While preparing for an upcoming presentation on Social Media for Nonprofits, I ran into this magnificent presentation put together by Amy Sample Ward (who will be joining me next April at NTC 2010 for a panel about Community Management for Nonprofits). I will let Amy’s slides speak for themselves:
Reading “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky is a reaffirmation of the brilliant thoughts he shares during his keynotes all over the place.
This book is not about specific technologies, though you will find many enabling platforms mentioned and exemplified. Neither does it offer a framework for businesses and individuals to follow, to embrace Web 2.0 and the new social internet, though his chapter titled “Promise, Tool, Bargain” comes close to offering a roadmap for the times ahead.
In “Here Comes Everybody” the essence beyond the hype, the fundamentals that make this technological revolution we’re in the middle of a turning point in history. I highly recommend it.
Much needed advice for those who run online communities
As many online forums as there are, sadly there are only very few titles out there that deal with the topic.
Until now, the best one (now out of print) was Design for Community. But Patrick O’Keefe has changed this for good with this amazingly comprehensive title that is packed with great (and fairly timeless) advice about how to start, develop, promote and manage your online community. Two chapters at the end deal with tips on how to keep your online forum interesting and how to monetize it.
Personally, the only downside I found in the book is that it has a very heavy emphasis on forums (phpBB, more specifically), leaving outside some of the aspects specific to social media. However, the knowledge that the author has included in here can be relatively easily ported to help folk wanting to manage social networks or other social applications.
As for me, I am getting a copy of “Managing Online Forums” for each of the Administrators in my communities.
Today we passed the 3,000 member mark in www.tudiabetes.com, a social network for people touched by diabetes.
3,000 folks touched by diabetes. 3,000 people that are sharing with others about they go through, about what their loved ones go through every single day… it’s quick to say but we all know it’s not quick to go through.
This family keeps growing and the warm and cozy feel is still here. Each of you make it possible, when you welcome a new member, when you answer people’s questions about diabetes in the forum, when you share a story, a photo or a video. A diabetes community that feels like one big family.
Thanks to each and every one of you: we should all feel proud of this important milestone!
Reputation Management is a very broad topic. So much so that there are companies such as Reputation Defender and International Reputation Management entirely devoted to it. Online reputation management exists at the crossroads between Internet Marketing, PR and good old Strategic Thinking.
While dealing with attacks on your reputation may be limited to nasty comments on your YouTube videos or your blog posts, they could go further, resulting in blog posts that tarnish your name or edits to a Wikipedia page about you or your company (if you have one).
This is a situation that is not simple to correct. Bloggers will understandably be hard pressed to take down a post they wrote and removing a reference from Wikipedia will take more work than reading Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.
The thoughts on these pages should come in handy when considering how to proceed if faced with a frontal online attack on your reputation: