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- The virtual community exists and thrives on the strength, number, and frequency of contributions made to it. If you want to be part of a vibrant community, take responsibility for nourishing it with your postings.
The following tips are about posting messages and responses in the virtual room. Use them as rules of thumb, then add your own suggestions regarding what other online communication guidelines would make our life in cyberspace more enjoyable.
- Be brief
- Express yourself for greater impact.
- Use descriptive conference item names if you open a new conference item
- The title of your conference item is there to help people decide whether or not they want to read it. Use it to tell people what your message is about.
- Avoid duplication of items on the same
subject
- First read the list of all items, that you can access in the conference lobby, before creating a
new one, to see whether there's a close fit between what you want to create and an existing
item.
- Be careful with humor and sarcasm
- Without the voice inflections and body language of personal communications, it is easy for a remark meant to be funny to be misinterpreted. You can convey the emotions that words alone cannot express by using such online conventions as "smileys" :-)
- Summarize what you are following up on
- When you are making a follow-up comment to someone else's message, be sure to summarize the parts of the message to which you are responding. Summarization is best done by including appropriate quotes from the original message. Don't include the entire message, since this could be irritating to people who have already read it.
- Give back to the Community
- Be a "giver" as well as a "taker" in this online community. If you have good and valuable experience and information to share, please do so in a response to the appropriate message, or if you don't find one, post it with your keyword(s) for that subject in the subject line of the header of your message.
- Spread the word
- Another way of giving back to the Community is by telling others who could both benefit from and contribute to this community, but don't know about it.
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© Copyright, 2001, Community Intelligence Labs
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