Overview: Online Community Management

The conversation continued through various responses and notes in different responses, blooming outward, but at that point to actually follow it you needed to perform a very impressive feat of what Gutbloom so aptly calls “digital spelunking”. Which then led everyone to discuss what could make the social part of Medium better... the thing I’d m…

"@NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world... and 3.5 million on Instagram. The Department of the Interior, whose stunning wildlife and nature pictures make it the only government agency with cool visual content to rival NASA’s, has just 654,000 ... John Yembrick and Jason Townsend are veterans of other government agencies...…

My EuropCom 2015 workshop on online communities is taking shape. (Update: view all slideshows and key takeways from the session) According to the EuropCom2015 site it'll be held after lunch on Day 1, and will cover:Convening and managing an online community is an extremely effective way of achieving communications goals, but will probably fai…

The Art of Hosting is a highly effective way of harnessing the collective wisdom and self-organizing capacity of groups of any size.  ... a suite of powerful conversational processes to invite people to step in and take charge of the challenges facing them... better decision-making, more efficient and effective capacity building and greater abi…

So the question at hand is how to keep your community alive and thriving. Or, on the flip side, here are the top 15 ways to (inadvertently) to kill an online community: - How To Kill An Online Community In 15 Easy Steps | Vanessa DiMauro | LinkedIn

We are thinking about how to optimize our content from its very conception... we obviously want to grow traffic... The second prong of the strategy is to change how we produce and distribute our content and optimize it for reach... optimizing some of our content for different distribution platforms, integrating visual and interactive content fr…

The Coral Project aims to change how publishers, contributors and readers think about interacting in online communities ... to further opportunities for online engagement, extending beyond comments into conversations and contributor contributions... The goal of the open-source software is to enable publishers to better manage contributions and …

sixth edition of the annual report series provides a snapshot of the progress and changes in community management approaches and highlights emerging standards. This year, TheCR analyzed data from more than 200 communities representing a broad range of community sizes and sectors to measure community maturity and its relationship to member engageme…

... shift participants’ perspective from “work” to “play.” ... a “one-day fellowship:” a chance to get away from the newsroom or office, from the usual day-to-day distractions, and to have an opportunity to really explore big, bold new ideas with a room full of equally-unleashed minds... there’s often more experience in the audience than there …

"Networks are pretty good for collisions. Bureaucracies are pretty bad for collisions." - Why I Write on Medium — The Message — Medium

Some really advanced techniques in handling trolls here - The Internet’s Most Trolled Cartoonist — The Nib — Medium

"The Influencer Identification Worksheet is a blogger outreach brainstorming tool [to] build a list of bloggers." - A 4-Step Blogger Outreach Tool for Identifying Influencers | Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

“In fact, the very point was to get them, and these comments, off my pages,” - After deciding to charge for comments, Tablet’s conversation moves…to Facebook » Nieman Journalism Lab

I need three speakers for a EuropCom2015 workshop to share their thoughts on convening and managing communities in the context of public communications and policymaking. The following throwaway remark on Linkedin landed me with the task of setting up a workshop at EuropCom 2015:"I'd suggest combining "Setting-up and managing online …

I quite enjoyed the experience of reposting to Medium, and really like how Medium is evolving as a platform, particularly how they are… … re-imagining comments with Highlight, Comment & Respond… these three interactive features echo the ‘nibble, bite, meal’ content model, but in the other direction, from you back to the …

LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rates compared to Facebook and Twitter, where leads were almost three times higher to convert than Facebook or Twitter. To perform this analysis, we collected one of the largest datasets of top performing long-form content across the LinkedIn Pulse network. This is what we found.... .…

An array of sophisticated language technologies could help ideas flow across EU borders, link national conversations together and support the EU Online Public Sphere - the demos the EU needs. But BloggingPortal is unlikely to feature them. [update (17/5/15): I finally decided to kick Medium's tyres by reposting this there, with less history. …

"... suggests articles to its users ... and then lets users schedule and share those links across LinkedIn and Twitter... [aimed at] marketing professionals... with story suggestions letting them stay active even when they have no links of their own to share, and analytics ... create specific topic areas to track ... also coopting a company’s la…

One of those projects you feel privileged to work on. It’s not often you get to experiment with crowdsourcing, augmented reality, faceted search and commemorating US war dead in one project.

"Startups are notorious for this: You’ll have two or three people who are true hustlers, wearing multiple hats, pushing themselves and others to get shit done, while the rest of the group sort of ‘tags along’ and waits for shit to happen. " - The Truth About Collaboration — Medium

Comment moderation and online community management strategies for news organisations, but relevant to government sites too: "Comments are a way for readers to connect with one another, and with the journalists and editors reporting the news. But ... can quickly turn uncivil, and news organizations often don’t have the resources or manpower to con…

Good case study, concluding with observations on the role of journalists which also apply to government communicators: "An engaged journalist's role in the 21st century is not only to inform but to bring readers directly into the conversation through... real-time coverage, alternative story forms, crowdsourcing, beat blogging, user-generated co…

"What was originally intended to be a simple and user-friendly tool for all EU citizens has turned out to be cumbersome and challenging in its use... Stakeholders have come up with concrete recommendations on how to adjust the instrument... first report on the application of the ECI Regulation by 1 April 2015 ... the first step towards a revision…

A whole load of recommnendations for the UK's House of Commons, including some intriguing ones - eg: "We believe the public want the opportunity to have their say in House of Commons debates; we also believe that this will provide a useful resource for MPs and help to enhance those debates. We therefore recommend a unique experiment: the use of…

"Crowdsourcing is not about work. Crowdsourcing is about community. Without a solid community, you get not-solid results from your crowdsourcing endeavor.... The goal of many of these tactics is not to stop assholes from being assholes, just to slow them down and demotivate them from destroying your community." - Crowdsourcing isn’t broken — Bac…

"While we've always loved a good chart and map at Vox, appreciating a chart or map does not data journalism make. Data journalism is not just data visualization... ... the explosion in data sources readily available on the web... can both aid in telling important and necessary stories, but can also be easily misunderstood and potentially manipula…

" online comments can be worth having, if the publisher puts the work in." Excellent case study. Found this stat particularly interesting: "Users who log in, which is required if you want to comment, view seven pages per session on average, while non-registered users make it to only 1.7" I'd suggest that users who both view 4 times as much conte…

"Guardian digital editor Aron Pilhofer say killing off comments is a “monumental mistake.”... ... many traditional newsrooms are failing to take full advantage of the web’s ability to create a two-way relationship with readers, and that this is a crucial element of what journalism has become in a digital age... ... "You see site after site movin…

"Q. Is it realistic to think that a European public sphere could ever be created? TGA: My view is that we should try, but we shouldn’t ever kid ourselves that this is going to be like a national public sphere. Apart from anything else, we speak different languages, which is a huge barrier. The key for me, in continuing to make the argument for …