“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

– Steve Jobs

I love this quote. I think it has great applicability to the community manager.

You have to know who you are and what you want to be – and vigorously pursue that. It’s not about pleasing everyone, it’s not about being loved; it’s about accomplishing goals and catering to your audience.

Think about the people who lead the most successful companies in the world, the most successful ventures, communities, organizations and teams and how they usually have at least some controversy surrounding them and/or a reasonable amount of people that dislike them and make a life out of criticizing them. This is not because they are stupid and not usually because they are overtly doing wrong. It’s because they’ve accomplished something that has placed the attention of others on them and, as such, their moves are more widely scrutinized.

Don’t fall into the trap of operating on everyone’s whim. Listening is OK, but doing what everyone wants is simply unhealthy. Execute the good feedback and follow your vision.

At Blog World & New Media Expo 2008, I was lucky enough to be on a pair of panels, sharing the stage with some great people. My friend Chrispian Burks was kind enough to record the panels for me and, in November, I posted the video from the “Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media” panel.

The other panel was called “How to Deal with Trolls, Spammers & Sock Puppets.” Here is the panel description:

You just wrote the greatest blog post you’ve ever written. You researched the subject, spoke with sources, conducted interviews and completed a well thought out, well written article. You hit the post button and your baby is up. Here comes the praise! The first comment you receive? “You’re stupid, you’re ugly and you’re writing sucks.” Whether you call them trolls, haters or griefers, they’re out there, waiting to ruin your day, harm your community and taint your world.

Or maybe the first comment was something like, “Hey, nice article, check out mine!” Just like there are people who’d like to harm you, there are also people who’d like to cheaply benefit from your work and your audience. Spammers can do their own sort of damage.

But, neither of these two groups need harm you, if you know how to deal with them. This panel will give you the knowledge you need to tackle it.

I was invited to join this panel by Rick Calvert, Founder of Blog World Expo & New Media Expo. It also featured John Chow of John Chow dot Com, The Tech Zone and TTZ Media and Jeremy Schoemaker of ShoeMoney and ShoeMoney Media Group.

The panel was a lot of fun and a great experience, being that it was the first panel that I had ever been on. Afterwards, we had a great Q&A. Here’s the entire session:

In addition to Vimeo, the video is also on YouTube (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8).

At the end of March, I joined the Online Community Research Network from Forum One Networks. From their site:

The Online Community Research Network (OCRN) is a collaborative effort of online community professionals to better understand the principal challenges of building and managing online communities.

A number of people I already know and respect are in the network already. They provide some interesting data and I look forward to getting more familar with it.

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’ve got this creepy guy e-mailing me every day or other day. Some days, he’s more condescending than others, but there is always this creepy, demeaning tone to them. Often times, he just asks “What’s up?” He calls me “Patty.” He’s been at it for weeks now, or longer. He’s very stalkerish.

The first time this happens, it can be fairly jarring. But, the truth is, I’ve seen it enough where it doesn’t even register with me. I stopped responding to him a long, long time ago. I think I only responded to the first e-mail, confirming he was banned, then he sent some long, disrespectful, crazy rant e-mail about how stupid I was. I’ve documented every single one of his e-mails in our private staff member documentation area, but that’s the only action I take.

When you hold a position of authority where you make decisions about someone’s ability to participate in something, this is just a part of life, unfortunately. So, how do you deal with it?

First, know when to stop responding. When we ban someone, we ban someone. We give people chances, often times many chances. When it’s time to ban, it’s time for them to go. I respond to every message from a member who is not banned, but once someone is banned, I only respond when there is a valid reason for doing so. I don’t repeat myself, I don’t argue with them. Usually this is confirming that, yes, they are banned and, no, it isn’t going to be lifted.

Once in a while, someone who is banned will apologize in a manner that allows me to consider unbanning them. But, that’s pretty rare. Once I have confirmed that they are banned, and that it is not going to be lifted, approximately four different things can generally happen.

1. I don’t hear from them again.

2. They accept it.

3. They let me know how stupid I am and then I don’t hear from them again.

4. They let me know how stupid I am and they continue to e-mail me over an extended period, usually with random insults or annoying statements.

1 and 3 are much, much more prevalent than 4. But, 4 happens (as does 2). And, once you tell them what is going on and they don’t have any legitimate questions, it’s time to stop responding. You only have so much time in the day and you can’t waste it.

Update: Embedded the saved stream below. Warning: it’s rough!

Today, March 14, at 1:30 PM ET, I will be speaking at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) 2009. I will be giving a presentation called “The Art of Responding to Feedback from Your Community.”

For those that were unable to make it to Austin for the conference, I wanted to try to stream the presentation on Ustream. The video stream is embedded below. If you’re free, please check back at or a little before 1:30 PM ET today. The presentation will last for no longer than 20 minutes.

It may not work because we are at the mercy of wifi and bandwidth, but I will try my best. The camera angle may also be awkward. Even if it doesn’t work or isn’t ideal, a friend will be taking video for me of the entire presentation that I will post online at some point, as well.

During the presentation, or after, please feel free to provide feedback on Twitter @patrickokeefe. Thank you for watching!

Broadcasting Live with Ustream.TV

CommunityAdmins.com (i.e. the big logo on the top right portion of this page) is a community for people who run communities, but also moderators and users of communities, in general. Anyone interested in online community. But, the focus is certainly on the management aspect.

