a Winston Salem, North Carolina-based web designer, who I had met previously. SixFour Web Design is his company.

Mr. Mitchell recently shared a blog post request for me Twitter: “Special tips for managing LinkedIn Groups to build real community vs. self-promotion.” Thank you for the suggestion.

Upfront, I have to say that my experience with LinkedIn Groups is somewhat limited. I am currently a member of 10 groups (make that 8 as I just left two of them while working on this article) and I don’t actively participate in, or even read, any of them. But, at the same time – a platform is a platform and LinkedIn Groups is not dissimilar from other platforms. Much of what applies to building community on LinkedIn Groups will also apply to building on other platforms, as well.