Des Walsh dot Com Social media for global business

Promo alert. This post is about the new edition of a book I co-authored. And about gratitude.

With Thanksgiving a few days from now, I’m feeling very grateful about the release, over the weekend just past, of the second edition of LinkedIn for Recruiting, “the roadmap for recruiters using LInkedIn”.

I’m grateful especially to my co-author, recruiting industry legend Bill Vick and to the recruiting industry leaders who shared their experiences and ideas very generously in a ground-breaking series of interviews with Bill, interviews from which the book was drawn and the recordings of which are available to purchasers of the book.

I’m grateful to our publisher Mitchell Levy and everyone involved in the behind the scenes work, on design, editing, proofing and distribution, at Mitchell’s company, Quick2Publish.

Above all, I’m grateful to all those people who have bought the book and in the process have given us the confidence to undertake a complete revision and produce this second edition.

When Bill and I completed the book for its first edition, published in March 2006, although gratitude would have been an appropriate  emotion, my recollection is that I mainly felt relieved that it was done. It had not been an easy run.

There had been plenty of very late nights and plenty of revisions, to get the book as close as we could to just right.

I must say I was pretty sure we had done a good job when the pre-launch reviews started to come in. Then when I held a printed copy in my hands I experienced a bit more exhilaration, a feeling which was definitely enhanced when the book started selling.

We are now two and a half years down the track and the first edition has kept on selling, which gives me confidence that in its second edition it will continue to be seen as a valuable tool for recruiters.

Then there is the package of bonuses, still available with this second edition.

• Free $195 job posting on LinkedIn
• Free $200 software program, Content Manager from Broadlook Technologies
• Free one month membership at Hireability.com -  a $150 value
• A 20% discount on any eGrabber.com product -  potential $100 value
• Password controlled access to the mp3 interviews of those interviewed for the book and
  others.

You can find out more about/buy the book here.

Book cover via Amazon

I’ve been talking lately with a colleague about possibly setting up an online forum or community for a project we have in mind. So I had an immediately personal reason to be delighted to receive a few weeks ago a review copy of Patrick O’Keefe’s new book Managing Online Forums

Then, just over a week ago, I seized an opportunity while traveling to read it right through at one sitting.

That might not be how most people will use this book. My guess is that experienced community discussion board managers will skim the book to check out its scope, then focus on particular sections which address their immediate needs, and those just setting up a community will likely focus on the earlier chapters first and perhaps make use of the excellent templates provided for community discussion board owners.

A summary of this review is:

• the book incorporates a huge amount of information and speaks at every turn of the author’s practical experience, over many years, in setting up and managing online communities
• it should prove an invaluable resource for anyone who is considering setting up an online forum or already managing one or more
• there are templates included, for guidelines and contact, which can be used and adapted freely
• advice on community software is restricted to vBulletin and phpBB  but the principles and practices set out in the book can be applied more widely.

My frame of reference was as a participant in online forums for fifteen or more years, going back to the days when The WELL (which had started in the 1980s) was still pretty prominent and Compuserve Forums. I have also been and in some cases still am a member of various Listservs, Ryze groups, Ning groups, Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups, some of which have been run well to brilliantly, some of which have verged on or tipped over into anarchy. I am also founding moderator of the now 900 or so member forum, LinkedIn Bloggers.

My personal preference (bias if you will) is for groups to be well run and the discussion managed in a kind of “loose-tight” way that means you can spend your time online enjoyably and/or usefully and don’t have to put up with nonsense and spamming.

From reading Managing Online Forums, I get the sense that the author too has a low level of tollerance for nonsense or spamming.

Managing Online Forums has a very readable, conversational style, which I found congenial. It would perhaps have been easier for the author to write more of a “shopping list” of things to do and not do, but I for one would probably have found such an approach not only boring to read but less than convincing. With Managing Online Forums I felt I was in the presence of a master, who had not only “been there, done that” but had reflected long and deeply on what works and what doesn’t.

The sub-title promises that the book will provide Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards. I found that to be a somewhat over-ambitious claim - perhaps a bit of publisher hubris: the author himself makes it clear that some aspects won’t be covered, for example technical issues (p 2) -

For the most part, I try to steer clear of technical issues, such as your particular administration-control panel, code editing, and custom programming. That’s not what the book is for.”

Nor does the book have specific advice with regard to other popular platforms as Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups or MSN Groups  - as is acknowledged also on page 2. There are huge numbers of forums on these and other platforms and it is inevitable that people managing communities on them will be looking for guidance, the specifics of which they will not find here. To provide one small example, as co-moderator of a group on Yahoo! Groups and requiring a specific identification detail for new members, I and my fellow moderators have found interface for joining totally inadequate, with the result that we have to go to considerable effort to help people join. Information on this sort of dilemma is not to be found in Managing Online Forums.

Although, as mentioned above, the principles and practices in the book can be applied to these and other platforms.

Chris Brogan was not impressed with the organization of the book but while I might have used different chapter headings I found the organization fairly unexceptionable.

The chapters are:

• Laying the Groundwork
• Developing Your Community
• Developing Guidelines
• Promoting Your Community
• Managing Your Staff
• Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos
• Creating a Good Environment
• Keeping it Interesting
• Making Money

Then there are appendices:

• Online Resources
• Blank General Templates
• Glossary

Two chapters which I found particularly interesting, from a forum founder or moderator viewpoint, were those on guidelines (Chapter 3) and on “Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos” (Chapter 6). As an aside, from reading these chapters it does appear that Patrick O’Keefe as a forum manager has had more than his fair share of difficulty-creating people to deal with. In his own words (p 3),

Part of managing a community is dealing with spammers, idiots, and people who just can’t seem to follow your guidelines. Of course, it gets worse - there are people out there who will actually want to do harm to your community.

