If you are a veteran of this profession – or you are new and hope to one day become one – I’d like to reflect a bit on the career path of the community management professional. Specifically, I would like to encourage you to seek advancement and not sell yourself short.

When we sell ourselves short as professionals, we don’t do justice to the importance of our industry. It impacts the space and those who work in it, in a negative way. It holds us back.

I know that, sometimes, you just have to take what you can get. You have a family to support. I respect that and it’s not what I am talking about. Also, if you are happy where you are and don’t want to take what might be a higher pressure role, I totally get that, as well. Family and happiness should be your priorities.

But then there are those of us who might not be aware of what is out there. Or we just might be a little too comfortable. Or possibly we are a bit too accommodating and too willing to compromise that we do so at our own detriment. You have to know your worth.

photo credit:
Nila Sivatheesan Photography

More and more, I’m seeing customer success fall under the responsibilities of the community department at various companies, both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). That makes perfect sense.

Where marketing grows your customer base, community aides you in keeping those customers by helping them to maximize the use of your product. Yes, those lines are muddied sometimes, yes, marketing helps you keep customers and, yes, there are exceptions that need not be mentioned.

You might be saying “but Patrick, that’s how it has been already. Community is essentially customer success for many companies and has been for a long time.” You wouldn’t be wrong, necessarily, but I think what we are seeing now is more of a formalization of it. Job titles including something extra and job descriptions making it clearer. David DeWald does this at Thunderhead.com. Meg Christolini did this at CoTweet. And the list goes on.

photo credit: huskyte77

The whole Comic Book Resources story has me thinking about the proper way to close an online community.

All online communities eventually come to an end. I’ve launched many communities and I’ve experienced unique longevity. I’ve managed KarateForums.com for 13 years, PhotoshopForums.com for more than 11 and phpBBHacks.com for 11 before I gave it away to a member. All of these communities will eventually come to an end – whether I am at the helm or someone else is.

I’ve also closed communities. Because the time had come. They were inactive, it felt like an uphill fight and I wanted to spend my time elsewhere or they had run their course. Whatever the reason – and there are many – your online community will end. For this article, I am going to presume that we have explored the alternatives to closing and decided that closing is the appropriate course of action.

photo credit: mikecogh

South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive is an emerging technology conference. Since I’ve been going, the internet has been very ingrained in whatever has constituted “emerging technology.” As such, the conference has been very internet centric.

And yet, when I was down in Austin this year, connecting with people and visiting with friends, it reminded me (as it always tends to) that it’s important to keep the internet in context. This is especially true for online community professionals because our work is almost entirely online.

The danger here is that when you work online all day, you tend to get too caught up and place too much importance in your own world. Oh man, this is a big situation. This server is down. That member is angry. Activity dropped this month. Catastrophe! Noise, noise, noise.

This is not a political article. I cannot stress that enough. Our comments section should remain free of general thoughts about President Obama, the Affordable Care Act or any topic that is generally political and not related to community management, moderation or the circumstance I am about to describe. Thank you.

President Barack Obama joined Quora earlier this week. His first two answers, posted Monday, were both to questions about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (answer 1, answer 2). They were of good quality, in my estimation. They both answered the question asked and did so thoughtfully. The only negative is that both included brief messages encouraging U.S. citizens to sign up for health insurance prior to next week’s deadline.

Those statements take up less than a quarter of the overall message and, since the discussion is ACA related and this is the President, I can understand how they may be generally forgivable. A tradeoff for getting the President on your platform.

photo credit: annastirling

Today is the fifth annual Community Manager Appreciation Day (CMAD). Check out the festivities taking place today over at My Community Manager’s dedicated website. In honor of the day, I present to you 10 reasons that you should appreciate the manager of your online community.

If you participate in an online community that you enjoy, it might be cool to take a moment and write a note to the manager of that community, letting them know that you appreciate what they do.

Of course, there are many different reasons to appreciate a community manager and it varies by the community and the person. But as I reflected on my time managing communities, what my members have told me and my experience as a member of communities managed by other people, here are 10 that I think are worth noting.

photo credit:
Red Rose Exile

When you hear the term “forensic evidence,” you think about police work and court cases. You think about DNA, blood and finger prints. You don’t think about online communities.

But our communities are home to a great deal of digital DNA and trace information. This evidence can be used to identify people who are trying to abuse or take advantage of our communities. Yet I don’t know of any software options that are making use of the data in this way.

There are certain key areas where this could be very helpful, where it could take a task best performed by machines and let a machine perform it.

I am sure that there are many ways this would be done, but I’ll give you one good example. Members who hold multiple accounts to push an agenda, agree with themselves or promote something. How could the software help, you might ask? Well, what if you received a notification in your admin area whenever any of these things happened:

photo credit: Petr Magera

In my final article of 2013, I reviewed data from member reports of inappropriate posts on my community, outlining the most popular reasons that posts are reported. For my first article of 2014, I thought I’d take a look at how community software platforms can address these issues and make all of our lives a little easier.

Not all automation is good, but I’m a fan of automation that works well without having a negative impact on member experience. I am going to discuss solutions that I feel could fit into this mold, as well as other manual solutions that could be built into software.

Some ideas could be impacted by technical limitations, such as server resources, but I am going to approach this from an ideal perspective. I think about this sort of thing all the time and I wanted to share some ideas freely. Any software vendor reading this, please feel free to take them (though credit is always nice). I do think it would be fun to take a role at a vendor where my job would be to focus on features and functionality, especially on the manager end of the spectrum. Maybe I’ll do that some day.

I used to host an online show called Soda Tasting. Though I had a nice website and I interacted with people on various platforms, by and large, my interaction with people occurred on YouTube. And the reputation that YouTube comments have is generally deserving.

That said, the Soda Tasting community of viewers was a utopia and it was that way for two reasons. 1. There are great, cool people out there and some of them were attracted to the show. 2. When someone showed up who was neither great, nor cool, I would delete their comments and sometimes ban them.

Even though I have stopped hosting the show, I still allow comments on YouTube (for the moment) and I still monitor them to ensure that they are respectful, in line with the personality and atmosphere of the show. As always, anything rude or disrespectful is removed.

Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos appeared on 60 Minutes earlier this week for an interview with Charlie Rose. I’m a big fan of Bezos and Amazon (disclosure: I’m also a long term shareholder). There were some great things that Bezos said. One of the quotes that caught my eye was about Amazon’s finite lifespan.

Jeff Bezos: Companies have short life spans, Charlie. And Amazon will be disrupted one day.

Charlie Rose: And you worry about that?

Bezos: I don’t worry about it because I know it’s inevitable. Companies come and go. And the companies that are the shiniest and most important of any era, you wait a few decades and they’re gone.

Rose: And your job is to make sure that you delay that date?