photo credit: Nuria_PC

I touched on this thought very quickly in my article about Popular Science’s decision to turn off comments on their website, but I wanted to take a moment to expand on it a little bit.

What I want you to think about is everything that exists between having open comments on everything you create and having no comments at all anywhere. These are two extremes and most people who have a blog or similar space stick to them, but you can get creative and explore the middle ground between the extremes.

Of course, you have the ability to establish a comment policy and moderate to it, which is generally a great idea. But, in addition to this, here are a few strategies that may work for some, in no particular order:

photo credit:
Tobias von der Haar

I’m downsizing in my life right now. Personally and professionally. On the personal end, I’m going through all of the things I have accumulated over the years and getting rid of a lot of it.

Last night, I came across some old school papers and stopped at a business management paper I had written when I was 17 (a lot happened when I was 17), talking about providing outstanding service. It included “seven qualities of service,” based on the letters in the word service. Reading it, I thought it fit in well with a lot of what we talk about here. I thought I’d share it with you.

S: Sociable – being genuinely and honestly interested in people and actually paying attention to your customers.

E: Effervescent – being excited about life, about the possibilities you have, about the people you meet and about the things you do.

photo credit: CERDEC

Sometimes there are things posted on my community that I am not sure about. Usually I can give a definitive answer easily, but once in a while, it isn’t as clear and I want to ask for feedback from my staff.

In these cases, the temptation is to say that if you can’t decide it’s inappropriate, then it stays. That is reasonable and I do that most of the time. But if you feel like it may not be OK and the resulting thread could easily lead to guideline violations, I wouldn’t feel bad about removing a discussion while I made the decision.

photo credit: The Headless Headbanger

Almost 4 years ago (wow, it definitely doesn’t seem that long ago), I wrote a long article discussing suicide threats and how to handle them when they are posted on your online community. I’m proud of that article and of how it has helped people.

Due to a recent experience (which I don’t feel comfortable sharing now), I’ve decided to make an update to the piece. The update has to do with the handling of a publicly posted threat. In the article, originally, I suggested that you remove it. I believe that to be good, sound advice – generally speaking. If you believe that your members may cause more harm than good, or if you are really undecided, then there is a good chance that it is in the best interests of everyone to remove it.

photo credit: barbourians

As of July 2, it has been one year since Monetizing Online Forums was released.

For me, and for Skimlinks, the book was an experiment. Write a book, treat it like a real book that you’d expect people to pay for, and give it away for free. A project that was supposed to be 10-20 pages and be done in a month or two was expanded to around 100 pages and developed over a period of 9 months.

Would there be enough interest in the book – a work focused on the monetizing of “forums,” not “social media” – to justify the investment of time, resources and money?

photo credit: Robert Couse-Baker

You spend a lot of time working on your online community. Whether you have a predefined work day or the freedom to work when you want, there are many tasks to tackle. However, among the many hours that you spend, you will also have moments where you don’t have much time to spare.

For example, if you have 10 minutes to lunch, 10 minutes before the end of the day or you simply have 10 minutes free that you want to put to good use, you can’t start a sizable project and do anything too involved.

When you find yourselves in that moment, there are always some quick things that you can do to help your community and make it better. From cultivating deeper relationships to ensuring that content is up to date. Here are some things that you can right now:

photo credit: amsfrank

“Communities can’t be managed. They have to be nurtured/loved/served/encouraged/grown. Due to this, the community manager job title is bad. It should be something like community facilitator/friend/guide/helper/specialist/intermediary.”

Once in a long while, I’ll see something like this expressed. So it’s not really a popular thought, just one that pops up. Often from people who have spent little or no time as a community manager, but who are general marketers or social media professionals. It seems like one of those thoughts that occurs when you have a little too much time to think and begin over thinking a situation.

Without wanting to be disrespectful to anyone who has had it, I can’t help but feel that this is one of those echo chamber things. Something that sounds catchy, plays to a crowd and really means nothing at all. It’s a good example of focusing on the wrong thing. For one simple reason.

photo credit: mikecogh

Once in a while, a member will contact me and ask me to delete all of their posts on my forums, as well as their account. If you’ve run forums for any measure of time, you’ve probably received a request like this. Recently, Jeremiah Hester asked how I handled these matters, so I thought I’d write about it.

Mass Deleting Posts

One of the things that makes online forums special is the fact that they are shared spaces. This means that when someone contributes, their contribution directly impacts the contributions of others. There are no walls or profiles, no individual areas where you have to opt-in to a specific person (at least, not usually and not in a way that outweighs the shared spaces). There is simply a space that everyone shares.

YouTube comments have a terrible reputation and deservedly so. YouTube is massive and there are a lot of people posting nasty and offensive things on the website.

At the same time, even though this is true, we don’t have to reserve ourselves to accepting this as the norm in the comments sections for our own videos. It comes down to what your standards are, how much you care and how much you are willing to work.

Soda Tasting, my 5 day a week soda review show, is now more than 6 months old and the majority of the comments made regarding my videos have been made on YouTube. I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect, but so far it hasn’t been that bad.

photo credit:
Music News Australia

Thanks to the internet, being a fan of someone means something totally different than it did 50 years ago, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago.

It means access, not just to the person you are a fan of, but to other fans. In general, that’s a beautiful thing. But, inevitably, society is society and bad stuff happens. Fans attack other fans, promote destructive behaviors and engage in a irresponsible manner, even though their intentions may be to support the celebrity they are a fan of. Running fan communities, I have bumped into this.

Here is an idea: Major celebrities could hire a community manager not just to facilitate official community spaces, but also to guide their fans online in best practices as far as how to engage with other fans, how to manage their fan communities and, in general, serve as a useful resource to them.