How can mentoring help online communities?

The job of the community manager is not an easy one. He or she has to juggle competing internal cultures of IT, senior management, and the community itself in order to deliver results. Results in terms of engaged, active discussions as opposed to corporate generated content which is typical of traditional websites.

But that said what positive tools can help you build a sustainable community and support your community manager? At SiftGroups we recognise how difficult this balancing act is. I’ve written about helping your community manager avoid burnout in the context of trying to run a customer-facing service without the skills and experience to meet those demands. Read more at the SiftGroups blog.

One world = real world + virtual world

Howard Rheingold of the ‘Travelling Geeks’ in London this week speaks with Micha Benoliel about the merger of the online and the offline world. He makes a distinction between the virtual world and the physical world. Hope to have dinner with Howard on Thursday, along with having my first tele-conference with the good people at global financial regulation website FinReg21 earlier in the day!

Howard Rheingold – Digitrad – Traveling Geeks from Micha Benoliel on Vimeo.