Tech4Good is a meetup group that connects people from all types of industries. Whether you are a non-profit organization, a funder, a programmer, an individual with a great idea, or a social changemaker, this meetup group will welcome you.
As most good meetups do, members are encouraged to share, learn and collaborate.
This month’s speaker, Justin Isaf, briefed folks about the benefits of managing communities. Justin currently manages 4 million comments a month for the Huffington Post Media Group, and has eight years of experience building highly leveraged online communities.
He covered topics like :
– how to spot the trolls who spam communities
– the importance of reaching critical mass of contributors and commenters
– how to get people talking to each other
– and…a URL to download an e-book version of Randy Farmer’s Building Web Reputation Systems.
Justin also offered three tactical approaches to leveraging communities (Twitter, Forums, and Blogs) while giving insight into their strengths and weaknesses. Twitter, for example, can be used to build conversations between followers, but those kinds of communities will never grow as large as the more traditional Forums. Blogs, on the other hand, give Community Managers more control over their communities than the other two approaches. Justin also discussed the Pros and Cons of being a community manager. “You need to have thick skin to do this work,” he stated after describing an experience where one of his former community leaders started spreading rumors about him on the web.