At some point you may have found yourself at work long after everyone else has left, the fluorescent lights buzzing above your head, and the sound of a lonely unanswered phone ringing through the empty hallways. Yet you remain, typing madly and wishing you had a clone to help you with all of the work…
Category: CMGR Toolkit
Three signs your association is ready for an online community
While I may be biased toward online communities–I think lots of organizations can find ways to incorporate community into their business strategies–I will also be the first to tell you that there is a right time, and a wrong time, to launch your association’s community. Before you can even start building your private social network,…
What is thanatosensitivity and what does it have to do with my community?
If you don’t acknowledge a member’s death, that person’s online contributions may live on, but their memory will quickly fade. Acknowledging death allows your online community to give special consideration to a person’s contributions and bring a sense of closure to the gap that can be left by a member’s passing. In case you haven’t…
Skariphos one year on…thank you!
If you subscribe to the blog, then you got a sneak peak of this a few weeks ago when I accidentally posted it as a test–I hope you enjoyed the early release! As a thank you to all of my readers and to celebrate the founding of Skariphos.com in September 2016 (and Labor Day weekend…
Community manager, advocate thyself! Speaking up for you, your job and your community
Being a good community manager means being an advocate for your members. It also means advocating for yourself and your job. To do that, you sometimes have to take risks. Once upon a time, I stepped into my annual performance review, palms sweaty, hands shaking. I wasn’t all that nervous about the review itself. I…
Retired members make great association community managers
I was getting coffee with a friend of mine, and she was telling me that her association is at the point where it needs a community manager, but they don’t yet have enough work to make it a full-time position. She told me about a few of the options they had considered, including bringing on…
Levels of order in online community: The art of banning users
I was listening to Community Signal (available wherever fine podcasts are sold) and Patrick O’Keefe’s conversation with famed criminologist George Kelling about applying the Broken Windows theory to community management. They discussed how behavioral demonstrations and “levels of order” can maintain a cohesive, orderly group, whether online or off. While the theory is somewhat controversial,…
How the 90-9-1 rule applies to community tactics–like welcome campaigns
You’ve heard of the 90-9-1 rule, or the 1 percent rule of online community participation. It’s the general principal that around 90 percent of your audience will lurk in your community, not producing any content, only consuming it. Meanwhile, approximately nine percent of your community members will share intermittently, and the last one percent will…