I thought that I would highlight five recently active, interesting discussions that popped up on the community. If you have any thoughts, please feel free to jump in!

1. Cult Threatends Legal Action Against Forum

An administrator shares the challenges that his or her community is facing, in dealing with a supposed “cult” and it’s threats against negative comments posted on the site.

2. Do You Used Non-Disclosure Agreements for Members of Staff?

In addition to standard staff guidelines, an NDA is also a viable consideration for many administrators.

3. Staff Members Doing Whatever They Want

The thread born out of this post on ManagingCommunities.com has inspired some interesting discussion and real experiences of staff members who have crossed the line.

4. How Much Can You Make with Forums?

Administrators share the ways they generate money and the expectations that you should have when doing so.

5. Private Communities: How Do They Work?

Finally, a discussion on private communities and who they will work for and won’t work for.

If you have any interest in discussing the management of online communities, I would definitely recommend joining us at CommunityAdmins.com.

On January 28, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis sent out an e-mail to his private mailing list titled “We Live in Public (and The End of Empathy).” The e-mail talked about the state of the internet as it relates to how people behave online and how accountable they are for those actions. There is a dehumanizing element to the internet that is fed by anonymity and the fact that you don’t have to see or face the people you are talking to, or about. Jason posted the e-mail on his personal site. I’d recommend reading it. If you are a community manager or moderator, parts of it – at least – will resonate with you.

Jason invited replies, so I decided to send him one, since I enjoyed the e-mail and found myself identifying with parts of it. I can’t share all of what I sent, but here are some of the more important thoughts.

What Jason talks about, I’ve certainly noticed, as well, and it does bother me. I’ve been managing online communities for nearly 10 years now and it’s something that I battle on a daily basis, so this really resonates with me. I’d like to think I’m “winning,” my communities are free of this type of thing. I could never run a community that worked like that. My communities are friendly, respectful and family/work friendly (for the most part). It takes work to get there, but that’s the environment that I want and that is my goal – that is the allure of the community. We welcome disagreement, but it must be respectful. We don’t allow anyone to call anyone names, to flame people, to beat people down, whether it be a member, myself, a staff member, Britney Spears – whoever.

I caught this part: “At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.” I can say that, in my case, that hasn’t happened on my communities. That’s what I prevent. Funnily, that is one of the reasons I wrote the book, to give a blueprint on how to create a respectful community. Community managers, like myself, don’t have to settle for this sort of stuff, just because there are people out there who want to inflict it and people out there who cry foul when you stop them from doing it. You can stand up and you can protect your community. The problem is that it takes work and not everyone wants to do that. In some circles, it’s also not cool. It’s “censorship.” But, I don’t care.

I had a guy recently come to one of my forums and as his first post, I think, he posted and said that everyone else that had replied to the thread was a “clown.” Not in the funny way, but basically he said, “you shouldn’t take the advice of any of these clowns.” We removed his post and he replied to a member of my staff that the removal of that post reminded him of 1939 Germany. Ah ha, Godwin’s law! Yes, this comparison has happened many times. I’m used to it. I’ve been called every name there is. I’ve written about it some.

But, just because that happens doesn’t mean it needs to be that way. I would like to believe there is room for people like myself, who are cultivating communities with this in mind. Part of the problem is what Jason says – the mentality where people want to get as many pageviews, unique visitors, friends, followers, etc. as they can. For this reason, a lot of people don’t want to offend the users they have, so they let people do whatever they want. Sometimes they pass it off as “well, this is what my user’s want.” They take the traffic, they cash the check, but in the process, they create a community of trolls.

I was on the phone a couple of weeks ago with two people from a major corporation and I was giving them some feedback on an internal community they have going on and I told them that one of the luxuries I have is that I own my sites, I am my own boss – no one tells me anything. I don’t have to worry about someone above me that I have to please with numbers – someone that needs to see that the community has X number of posts, members, etc. to justify it. Results are good, but sometimes to get those results, to please your boss, you sell out the would be soul of your community and that’s sad.

Those aren’t my values and I’ll never run a community where that is OK. I would like to think this is not the majority – that what we hear in these IAS comments is the loud shouting of the minority. I hope so.

Recently, on one of my communities, there was a member who had a post removed. He didn’t care for this and in his next reply, on the very same thread, he talked about how someone had “snitched” on him. His aim, of course, was to speak poorly of the person who supposedly reported him to a staff member and to devalue the action itself, in general.

Of course, this post was removed as well, for a couple of different reasons, with one of them being that it is inappropriate to attempt to intimidate or belittle members who report posts on my forums. We encourage people to do so, proactively, through our guidelines, through messages displayed on our site and directly to members, when they reply to a painfully obvious violation of our guidelines.

I told the person, in no uncertain terms, that his behavior was unacceptable. Members who report potential violations to us are to be thanked and appreciated, not ridiculed. This is why we never say whether or not something was actually reported and, even in a case where it might be relevant, we’d never say by who. We’d never put someone out like that. You have to protect the people who are helping you and your staff, who are helping you to maintain the atmosphere of the community.

Oh, yeah. By the way, the post that was removed, where the person said someone “snitched” on him? No one reported the post. I saw it myself and I removed it, myself. But, I didn’t correct him because it is irrelevant, whether or not someone reported it. The important thing is that he not be allowed to treat post reporting as something that is dirty, or wrong.

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.