Tumblin' with CraftySpace

No online community is perfect – there will come a time (if it hasn’t happened already) when a member becomes abusive or confrontational. Dealing with these bad apples can be a challenge – they will often stir up emotions and lead to a huge spike in member engagement and discussion. However, it’s unlikely that this is the kind of activity you want to see in your online community.

Following up on my note to the Drupal4lib list, I propose that we have a library DrupalCamp. Presuming that this would be a one day event, I suggest Thursday, June 24th (ish) immediately proceeding ALA Annual in Washington, DC. Of course, it could be two days.

Formal or unconference?

If anyone is interested in getting involved or, preferably, taking charge of this, please step forward.

Remember that community building takes time. That being said, sometimes an online community just won’t get off the ground. If you are struggling to encourage activity or if you want to build more of a buzz around your site, sometimes closing it down is the best course of action.

Social Media Governance offers a database of Social Media Policies, a selection of corporate and government agency policies regulating their staff use of social networks, the internet in general, email, and more.  There are also policies meant for their website’s users, such as commenting policies. These literally run the entire spectrum from the overly-restrictive and horribly unrealistically impractical to the open and modern policies we’re used to seeing in libraries.

As Kathy says right in the introduction,  “The Accidental Library Marketer fills a need for library professionals and paraprofessionals who find themselves in an awkward position: they need to promote their libraries and services in the age of the internet, but they’ve never been taught how to do so effectively.”

Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization is ….  a practical, step-by-step guide that takes the mystery out of Drupal search engine optimization (SEO) by showing you the tricks of today’s top marketing pros to achieve top ranking in the search engines.

Libraries are not so unlike market giants Netflix, Amazon, and Pandora. That is, they all thrive when librarians succeed at helping users make the next choice. Despite our significantly different business models and missions, we share an interest in facilitating the search for information, including what to read, view, and listen to next. The desire to harness data, user-oriented data, is driving innovation by these companies and others, and librarians of all stripes can and should learn from them.

There are thousands of Apps in the Facebook App Directory that Nonprofit Admins could experiment with on your organization’s Facebook Page, but below I have highlighted my five favorite Apps to get you started.

A vital element of a successful online community is trust. Without it, your community won’t be as strong as it could be – trust brings people together; it encourages people to share information and the more they share, the more others will share. Strong bonds result in a strong community. In this article, I’ll outline some of the ways you can build and maintain trust in online communities.

Some web designers, especially those with a marketing or graphic design background, say they want to build an experience – but their designed experience, no matter who the website is for, tends to be designed like a movie or a rockstar’s website  – heavy on the Flash, on the intro page (complete with low-pitched ominous music), and it makes cute noises when you click on a link.

That’s great for a movie or a rockstar website. But most of us are building library, organization and company websites. What type of “experiences” should we be creating for those types of websites?