We want people to be happy and we want to help people however we can. But, in doing so, you have to be careful not to set up unrealistic expectations. When a member expresses an expectation that is unrealistic, you need to be sure to set them straight. Respectfully, kindly, but honestly nonetheless.

Moderation is often an area where unreasonable expectations can manifest. So, let’s use that as an example and talk about statements like this:

“Why are there porn links on this site?!”
“Hello, where are the moderators?”
“Can someone PLEASE look at this thread?”

Following through with this example, what you want to try to do (and not everyone will be receptive) is to turn them into people who will report supposed violations to you and/or your staff through the means that you designate.

Your members have to understand that, just as they are allowed to post and have it instantly appear on your site, so can anyone else. Spammers and other unsavory types enter your community in the very same way that legitimate members do. If there was some back door to close that would shut out all spammers forever, we would have closed that door long, long ago.

In the past four months, since I posted my last book coverage update, I’ve been honored by all sorts of coverage for “Managing Online Forums” and I wanted to take a moment to share the interest that has been shown in this period and thank those that were behind it.

One of the biggest things to happen was the Slashdot review, written by JR Peck of GeekBook. It propelled the book into the top 1,500 books on Amazon.com and kept it in the top 10,000 for a number of days. The Slashdot review was mentioned on the AMACOM Books Blog.

There were also reviews by Michelle L. Rodriguez of Mequoda Daily, Rich Villalobos of Cisco Systems, Dr. Natalie T. Wood in the Journal of Consumer Marketing and Richard Millington of FeverBee. The book received it’s first review on Amazon.co.jp, thanks to Kushi-book-reviews and it’s first review on Amazon.fr, thanks to Dominique.

I participated in text based interviews with Commania, AdminQuest, Des Walsh dot Com (also posted on the International Blogging & New Media Association website and Mr. Walsh was kind enough to mention the book favorably on his blog, as well) and sparkBB. There were new podcast interviews on Podcaster Training and WordCast. A previously recorded interview on PerfCast was mentioned on the Splashpress Media blog.

I attended South by Southwest Interactive 2009 from March 13 through 17 and I gave a book reading (really a presentation around a theme in the book) called “The Art of Responding to Feedback from Your Community”. I also had a book signing at the conference’s bookstore. I spent the signing next to Thom Singer, the author of “Some Assembly Required” and “Some Assembly Required: A Networking Guide for Women,” who was kind enough to mention the book, and some kind words, on his blog.

In “Managing Online Forums,” I wrote about a monetization idea that, to my knowledge, did not yet exist functionally. Basically, I believe that communities should be able to generate revenue from sales generated through their site, passively, if the merchant selling the product has an affiliate program.

I am speaking, primarily, of links included in posts. Of course, you can’t go into member posts and change their links to affiliate links. Besides editing posts in that manner being a no no, it’s also inefficient. So, the only solution would be an automated one, something that automatically includes an affiliate tag onto links out to qualifying sites, without discretion. In the book, I discussed something like this when working with Amazon.com.

While I was at South by Southwest Interactive in March, I met Joe Stepniewski, co-founder of Skimlinks. What is Skimlinks? Well, it’s basically the type of service that I had envisioned. It takes ordinary links on your website and turns them into an affiliate link, where applicable.

Their homepage shows this example: let’s say you were writing about a product from the Gap. You don’t need to mess around with any affiliate code or even apply to be a member of the Gap affiliate program – just post a link to the product like normal, just as if you were passing the link to a friend. With Skimlinks installed on your site, that link will automatically become an affiliate link.

Skimlinks keeps a portion of the revenue generated. But, their FAQ states that they are able to negotiate better affiliate rates than an individual affiliate would be able to get and, because of that, “you can earn up to 110%” of what you normally might.

One of the markets they are targeting pretty heavily is online forums, where people regularly link out to products related to the community’s subject. I’ve had the opportunity to test Skimlinks out on a couple of sites for around a month and I’m ready to talk about the pros and cons of the service, in my eyes.

I’m a little belated in mentioning this, but the publication date of “Managing Online Forums” was April 28, 2008. That means that the book has been in circulation for over a year. Has it really been a year already?

The book was and is stocked nationwide at Barnes & Noble stores. It’s cracked the Amazon.com top 10,000 on numerous occasions. It has received a total of 43 reviews on the Amazon international network of stores, including 37 on Amazon.com. It is in at least 223 libraries. I’ve been overwhelmed and flattered by the praise that I’ve received not just on review sites, but also in e-mail, on forums and in person at conferences.

I’ve been blessed to have been interviewed countless times for online media, print and even television and to have had the book reviewed by many people of very different backgrounds and levels of experience. I am truly thankful for all of the support that I have received and I have a lot of people to thank.

It starts with the people who support me, my family and my friends, like Brandon Eley, Chrispian Burks, Jared Smith and Stephan Segraves, who gave me kind encouragement before everyone else knew I was working on it. My agent, Neil Salkind and everyone at AMACOM who worked on it, from editors to sales people.

