November 30, 2008 | Community Strategist Links | Connie

Here are some great resources to wrap up the long weekend.

• An ebook by Angela Connor – 18 Ways to Engage Users Online
• Metrics are always a big topic – Janine Southard shares her slide deck
• Rich Millington is  a frequent reader here & is presently working with Seth Godin in New York. In browsing his blog I found this great article by Ayelet Noff. 
  • Why people participate in online communities
• Adam Metz outlines factors that affect negative interaction in communities Four Learnings on (Diverse) Community Management

And finally, this article by Larry Goldman highlights his takeaway from two conferences of the increasing importance of the Community Manager role. Here are two quotes from the article, Web 2.0 and Social Media: Two Worlds, Two Dress Codes, No Answers
• The community manager is a role that is becoming increasingly important. The community manager is the user’s representative to fight for new features, keep peace in the community, handle complaints, watch for new trends in discussion or usage, and evangelize the site through promotion and blogs. The community manager is a live connection from the user base to the organization and makes the interactions more intimate.
• Several different categories are emerging as ways to keep users engaged. Each community needs to discover what works best for them. In general, you have competitive sites like Amazon that count the number of book reviews you wrote, but not necessarily how helpful they were. In contrast, Yelp provides labels to its super users as a reward of reputation, instead of instilling competition.