photo credit: mikecogh

I was recently watching a video released by an actor and popular YouTuber. He had announced plans to start a Kickstarter project to fund an idea that he had and that was the subject of the video.

Now, this video was on YouTube and with that comes YouTube comments, generally regarded as poor quality. You can add a healthy amount of self entitlement into the mix, too. But, what really struck me was the people who were offering him unsolicited advice. I want to highlight advice that fits into two particular categories.

The first category is people telling him how he should make money online. Don’t use Kickstarter, we don’t want to give you money (always love the “we,” forgetting that within an hour or two, the campaign already passed a thousand dollars). You should monetize your videos on YouTube, you’ll make way more money, you should do X, Y and Z.

photo credit: ChristopherA

The 90-9-1 rule, popularized by Jacob Nielsen, based on research by Will Hall, says that 90% of users in an online community are lurkers who don’t contribute, while 9% contribute sometimes and 1% contribute frequently.

Last year, Paul Schneider attempted to update this principle by looking at a relatively small data set of 15 clients and suggested that the the rule should now be 70-20-10.

Once in a while, I see someone comment or write a post about how 90-9-1 is dead or no longer relevant or something similar. Sooner or later, if it reaches enough people, someone will come along and suggest the 70-20-10 rule needs to be updated, too.

photo credit: kidsire

I watched the Home Run Derby this evening. For non-baseball fans, it is part of the yearly All-Star Game festivities, where a selection of players try to hit as many home runs as they can.

Robinson Cano, the second baseman for the New York Yankees, was the captain of the American League team this year, having won the competition last year. He put on a great show, with his dad pitching to him.

The All-Star Game is being held in Kansas City this year and, leading up to the Home Run Derby, Cano had said that he would like to see a Kansas City Royals player make the 4 man American League team. The Yankees and the Royals, are both in the American League. Not that he would pick a Royal, just that he would like to.

photo credit: BuzzFarmers

As the community manager role has become a popular one, we’re seeing more and more companies and individuals try to generalize it.

On the individual side, you have a lot of people who have spent time working in a specific profession, who are wanting to become community managers, which is great.

But, it becomes challenging when they treat community management as the same thing they’ve been doing for years, when in reality they have had a completely different job function. They may have had to utilize some complementary skills, but complementary skills don’t necessarily translate to experience.

photo credit: billsoPHOTO

There are a lot of community management professionals out there.

There are people with 10 plus years of experience in that space, at varying levels. People like Rebecca Newton, Jake McKee, Sue John and (cough, I’m not that old, cough) me. Then there are many people with 5-10 years of experience. I would put the majority of community managers in the neighborhood of 0-3 years of experience.

Many companies are hiring community managers and there are many people who want to be a community manager or want to switch companies. There are plenty of considerations to make when choosing the right person. But, in order to quantify their experience, I believe that the most important question is this one:

photo credit:
Pink Sherbet Photography

Unauthorized hotlinking is one of those rare issues that most community managers (and most web savvy people) will universally agree is a bad thing.

But, agreeing it’s a bad thing and taking action against it can be two very different things. It can be tricky to catch because people may share a lot of images on your community. Do you check them all?

If the community is small enough, you can. But, even if it isn’t small enough to do that, you can randomly check a sample of images posted. You can take action against any that you see. You can include it in your community guidelines and inform those who do it that they should not do it in the future. You can encourage people to report it and then take those reports seriously.

photo credit: Sarah German

Commenting on the Internet Protection Act, the smart and funny Jay Smooth tackles anonymous comments over at ANIMAL. I thought he had an interesting take. He says we need anonymous comments – for our own safety.

“Anonymous comments are the only thing keeping all these trolls in their house and away from us,” he says.

“If we take away their only source of joy and fulfillment in life, they’re gonna be forced to leave the house and then we’re gonna have to interact with them in person. I mean, the really extreme trolls who do serious harassment and stalking, we need legal measures to counteract that. But, most trolls don’t have enough ambition to reach that status. Most trolls are not criminals, they’re just annoying jerks who are addicted to petty forms of negative attention. And the internet has given them a way to feed that addiction non stop.”

photo credit: Lhopfan

I’ve been writing about online community management for a long time. I started writing my book in 2003, launched this blog in 2008 and published the book in that year, as well. Before the blog, I wrote about the topic sporadically elsewhere, including SitePoint.

I love community management and I care about the space, which is why I enjoy writing about it and sharing my experiences. I don’t really do consulting, but I always listen to people who want me to consult. Not long ago, I turned down a reasonable gig because the person I was consulting with wanted to own the ideas that I gave them. I could have used the money, but I objected and that was the end of that deal. My ideas are mine to share.

In writing about community management and sharing thoughts and conversations with those who read this blog, my ideas spread and beautiful things happen, that I am proud of. This builds community around my writing. I thought I would share a few of the things that I love to see.

photo credit: Jason Hargrove

The sixth post ever published on ManagingCommunities.com was about “brain crack” and the importance of doing, care of some magical words from Ze Frank.

By the time I wrote that post, in February of 2008, Mr. Frank had ended “the show with ze frank,” where those words had come from. More than 4 years later, at the end of February, Mr. Frank launched a Kickstarter campaign to “bring back the show.” The result? $146,752 pledged by 3,900 people (including me) – almost 3 times his goal of $50,000.

I could say something here about the power of community and about how community builds around quality and that being why people couldn’t wait to support him in this new venture. All of that is true.

photo credit:
Pink Sherbet Photography

I have been thinking a bit about the design of the block feature on some platforms. Let’s take Twitter as an easy example.

When you block someone on Twitter, they don’t notify the person you block, meaning that they don’t specifically send them a message. But, when the person notices that you are no longer showing up in their timeline, they may go to your profile and try to follow you again. At that point, they are notified that they can’t follow you because you have blocked them.

Personally, this means I will never use the block functionality. Even though I might otherwise like to filter some people out of my streams. If I want to do it, I’ll need to use a third party application (like TweetDeck) that allows me to filter out tweets from specific people. I won’t bother to do that because the list only works in that app.