Thank you to everyone who has reviewed the book and/or invited me into their space to talk or for an interview. This includes Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, Lee LeFever, Rick Villalobos, Jake McKee, Jim Kukral, Thomas Myer, MarketingSherpa, Des Walsh, Shai Coggins, Martin Reed, Michael Kimsal, Richard Millington, Geek Book, Michelle L. Rodriguez, Dr. Natalie T. Wood, Martin Kloos, Jessica Smith, Rob Diana, Kare Anderson, Manny Hernandez, ONLINE, Brad Williams, Heidi Miller, Travis Smith, Liz Fuller, eModeration, Dr. Jeffrey Barlow, Book News, Rico Mossesgeld, James Seligman, Ray Angel, Andy Staple, Vincent Lauria, David Berkowitz, Midwest Book Review, Ramona Iftode, Andrea Hermitt, Jonathan Bailey, Jason Bean , Jeff Henrichsen, James Fintel, Gary Pollock, Miranda Marquit, Ken Davidoff, Douglas Bell, Ethan Kwassman, Wendy Piersall, David Askaripour, Zack Urlocker, Douglas Hanna, Blake Thompson, John Wilkerson, Jim Turner, David Lewis, Jerry Stephens, Christa Casebeer, Joel Trigger, Jon Scheiber, Pete Carr, Chris Matthieu, Aric Cabot Hoek, Ahmad Jordan, Anne Marie Nichols, Marcquis P. Knox, Sniff Code, Ryan Zieno, Duncan Rawlinson, Edwin Vaughan, Danielle Williams, T. Hooper, Juana Pacheco, Brian A. Pomeranz, Simon Peter Lewis, Matt Whiting, P.J. Dixon, Mrs. K A Rowland, Catherine Archer, Kushi-book-reviews, L. Sutton, sparkBB, AdminQuest, Commania, BloggerTalks, Urban Lifestyle Report: New Media, Blog World Expo, Josh Klein, Performancing, lefora, LIVE Interviews Online, Bill Johnston, Website Magazine, Pete Prestipino, The Daily Advance, Talk Social News, Wayne Sutton, Kipp Bodnar, BlogTalkRadio, WordCast, Alejandro Reyes, The Tech Buzz, Scott Fox, WebProNews, Social Medialogy Conversations, Zane Safrit, New Media Pro.TV, Startup Spark, WordPress Weekly, Fitness Business Radio, WITN, Heather King, Meet the Experts, Inside Digital Media, Thom Singer, Lynn Terry, Esther Schindler, Blogs.com, Barbara Rozgonyi, Gwen Bell, Connie Bensen, Slashdot, Bradley Kelly and so many others.

And I can never thank everyone who has supported me or the book. But, if you have purchased the book, worked on the book, helped spread the word, stocked the book, liked it on FriendFeed, mentioned it on Twitter, bookmarked it on delicious or helped it to reach more people, from the smallest gesture to the largest, please accept my sincere thanks. I really appreciate it and the support means a lot to me.

Over at ProBlogger, Darren Rowse was kind enough to allow me to provide a guest post that I titled “Enhance and Grow Your Online Community Through Appreciation.” In the post, I discuss how simple acts of appreciation can have noteworthy impact on the growth of your community. Here’s the closing excerpt:

Appreciation is a powerful thing. It can open doors, start relationships, give people happiness, bring people back and give them confidence. In the interest of cultivating community, please consider how not just appreciating people – but making sure they know you appreciate them – can enhance your community.

Please let me know what you think about the post.

When I wanted to look into the benefits of using Twitter to promote your forums, I did an account search, looking for words like forums, forum, boards, board, community, etc. The most followed account at the time, back in March, was the rkforums account, for the Raisingkids Forums. They are part of the UKfamily.co.uk network, owned by The Walt Disney Company.

The rkforums account has been used to showcase recent activity on the forums, linking to new threads through an RSS feed that is posted through Twitterfeed. To get an insider’s perspective on the value of this type of integration, I spoke with Michael Howard, the administrator of the Raisingkids Forums.

“I streamed the forum feeds into Twitter to see if there was any interest,” Michael said. “I fully expected to get told off for spamming because I set Twitterfeed to the maximum amount of postings (5 every half an hour) – but because we’ve got a fast moving forum, I thought that it would be OK as the content posted to Twitter is always new and different. I’ve had no complaints yet and people can always vote with their feet by ‘unfollowing’ us.”

Approved by the company’s legal team, the account started off as only posting entries from the forums automatically, Michael has begun posting manual tweets, as well, including the promotion of competitions and the monitoring of mentions of the rkforums account on Twitter, in order to engage in conversations and answer questions.

I wrote a guest post for SmartBlog on Social Media that was published on Monday. It’s called “4 Simple Rules for Generating Traffic from Forums.” That title is pretty descriptive – it’s a simple, straightforward guide for those who want to participate on forums in an effort to drive traffic to their own site. The four steps are:

1. Observe first, act second.

2. Fill out your profile, especially your signature.

3. Want to be there.

4. Don’t mention your website.

The article goes into more detail. If this is something that you are interested in, I hope that you find it useful.

