Brewster’s Law of Online Communities by Ryan Graves where he says

In summary, don’t run from the vocal minority that Brewster’s Law of Online Community highlights. Embrace the voices for or against your organization. The cliche that there is no bad press is definitely true. Engagement, transparency, and honest communication will transform any voice about your company into a net gain.

High Level Reasons for an Internal Community – Getting Started with enterprise social networking I loved this article because it has so many good ideas in it. And it’s not the same ole, same ole. My favorite idea from the article is, "Control and micromanagement, it turns out, is very expensive, and trusting people is a lot cheaper." The slide deck has some engaging photos to go with it. We are in an age of knowledge workers. Here are some of my favorite ideas:

• From managing ‘content’ to supporting knowledge flows
• Most important content is people
• Have a grown up ‘risk’ conversation

A very comprehensive interview about Online Community Management from New Zealand (I think the video is great!)

A comprehensive overview of the Fiskateers community

5 Tips for Successful Blog Optimization offers some excellent ideas for growing your blog

I’m a strong believer in volunteering for projects. The more that you can learn & become indispensable the more job security that you’ll have. Why not help with social media ventures?!  Can Social Media Work Protect your Job?

Jon Burg has a great list of 10 Rules for Effective Corporate Blogging

• 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.

Enjoy!

Olivier Blanchard builds on Tish Grier’s 7 Traits of a great community manager. (I met Tish at Blog World. She’s amazing! )

Romaine Pechard has Community + leveraging = You have to lead or fail

From Poland, community manager Arvind Juneja wrote a great piece showing a software company’s humorous response to a bug that a customer found. You definitely should watch the 2 videos! It’s a good chuckle.

Dawn Foster has created a specialized Google search of blogs by Thought Leaders in the Community Management space

Adam Singer lists some new people to follow in his series on Influencers:

• Social Media Power Users And Influencers: Part 1
• Social Media Power Users And Influencers: Part 2

Where should the Community Manager Role be in an organization by Jeremy 

Measuring the Immeasurable: Researching Community Health by Kristin Shoemaker

Tom Humbarger has a nice graphic in Everything in Moderation

Building community around your blog by Ricardo Bueno (I met Ricardo at Blog World – he’s a rising star & his blog has many valuable tips + he’s a super guy!

LiveBar adds a Community to any website – Bryan Person, LiveWorld evangelist gave me a sneak peak to this & demo’ed it for me last week. I was impressed. It melds comments with the full community experience. The nice thing is that it leaves the discussion connected with the article in a nice clean way. With the popularity of magazine style sites I can see this as being a great option!

A great piece on social networking by Beth Kanter, Pumping up your Professional Network (Her blog is filled with great information on using social media)

The popularity of my Twitter 101 post surprised me! For the teachers that read my blog: Using Twitter as an Educational Tool by Ron Jones

Zappos 10 principles they live by (a bookmark posted by Jake McKee)

Gartner Report Why Many Social Software Projects Fail has a good list of characteristics needed for success.

Salesforce shares their hierarchy for gathering ideas from their community. Click on the graphic.

Some excellent guidelines if you’re Planning a community

Cadence community is gaining momentum

A good article but I don’t care for the term Internet Police

Penny Power talks about establishing tone/atmosphere in a community

List of Top 50 social media blogs

Some ideas that make for a great blog

Education/Networking

CNN had an article on Online student-teacher networking

Here’s some great reading:

10 PR 2.0 tips for Startups – I was glad to see #6 was ‘have a community manager’.

5 Steps to Start an Online Community by Darek Kleczek

Managing Online Communities

More good ideas for Online Communities on Social Media Today.

This one is definitely worth listening to. And I’m really enjoying Matt Rhodes’ insights on Fresh Networks so browse around while you’re there. Yet more evidence of online community benefits – audio slideshow of the Deloitte Study

If you find those helpful there are many more links to my favorite posts on my Resources tab.

And the Fedex man brought me an Advance copy of Conversational Capital: How to Create Stuff People Love to Talk About by Bertrand Cesvet. I’m always open to new Word of Mouth Marketing ideas! And as a past librarian having the pre-published book in hand is like heaven! 

An incredible article about Brands building community on Flickr

Beth Kanter pointed me to this ongoing wiki project that is going to be an amazing resource for Non-profits using Social Media. I’m sure that she would love your contributions!

A must see slide at Dogster.com along with this truth "Being a community manager is never about you, the community manager or the company you work for. It’s always about the community member or site user, who we like to call the customer.

Wall Street Article on Why Most Online Communities Fail? (yes, lack of human intervention) Take a look at how the industry spoke up in this article.

That was a warm up article for this one by Augie Ray that provides an excellent analogy between gardening & nurturing a community.

And kudos to Dell!!  Dell Opens Up Social Media Sites to All Employees