Summary: The Community Evangelism paradigm — 3 other posts that talk about it; Web Worker Daily, Jeremiah Owyang, and Isabel Wang

Communities can be colorful and noisy; moderators can help

I was pretty stoked that Web Worker Daily (a part of the Giga Om Network, one of my favorite reads on productivity and a perennial Top WordPress blog) bookmarked my earlier post on Community Evangelism on their Weekend Reader column. As you probably know, my post was viewed through the prism of Seth Godin’s writing; he calls it Online Community Organizer.

The job of the future, community evangelism — Call it Online Community Organizer, Online Community Manager, or Community Evangelist, lots of people are doing it. And talking about it. [Marketing Nirvana]

Through Anne’s post I stumbled upon a couple of other community/evangelism posts that are worth sharing. I’ve also included another post on community by my friend Jeremiah, who continues to innovate at Podtech as Web Strategy Guru and shares his community management experience as well.

Below are the three posts that provide unique insight into community management attributes w/ great examples:

1. Susan Heid (Web Worker Daily) has written a post on the evolution of community management:

Many sites, especially those catering to niche audiences, use the skills of online community managers to nudge the conversation, seed chat forums with threads, recruit others to take a lead in various topics, and monitor the dialogue to follow site policies. Pay varies from highly compensated to totally voluntary.

Susan then gives us two examples of online community managers, Claudia Linh (Director of online programs for Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation) and Kanoe Namahoe (Namahoe acts as a moderator for Starbright World, a chat room for sick kids), which shows you that the one factor that brings all community managers together is a enthusiasm and passion.

Read the rest of the insightful post by Susan here (via Web Worker Daily)

2. Isabel Wang, “a marketing consultant who focuses on the web hosting industry” describes the four attributes of an evangelist’s job, in addition to the “art of listening”.

* Build online networks (irrespective of the platform)
* Participate in local developer groups
* Attend relevant conferences
* Track and monitor appropriate blogs (community blogs? more on this in an upcoming post)

Read Isabel’s complete post here (via Isabel Wang’s blog)

3. As Isabel mentions, attending and organizing events is a key attribute of an evangelist. LinkedIn, recently kicked off the summer series of Lunch 2.0 and had incredible success in that space. We’d had over 200 Bay Area professionals show up and we ended up receiving job applications from those who attended!

My friend Jeremiah from Podtech was the community manager over at Hitachi before he solidified his reputation as web strategist at Podtech. He has blogged about community concepts and was the host (while at Hitachi) of another blowout Lunch 2.0 and he draws on that experience, by defining both (i) things to remember and a (ii) checklist that would come in handy when you organize such community events.

Read Jeremiah’s entire list of to-do’s (via his Web Strategy blog)