No two ways about it. Managing and moderating social networks and web communities hurts. I’ve been doing this for a while – I now walk with a limp, speak slowly, and avert my gaze when someone looks at me. Just kidding, my honest advice is that if you’re just starting out administering and building networks, forums, or communities on the web, keep with it. There is no job so rewarding and it can take you to some very interesting places. Here are a few tips that I’ve learned along the way to keep you sane:
what was i thinking?
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William Gillette was the actor who played Sherlock Holmes at the beginning of the 20th century. He made a lot of money and then built himself a castle overlooking the Connecticut river. Now the grounds are a state park and it makes for a nice place to picnic with kids. It turns out he was a pretty strange guy.
The next time I’m on Mashable will probably be the year 2046. I didn’t see this for a week. But the next time that happens, can someone call my rest home? Thank you.
I was driving today with my wife and we realized that we didn’t quite know where we were going. No problem, I thought, and handed her my iPhone. “I’m not using that thing,” she said, “I hate it.”
“Really?” I said, “can’t you just look up some directions?”
“Really, I won’t.” (more…)
I started a new position recently with RecruitingBlogs. RecruitingBlogs is an online community for the recruiting industry (and a darn fun one.) It’s been a pretty wild ride so far. Just for fun and maybe for a bit of a scrapbook for myself, here are some of the things I’ve learned in the last two weeks:
- There are only 24 hours in a day. Really 12 if you eat and/or sleep. Going into a small company, you think you’re going to do everything, affect everything. But you can make any particular aspect of the company a fulltime job if you want to. A large web community needs constant attention, improvement, communication, and initiative. Just thinking about new technical improvements can take up a full day. You need to budget your time, because it’s precious. (more…)
If your first click of the day is usually on the tech section of Google, you’ve probably already heard about some radical new changes at Ning. The company provides a free “social networking in a box” service which millions of people have used to build their websites. I’m a big fan – our company uses it to power a huge community for the recruiting profession. Ning recently outraged scores of network creators by announcing the end of free services. At the same time, they cut a good percentage of their workforce. Was this a simple prudent business decision, or should network creators be worried? (more…)
A while back we developed this great little application for sending cards with Twitter. We called it HashLove. Why, you ask? Because hashtags on Twitter are important, and they represent the subject of the conversation – be it #jobs or #justsayin or #britney. So although these cards don’t have to be about love, we wanted a tongue in cheek mushy sentiment for the name. (more…)
