community

Community Guy Job Board Relaunched

February 13, 2009 By Des Walsh

People looking for jobs in the online community and social media space should check out Jake McKee’s Job Board, which he has just re-launched, in his words “newer and better”.

This is a gift also for employers seeking talented people for community and social media roles.

Look for the job board in the sidebar of Jake’s Community Guy site.

The board should be especially appealing to job seekers and employers insofar as Jake is not charging for the privilege of advertising such positions on his site or applying for them.

Just to be clear about that:

posting a job doesn’t cost a cent
applying for a job posted on the site doesn’t cost a cent

Some new features Jake listed in an email I received from him on the subject:

Employers: Searching & browsing resumes and candidates is now a core function
Employers: Posting and managing job openings is much easier
Employers: Alerts and updates to help you keep up with new candidate profiles
Seekers: Privacy options
Seekers: On-site resume creation for easier application

The key condition for advertising a position is that it is relevant to the field of online community or social media – which Jake interprets liberally – but expects people to use some judgement.

How to Manage Online Forums: Book Review

November 17, 2008 By Des Walsh

Book cover via Amazon

I’ve been talking lately with a colleague about possibly setting up an online forum or community for a project we have in mind. So I had an immediately personal reason to be delighted to receive a few weeks ago a review copy of Patrick O’Keefe’s new book Managing Online Forums

Then, just over a week ago, I seized an opportunity while traveling to read it right through at one sitting.

That might not be how most people will use this book. My guess is that experienced community discussion board managers will skim the book to check out its scope, then focus on particular sections which address their immediate needs, and those just setting up a community will likely focus on the earlier chapters first and perhaps make use of the excellent templates provided for community discussion board owners.

A summary of this review is:

the book incorporates a huge amount of information and speaks at every turn of the author’s practical experience, over many years, in setting up and managing online communities
it should prove an invaluable resource for anyone who is considering setting up an online forum or already managing one or more
there are templates included, for guidelines and contact, which can be used and adapted freely
advice on community software is restricted to vBulletin and phpBB but the principles and practices set out in the book can be applied more widely.

My frame of reference was as a participant in online forums for fifteen or more years, going back to the days when The WELL (which had started in the 1980s) was still pretty prominent and Compuserve Forums. I have also been and in some cases still am a member of various Listservs, Ryze groups, Ning groups, Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups, some of which have been run well to brilliantly, some of which have verged on or tipped over into anarchy. I am also founding moderator of the now 900 or so member forum, LinkedIn Bloggers.

My personal preference (bias if you will) is for groups to be well run and the discussion managed in a kind of “loose-tight” way that means you can spend your time online enjoyably and/or usefully and don’t have to put up with nonsense and spamming.

From reading Managing Online Forums, I get the sense that the author too has a low level of tollerance for nonsense or spamming.

Managing Online Forums has a very readable, conversational style, which I found congenial. It would perhaps have been easier for the author to write more of a “shopping list” of things to do and not do, but I for one would probably have found such an approach not only boring to read but less than convincing. With Managing Online Forums I felt I was in the presence of a master, who had not only “been there, done that” but had reflected long and deeply on what works and what doesn’t.

The sub-title promises that the book will provide Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards. I found that to be a somewhat over-ambitious claim – perhaps a bit of publisher hubris: the author himself makes it clear that some aspects won’t be covered, for example technical issues (p 2) -

For the most part, I try to steer clear of technical issues, such as your particular administration-control panel, code editing, and custom programming. That’s not what the book is for.”

Nor does the book have specific advice with regard to other popular platforms as Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups or MSN Groups – as is acknowledged also on page 2. There are huge numbers of forums on these and other platforms and it is inevitable that people managing communities on them will be looking for guidance, the specifics of which they will not find here. To provide one small example, as co-moderator of a group on Yahoo! Groups and requiring a specific identification detail for new members, I and my fellow moderators have found interface for joining totally inadequate, with the result that we have to go to considerable effort to help people join. Information on this sort of dilemma is not to be found in Managing Online Forums.

Although, as mentioned above, the principles and practices in the book can be applied to these and other platforms.

Chris Brogan was not impressed with the organization of the book but while I might have used different chapter headings I found the organization fairly unexceptionable.

The chapters are:

Laying the Groundwork
Developing Your Community
Developing Guidelines
Promoting Your Community
Managing Your Staff
Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos
Creating a Good Environment
Keeping it Interesting
Making Money

Then there are appendices:

Online Resources
Blank General Templates
Glossary

Two chapters which I found particularly interesting, from a forum founder or moderator viewpoint, were those on guidelines (Chapter 3) and on “Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos” (Chapter 6). As an aside, from reading these chapters it does appear that Patrick O’Keefe as a forum manager has had more than his fair share of difficulty-creating people to deal with. In his own words (p 3),

Part of managing a community is dealing with spammers, idiots, and people who just can’t seem to follow your guidelines. Of course, it gets worse – there are people out there who will actually want to do harm to your community.

Complementing these chapters on guidelines and “dealing with chaos” is the set of general guideline and contact templates in Appendix B: Blank General Templates. I would love to have had these templates a few years ago when LinkedIn Bloggers was just getting going – and am looking now at what can be gleaned from them. Having guidelines in place and known to members makes it a much more straightforward task to deal with behavior that does not serve the community. I know it’s a bit of a cliched expression, but the fact is that this set of templates alone is worth the price of the book and more – much more.

Overall, it is evident that Patrick knows his stuff: he has been building online communities for years and it shows. Anyone who wants to set up an online forum or already has one can learn from this book. Anyone who wants to know how to build a community online, can find plenty of guidance here. If you want to know how to deal effectively with troublemakers and wreckers, you may need some trial and error but there is a ton of practical advice here. If you want to know how to manage and lead staff (paid or volunteer), it’s in the book.

