One thing that became very apparent to me after starting my work here as Community Manager is that Inman already has a wonderful community. Between the dedicated folks on the Inman team, and the vibrant Inman membership, the community is strong. I hope that I can help foster growth in the community and improve the experience for everyone.
We are going to do what we can here at Inman, but in order to make the whole thing work, we need some help from you as well. Namely, we would much appreciate it if everyone could take a minute to look at the Inman Community Guidelines. The VAST majority of folks participating in the groups and leaving blog and news comments are following the guidelines, and doing an excellent job of pointing out the rare instances when fellow participants might need a gentle reminder. For that, I want to thank you. It makes my life a whole lot easier.
One area that isn't addressed in the guidelines is the use of HTML links in comment signatures. These are the signatures that you filled out in your Inman profile (you did fill out an Inman profile, didn't you?). Some people have no links, some people have one or two, and some have a lot more than that. Our preference would be that everyone try to limit the links in their signature to one or two. There are a few reasons for this:
1) More links makes for unnecessarily longer comments. People are most interested in the value of your comment, so having too many links can sometimes dilute that message.
2) Your comments are your comments, and your profile is your profile. If there are links that you want to highlight for one reason or another, your profile is the place intended for this. Similar to the first reason, it would be most effective for everyone if the focus of your comment was, in fact, your comment. Don't worry, if someone likes your comment, they will click through to your profile and find the links.
3) Nobody likes spam. The groups and comments are designed to be conversational, not sales tools. People participate because they want to add to the conversation, not be the target of a sales pitch. That is precisely the focus of the community guidelines, so comment signatures should fall under that umbrella.
Like I said, the VAST majority of folks are doing an incredible job. If you do happen to see a comment that you think violates the guidelines, don't hesitate to flag it, and we'll take a look. If we see something, we'll take care of it. The important thing is that everyone's experience in the Inman Community is a positive and enriching one. I know that it has been for me; I learn something new every time I visit the groups or read the comments on the news articles.
Keep up the good work, and let's keep those comment signature links to a minimum. :-)
And if you read this and said, "huh? What is he talking about?" then you might want to head over the Inman Community and check it out. Or hey, you could even start by leaving a comment on this very post!
