Planet Gold Coast

I’m so excited!

In March last year I asked whether Brisbane, an hour and a half drive north of where I live on Australi’s east coast, was ready for a Social Media Club.  .

Entering 2009 it is clear that Brisbane was ready: Social Media Club Brisbane has an event scheduled for next week (see below). But not just Brisbane.

Gold Coast, the region where I live, and the Australian National Capital city of Canberra are not just ready but launchingt their own Social Media Clubs.

My guess is that other Australian cities, including the major conurbations of Sydney and Melbourne, will join in sooner rather than later.

Social Media Club Canberra, with the leadership of social media expert Stephen Collins (@trib on Twitter), kicks off tomorrow morning, Friday Jan 16, with a breakfast at Cafe CREAM in Bunda St, Civic, 8 am to 10 am. I noticed at least a couple of Twitter-savvy politicians have been pinged on Twitter to come. On Friday, in Canberra? Well, you never know. You can join SMC Canberra at the Facebook site. And you can RSVP (please, so Steve and the cafe have an idea) at the event site also on FB.

Social Media Club Gold Coast has a committee let by Associate Professor Michael Rees - a social media enthusiast par excellence - from Bond University and we have our inaugural event at Bond on Thursday January 29, at 6 pm. We also have a Facebook site. If you would like to join and get all the info about events, use the contact form on this site.

The inaugural event for the year for Social Media Club Brisbane is next week, on Tuesday January 20, commencing at 5.30 pm. This will be at what looks to me from the website as being rather more stylish than your average pub, the Melbourne Hotel in West End, Brisbane.  Co-hosting this event with SMC Brisbane, and generously covering venue costs and providing refreshments, is the blogger advertising network Nuffnang, established recently in Australia. Nuffnang Co-Founder, Cheo Ming Shen is flying in from Singapore that afternoon and will be at the function, explaining for 15 minutes or so how interested bloggers might be able to benefit from being part of the Nuffnang network. Should be great fun as well as informative.  RSVP (please) at the Facebook site for this event.

So much for the idea of us all lazing around on the beach in mid-summer. It’s not even Australia Day yet and it looks as if Social Media Club in Australia is Going Off!

By the way, you don’t have to be in a city to have or be part of a Social Media Club. Whether you are in Sydney or the Back of Bourke, and want to know more, please contact me via the contact page, or go to the top via the main Social Media Club site.

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• Filtering in Oz: Australia's Foray into Internet Censorship - Brooklyn Law School, Legal Studies Paper No 125 Critique of Australian Government's plans for Internet censorship (tags: Internetcensorship Australia Conroy)

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I confess to having only just now really focused on the extraordinary development, in just under twelve months, of the Coaching Commons site. The Coaching Commons describes itself as “a non-partisan ‘big tent’ under which coaches can freely create the future together in a non-commercial setting on the world-wide-web”.

Writing on the site, philanthropist Ruth Ann Harnisch says the cornerstone of her philosophy of philanthropy - and by extension her aim in her amazingly generous work of supporting coaching and specifically the Coaching Commons - is “unleashing untapped capacity”.

Reading the various contributions on the site you cannot avoid seeing that there are big dreams at work here, dreams about the potential of coaching to make a substantial positive difference to our world.

It would have been very helpful to me, back when I was first encouraged by a friend to consider coaching as a profession, to have a site like this. There is plenty of information about coaching. More important, in my opinion, there is plenty of activity: people contributing, news items about coaching, an events calendar, blog posts encouraging and attracting questions and discussion.

And for those who, like me, like to know the antecedents, the history of things, there is a virtual museum of coaching and a coaching hall of fame.

I found touring the site a very informative and stimulating experience, although I could not figure out whether there was a formal online “Coaching Commons” community I could join, or whether the idea is just for the site to be a place for people to visit and hang out.

I’ve signed up for the newsletter, so I am assuming more will be revealed as time goes by.

In the meantime, for anyone involved, interested in or just curious about coaching, this is a site to visit and bookmark.

