The MyBlogLog Blog The source for all things MyBlogLog.

What Defines A Great Community Member?

1.  A Desire To Share And Broaden Your Knowledge
A member who is in a community because he wants to learn more or share more about a given topic is usually someone who does well in a community. 

Conversely, a member who has only selfish reasons for being in a community, will not be able to fully experience any community site.  I'm always saddened to read that someone came here only to send their link out to the allotted 20 people per day.  It seems to be such a waste of time, since traffic that results from spam is rarely useful to the site owner in terms of subscriptions, advertisements, sales, etc.

2.  A Desire To Make Friends
I scan through the conversations I see on MyBlogLog and it's heartening to see how many online friendships have developed through this community.  By being able to find people with similar interests, some of our members have decided to co-author blogs together. I've also seen friendly banter that has turned into real friendship.  Making friends with similar interests is integral to any community site.
 

3.  A Desire To Work Within The System
The policies that we set up here are always created with your needs in mind.  The 'community-join' limitations, the Rock Star message algorithm, the racy avatar deletions and the spam flags were all designed to help our users.  Each was created because of an outcry from the community.

A moderately skilled techie can build a bot or any other type of program to overcome these systems, but users who genuinely care about the other members, like they were real people (because they are), would never consider harming their fellow MyBlogLog friends. 

4.  A Wholistic, "What's Best For The Community" Outlook
The perfect example of this, is the response to the racy avatars I've been deleting lately (over a hundred in the last two weeks, by the way). 

1. Some people ignore the fact their avatars have been deleted and post another, just as bad as the first.   
2. Some people will ask why their avatar is wrong, since the human body is beautiful.  Agreed and agreed, but it's not really fair to ask business sites and family blogs to either show your avatar when you visit or spend all day monitoring their site for your images, just because you look really, really hot naked. 
   
3. Some people apologize and upload a new image that is more appropriate for a publicly viewable site.

In each of these examples, you see different ways that people responded to a particular problem, but only in the last one do you see an example of a user who is 'community-minded'.  They may not have realized that their image was a 'mature' image, but rather than complain, they chose to put the community first. 

One guy said, "That's cool. I can respect that."  He understood that we're not prudes here (far from it), but because MyBlogLog avatars show up on a variety of sites, perhaps an image of cleavage is not appropriate, even though it's far from porn.

5.  The Golden Rule
Before a user messages someone or uploads any images, I think a great question would be, "Is this something that I would want to see/read and is this something that the person I am sending this would want to see/read."

• Sure, you want to gain more viewers, but is sending out thank you messages to every person who views your profile the right way to do it?  If you were in their shoes, would you want a thank you from every site you visited online?  I think you might think that was a little creepy to have several dozen thank you emails in your inbox every time you checked your email.

• Sure, you want people to notice that picture of a hot girl on your avatar (whether or not it's you), but would you be impressed by that?  Would you click that avatar?  Agreed that you may see an attractive avatar and think it's hot, but what would be your first impression of the person who needed to resort to the 'hot chick' gimmick to make you notice them?

In my experience, bloggers who write well and actively take part in discussions tend to get noticed, and build large followings.  Bloggers that just leave "I agree" or "Welcome" comments everywhere just annoy people enough that they refuse to read their blog. If you want readers, you'll have to write content that is so darn useful that people can't live without it.

If you aren't writing content like that, then chances are that no matter how hard to message users, you still aren't going to get noticed.   Start by improving your content, and then I assure you that the 'where to find users' problem will cease to exist.

Do you have any additions to this list?  If so, send me an email to robyn@mybloglog.com and I'll pick a few to spotlight here on this blog.