I’ve loved putting together a series on debunking community management as part of FreshNetwork’s commitment to promoting best practise and sharing knowledge. The hardest part, of course, was boiling such a huge subject down into just five blogs. And they ended up behemoths…. So to help any time-poor, interest-rich readers out there, here is a summary of the key points from the series: Introduction to community management. The what, who and why of community management. It’s a strange job to explain, and a challenge to do well. Respect your members. Retain good, safe boundaries and rules. MORE >>

Image by Crystl via Flickr. couple of weeks ago, we wrote about how to write your firm’s social media policy. How it was important, first and foremost, for firms to have a social media policy. And  that it is best to involve employees throughout the process of developing and implementing it. For any firm, a social media policy is sensible. Your employees are already all using social media , they are talking to each other on their, they  might say who they work for, they are giving advice to friends and maybe to customers. So writing a policy is just the first step. Or have many. MORE >>

Image by alistair_35 via Flickr. As an online community manager , you will have a ‘gut’ understanding of who makes up your community. Their rough interests, probably the gender split and a fairly good grasp of age. But this will largely be based on who is posting, what they’re posting and how often. The real shape of the community will be far more nuanced. The 90-9-1 rule. The 90-9-1 rule, or 90-9-1 principle, is a really handy way of remembering who does what on your community. In brief: 90% of community users are passive members. They ‘lurk’ and read, without contributing. MORE >>

Image by jurvetson via Flickr. Last year we highlighted a great presentation from Paul Isakson on the future of marketing and advertising , where his argument was that advertising was dead and the future was marketing. This week, Isakson updated this presentation and theory for 2009, with an equally good presentation on what’s next in marketing and advertising. In this he looks at the constantly evolving marketing world and the way that marketing and advertising is reacting to and evolving with this. For him: The future of marketing is not about doing and saying things to people. MORE >>

I’m at the Communities 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week. It’s such a beautiful and diverse city and sadly not enough time to explore (sigh). One of the hot topics raised at the ROI symposium was the thorny issue of getting internal buy in for your online community from across departments and management levels. At FreshNetworks a lot of the early work with our clients is around supporting the project sponsor to achieve this. Many social media projects start as skunkworks projects and sometimes this is the only way to gather the evidence that the demand and the benefits are there. MORE >>