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I’ve been a fan of Alltop - “We’ve got all the top stories covered all the time” - from early on and I admit that having this site listed on the social media page there has helped. Alltop describes itself as an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. It’s an amazing resource for finding blogs from a great range of topics.

I had an example just today of how helpful Alltop can be in that regard.

I was responding to a friend who is thinking of setting up a travel blog. I wanted to send her some examples of quality travel blogs and - this is not an area of specialization for me - the only one I could think of, off the top of my head, was Sheila Scarborough’s excellent Family Travel Logue.

Then the penny dropped. Alltop, of course! Assuming they had a travel section, which I quickly discovered that indeed they did. I counted 56 sites listed on the Alltop travel page. Authors included kitchen expose guy Anthony Bourdain who writes about travel and food, Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler, the FareCompare guy Rick Seaney, the dynamic Travelling Mamas and the inimitable Sheila Scarborough as previously mentioned.

Back in November last year there were, according to Alltop co-founder Guy Kawasaki, some 350 topics on the site overall. There are no doubt plenty more now. And there is an email update system so that fans like me or the just plain interested can receive direct notification of new topics when they are launched.

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My friend and colleague Lonnie B. Hodge, who is based in Guangzhou, China, doesn’t just “think outside the square” - he left the square thinkers behind long ago. And he is always coming up with bright ideas and often I find in the morning that he has implemented them overnight. I try to keep up, but I don’t think he sleeps.

Lonnie’s latest idea - or rather, the latest one I know of - is the Social Media Consultants site.

This has been launched to provide a space for social media consultants and PR 2.0 specialists to be more easily found by potential clients and business collaborators, with specific attention to being findable by geographic location and specialization. We also see it as a virtual coffee shop for discussion - via blog posts and comments right now - of matters of common interest.

We’ve started out with a WordPress site, because that was relatively easy to get up and running without a whole lot of configuring and with minimum palaver.

We’ve issued general invitations via Twitter and plan to get the word out as widely as we can. We’re encouraging those responding positively to post about who they are and what they do and to use social media tools, including audio and video, in the process, and to list and link to their Twitter, LinkedIn and other links.

Basic requirements to be able to participate are as simple as we could make them:

1. You should have an active blog that you update regularly (we too are guilty of not nearly enough updates, but we’d like you to have a presence on the net)
2. You must have worked in or been active in Social Media or PR 2.0 for at least a year.

Have we worked out all the rules of engagement, moderation, etc? Absolutely not. We are truly making it up as we go along and we know that will bother some and please others.

One thing we do know is that we want it to be truly international. Which means that, among other things, language is going to become an issue at some point.

Along with all the other issues. In the meantime, we are having fun.

And there is no fee - and never will be - for consultants and specialists to list themselves on the site.

If you want to be part of that and meet those couple of criteria above, please contact me via the Contact page here or tweet me on Twitter - @deswalsh - or Lonnie @lonniehodge.

And note that if you are a startup or the provider of an established social media platform you are welcome also to contact us about listing some informative information (as distinct from a pitch).

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• Beach Notes: flipflop - Liz Strauss at Successful Blog - Thinking, writing, business ideas . . . You’re only a stranger once. Guest post - my meditation on an abandoned pair of flip-flops: finding the business balance between a necessary flexibility and the risk of flip-flopping (tags: business flexibility adaptiveness)

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With economies everywhere under challenge, businesses of all kinds are also under challenge to refine and improve what they do and how they do it. Professional coaching businesses are no exception.

In fact, there is a good chance that some coaching practices will be suffering a “knock on” effect and seeing their business flow slowing, or even drying up completely.

In a timely move, Coachville, the global learning community and resource center for coaches, has established the Business Academy for Professional Coaches, dedicated to providing a perfect environment for members to thrive in the world as professional coaches, with profitable businesses.

Coachville describes the Academy also as “a Revolutionary Way to Learn, Play and Win the Game of Business.”

Being a coach, whether in a role of helping others realize their personal potential, grow their businesses, build great relationships or win games and championships, can be immensely rewarding emotionally, a very personally fulfilling way of life.

