In May, KarateForums.com celebrated 10 years online. I launched the forums on May 21, 2001 and have managed them ever since. 10 years, 4 months, 3 weeks and 1 day.

It may surprise you to learn that I am not a martial artist. As you might expect, this question comes up once in a while. “What martial arts do you take? None? Wow. So, why did you launch KarateForums.com?”

I’ve always been very open about this. I’ve never pretended to be a martial artist and have never been anything other than honest when the question is asked.

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:
erin_everlasting

There are a number of ways to tackle the index page of your community. It’s about showcasing your content and your members and that can be pretty flexible. Different approaches have different benefits and work well, depending on your audience and situation.

The traditional list of forums can work well. Another popular one is showing some of the recent topics or some featured topics. That can work, too. Options are a good thing and I’d love to see activity streams become an option for more platforms, either as a default feature that you can turn on or off or as a hack or add-on.

By an activity stream, what I meant is a stream of popular or relevant content, tailored to the individual viewing it based on numerous factors, including the popularity of the content within the community, based on views, replies and likes or some other measurement and content that has been interacted with by community members that they have chosen to “friend” or “follow.”

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: proisraeli

I am an active speaker on the topic of online community and how businesses and individuals can tap into the power of online community and grow and manage their own communities. I have logged 30 engagements thus far and have spoken at important digital conferences (like South by Southwest Interactive), to universities (like Northwestern and North Carolina State) and corporations (like FedEx).

Under that umbrella, I have delivered presentations or participated in panels on numerous topics. Everything from creating a positive environment on your forums and how to respond to feedback to ethical social media marketing and how to market your products to online forums and communities. Management, engagement, marketing and more.

photo credit: soukup

Why moderate? Why do we moderate? If you ask a collection of people who run online communities, you’ll likely come up with dozens of different, or different sounding reasons. But, they’ll likely all come back to one thing.

That thing is focus. When you really break it down, that is why we moderate. Because we’re focusing on a specific niche, a specific environment. Moderation is the act of creating focus.

If you remove vulgarities and profane language, you are focusing more on a work and family friendly environment. If you remove inflammatory and disrespectful comments, you are focusing on a more respectful community. If you don’t allow political or religious discussion, you are focusing on whatever the main topic of your community is.

Moderation is a way of taking a space that is undefined and giving it definition. This can happen without moderation, but it rarely can be maintained without it.

photo credit: Mrs Logic

Today’s inspiration comes from Hannah Keys (this makes two posts in a row mentioning her), who wrote Stop Looking at Other Girls on her Stop Being Crap personal site.

The premise of the post, aimed at women, is that you should appreciate what you have physically, rather than looking at other women, deciding that they are more attractive than you in one way or another, and beating yourself up. Instead, Hannah says, you should appreciate what you do have and understand that each person has their own unique situation that helps dictate how they look or what they weigh. She explains this in her own funny way, so check it out.

I think that most (all?) people do this. Hannah did (totally unnecessarily!), I did and, heck, do. It’s a very human thing to do. I’m my own worst critic. If not physical appearance, it’s some decision, or my writing, or my business or when I speak at conferences (I pretty much tear myself apart every time I get off stage).

Today, I would like to take some inspiration from Dr. Dre’s “I Need a Doctor” featuring Eminem and Skylar Grey. It’s a personal record for Dr. Dre and Eminem and a motivational one, as well. I love it.

I’m going to discuss some community management related takeaways from the song, which you can listen to at the bottom of this post by playing the music video. I should warn you, it is explicit and I quote some explicit lyrics in this article.

Give People Opportunities and Mentor Them

The biggest underlying theme in “I Need a Doctor” is the relationship that Eminem and Dr. Dre share. Dre is his mentor, someone who gave him a chance when others wouldn’t, who believed in him and helped him to reach the level of success that he has achieved.

photo credit:
HikingArtist.com

Sometimes I feel like forums don’t get the respect they deserve, in the grand scheme of social media. Sometimes people want to put forums in a box, separate them from the social media “movement,” as if they are separate or as if they aren’t just as important to the whole thing as Facebook or Twitter or the buzz platform du jour.

This is disregarding that, in large part, social media is forums, or threaded text-based conversation. Forums are everywhere – it doesn’t have to be called a forum to be one or to have similar functionality.

photo credit: Silly Little Man

There is always a lot of heavy, meaningful stuff going on in the world. Death, destruction and tragedy and what can be done to help.

Your community might be about something on this level – dealing with illness or struggle in some way, for example. But, chances are, your community isn’t really as important as these concerns in the grand scheme of things. I know mine aren’t: phpBB, Photoshop, community management and the martial arts.