Posts Tagged ‘Community Management’

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24Jul09

A blog article by one Eric Heimburg has been floating around my circle of online amigos over the past few days, with rather mixed reactions. Some have hailed it as a realistic and well grounded take on forum communities, and naturally others disagree.
I got into a discussion with a friend about the content of the [...]


In my previous post I talked about the inability of some community managers to shrug off old clichés and start customizing their practice to the needs of their community.
The inability to recognize those needs runs in parallel to the inability to innovate for your community. If you can’t recognize and meet their needs in one [...]


To help illustrate my issue with stagnation in community management, I’ll offer a frustrating cliché as an example:
Don’t talk about things in development, because should they change (and inevitably they will) you will only disappoint and aggravate your community.
This is a fine rule of thumb for the inexperienced, someone in the first few months of [...]


In my last entry I talked about an article on user feedback by Sanya Weathers.
In the article she stresses the importance of transparency and a flow of information both ways between the developer and community. As someone with experience handling online communities I could appreciate the point, but it was nothing new. I wrote the [...]


Seeing how ‘User Feedback’ is a drum I frequently bang, it would be remiss of me not to link a fantastic article by Sanya on the topic.
World of Warcraft didn’t get a billion people playing because of their wonderful communication, but in spite of it.
The gist of the article is ‘hey guys, communication is cool’. [...]


In my recent spate of trolling fellow bloggers comment sections with my unholy walls of text I stumbled into the following conversation with a member named Mist, over on Scott Jennings’ blog. As with my last entry, I thought it was interesting enough to share here.
It’s a very interesting article, by the way, so if [...]


In a post by Ryan Shwayder on official forums being a necessary evil, I came across this comment from a user called makkaio:
Yes. But I think official forums should be used, like you say, to build community. Forums should not be used for serious feedback. Other methods that provide better results for feedback should be [...]


Sparked by this interesting event with the Spellborn French Community Manager there has been some interesting discussion about names or handles that CMs use for interacting with their communities.
In the case above the CM in question had worked for Blizzard, and upon moving to  Spellborn he was asked to leave the nickname behind as it [...]


There has been a lot of discussion recently about qualities necessary to move into the CM field. Not just academic qualifications, but extra-curricular activities and even personality traits that can contribute.
To be very general, because I want to keep this short, I’ve always been a believer that there are certain personality types that excel in [...]


Read these posts by Sanya Weathers.
Old though they may be (I first read them near the start of my time working on Fury) they are as relevant today as they were then, and will probably still be relevant in many years to come.
I have seen many people try to categorize or explain what a community [...]