community

Patreon Pick: Dealing with Haters

It’s a sad truth that if you’re conducting business online, you will run into… let’s just say disagreeable sorts. Part of managing an online community is learning how to deal with negativity. In short, learning how to deal with haters. Because as we all know, haters ARE gonna hate. Being unprepared for the inevitability is a fast track to failure.

So how do you deal with all that hate? Check out this set of 5 tips to get you started!

Note: For the purposes of this article I’m talking about  your average grumpy community member, not aggressive, personalized attacks. If you’re dealing with personal attacks, please seek additional assistance!

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book review, community

Book Review: The Art of Asking

I have never been a big fan of the Dresden Dolls. I don’t actively dislike them, but outside of their aesthetic they’ve never really done much for me. As a result, prior to reading this book my knowledge of Amanda Palmer was hand-wavvy at best. I knew of her TED talk, and witnessed some of the backlash against her Kickstarter, but outside of that I was pretty new to the Amanda Palmer experience. So when I started hearing such great things about her book, I decided to give it a go.

TLDR; It’s an entertaining, quick read filled with some fun (and less-than-fun) personal experiences & the lessons learned therein. Highly recommended for independent artists, or for those getting started with community management.

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best practice, community

The 3 Questions to Ask When Creating Content

When you’re creating content, it’s really easy to get caught up in the ‘I need to create a TON of this’ aspect of producing frequent updates. While frequency is a great motivator, it’s important to not lose sight of why you’re producing content, and the impact it will have on your intended audience. If you follow the old adage of ‘time is money’, then why would you spend time on content that’s going to have little to no impact on your business objectives? Creating content for the sake of creating content can be a fun exercise, but if you’re looking to fulfill a business need a bit of forethought can make a substantial difference.

For every piece of content you’re creating, I’ve found that it’s useful to keep the following 3 questions in mind:

When creating content

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community, gamedev, templates

Reporting Issues

As a follow-up from my Status Report Templates post, I thought it’d be a good idea to cover reporting individual issues into your team. While a weekly or monthly summary is great for highlighting the more general issues, sometimes you need to quickly communicate issues back into the team individually, or with more direct information. These are often communicated via a quick email, and generally contain either a single (high or critical severity issue), or a collection of 3-5 of the most relevant individual issues.

Audience: Community Managers, Social Media Managers
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