Communities occasionally go through tough times, and it’s important as the community manager to be there and support your community as much as possible. For example, last Friday there was an announcement scheduled at 2am my time with a webcast that promised to have at least some impact on the community that I manage. Rather than sleeping until my normal wake up time of 6am, I pulled my butt out of bed to watch the webcast with the rest of the community and sit on IRC to support people and answer questions where possible. I thought it was important to be there for people in this case.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- None of us can be awake 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but we should be there during tough times.
- Don’t be afraid to shift your work day to accommodate key community activities.
- Pay attention to your community and anticipate times when they might need you more than other times.
- Answer questions and be honest when you just don’t know the answers yet.
Recommended Reading
Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.
Illustration by elkokoparrilla used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
The next Portland MeeGo Network Meetup will be Monday, January 17 at 6:30pm at Kells. We will also be meeting at Kells on the third Monday of every month starting in March, but we’re skipping February to celebrate Presidents Day.
Community managers tend to be busy people, especially when you have an active community with many contributors, and it’s easy to forget to thank people for being really helpful in the community. I am as guilty of forgetting to thank people as anyone else, maybe more guilty of it. We need to remember that these people are contributing their valuable time to do something nice for us, and they deserve to be recognized for it in some way.
Every year, I like to write some kind of year in review blog post. I started writing these in 2007 as a way for people that I don’t talk to very often to keep up with what I’ve been doing, but I’ve found that it helps me see what I’ve accomplished (or not accomplished) that I can use to reflect on what I want to do in the next year. You can find the 
I like to occasionally launch random websites, so here’s my latest: 
Here are a few of my favorite pictures so far:
It can be all too easy for community managers to fall into the day to day routines of managing your community without spending time on planning and strategy to make sure that you are heading in the right direction. All of those daily responsibilities and urgent requests are usually a full time job, which leaves little to no time for reflecting on what works well (or doesn’t), planning improvements, thinking strategically about where the community should be heading and coming up with a plan for how to get there. Many communities tend to slow down during the holidays, so now might be a good time to start!