Recently, on e-mint, Caspar Aremi shared an interesting BBC News story about whether or not people should be off on Fridays.

What was interesting about it is that the first person quoted in the story is Steven Shattuck, who is a community manager for Slingshot SEO, a company in the U.S. where employees work from 8 AM to 6 PM, Monday through Thursday.

9 AM to 5 PM is considered by many to be a typical work day (I don’t know about a typical work day in the field of community management, but generally speaking). In other words, 8 hours. But they extend the work day by 2 hours and eliminate one day of the week. However, 2 extra hours for 4 days of the week equals 8 hours. They are working the same number of hours, technically speaking, as someone who works a 9 to 5 for 5 days a week (they save some time in that they don’t have to get ready for work on Friday or commute).

Last week, United Kingdom-based entertainment retailer HMV, currently in administration, announced a round of firings to staff. One of the people being fired was Poppy Rose Cleere, who has taken responsibility for a series of tweets sent from the brand’s Twitter profile as the firings were being announced. Check out stories by NME and the London Evening Standard if this is the first you’ve heard of it.

She posted a series of tweets that were either snarky or offered her personal criticisms of the company. In an ironic twist, one of the tweets criticized the company for allowing an intern to set up the Twitter account, an action which she called “unpaid, technically illegal.” According to her sister, though, Ms. Cleere offered to work for free for the company in order to stay on board, apparently unconcerned with the legal ramifications that might have.

I am a big fan of “Saturday Night Live” and, as I thought about it, I realized that the cast of SNL has a lot in common with the members of an online community.

The show is now on it’s 38th season and, according to Wikipedia, the program has had a total of 132 cast members. If you look through the list of cast members, you’ll notice a lot of names that you know, but also many that you don’t.

The changes that occur with the SNL mirror the changes that your online community experiences with membership.

photo credit: briannaguest

As of yesterday, ManagingCommunities.com is 5 years old.

Over the last 5 years, the profession of online community management has grown in popularity in a very meaningful way. It certainly wasn’t as trendy 5 years ago when I started this blog, 10 years ago, when I started writing “Managing Online Forums,”  or 13 years ago when I started managing my own communities.

It’s been fun to watch and I’m grateful that my writing has been well received and that I have had the opportunity to help as many people as I have.

photo credit: Jan Seifert

Last January, Amazon.com-owned shoe retailer Zappos.com announced that they had been the “victim of a cyber attack by a criminal” who had potentially gained access to the contact information of their 24 million plus customers, in addition to the last four digits of their credit card number and their “cryptographically scrambled” password. The database with credit card data and payment information was not breached.

As one might expect, lawsuits followed. Zappos attempted to force these lawsuits to arbitration, citing a clause in their user agreement. But they ran into a big problem. A federal court ruled that their user agreement – in effect, their contract with users – was invalid. Not just a portion of it, but the whole thing.

Albert Pennyworth: With respect, Master Wayne, perhaps [the Joker] is a man you don’t fully understand, either.

A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never met anyone who traded with him.

One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: So why steal them?

photo credit: gr8dnes

A funny thing happened the other day. On one of my communities, member1 requested some help with an image, which member2 started to do (for free), but didn’t finish. Member1 made a post complaining about how the way member2 went about it was sneaky, used some profanity and was generally disrespectful.

I removed it and sent him a message explaining why I removed the post and why his comments toward member2 were inappropriate (basically a brief explanation of how free requests don’t make you entitled to anyone’s time and how you have to be patient).

photo credit: oatsy40

Last week, Conscious Life News posted an article titled, “I Was a Paid Internet Shill: How Shadowy Groups Manipulate Internet Opinion and Debate.” Joe Anzalone pointed me to someone who had copied and pasted the text of the post, which I Googled and found on a forum, with a post date in the spring of 2012. Here is a cache, since the post has now been removed.

If you don’t want to read it, I’ll summarize: the poster claims that he was hired by a company who specialized in “influencing people’s opinions” by participating in forums, chat rooms, social networks, etc. and further a particular viewpoint. The viewpoint he says he was hired to further was “to support Israel and counter anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic posters.” More or less, he was paid to manipulate opinion online.

photo credit: adam1481

Recently, a series of events occurred that indicated to me that I could no longer trust a member of my staff. No matter how careful you are in selecting people, this will happen because people change and people are imperfect.

Most of my staff members tend to be popular within the community. That’s not why they get selected, they get selected because I believe that they are good people and they care about the community. That leads to popularity (at least it does on my sites) and this member was no exception.

I’m on Quora and, despite the ironic questions about forums being dead, I think it is a pretty cool site.

Quora has been accessible to the public for about 2 and a half years now, so it isn’t a new service any longer. Even so, I regularly see brand representatives who post low quality answers or answers that will be generally seen as spammy and not in the spirit of Quora. Worse yet, even when called on it, some defend the practice as legitimate.

There is a lot of value to be had on Quora for a brand, if you participate in an exemplary way, which is true for most platforms. But the part where people often drop the ball is when they fail to differentiate between different platforms. You can’t expect to participate on one as you do on another. You can learn how each one works, and it usually isn’t that complicated, but you have to actually take the time to learn (and care enough to do so).