But if you haven’t got your business model right and functioning effectively, you won’t be able to rely for long on your coaching to help pay your bills and put food on the table.

Which kind of defeats the purpose.

One of the reasons I was attracted to the idea of joining Coachville and subsequently its Graduate School of Coaching, now part of the Center for Coaching Mastery, was that it was clearly a fundamental part of the organization’s mission to give coaches the tools and training to build viable, flourishing businesses.

It still is, as exemplified in the new Business Academy.

On Monday, December 22 at 12 noon Eastern time (USA) and then again, on the same date, at 7 pm ET, Coachville CEO Dave Buck will be hosting a teleclass call, Win The Business Game, where there will be an exploration of how to thrive in business by playing a game - this is a specialty of Dave’s. The only pre-requisite to being on the call is to be a member of Coachville - for which basic membership is free: details of Coachville membership and registration here. By the way, there is no trick in the free membership. It was how I and many others started with Coachville and I was never pestered to upgrade - that was a choice I made in due course (and have never regretted).

Being on the call with Dave will provide an opportunity to get a good sense of  what it might be to participate in the Academy’s courses.  Level 1, for coaches earning $0 to $4,000 a month, will be launched in January 2009 and there is a great discount available until just before midnight on Monday December 22.  Level 1 has two 12 week programs:

• Getting to YES! The ultimate new client enrollment method for coaches, and
• Be Known as THE Coach - Branding and visibility strategies for the new coach

Level 2 programs, for coaches earning from $4,000 to $8,334 a month, will be launched in September 2009.

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“The Sea Rises” via Wikipedia

Is right now, with the global economy a daily story of disaster and fear, a good time for a startup company?

My hunch is that, if I asked around, the more common response would be that it is a bad time. Even a very bad time.

Companies and individuals are tightening their belts, people are being laid off, credit is tight. Plenty of reasons to sit tight and not try to launch something new.

My friend and unquenchable entrepreneur Mick Liubinskas clearly thinks that, for the web industry specifically, this is not just an ok time to start a new business but actually “the right time”, as he explains in the current issue of Anthill magazine. For one thing, he says, it’s easier to hire the stars you want on your team. And the money? There is money around, he says, even now:

Yes, there’s less silly money, less private equity, less from family, friends and fools, but it’s there. Maybe it will take longer, maybe you’ll have to work harder, maybe you’ll get a bit less – but it’s there.

On the same topic, Zoli Erdos in So Is It a Good Time or a Bad Time to Found a Startup After All? links to posts arguing against and for this being a good time for a startup and gives his own perspective.

One aspect of all this that struck me on reading these posts was that they are set in the Australian context (Liubinskas) or the US one (Erdos and others quoted by him). It would be interesting to know how this issue would be looked at - or whether it would be looked at - in, say, China, where the economy has certainly slowed but is still growing.

If Western entrepreneurs take time out now, will they come back in several months (years?) time when the economy will hopefully have become more stable and back into growth mode and find someone from China, for instance, has eaten their lunch?

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Life moves so fast in the online, social media world that three and a half years, which is how long the LinkedIn Bloggers group has been going, seems a very long time indeed. To put that in perspective and according to the fascinating social media timeline produced by Danah M. Boyd and Nicole Ellison, it’s about  contemporaneous with YouTube, about one and a half years longer than the time since Twitter started and about the same length of time since Facebook became available to all. (HT Tran Tuan Tài for link to Boyd & Ellison social media timeline.)

Given the millions of people on LinkedIn (factoid: at the third level of my LinkedIn connections I am currently connected to 8,774,400 other members and I am by no means a mega-connector) and the untold thousands (hundreds of thousands? millions?) of them who are bloggers, the growth of our group to 896 over those three and a half years of dramatic development and change in the social media/social networking sphere is modest indeed.

Not that growth for its own sake has been a priority or is likely at any stage to be a priority.

But we have decided to give the bus a nudge along on the road to sharing what we have with more people who are interested in the kind of conversations we have, broadly about the intersection of social media, especially but not exclusively blogging, with  social networking and specifically with the LinkedIn platform.

