photo credit: jeffsmallwood

When a B2B (business-to-business) company starts an online community – like Shopify did with their Ecommerce University – one of the questions they might wrestle with is: how do we get our A players involved? In other words, how can we get our most successful customers into the community?

With Shopify, for example, you have a wide customer base. They power online stores that are just getting started, that have no revenue, and they power online stores that are generating millions of dollars. Why would the million dollar people want to join the community? Why would they want to talk with the people who are new? What value would they receive?

“Can’t touch me, the community loves me.”

– Ryan Leslie, Carnival of Venice

Back when I wrote Managing Online Forums, one of the people I reached out to for advance praise in late 2007 was Ryan Leslie.

This wasn’t some blanket spam request. I asked around 17 specific people and of that 17, 14 provided praise. I had reasons for contacting these individuals. At least as far back as 2006, I had been following Ryan’s work and was impressed by him, his background and his entrepreneurial spirit. He’s a uniquely smart, talented guy and I felt that he was on the way to even greater heights. When he agreed to read the book and then provide a blurb for me, I was honored.

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permanently scatterbrained

I always laugh when I see someone say that Sean “Diddy” Combs isn’t “relevant.” Whatever that means. As if time has passed him by and no one cares what he does.

I laugh at the irony because the self-important people that make these remarks are always vastly less “relevant” than Combs. Far less people have paid for anything they’ve done and far less people care about what they do now.

Combs is a master of long term relevance. Bad Boy Records, the music label he founded 20 years ago, is still around and is still producing hit music. Seemingly every other similarly sized, hip-hop focused label from 20 years ago is gone. That’s the way of the world. Success is generally fleeting.

When phpBBHacks.com turned 10, back in April of 2011, I hosted a live streaming celebration for 3 hours. I was joined by a co-host, a friend and former staff member of the site (Jared W. Smith), and together we spoke to a slate of guests that I lined up. They were all people who had contributed a lot to the community.

The very next month, I did the same thing when KarateForums.com turned 10. Except that instead of one guest host, I had 3 of them and they each guest hosted for one hour.

I ran these events off of Tinychat, where I was on video and I had a friend of mine (Jonathan Bailey) patch the others in over the phone (since, for the most part, they weren’t comfortable joining me on Tinychat or being on video). On the phpBBHacks.com event, my guest host was on video. For the KarateForums.com event, none of my guest hosts were.

YouTube comments have a terrible reputation and deservedly so. YouTube is massive and there are a lot of people posting nasty and offensive things on the website.

At the same time, even though this is true, we don’t have to reserve ourselves to accepting this as the norm in the comments sections for our own videos. It comes down to what your standards are, how much you care and how much you are willing to work.

Soda Tasting, my 5 day a week soda review show, is now more than 6 months old and the majority of the comments made regarding my videos have been made on YouTube. I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect, but so far it hasn’t been that bad.

photo credit: bradleygee

April 1 has come and gone and, besides the fact that I need to work on my taxes, that also means April Fools’ Day has happened. Every year, I consider what I might want to do, discuss it with my staff (if applicable) and execute it. It’s almost like a feature of the community, when people expect it.

On KarateForums.com, we announced a brand new etiquette policy. This policy detailed how members on our community should address senior members – those with 1,000 or more posts and members of our staff. If a member has 1,000 or more posts, they must be addressed as sir or ma’am. But before you can reply to them, you must privately request permission from the senior member. Once approved, you may respond.

photo credit: Trinity

Alex Papworth runs a premium member community and recently asked if I would talk about how you can encourage your members to participate in your community without annoying them.

“I’m keen to encourage participation,” he writes. “Especially to ensure people feel they are getting value but I don’t want to push people when they have busy lives and become a ‘nag.’ Do you have any suggestions on how I could manage this balance?”

Thank you for sharing this with me, Alex. When we talk about encouraging people to participate without annoying them, I think there are two things that you need to consider carefully.

photo credit: chuckychoi

“Don’t Yuck My Yum” is the title of a recent episode of a show with ze frank. On it, Frank talks about moments in his life where he has liked something that was otherwise harmless, only to have people suggest to him that he should stop liking it.

“The yum getting yucked is when you like something harmless – and harmless is the trick here and leads to my confusion – when you like something harmless and someone tells you to stop liking it,” he explains.

I think we’ve all experienced those moments where we like something – a song, a TV show, a movie – and had someone tell us, either with their words or the expression on their face, that they thought the thing we liked was terrible and/or embarrassing. And, certainly, we’ve probably done it to other people.

photo credit: Caden Crawford

My friend Jared W. Smith recently sent me a link to and asked for my thoughts on an article on TechCrunch by Sarah Perez, “The Best Platform for Online Discussion Doesn’t Exist Yet.”

Ms. Perez laments the current state of online comments and discussion, saying that TechCrunch has been missing the “sense of community that blog comments once provided.” Hence their switch to Livefyre. “But there’s no system alive that can bring that [sense of community] back, because that era of the web is over. And it has been for a long, long time.”

Tired of short comments and noise, she wishes that more people would take the time to read an article and comment in long form. The proposed solution is some sort of system that tells you whose opinion’s carry more weight. Ms. Perez criticizes commenting systems for “competing on features” like crowdsourced anti-spam techniques because they don’t “really improve the nature of online discussion.”

I am a big fan of “Saturday Night Live” and, as I thought about it, I realized that the cast of SNL has a lot in common with the members of an online community.

The show is now on it’s 38th season and, according to Wikipedia, the program has had a total of 132 cast members. If you look through the list of cast members, you’ll notice a lot of names that you know, but also many that you don’t.

The changes that occur with the SNL mirror the changes that your online community experiences with membership.