Complementing these chapters on guidelines and “dealing with chaos” is the set of general guideline and contact templates in Appendix B: Blank General Templates. I would love to have had these templates a few years ago when LinkedIn Bloggers was just getting going - and am looking now at what can be gleaned from them. Having guidelines in place and known to members makes it a much more straightforward task to deal with behavior that does not serve the community. I know it’s a bit of a cliched expression, but the fact is that this set of templates alone is worth the price of the book and more - much more.

Overall, it is evident that Patrick knows his stuff: he has been building online communities for years and it shows.  Anyone who wants to set up an online forum or already has one can learn from this book. Anyone who wants to know how to build a community online, can find plenty of guidance here. If you want to know how to deal effectively with troublemakers and wreckers, you may need some trial and error but there is a ton of practical advice here. If you want to know how to manage and lead staff (paid or volunteer), it’s in the book.

On a less positive but hopefully constructive note, it would have been beneficial to have some more rigorous copy-editing, to improve the flow of argument. I find it distressing to see a book as professionally produced in other respects, as this, let down by a lack of thoroughness in final copy editing. In one instance, I had to read a sentence two or three times before I understood the instruction being given. Elsewhere, there seemed to be a proliferation of unnecessary commas, which had the effect of breaking up the argument, or making the flow of thought more jerky than it needed to be. Hopefully the publishers will put some resources into some smoothing, when the time comes, as I am sure it will very soon, for a second printing or second edition.

My main takeaway from reading Managing Online Forums was not so much about the mechanics of setting up or managing a community, but more about personality traits and character-building. It was pretty clear to me that if you are going to be a successful forum manager/community builder for the long haul, you’ll need a blend of thick skin, sense of humor, respect for others, a sense of order and a determination to apply the rules firmly and fairly, without fear or favor. There is an excellent section on this, under the heading “What Skills and Characteristics Do You Need to Have?” at pages 14-16 in Chapter 1, Laying the Groundwork.

You can order your own copy of Managing Online Forums from Amazon at this link.

Photo credits

Managing Online Forums book photos - Des Walsh, Creative Commons

Photo of Patrick O’Keefe by Wendy Piersall via flickr - Creative Commons license

• 75% of adults use social networks – here’s how to tap into them -
  article summarises new Forrester report - interesting stats about high rate of usage of social networks by boomers and seniors
  (tags: Australia socialmedia marketing socialnetworks survey Forrester StevenNoble)

The Leader of the Federal Opposition in Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, has been on the social networking platform Twitter for about a month now, as far as I can see. That’s the real Malcolm Turnbull, who has to go by the Twitter handle of @TurnbullMalcolm on Twitter, because someone else had already taken the Twitter handle MalcolmTurnbull. Now the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has joined in, with the handle @KevinRuddPM on Twitter - yes there is a fake KevinRudd too.

I’m following both of the real ones and they have reciprocated.

At least I think they have reciprocated. It could well be that each of them has a staff member or three managing the process. Time, I believe, will tell.

My guess, from “twits” I’ve been reading and from my own perception, is that the real Malcolm Turnbull is dealing directly with his tweets and someone on the Prime Minister’s staff is dealing with his. I’m open to being corrected on either count.

But still, it’s kind of nice to dream that the Prime Minister of my country might just have taken a few seconds out of his busy day to connect with me directly.

G’day Des, as it were

But even if it is, as I suspect, a member of Malcolm Turnbull’s or the PM’s staff - or maybe even robots organised by those offices - messaging me via Twitter, I like the idea that people influential in the offices of both the chief minister in the land and the leader of the alternative government, maybe even the principal players themelves, believe this sort of social networking is sufficiently important for the business of government and the highest level of politics for the respective office-holders to be, in some fashion, participants.

Maybe not fully engaged players, but at least what you might call involved spectators of the passing parade.

I much prefer this to the alternative.

And who knows, perhaps I’m too sceptical. Maybe late tonight, wherever each of our protagonists is in this vast land (I think they are both in the country) they will be crouched over their laptops, eagerly checking on the latest tweets and firing off their own, personally crafted 140 character bon mots!

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, via the internets - via Twitter.

And I almost forgot. @BarackObama is following me on Twitter -  with only 132,006 others. And I don’t even have a vote there. But at least he got his own name.

Update: I had no sooner posted this than I noticed on Twitter a message that I had lost my new Twitter friend @KevinRuddPM. But not I alone - suddenly it appeared he was not following anyone.

I say “apparently”. There are a couple of people suggesting it’s a misunderstanding and a Twitter failure, not a deliberate “unfollow” by the PM.

I’m finding this whole story a fascinating case study on the challenges faced by politicians in the social networking space. They can’t, in my opinion, afford to stay aloof. But where is the manual for when they hop in and things don’t go perfectly? Whatever “perfectly” might mean.

• Net censorship plan backlash - BizTech - Technology - theage.com.au
  Australian Communications Minister Conroy's endeavours to censor the Internet skewered in Melbourne Age newspaper article
  (tags: netcensorship censorship Conroy Australiangovernment)