I’ve been meaning to blog for a while now about 2 excellent books I’ve read this year about communities online, both of which are pretty much essential reading for anyone involved in community management.

The first is Andrew Lih’s book The Wikipedia Revolution. Lih is for me the world’s leading academic on Wikipedia, not least because he’s been a participant in Wikipedia himself and has a great understanding of how the community works from the inside.

The book charts how the community has evolved from one that was maintained by personal connections to a whole stratified society of rules, roles, technologies and norms.

Particularly key are the sections on the development of the ‘Spanish Fork‘ (the mere mention of a commercial version of Wikipedia led to members of their Spanish site effectively leaving in protest and setting up their own encyclopedia) and Chapter 5: The Piranha Effect, which I gave to my MA Online Journalism students as one of their first readings.

The book also deals with trolls, vandalism (the Siegenthaler incident) and censorship.

The second great book is from experienced community manager Angela Connor: 18 Rules of Community Engagement (also available as an e-book). This is a great complement to Lih’s as this comes from a very different, practical, angle drawing not just on her own knowledge but those of readers of her blog. In fact, it’s a very bloggy book generally.

Connor emphasises the need to invest lots of time in any community developing relationships, making connections and fostering relationships. She looks at the importance of content (of the right type) and questions, of rules and culture, egos and compliments, influence and complaints.

It’s a breezy book that doesn’t impose one solution on every problem but frequently returns to the fact that every community is different, and so even common problems like trolls and spamming will have different solutions. That said, there are plenty of experiences offered.

These are probably the best 2 books I’ve read on online communities – but if you’ve read something good in the area, please let me know.

Don’t worry, I’ll get over this Twitter thing very soon, but for now I want to address all of the ill informed coverage that stifles use of Twitter because it can’t see beyond a) celebrities using it and b) the Facebook-style status update thing.

If you’re struggling to think of what to talk about on Twitter, here are some suggestions:

1. What you are doing right now – clearly the most obvious one, and the easiest one, but also the least interesting. Let’s move on…
2. What you will be doing later - more useful, as people may be interested in the results, or want to meet where you’re going.
3. A useful link you’ve found – easy and useful. If others find it useful they might pass it on, introducing you to more followers. Which brings us on to…
4. Retweet something interesting someone else has tweeted – again, pretty easy – and in fact many Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl allow you to retweet with one click. The more people you follow, by the way, the more likely you are to come across something useful.
5. Something you’ve done – many people use Twitter as a way to alert people to their latest blog post. You can even automate this with an RSS-to-Twitter service like Twitterfeed or Pingvine.
6. Something you’ve seen – upload your pictures to Flickr and post a link, or use a service like Twitpic which will do it for you. If you have Shozu on your phone that will allow you to upload images directly from it to Twitpic.
7. A message to someone else on Twitter – Twitter is a social medium, not a broadcast one, so conversation is part of the deal. To talk to someone just put @ in front of their name (e.g. @paulbradshaw) and they will be able to see it when they click on @replies on the right column of Twitter (if they use a client like Tweetdeck they will get an audio alert).
8. A quote - by someone else, or one of your own
9. A question - this is where it gets really useful. Twitter allows you to put a question out to everyone who follows you – meaning access to a wealth of experience and knowledge. You may get the right answer – you may get a range of interesting answers. You can also ask people to retweet it in the hope of finding the person who can answer it best.
10. A call for assistance - equally, Twitter is a great organising tool. Arrange a meetup, a demonstration, a protest (real or virtual) by tweeting what you want to do, and asking followers to pass it on.

One great thing about Twitter – and this is why it is so useful for student journalists – is that after a while it trains you to look for interesting things around you (and think how you can communicate that in 140 chars). Those who write off the minutiae of Twitter need to realise: it’s the writer who makes it interesting.