thought this was a great collection of social media principles to live buy when it comes to engaging your community and motivating them to work with your brand to fulfill a common purpose. Be the celebrant, not celebrity, of your community. Become a community architect. If you like to understand how to integrate these myriad principles into a step-by-step plan that allows you to inspire your customer community to build your business with you, click here. Advertising Brands Consumers Purpose Social media We First purposeInfographic by Fast Company. MORE >>

The following post is part of the  Mindjumpers Network  series and written by our Community Manager, Sara Hansson. Mindjumpers Network is a global network of local country community managers enabling international companies to execute and maintain brand communities in a structured, quality assured and cost effective way across markets with the aim of creating effect and value. According to  the Facebook IQ 2012 report , 41% of international brands maintain at least one local country page. The Performance of 100 Icon Brands on Facebook [report]. MORE >>

Many community manager positions advertised online ask for someone to help supervise and develop a newly launched community. In my opinion this is far too late to look at employing a community manager. They should be involved from an early point in the development cycle, ideally when plans for the community are still being developed. There are a number of reasons why ensuring the online community manager is onboard from this early planning phase: They can get to know the platform the community is built on. Image by Compound Eye via Flickr. MORE >>

For their marketers, that translates to creative briefs like, “How can you get me to a million Facebook fans fast ?’ This inevitably begs the question: “What good are a million Facebook fans if they are not engaged and won’t do anything for the brand?’ That means a brand must show genuine interest in their community  as Zappos , Ford , Dell , Nike , Pepsi , Old Spice and Starbucks have done. The reason a brand builds a social community is to provide a fair exchange of value. Once they get that, they’ll build a community for you. MORE >>

Philip is Community Manager at Zmags. Previously, he was community manager of  FIFA UK at Electronic Arts and Digital Producer at The Walt Disney Company. G: How did you build your experience as community manager/strategist? Special interest fan sites and smaller communities with a core following were the order of the day for several years. did however take a break to focus on the strategy side rather than the management for a 2 year period and spent that time as a consultant / strategist before diving back in to community management. G: Does the size matter? MORE >>