Everyone has seen them. They invade your e-mails with useless information ranging from bogus vacations to prescriptions for pills that either don’t work or you don’t need. And in an online community, they’re worse, pitching their wares in public.
You know them as spammers, the scourge of the Internet. And historically, spammers and their non-human counterparts, spambots, have made life for community managers miserable.
Earlier this week, I had to ban a troll. I only consider it memorable because for the online communities I manage, trolls tend to be few and far between. However, if you happen to manage a community that is prone to these type of users, you may run into this issue much more often.
Trolling has been around as long as the Internet. They are, in their basic form, one of the most potentially disruptive and, as a consequence, damaging element to building and manageing your online community.
Like any other project, online communities must have one person who has the power to make sure everything runs smoothly. In this case, that job falls on the shoulders of the moderator.
Online communities have called this person by other names, such as administrator, director or other names users call them when they don’t get their way. But their functions are all the same: To keep the community functioning and a viable place for users.
As one of the countless job seekers out there, there may very well be many people who share the same name as you do. As a result, this may lead you into the false notion that somehow, you can do whatever you want online and nobody will notice.
Guess again. There are plenty of ways in which prospective employers can figure out that the person they are thinking about hiring may also be the same person who likes to cause trouble on the Internet.
When Your Fans Turn Against You
Social media tends to be the place of trial-and-error when it comes to marketing and brand management. But for some, it becomes an embarrassing lesson in what not to do.
Take the marketing and design staffing firm Aquent, for instance. Recently, on their Facebook page, they posted a note, telling all of theirs tans that, like Jerry McGuire, they were there to “Show them the money.”
Their fans, in turn, took issue with that statement, to the point where some of them posted comments about the lack of money, or even the common courtesy of a follow-up, for that matter, that Aquent had showed them in recent memory.
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