Sometimes in my life, worlds collide. And sometimes in my life, that is a good thing. Because it shows that despite my disparate industry backgrounds (finance, non-profit, travel and HR/Recruiting) what I have been doing all along is marketing, community building and communications. Yesterday, something came to my attention that illustrates this beautifully and brings up a whole slew of new questions. You can read the full post here but the nutshelled version is:

-Hosted weekly twitter chats by a for-profit entity that by all accounts, everyone loved

-After posting a disclaimer that any tweets/photos might be used without compensation on their website (not where the chats took place, no sign-in of any kind was required)

-The organizers of said chats put together an e-book of the chats and charged for it

- Organizers claimed that they “did not receive negative feedback of any kind” when they notified folks that they were to be in the book

- Of those that were allegedly notified of their inclusion in the already created e-book, most did not remember and few recall knowing that the book was for-profit

Now should you have time to read the comments, you can see that many of the people involved (part of a larger community wherein many of those affected are not only twitter account holders but paid writers, bloggers and/or photographers) fall into the following camps (more or less):

- Not necessarily offended by the for-profit idea but intend to clarify what intellectual rights they retain when they post on social media, regardless of length. (concerned)

- Not okay with ANY of their material being used without permission, particularly in a format that provides no “internet currency” (linkbacks, atribution, new followers etc). (upset)

- Okay with the book inclusion because of a “pattern of behavior” that included inclusion in electronic means and because of the “sense of community” that the organization had previously built. (don’t care)

Watching this unfold, I was PRAYING for the company involved to do the right thing. There is a ton of goodwill for organizations building community and grappling with “the new rules”. When I saw that the author of the post graciously included their “official” statement in her post, I thought that was even more reason for them to act reasonably. Why? Because I know what they’re going through.

I’ve built a couple of pretty incredible communities over the years and very few people understand JUST how hard it IS and just how hard it WAS before FB Connect, Twitter Chats and the like. It takes a lot of time, is a labor of love for the most part, and people jump in and out as they wish and question many of the decisions you agonize over before the official statement is even done being read. It’s not easy and it takes time and loads of work. Work I love but work nonetheless. And after a while, you (or your bosses) start to feeling like that work should be compensated somehow.

So begins the natural transition to “monetizing a community”. It feels dirty to say doesn’t it? But you have to at some point, or else it dies or you burn out or it drags down from the original product or service, and that sucks. If you’re a good community manager AND a good marketer, there’s a constant tightrope over which you walk every day, trying to ensure that your ideas are pure, your community members are happy and sponsors are getting what they paid for (which means you get to prove the fun slippery ROI of social media for not only your boss but every client you have EVER).

I’ve made mistakes. I remember when we shifted from a universally hated platform that had no flow or attractive qualities to a beautifully designed, sleeker design on a different platform. Everyone HATED it. And they told us so. Instead of changing it back and finding other ways to showcase our design skills, we held on for six months as our traffic decreased and the complaints rolled in. We did switch back to the old format eventually, with some important lessons learned, not the least of which is that crowsourcing is important, but painful. This was just one of many mistakes I’ve made. (Should be noted that I have also had a lot of successes

So I can understand why the people behind the e-book idea in the study above reacted the way they did (described as petulant). Their response was (maybe) reasonable but definitely made them look

-guilty

-unconcerned with their community members feelings

-motivated by greed

-evasive

-angry

It’s hard to create something everyone loves, try to monetize it successfully and then make a big fat public mistake. The cooksource debacle was a different story with a far worse outcome but shows the importance of:

the community knowing when and where to draw the line about their content

the offending organizer knowing when to just say I’m sorry. I messed up. I didn’t know it would affect US this way.

Yes, US. Because what many community organizers forget is that a community is nothing without the people IN it. Break that trust and you’re screwed, which is why the apology part is so important. And when you mess up the apology, you get this.

A journalism major, an ethics major and a PR major walk into a bar….