In other words, we are working on a strategy for the group to become better known and to continue to grow. We haver been rather quiet, having our chats. We’ll still be having our chats but we are also beating the drum to let the world  - especially via the search engines - know we are here.

Right now, if you Google LinkedIn Bloggers you will get at best a mixed and tangential message about the group - at best. That is about to change. With the strategies we are working on, it will soon be much easier for people wanting the sort of group we have, the sort of conversations we have, to find us.

I’ve posted about this, with more background on LinkedIn Bloggers, at my Thinking Home Business blog.

Thing is, if you are already in LinkedIn Bloggers, I hope you will like the idea of augmenting this little bit of drum-beating with some word of mouth/word of blog of your own.

And if you are one of those who has yet to discover the joys of being a member of LinkedIn Bloggers, please come and check us out. It’s a .net url. http://www.linkedinbloggers.net If you would like to join, please read the instructions carefully, especially about providing your LinkedIn profile link (it’s explained there).

Picture of drummer boy by notfilc, via flickr: Creative Commons

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lurk vb. (intr.) 1. to move stealthily or be concealed, esp. for evil purposes. 2. to be present in an unobtrusive way; go unnoticed.   Collins English Dictionary (Australian Edition - 3rd edition 1991)

This post is about participation in online groups.

More specifically, it is about why we should be more polite in speaking about those people often referred to as “lurkers”, i.e. people who join groups but don’t start or join in the online conversations.

The post was prompted by a discussion thread started by my colleague and co-moderator, Dennis McDonald, on the LinkedIn Bloggers group. After posting my thoughts on the subject, I was encouraged by group member Miki Saxon to re-post them via this blog.

The discussion point was a reference to what Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen had written a couple of years ago about a phenomenon he dubbed “participation inequality“.

Nielsen cited research, which is pretty well known and which I have used on occasion, to the effect that, across a variety of large scale, multi-user groups and social networks, only 9% participate actively from time to time, by way of starting or joining in discussions, posting information and so on. And an even smaller group, 1%, participate a lot. For the remaining 90% “who read or observe, but don’t contribute”, Nielsen employs the commonly used online term “lurkers”. He provides a formula, the “90-9-1″ rule, which I for one have quoted several times in different contexts:

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute)
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

Nielsen goes on to make some very useful suggestions about how to increase active participation rates, explaining on the way why that is a useful objective.

But reading what he had to say I realized that, as the founding moderator of a group of now over 980 members, I had suddenly become uncomfortable with the suggestion, implicit in the term “lurkers”, that some 885 of the members should be seen as “non-contributing“.

At one level, that is probably unexceptionable. At another, I believe it could be seen as less than respectful of people who join groups, such as LinkedIn Bloggers, where there is no obligation to post, and who choose to read, learn, be amused, be indignant perhaps, and still choose not to post.

It’s perhaps a challenging thought for those of us who like to jump in and start discussions or comment on the views expressed by others, but some people evidently don’t feel a need to do that.

And those of us who participate actively are surely not wanting to lose our reading audiences! Show me a story teller, a presenter, a writer, an active participant in any online group who doesn’t like to have an audience and the bigger the better.

So my contention regarding the notional 90% is that their not participating actively does not warrant their being spoken/written of disrespectfully. Because let’s face it, in the world of online communities the term “lurker” is not only not complimentary, it is pejorative - as illustrated for example in the standard “equation” “lurker”=”non-contributor”.

Whereas I believe that people “contribute” by the simple fact of being members, with varying degrees of interest in the conversations going on. And further, for all I know, there may be a number of conversations that have been conducted/ are being conducted offline, between people who first got to know about one another on one or more of the groups to which I belong. Maybe even done business together. That, for me, contributes to the health and growth of the community, even if the rest of the group don’t hear about it and even if some of the people concerned don’t post or don’t post much.

But what really hit me was realizing that television stations don’t call the people who watch “lurkers”. Radio station announcers don’t say “Good Morning, Lurkers!”

So why, I asked myself, do we use this quite pejorative term in online groups? Do we want people who don’t post to either post or go away? Surely not.