At Blog World & New Media Expo 2008, I was lucky enough to be on a pair of panels, sharing the stage with some great people. My friend Chrispian Burks was kind enough to record the panels for me and, in November, I posted the video from the “Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media” panel.

The other panel was called “How to Deal with Trolls, Spammers & Sock Puppets.” Here is the panel description:

You just wrote the greatest blog post you’ve ever written. You researched the subject, spoke with sources, conducted interviews and completed a well thought out, well written article. You hit the post button and your baby is up. Here comes the praise! The first comment you receive? “You’re stupid, you’re ugly and you’re writing sucks.” Whether you call them trolls, haters or griefers, they’re out there, waiting to ruin your day, harm your community and taint your world.

Or maybe the first comment was something like, “Hey, nice article, check out mine!” Just like there are people who’d like to harm you, there are also people who’d like to cheaply benefit from your work and your audience. Spammers can do their own sort of damage.

But, neither of these two groups need harm you, if you know how to deal with them. This panel will give you the knowledge you need to tackle it.

I was invited to join this panel by Rick Calvert, Founder of Blog World Expo & New Media Expo. It also featured John Chow of John Chow dot Com, The Tech Zone and TTZ Media and Jeremy Schoemaker of ShoeMoney and ShoeMoney Media Group.

The panel was a lot of fun and a great experience, being that it was the first panel that I had ever been on. Afterwards, we had a great Q&A. Here’s the entire session:

In addition to Vimeo, the video is also on YouTube (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8).

During the second week of March, I headed to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) 2009. The conference itself ran from March 13 through March 17 and I arrived on March 12 and left on March 18. Since it is still fresh in my mind, as I did last year, I wanted to provide a recap of the experience. This is my epic and unnecessarily detailed and long (even boring by some standards) recap of the conference. This is the “WHY DID YOU WRITE ALL THAT? NOBODY CARES.” recap. It’s for me personally, to remember the event, as much as anything else, but if you want to read it, you are definitely welcome! Good luck.

March 12

Let’s start with this: I’m sitting in the Charlotte airport on wifi, waiting for my flight to Austin, and a guy walks by. He looks like a much older version of Kevin McCallister’s mean brother Buzz, from the movie “Home Alone,” which I loved as a kid. I tweeted this out at the time. The next day, after I’ve arrived in Austin, a girl at the convention center hands me a promo for a movie called “The 2 Bobs.”

I look at it and notice that this was the guy on my flight. And then the girl who hands it to me says that he was in “Home Alone.” So, it was the guy. His name is Devin Ratray and he was in town doing promo for the film.

On the flight from Charlotte to Austin, I sat next to Scott Brewster, the Director of Online Learning for The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and we got to know each other a bit, for the duration of the flight.

I got in town at around 5 PM and it took me an hour and a half or so to get to the hotel and get checked in and settled. After considering various dinner options, I saw a tweet by Paul Boag of Boagworld. I had hoped to meet up with him at some point, but he said he was having an informal dinner and I made my way over to his hotel lobby to meet up.

But, first, I went to the Austin Convention Center to pick up my badge for the conference. The line for the general attendee pickup was very, very long. About three quarters of the first floor – four people deep. But, the panelist registration had all of two people in line when I got there. Yes! So, I was able to pick my badge up very quickly, but not before chatting with Grant Robertson of Download Squad and meeting Victor Agreda of Weblogs, Inc.

When I made it to Paul’s hotel, I realized that I had only a hazy idea of what he looked like (basically, my best memory of his Twitter avatar, with him looking in a downward direction). But, I spotted him rather easily and joined him and a group that included Niqui Merret, Marcus Lillington, Phill Tran and John Morton. I actually ended out hanging out with Phill at various points of the conference, as well. All cool people. After dinner, they headed to Buffalo Billiards… I headed to bed.

There are plenty of ways to promote a community. After all, a community is a website, so most of the ways that you would promote any type of website will also apply to forums and communities. However, there is one simple promotional ideal that is probably one of the most important ones, as well.

That is: activity breeds activity. With online communities, and especially with a site where forums are the main draw, activity can dictate a lot. When people visit your forums, they want to see posts – they want to see activity. They want to have something to jump into. When they see activity, it encourages them to join in and participate. When they don’t see anything happening, they are much less likely to become a member of your forums.

This may not seem like a promotional thought. Most would associate “promotion” with things like advertisements and word of mouth. But, the activity on your community directly impacts the value you receive from any other marketing endeavor that you undertake. For example, if you spend money on an ad campaign. You don’t want to send people to a dead site because they’ll be more likely to leave and you’ll be more likely to have wasted your money. You want to send them to a site that already has something going on, that has some kind of appeal.

So, if you are looking to bring people to your community, you don’t want to forget the first step, which is to actually create some activity yourself. Whether it’s just you starting topics or discussions or you assemble a group of friends to help you do so, ensuring that your community has something going on, on a daily basis, allows you to more easily engage and retain new members. In three words: activity breeds activity.