Here is the roundup of links relating to Online Communities I saved on delicious.com or retweeted for the week ending 30th of July 2010. Enjoy!

How to Socialize User Experience Design: Thinking Outside Your Website

Social commerce – the future of e-commerce?

Connecting With Fans… In The Porn Industry?

The rise of branded communities of purpose

What I wish I knew then about being a Community Manager

Social Media internal process book

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Blaise Grimes-Viort.

To truly understand what is going on around you, and in your online community in particular, you must be able to observe the details of your members’ interactions.

Without observation, you cannot unravel the complex social fabric your members wrap around their daily discussions and debates, and this will hold you back in terms of building and managing your community successfully.

Along with listening to what people are saying to you, the skill of observation is one of the Social Media or Community Manager’s vital traits. Looking for tangents and deeper meaning in your community members’ behaviour will bring depth to your actions and decisions, providing you with the ability to gauge your response to a given situation.

What does being observant mean?

The dictionary defines the word Observation as such:

an act of noticing, perceiving, regarding attentively or watching for some scientific or other special purpose (to gain information)

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Blaise Grimes-Viort.

As I research new thought on online community management and connect with community managers around the globe, I come across an increasing number of practitioners. When Twitter launched their Lists functionality, I thought I’d put it to good use and keep track of all these people in one place.

At this early stage, I don’t follow a particular methodology (which I am starting to regret as the list grows). I am considering splitting the list up into ones based on nationality, if only because industry lists would be too hard to manage as people move jobs. If you have any suggestions on how I should proceed, please post them in the comments section!

The bottom line is that to make this list, the person had to have a Twitter account, mention that they were a community manager in their bio, and that this held up when I did a LinkedIn search for them to confirm their employment.

Of course, this means the list is far from definitive, and can be a bit difficult to read due to the number of foreign languages involved, but is a great way to get a snapshot of what is going on with Community Managers in different countries.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Blaise Grimes-Viort.

A Community Manager cannot be successful without passion, as the role requires a drive to be able to push through difficulties and setbacks inherent with managing interactions between humans (it’s a bit like herding cats).

When your life is being taken over by people who need you all hours of the day and night due to the elasticity of the boundaries of your public and private life, you need to have a very deep well of enthusiasm for your job to keep going.

There are all sorts of adjectives to define what passion is: Workaholic, enthusiastic, fanatic, insane, devoted, obsessed, charismatic, magnetic. Some of these have positive connotations, others bad. But they all suggest the deepest kind of interest one can have in the topic at hand.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Blaise Grimes-Viort.

As a Community Manager, it helps if you have a genuine passion for the topic of the community you are building. However, sometimes you may be asked to work on one in a field you are less knowledgeable about, if at all.

With a well-cultured passion, you will find it easier to work the hours necessary to maintain your community and support the people within it. Even if the topic is not one you know much about, you can train yourself to develop passion, at least enough to enjoy managing the community and have enough understanding to help others.

Here is a template to follow to help you build up knowledge and eventually passion.

Do the prep work

First off, you need to define for yourself what it feels like to be passionate. Pick something you are already really into, and think about how it makes you feel, and how you come across when you talk to others about it. This might be a hunger for knowledge and opportunities to discuss and practise your passion, a deep sense of fun doing it, or an energising feeling.

Hold on to that feeling, and use it as a benchmark; this is what we want to get close to so you can transfer a similar enthusiasm to you community management and interactions with community members.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Blaise Grimes-Viort.

Since I started this blog about Online Community Management, I have covered a number of topics such as how to recruit a community manager via social media sites, a list of social media and community manager job role templates for you to use as a starting point, whether your new hire should be found internally or externally, and of course whether you need a community manager in the first place.

Once you’ve found a few prospective candidates, how do you make sure you don’t end up hiring the wrong person for your particular role? Should you go for someone with a firm hand, the sort of person who thinks everything goes, or maybe one with Pollyanna tendencies?

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Blaise Grimes-Viort.

Following the article The importance of maintaining impartiality during conflict resolution, I thought some of you would be thinking “That’s all very well saying to be impartial, but it’s not that bloody easy!” You’re right, it isn’t. So here’s a little exercise to allow you to practise impartiality and improve your ability to distance yourself from your own bias and preconceptions when approaching issues which need to be adjudicated on.

This little exercise helps to promote your self awareness, particularly in terms of how you see others and illustrates how this will affects your ability to remain impartial. I like to call it “Wine or beer drinker?” but you may have come across it before under different names.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Blaise Grimes-Viort.

An Online Community Manager needs to possess a strong grasp of communication skills to navigate the sometimes tortuous interactions they will have with their company’s customers.

When managing people on mass-user platforms such as forums, chat-rooms or within blog comments, you will have no doubt have witnessed two or more community members at each other’s throat, ultimately resulting in both sides pleading their case to you.

Whether negotiation, a stern word or a banning ends up being in order, you must be able to display impartiality, which is one of the more common aspects of the role of the moderator.

Easier said than done…

Of course, no-one is asking you to become an unfeeling automaton; we all have our own feelings and bias, but it is important to work in such a way that this bias is minimised in the period during which you consider how to resolve an issue between several members of your online community.

While it is impossible to be completely impartial, we can continually review what we think and feel about participants and the situation to maintain awareness of our natural inclination towards bias, and this is an important part of being an effective and fair moderator of online discussions.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Blaise Grimes-Viort.

With everyone talking about Community Managers and Social Media Managers, you’re seeing your competitors hiring them, and you’ve started thinking you could do with one to manage your brand’s community on your site or social networks.

You’ve read and compiled a job description, figured out whether you need a Community Manager or Social Media Manager, are sure you don’t believe in any of the common misconceptions about Community Management and are ready to go hunting for the right person to represent your company. But where to look, and how to go about it?

Ensure the circumstances are right

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Blaise Grimes-Viort.

The lovely Tia Fisher of eModeration, international provider of outsourced multilingual community management and user generated content moderation services, got in touch this morning to let me know they have just published their latest white paper: Communities of Purpose.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Blaise Grimes-Viort.