photo credit: Horia Varlan

It’s important to be proactive on matters of content theft and copyright infringement. A large part of this is text quoted from other sources. With some exceptions (public domain works, works by the Federal Government, works released under alternative licenses to copyright, and more), you can’t allow your members to post entire text articles that they did not author or hold no rights to, source or no source.

But, that doesn’t mean that they can’t quote some portions that are properly attributed. Fair use is an exception to copyright that, among many other things and without getting too legally technical, allows you to quote excerpts of someone else’s work with proper attribution. Fair use isn’t a law as much as it is a defense.

photo credit: chrisdlugosz

The act of blocking URLs from being posted on your community is a great tool and one that you should have in your arsenal. I’ve used it to block out spammers, affiliate links and sites that were determined to harm my community or attack my members. I have Censor Block in place, in order to stop the link before it is posted, so that the member can remove it from his or her post, rather than them having to see their post, already made, with the link censored in some way.

But, as with most administrative tools, it’s level of effectiveness depends on it’s use and, in practice, I’ve seen administrators do two things that you need to avoid.

photo credit:
permanently scatterbrained

Here’s another gem from the song “Victory” by Diddy: to close out his first verse on the song, Diddy raps: “While they making up facts, we raking up plaques.”

This speaks to a focus on one’s goals, even when faced with those who seek to harm, unfairly criticize or lie about you. Whether it’s competition, disgruntled ex-staff members or banned members – if you reach a certain level of popularity, you’ll see people make up facts about you.

“Patrick banned me for no reason.”
“Patrick stole my chickens and relieved himself in my garden.”
“Patrick eats chocolate covered crickets.”

But, you have to keep raking up plaques: you have to keep achieving, keep growing, keep working. Stay focused on your work, on being the best that you can be. When these people are too busy thinking about you, they’re not getting enough work done and they’re falling behind you.

photo credit: Daquella manera

Part of being a good community administrator is believing in yourself. It’s always easy for an outsider, someone who doesn’t know what it means to manage your community, to say “look in the mirror” and consider how you could do better – without actually thinking of actual situations or moments. That’s too easy. Far, far too easy.

If you care about your community, believe in yourself. That doesn’t mean arrogance, it doesn’t mean that you’re always right, but it does mean that you’re trying hard and that you consider your decisions carefully and when you do something, chances are it was actually required. Caring is that powerful.

There is this train of thought that if someone else doesn’t understand you or doesn’t do the right things on your community, that it isn’t their fault, it’s yours. While may sometimes be the case and  you can always be looking to improve, do not allow that to turn into needlessly blaming yourself for the actions of other people.  People will take warnings the wrong way, people will not like having their post removed or edited, people will not like being told they can’t do something… that doesn’t mean that your actions are wrong. That doesn’t mean that you should change a single thing. Meaningful change doesn’t come from knee jerk reactions to singular events.  Meaningful change comes from witnessing trends and adjusting to ensure your community handles them in a consistent manner.

This is the video for “Victory” by Diddy featuring The Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes. It’s a masterpiece and one of my favorite music videos of all times. It’s an awesomely inspiration song and quotable in so many ways.

During Diddy’s opening verse, he opens with this gem: “yo, the sun don’t shine forever, but as long as it’s here, then we might as well shine together.”

Last October, I traveled to Greensboro, North Carolina for ConvergeSouth and the Independent Blogging Conference at Greensboro. I spoke at the latter, leading a solo session and participating in the day’s opening panel.

Led by Kelby Carr of Type-A Mom, the panel also featured Jared Smith of Charleston Weather, Heather Solos of Home Ec 101 and Anne Fitten-Glenn. It was titled “The Blogging Revolution” and we discussed blogging in general, the responsibility of it, where we saw the medium going and more. We had a great Q&A and discussion with the group that attended. Thank you to Kelby Carr and Dave Slusher for having me.

Unfortunately, we used up my entire camera tape before we ended, so I didn’t get the entire session. However, in the clip below, you can watch the length of the recording.

