photo credit: hoyasmeg

Community management is about small stuff. It’s about a lot of small actions adding up to a bigger goal. It’s not about home runs, it’s about base hits. It’s not about touchdowns, it’s about field goals.

For those who might not appreciate the sports analogies, in the game of American football, a touchdown is usually good for 7 points. A field goal is 3. It is not uncommon for the team who made the most field goals to also win the game, even if the other team scored more touchdowns.

Field goals are small victories and small victories can add up to big wins. Don’t try to make it more than it is. There are occasional touchdowns, but those come in between the many field goals. In other words, don’t manage your community looking for home runs or case studies or big moments that you can trumpet to your boss.

photo credit: neurmadic aesthetic

When I use platforms, I don’t think “what is this platform a replacement for?” I think “what is this platform good at?” Each platform has strengths and weaknesses.

I think Facebook is great. I use it every day. It excels at keeping me in contact with people on a personal level. This post isn’t to criticize Facebook. It’s not Facebook’s fault that some want to look at it as a be-all end all of social interaction on the web.

A perfect example of this, at least in my experience, is when questions are asked. It has reached the point where when I ask questions on Facebook, I feel an uncomfortable urge to qualify the question more than I usually would, just to hopefully mitigate poor answers that I might be able to anticipate.

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.

Kanye West just released a new album on Tuesday. If you’re not a fan of Kanye West, you probably don’t know that. But if you are a fan of West, you undoubtedly do. And that’s sort of the point of this post.

West put out the album, titled “Yeezus,” on June 18 and did so while bucking a lot of traditional promotion patterns for a release of this magnitude. How so? Well, let’s run through the list of how he bucked traditional promotional patterns for a release of this magnitude.

Did he announce the release date in advance, allowing for a build up? No. A month and a half before it would be released, he sent out a vague tweet with the date. When he put the date out, it wasn’t even clear what the date meant. That was confirmed later.

photo credit: Danny Nicholson

I’m sick. It’s certainly not the worse illness I’ve ever had, not by a long shot, but it includes a pretty annoying sore throat, which is probably one of my least favorite symptoms of being sick.

Anyway, if I wanted to, I could certainly force myself – mind over matter – to accomplish a lot today. But I am not going to do that because there really isn’t any reason to do so. Pretty much everything that I can accomplish today can wait a day or even a few days, until I’m feeling better.

I might poke around some projects as I am motivated to do so, but otherwise I am going to take it easy, get some rest, take some medicine, eat foods that make me feel better and drink plenty of liquids.

photo credit: jo-h

There are no lessons to learn from this situation. Thank you.

photo credit: Greene Connections

To paraphrase Ryan Leslie, I’ve never had a big board, but they still respect my art.

A “big board,” as referred to in community manager circles, is a community with 500,000 posts or more. I’ve never managed one. That will change, soon, when KarateForums.com passes 500,000 posts. What does that really mean? Honestly, not much. It’s a milestone accomplishment and it means something, but I don’t suddenly know more about community, not because of a few extra posts on the ones that I manage. It’s the journey that has allowed me to collect the knowledge, not where I’m at right now.

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.

photo credit: theHalo

A friend passed along Kurt Opsahl’s blog post on the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)’s blog, “Georgia Court Censorship Order Threatens Message Boards Everywhere.”

Matthew Chan runs a website called ExtortionLetterInfo where he targets “copyright trolls.” The EFF story paints a somewhat noble picture of his actions. When you read the story by Ars Technica, though, you start to get a greater sense of what occurred.

Linda Ellis is a writer and the author of a poem called “The Dash.” Another author published this poem in his book without permission and was contacted by Ellis requesting compensation of $100,000. The author chose to instead pay Chan to bring attention to the situation, hoping public pressure would force Ellis to back down.

photo credit: chuckychoi

“Don’t Yuck My Yum” is the title of a recent episode of a show with ze frank. On it, Frank talks about moments in his life where he has liked something that was otherwise harmless, only to have people suggest to him that he should stop liking it.

“The yum getting yucked is when you like something harmless – and harmless is the trick here and leads to my confusion – when you like something harmless and someone tells you to stop liking it,” he explains.

I think we’ve all experienced those moments where we like something – a song, a TV show, a movie – and had someone tell us, either with their words or the expression on their face, that they thought the thing we liked was terrible and/or embarrassing. And, certainly, we’ve probably done it to other people.