Sophisticated research (irony flag) seemed called for, viz. in Google, type . Result:

The term (”lurker”) dates back to the mid-1980s. Because BBSs were often accessed by a single phone line (frequently in someone’s home), there was an expectation that all who used a bulletin board would contribute to its content by uploading files and posting comments. Lurkers were viewed negatively, and might be barred from access by the sysop, if they did not contribute anything but kept the phone line tied up for extended periods.

So there was a good enough reason then to use a less than complimentary term. But no longer.

It may be unrealistic to expect people to stop using the term “lurker”. I think it’s too embedded in the language of the online world.

But we could adjust what we mean by and even change the way we explain the concept of “lurker”.

Seattle-based Ryan Turner does just that in The Lurker Myth: Measuring the Value of Passive Participation in Community. As the title of his post suggests, he changes the language about “lurkers” from “non-contribution” to “passive participation“.

And he observes pithily:

Active participation creates potential value, and passive participation realizes that value. Most people do both.

He also has some great diagrams to illustrate the point.

On LinkedIn Bloggers we’ve always encouraged new members to introduce themselves, tell us a bit about themselves, but it has never been a group where there was any pressure to contribute by posting anything beyond that first “Hello, I’m …”. Certainly there is no rule that people have to post. There is no question in my mind that the “passive participant” members add value to the group.

And - shameless plug time - the door at LinkedIn Bloggers is always open for new members - passive participants included! (Note, the mechanics of signing up can be challenging - contact me if you have a problem).

What’s your view? Are you comfortable with the idea that some people are actually participating, even if they are not being “vocal” in the conversation?

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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.

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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

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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.

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• 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)

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Along with no doubt many, many others, I am watching with fascination Shel Israel’s unfolding adventures in the Middle Kingdom.

For those who just came in, Shel, who has an incomparable overview of social media internationally and its impact on business and culture, is currently visiting China for the first time. He is part of the China 2.0 tour and also keynoting at the Chinese Blogger Conference 2008 (Cnbloggercon ‘08) this coming weekend, November 15-16.

Having visited Beijing myself for the first time in November last year, I’m taking particular interest, given that Shel is also doing the first impression exercise.

On what is obviously an activity-packed tour, he is doing his best to get some blog posts out and they make great reading.

As well as doing some regulation tourist activities such as climbing up to a section of the Great Wall, he is also gleaning information and insights into the China blogosphere and social media space and sharing those in his blog and on Twitter.

I must admit I was quite dazzled last year by some of the numbers being thrown around, such as the number of Chinese bloggers and the number of people using bulletin boards. Being in business as a social media strategist, I naturally found myself trying to translate those numbers in terms of what they might mean for, say, social media consulting or other marketing opportunities.

I then started to listen more attentively and ask some questions. Which meant that I started to understand that such estimates could vary quite dramatically and should in any case be looked at carefully in terms of what the numbers might mean, for example how the gross number of bloggers might translate into estimating numbers of business bloggers.

From the post I read today, it looks as if Shel is having some not dissimilar experiences:

I learned that the 100-million bloggers estimate I was planning to use at my CNBloggercon talk would have drawn laughter. The real number is closer to 25 million. Bulletin Board Messages remain much more popular, with nearly 70 million people enjoying anonymity as they exchange information and opinion. Most blogs are very social. They are rarely political and almost never business related.

That bore out what I had learned last year and in subsequent observation from afar. Clearly the idea of a “business blog” has some way to go before it is as pervasive of the Chinese blogosphere as it is in, say, the USA.

Of course, the numbers in China are still huge - and there is amazing scope for growth and for new and expanding market opportunities.

I’m looking forward to more of Shel’s posts on his journeys in the Middle Kingdom. Our Marco Polo of social media.

As well as subscribing to Shel’s Global Neighbourhoods, you can keep up with his tour and impressions on a more “as it happens” basis” via Twitter.

Photo credits: Kaiser Kuo & Shel Israel - shelisrael1 via flickr - CC; Marco Polo Traveling - Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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