On a less positive but hopefully constructive note, it would have been beneficial to have some more rigorous copy-editing, to improve the flow of argument. I find it distressing to see a book as professionally produced in other respects, as this, let down by a lack of thoroughness in final copy editing. In one instance, I had to read a sentence two or three times before I understood the instruction being given. Elsewhere, there seemed to be a proliferation of unnecessary commas, which had the effect of breaking up the argument, or making the flow of thought more jerky than it needed to be. Hopefully the publishers will put some resources into some smoothing, when the time comes, as I am sure it will very soon, for a second printing or second edition.

My main takeaway from reading Managing Online Forums was not so much about the mechanics of setting up or managing a community, but more about personality traits and character-building. It was pretty clear to me that if you are going to be a successful forum manager/community builder for the long haul, you’ll need a blend of thick skin, sense of humor, respect for others, a sense of order and a determination to apply the rules firmly and fairly, without fear or favor. There is an excellent section on this, under the heading “What Skills and Characteristics Do You Need to Have?” at pages 14-16 in Chapter 1, Laying the Groundwork.

You can order your own copy of Managing Online Forums from Amazon at this link.

Photo credits

Managing Online Forums book photos – Des Walsh, Creative Commons

Photo of Patrick O’Keefe by Wendy Piersall via flickr – Creative Commons license

Filed Under: Social networking Tagged With: book, community, online communities, online forums, Patrick O'Keefe

Setting Up a Community Site: #2 Purpose

July 17, 2008 By Des Walsh

In my previous post in this series on setting up a community site, I summarized the concept of the site I am working on, using the WordFrame platform, as being focused on social media in the geo-political region which includes China, South East Asia and Australasia. The name – Social Media East.

This post is about clarifying the purpose of the site.

The key distinction: the concept is what the site is about, the purpose is what it is for, or what it is trying to achieve.

As with the previous post, this one will be somewhat discursive: rather than simply stating the purpose I have decided to focus on, I explain the thought process that led me there, sharing a couple of the twists, turns and backflips along the way.

That’s not out of any particular fascination with my own thought processes: it’s because I recognize that ideas about the purpose of a site do not always spring, fully formed, from the mind of the site initiator. My sharing the process is intended as an encouragement to others to play around with your initial ideas and not necessarily settle on the first idea that pops up.

Before setting up a community site, other than for, say, an established association or clearly defined, “ready to act” community of interest, It will generally be a good idea, even essential, to do some market research to see what sort of site might be attractive to the people you want to visit the site and participate.

In other words, is there a community in place likely to use the site, or is there evidence that a community can readily be built around the site?

My reading suggests that the process is more likely to be successful when there is a community already in place than if you have to seek to build a community.

But in the case of the planned Social Media East site I am pressing ahead without doing a formal market research exercise. That’s not because I think I have nothing to learn – far from it.

It’s because:

there is clearly a conversation going on already about social media and a sufficient number of people involved to make that a significant conversation
business is switched on enough to the concept of social media to make it a subject worth discussing in a business context
my perception is that the conversation about social media in the USA, Canada and Europe – i.e. “the West” – pays only lip service at best to what is happening with blogging and other forms of social media in China and South East Asia – “the East”
as far as I can see, there is not an online site dedicated to the topic as far as this region is concerned (although there is always the possibility that there is a website I haven’t discovered!)

In short, I believe there is an emerging community of people interested in the subject and already discussing it and where a site dedicated to the subject of social media, with an emphasis on this region, could be useful and attractive.

And where do Australia and New Zealand (“Australasia”) fit in that? My view is that we are, as in various areas of geo-politics and culture, to some degree in the middle, a potential bridge if you will, between West and East. We have, still, a predominantly European or Western culture but we are physically and to some degree culturally located in the broader Asian region – and our fortunes are very much bound up with the fortunes of the Asian region. That give us a particular interest and perspective on the issues.

About here is where I should say that, as I thought about the community aspect, I even toyed with defining the purpose of the site as being focused on community, in the sense that, as “community”=”people”, that was a fundamentally more important topic that social media, which are simply tools for the community. This is another aspect, or broader view of community, as distinct from the narrower concept of “the community of people interested in social media”.

But as I thought about that more, and went through a page or three of mind-mapping, I came back to the fact that I really wanted to have a site focused on social media.

Which I is how I came to a degree of clarity about the purpose I have in mind for the site.

The rough mind map with “Community” as the central idea got the flick and I was back to “Social Media”, then “Social Media East” as the central idea.

So here is my statement of the purpose of Social Media East, a statement which I feel is clear enough to enable me to proceed systematically, although I may well tweak or amend it in the light of experience.

The key purpose of the site, Social Media East, is to provide information, content and conversation about social media, with a focus on the region (“East”).

And as the WordFrame platform comes ready-made with social media tools as well as document management tools, the fulfilment of the purpose will be facilitated by inviting others with an interest in the subject to make their own distinctive contributions.

Further, the WordFrame tools for group and sub-group collaboration will allow the provision of resources for particular groups, for instance regional or subject-focused groups, to have their own “space”. So there is scope for sub-community activity within the broader framework.

There is of course the risk that there will not be a sufficient level of interest to make this a dynamic project. I can live with that. At the very least I will have put together some resources which may prove useful to someone, somewhere, some time.

And I will have the practical experience of setting up and managing a WordFrame site and sharing that experience as I go, which can only be a plus in terms of my ability to relate to and help WordFrame customers.

So now, having established the concept and purpose of the site, in the next post in this series I will look at the people who might be interested in the site, whether as readers (including subscribers) or more active participants.

(Map of Southeast Asia courtesy of Wikitravel, Creative Commons licence.)