Credit: Elliott Brown (CC BY 2.0)

I launched ManagingCommunities.com 8 years ago. At that point, I had been managing online communities for about 8 years (and moderating them for 10). After 5 years in development and approximately 100 publishers who didn’t want to publish a book about community, Managing Online Forums was about to be released. I decided I wanted to start writing about community regularly.

Even after all this time, I still keep a close eye on mentions of my work, and it still means a lot to me when something I wrote helps someone. Thank you to everyone who has been supportive of my work. If you’ve shared it, provided a thoughtful comment or a kind word in private, that means you.

Looking forward, I am planning to make some changes to this website. It needs a new design, and probably the biggest part of that will be completely overhauling how information is organized. It’s badly needed. It’ll take some time to make these changes, but I am really excited about them.

Thank you for 8 years of ManagingCommunities.com!

Credit: Kevin Dooley (CC BY 2.0)

The seventh annual Community Manager Appreciation Day is on January 25, 2016 and, for the fourth straight year, My Community Manager is planning a livestream featuring 24 hours of community management-related programming.

I am organizing a session on volunteer management, scheduled for 4 PM EST (GMT -5). Unfortunately, it’s unclear whether or not I will be able to participate, but I am working on it. However, I built the session so that I wouldn’t really be needed. My panelists, Rebecca Newton, Scott Moore and David DeWald (who is also tentative, but hopeful that he’ll make it) are extraordinarily well-versed on this topic. Whether or not I’m there, it should be a great discussion.

Other participants in the livestream include Alison Michalk, Blaise Grimes-Viort, Carrie Jones, Christin Kardos, Crystal Coleman, Dom Garrett, Jessica Malnik, Joe Cothrel, Jonathan Brewer, Sarah Hawk, Sherrie Rohde, Tim McDonald and many more.

For more information, check out the dedicated Community Manager Appreciation Day livestream website. I hope to see you on January 25.

I’m so excited to introduce Community Signal, a new weekly podcast for online community professionals.

This is going to be a very high quality, well-produced community-focused podcast. This isn’t a social media podcast or a marketing podcast – it’s a community podcast.

My first guest is Bill Johnston, one of my favorite thinkers in the community space. We talked about what happened when marketing automation became a community problem at Autodesk, why communities need to partner with networks and the community industry’s fractured leadership. I really enjoyed our conversation, and I hope you will, too.

South by Southwest is a great event. Well-organized with a seemingly limitless number of experiences available to you. It’s a lot of fun to speak at, and I’m hoping to do so again in 2016.

This year, I teamed up with Scott Moore on a proposal. Scott is an online community veteran that I respect. His knowledge is insanely deep, based on his 19 years in the space.

We want to talk about managing online community volunteer programs. During the reddit issues this summer, the one issue that stood out, above all others, was how they were treating their volunteer moderators. Long term neglect led to a showdown where the moderators effectively shut down many of the most active communities on the platform.

I see Patreon as a really interesting community platform. The service allows creators to receive financial support directly from those who appreciate their work. It’s become really popular and is used by all types of creators: YouTubers, musicians, cartoonists, writers, podcasters, artists, photographers, filmmakers and more.

The longer I thought about it, the more I decided it would be fun to experiment with it for my work here.

If you look around at this site, you’ll see it really isn’t built for consulting. Even when I receive those emails, once in a while, I usually decline or recommend a person for them to talk to. Consulting isn’t the point of my work. I view myself, first and foremost, as a resource for fellow practitioners. I love to offer whatever support I can to professionals in this space, and those aspiring to be one.

I just returned from South by Southwest, and I had such a great time. SXSW is a wonderful event. This was my seventh year attending and my sixth speaking. It’s always a pleasure.

The people behind the event do a great job. I must have interacted with 100 or more staff and volunteers during my week in Austin and the lead-up to it. They were all terrific. Fantastic attitudes. Everyone behind the scenes deserves a ton of credit. Thank you to everyone who made this year’s SXSW happen – and thank you for having me again.

During my time at the conference, I did a lot of things. I led a panel discussion. I attended a couple of sessions. I walked the trade show floor. I saw a few comedy shows. I went to some meetups and parties, as well as connecting with specific individuals. Much of it had to do with community work, and so I thought I’d post a recap of all of the community-related things I did at SXSW 2015.

In a little over two weeks, I’ll hop on a plane bound for Austin, Texas, on my way to South by Southwest Interactive. Are you making the trip?

It’ll be my seventh year attending the conference – and I’m very happy to be speaking again this year. It’s a really fun, interesting and challenging event to speak at.

I’m leading “How CNN and The New York Times Moderate Comments.” Bassey Etim of The New York Times and David Williams from CNN will be joining me. Respectively, they lead comment moderation at those organizations. The basis for our talk is the interview I conducted with them and published here back in July.

Today marks the sixth annual Community Manager Appreciation Day (CMAD).

Originally created by Jeremiah Owyang, CMAD encourages companies and community members to express their gratitude to those responsible for the communities that they enjoy and receive value from.

It’s being celebrated online and in-person all around the world by many different groups and organizations. But the center of the festivities is the 24 hour live stream managed by My Community Manager. It began a few hours ago (at midnight GMT -5) and will continue until midnight tonight! Even if you miss a session, you can watch it later as it will be recorded and available immediately after.

Sherrie Rohde and Jonathan Brewer were kind enough to invite me to organize a session (and I also received an invitation from one of the panel organizers), but unfortunately, I had to decline. This is family time for me. I’m really sorry to have to miss this great event!

Credit: Mr.TinDC (CC BY-ND 2.0)

It’s that time of the year again. I hope that you have a wonderful holiday season and a great 2015.

2014 has been a great year for our profession, and I’m grateful for that. I am also thankful for all of the fantastic professionals I bump into on a regular basis because of my writing and speaking. It’s a special feeling when people find value in my work. I love to be able to help people in this space.

If you have sent me a kind word, left a thoughtful comment, shared my work or simply appreciated something I’ve shared, I’d like to thank you because your support motivates me. I have a deep respect for the work that we do as community professionals. I believe it is important work that shouldn’t be undervalued.

Having been in this space for so long, I am fortunate to know many great minds that work within it. I enjoy the interactions that I have with them and have been thinking recently about how I could showcase those conversations here. I came up with something I am referring to as The Circle.

My hope is that it will become a regular feature, fueled by your questions. I will select questions and then ask great community professionals to answer them, instead of just trying to answer them myself. It’ll be a different group of people each time. A lot of these professionals will not be people who blog regularly or write regularly on the profession. They’ll be people I know who do the work and understand this space as well as anyone.

It’ll be fun to add these other perspectives into the blog. I look forward to learning from them. But to get started, I wanted to introduce the concept and put a call out for questions. What would you like me to ask? Please leave me a comment or, if you’d like to remain anonymous, send me an email. Thanks.