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…
Category: Community Management
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…
August in Review: Highlights From Skariphos.com
It’s been a busy month here at Skariphos, so I thought I would take a little break and take a look back at some August highlights. In addition to a few of my favorite articles from the blog, click the image below to get links to features of Skariphos and me, Luke Zimmer, in ASAE’s…
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…
Creating a member-oriented online community
This article originally appeared at ASAE: The Center for Association Leadership. My thanks to Oona Schmid who co-wrote this article with me! Just because an association creates an online community platform and stacks it with educational material does not mean members will rush to sign up. These tactics will help you build an engaging and…
Finding your calling as an online community consultant
In today’s internet-fueled economy, it’s easier than ever to find a niche in the workforce and fill it, which is essentially the definition of what consultants do. And frankly, in the future freelance jobs like consulting will likely become the norm, if they haven’t already, for making a living. Boutique marketing consultant Caitlin Connors made…
