Community Manager Tips

Community Manager Tip: Reuse Your Work

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Community managers get asked the same questions over and over and over, so being able to quickly and easily reuse your work can save a lot of time and help maintain your sanity. The second time I’ve dug through my email archives to reuse a piece of a previous email to answer a repeat question, I usually realize that it’s time to formalize that answer and make it easy to reuse it.

Here are a few ways that you can reuse your work:

  • Have great documentation: use your online community or a blog to document frequently asked questions, processes and other useful information so that you can send a quick note and a link the next time you get the question.
  • Resources: pull together collections of links and other resources for people on a single page or section of your community to make it easy for people to find enough information to get started. The ‘Starting Point‘ page on this blog is an example of a quick and easy way to do this.
  • Use email templates (Gmail canned responses): these can be a quick way to organize information or content that gets sent by email, and I use them for collections of links, confidential information (invoices, etc.) and other things that are commonly sent via email multiple times.

Additional Reading

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

Image by Flickr user andriux-uk used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Community Manager Tips

Community Manager Tip: Always be Professional

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The good community managers can maintain professional communications when faced with the most belligerent trolls on the internet without letting themselves be goaded into unprofessional behavior. As a community manager, you are often the face of your company to the outside world and everything you do in the community reflects on the organization that you represent. If your interactions are unprofessional, the company looks unprofessional, not just in front of current and potential customers, but also potentially the media and industry analysts. Staying professional at all times can be harder than it sounds, especially when someone catches you on a really bad day or when you are being bombarded by negative comments. The Earth Class Mail example in the image below provides an example of what can go wrong.

Here are a few tips to help you stay professional.

  • Don’t be afraid to wait and see if other community members chime in with a positive response. A post coming from the organization might sound defensive when the same information would be seen more positively coming from a neutral third party.
  • Don’t post angry. If you start to feel really angry, step back and stop interacting with the public until you cool off. Go for a walk or catch up on some work that can be done without talking to anyone else.
  • Take a really hard look at what you plan to say. Can it be misinterpreted? Would you want to read a quote of that post on the front page of the newspaper? Would you be embarrassed if your mom or your boss read it? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, throw it away and start over.

Additional Reading

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

portland

Portland MeeGo Network Monthly Meetings

I thought it would be fun to start to organize a monthly (or so) Portland MeeGo Meetup … because that’s what community managers do. 🙂

As Intel’s Community Manager for MeeGo, it’s about time for me to start some type of meetup here in my adopted hometown of Portland. I’ll be kicking off these meetings, but I would love to have some help in organizing the meetings and finding presenters, so let me know if you are interested.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with MeeGo, it is an open source operating system for small form factor devices (netbook, handset, in-vehicle, tablet, connected TV, etc.) You can get all of the details about MeeGo and learn more about it at meego.com.

I checked Calagator and the third Monday of every month is looking fairly open, which would put our first meeting on October 18.

Some logistics
When: October 18 from 6pm – 8pm
Where: Lucky Lab 1945 NW Quimby St in Portland
RSVP: On Upcoming to help us plan

Agenda for October 18
6:00pm – Introductions
6:15pm – MeeGo Overview & Demos
7:15pm – Discuss potential topics for next month

You can also join our new Portland MeeGo Network Google Group to receive updates for every meeting and any additional information.

elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks.

US Airways Magazine

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

MeeGo.com*

*Disclaimers:

  • GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
  • MeeGo: I am a full-time employee at Intel and contributing to MeeGo is part of my job.
Community Manager Tips

Community Manager Tip: Have Great Documentation

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One of the biggest challenges for any community manager is to find ways to get new members integrated into your existing community with all of its established norms and ways of working. This can be particularly difficult if many of the things that define your community aren’t clearly documented. For any community, having great documentation can solve so many potential issues and make it easy for both new and existing members to get the information that they need quickly and easily. Ideally, you can put all of this documentation in a wiki and enlist the help of other community members. In the MeeGo community that I manage, getting all of our processes, guidelines and frequently asked questions documented has been a big focus for me lately.

Here are a few things that should be clearly documented:

  • FAQ: Always have a good frequently asked questions document. We have a main FAQ for MeeGo, which also links off to several other FAQs for specific topics. This is on my short list of things that still need a lot of additional work.
  • Processes: Document as many of your processes as you can to help members learn how to participate. Nothing is more frustrating for a new member than trying to participate, not getting it right and having to start over.
  • Community Guidelines: Have clear guidelines about what members are expected to do (or not do) that you can point people to for more information. I try to avoid guidelines that look like lists of rules, and instead, focus on encouraging people to make the right choices.

Additional Reading

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

Photo by Flickr user mind on fire under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Community Manager Tips

Community Manager Tip: You Can't Please Everyone

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We always need to keep in mind that every choice and every decision that we make, no matter how sound, will please some people, but not everyone. “You can’t please everyone” is a saying that you hear all the time, but I remember being in high school when the impact of this statement really hit me. At that young age, I vowed to think about decisions in a different light with a component of any decision being to understand which people I cared about pleasing, and more importantly, which people could jump in a lake if they didn’t like my decision. This dynamic applies to everyday life and isn’t unique to community managers, but it does come up often when making decisions on behalf of the community.

A few tips:

  • Think about the impact of your decisions on the most important contributors in your community. Don’t let trolls and chronic whiners who will never contribute in a meaningful way dictate solutions.
  • When a few people want a change, make sure that the change would benefit the community as a whole. Don’t let a vocal minority push a decision that isn’t in the best interest of the whole community.
  • Look past your preferences to embrace solutions that benefit the community, even if they aren’t your personal favorites. Do the right thing for the community, not the individual (even when that individual is you).

Additional Reading

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

Photo by Zen Sutherland used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

Linux.com

MeeGo.com*

On Video (OK, not really blogging, but I thought it was fun anyway)

*Disclaimers:

  • GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
  • MeeGo: I am a full-time employee at Intel and contributing to MeeGo is part of my job.
Community Manager Tips

Community Manager Tip: Meet People in Person

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For those of us who manage global online communities, meeting people in person isn’t always easy. However, it is important to find ways to meet people in real life whenever possible, and we should be careful not to underestimate the value of making these real world connections. Last week, I attended LinuxCon where I gave a presentation about the MeeGo Community and did more demos than I can count, but the real value of the conference was in the conversations that I had with community members.

Some thoughts on why this is so important:

  • You put a face to the name and start to build better relationships with people.
  • People will provide different feedback in person and will often talk more frankly about community issues that they would not be comfortable putting in writing in a public forum.
  • It’s fun! These are people that you have something in common with and you can have some really interesting conversations with people and make new friends in the process.
  • I return from conferences refreshed with new ideas that come from having conversations with people outside of the typical daily routine.

Additional Reading

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

Photo by Aaron Hockley of Hockley Photography.

Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.