In addition to Vimeo, the video has also been uploaded to YouTube, in parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.

photo credit:
Caveman 92223 — On the Road Again!

Recently, on the e-mint discussion list, a member was asking for some suggestions for a list of 10 ways to kill your online community, with some humor. Taking approximately 10-15 minutes, I came up with a quick, fun, spur of the moment list and I thought I’d share it with you!

1. Don’t have any guidelines! We’re all adults – and cursing is fun! Weeeeeeeeee…

2. Since we’re all adults, it’s not like you actually need to visit your site much. A few times a month should be good.

3. Create an open group that anyone can join called “Moderators” and let anyone who wants to join in and move, edit or delete whatever they want. They’re here to help!

4. As the administrator, when you post, try to set the worst example possible. Since humans all strive to be better than one another, this will force your members to be awesome!

If you know me, you know I like to keep private business private. I don’t like to air dirty laundry. When someone violates our guidelines, it’s removed completely and we contact them privately and ban them privately, if appropriate. We try hard to keep details internal, even if it means that people believe some lie a banned member told them. This is my policy and I am happy (and proud) to say we are great at sticking to it.

But, that doesn’t mean that exceptions won’t be made. It doesn’t mean that you can push me around, lie to me, trick my users, try to intimidate me on Twitter and take advantage of countless forums, blogs and social spaces and get away with it. At some point, eventually, you can go too far. And when that happens, as much as I don’t enjoy it, I will tell people about what you are doing because there is a consequence and there are repercussions for unethical behavior.

This is what happened with Sports Legends Challenge. They have engaged in despicable activities and deceived people in their marketing efforts. The funny thing is that there are a few details left out of that post, too, that make it even worse.

Make no mistake that my intention is to shed light on this, but I was also careful to keep the discussion productive, to the best of my ability and resisted name calling and things that would serve to derail the post’s true purpose, which is to expose these activities. I hope that it is taken as a learning experience.

It’s a good read, I believe, for community managers because it’ll help you to see how far some people can go and what you need to look out for, if you haven’t already experienced it. Good luck.

As a community manager or administrator, the situations we have to deal with are as varied as life itself. For all talk about the online and offline worlds being different, at the end of the day, they have more in common than they do dissimilar. Unfortunately, this is not just the fun, easy parts of life, but also the difficult, challenging ones.

Though it may not be one of the more enjoyable parts of our job, it’s smart and important to ponder what circumstances we may face, even if we haven’t yet faced them. This leads me to what I’d like to talk about today: suicide on our online community, and how we can most effectively help and protect everyone involved. This isn’t about suicide in general, why people think about it, the repercussions of it or anything of that nature – this is strictly about how we should approach it on our communities.

When we think about suicide on an online community or social space, the two recent examples that will probably jump to your head are Abraham K. Biggs’ suicide on Justin.TV and the suicide of Megan Meier, apparently driven by messages exchanged through MySpace.

Before I jump into this subject, I want to be clear that I believe that we are all responsible for our actions as individuals. I don’t think it’s fair to blame Justin.TV, MySpace or any community or social site for the actions of an individual in this sort of case. The nature of communication itself dictates otherwise.

Your community should have it’s own mission. Why do you exist? Who are you? Who are you for? What do you want to be? Those are the things you and your community should be focused on.

Unfortunately, what can happen sometimes is that your community is used to talk about another community in a negative way. “I was banned from this forum. They suck! The administrator is a lunatic!” Sound familiar?

Generally speaking, I believe that your community should be about your community – not about cross forum politics. If someone has an issue with how someone else runs their site, they can take it up with that person. Either way, how someone else runs their site shouldn’t really be a topic of discussion on your site, which should be focused on it’s own identity.

Please be careful not to lose that. At the end of the day, you want people who are at your community to be at your community – not people who are there to bash someone else’s. Even if it’s someone you don’t like – even if you feel they deserve it. There may be exceptions, but try to take the high road and not let your community become consumed by it.

Stay focused and keep it moving.