Even though my current role is broader than community management, I'm still a community manager at heart and it's still my passion. So I was super excited to get a peek at the first report of the Community Roundtable's 2013 State of Community Management yesterday and even more excited to see that it contains some great findings that should hopefully help show businesses that community management DOES matter.

You'll definitely want to read the report The Value of Community Management in its entirety, but in the meantime a few key findings for you:

• Almost 40% of organizations surveyed reported being able to measure the value of the role. I think this is huge because there are still far, far too many organizations who are willing to invest a bunch of money in a community platform (technology) but then refuse to spend any on community management--then a year or two later when the community the vendor promised would be so great is  nothing but crickets, leadership declares the experiment a failure and gets rid of it. If you want to see value from online community, you need to invest in community management.
• Successful community management is not a role delegated to the least experienced members of a team. Findings showed that, on average, community managers have about eight years experience and three years of community management experience. These are not interns running successful communities; they are experienced professionals with experience across many disciplines and with varied skillsets.
• Technical skills are not the primary requirements for community managers. Forget looking for a community manager based solely on whether they use Facebook and Twitter or tasking tech gurus with community management. Engagement and people skills ranked highest in importance on the survey, followed by content development and strategic and business skills. Building community is about engaging with people, not using tech tools.
• Community management is not just one person's job. Approximately 40 percent of survey respondents had only one community manager, but 80 percent of organizations that could calculate the value of community management employed more than one community manager. Community management is a huge job that spans across entire organizations and for a mature community, tasking just one person with all facets of community management is too much. Burnout is a big topic in the community management world recently; it's why I left my dream job. Especially as communities become more successful, organizations need to pay attention to scaling appropriately or they risk losing the very people responsible for the success of the community.
• Community management is an inside job. Only 22 percent of respondents reported that they are hiring contractors, vendors or agencies for external community management services, and only 10 percent are hiring them for internal community management. The report predicts that as community teams grow, this will change; I personally suspect that it won't. To me, it stands to reason that as community becomes more mature within an organization, more internal people will start taking on community management roles and the need to outsource will shrink, not grow....but that's just me.

The biggest takeaway from the report, though, is that community management matters. Remember the old 90-9-1 rule? With effective community management, those numbers are a thing of the past; survey respondents reported an average engagement profile of 55-30-15, and the most engaged communities reported more creators than lurkers at 17-57-26. 

There's a ton of great information in the report, so I won't spoil it all--do yourself a favor and read it to learn about what standards are emerging, which program elements are most important, what metrics you need to be tracking and reporting, and why your organization needs to develop a community playbook.

So far so good.  I’m using a fair amount of technology to keep track of my progress.  I’m using LoseIt to track food and RunKeeper to track actual exercise as well as Accupedo for tracking basic steps taken throughout the day.  Here’s what I’ve learned over the last few days:

1. I eat a lot of carbs.  Most days over 50% of my intake is carbs.  I can’t decide if that’s bad or good.  Most of my carbs are things like whole wheat bread and brown rice and beans.  Aren’t we supposed to eat more grains?
2. I’m pretty sedentary.  Even with a 30-40 minute walk during the day, I barely break 5,000 steps per day.  And I wish I could blame that on the fact that I don’t always carry my phone with me.
3. The 4 p.m. time slot works pretty well, though it comes up fast on days when I don’t get started until 9/9:30.  During the school year, when I start at 7:30, 4 p.m. definitely feels like the end of the day.  Now, it feels like 2/3 of the way through.  But I’m going to stick with it.
4. My shorts still fit!  I put on some of my non-elastic waistband shorts this morning and though one pair felt a little tight (always has really), they all fit comfortably.  I’d love for them to be just a smidge looser.  I’m talking a 1/2 inch or so off the waistline.

So that’s all pretty good feedback.  I’m actually going to invest in a scale, so I can see the weight feedback.  Next week when I’m on vacation, all bets are kind of off on the food front.  I don’t have a huge amount of control over the food, especially for dinner.  On the flip side, I’m more active, so it could work out just fine.  I’m not going to be fanatic about it, but I’m still going to try to maintain better eating and exercising habits than I might otherwise.  Another thing I’m doing is working on a minor knee injury, which is adding a little to my exercise plate.  Not burning very many calories, but certainly beefing up some muscle.

Related posts:

1. On the food front
2. Productivity on the home front
3. The Body as a Site of Competition

I’ve only ever used Date.today and Time.now to get the current date and time. But for those of us concerned with global timezones (and who isn’t), we should really be using the .current method.

Date.current is a rails core extension that gets the current date in the set time zone.

Awesomesauce.

That was the call I got today.
"All I did was add a VMkernel interface and my host lost connection to vCenter".

On went my troubleshooting hat.

First the environment (simplified)

The physical interfaces on which the VMkernel interfaces reside were trunked with multiple VLANs. In this case VLAN(4) and VLAN(49).

vmk0 was used for ESXi management - with a default gateway of x.x.4.254

When the user added vmk1 - the host would become disconnected, he removed vmk1 - the host reconnected to the vCenter.

While the host was disconnected, we tried to ping the vmk0 interface - replies were fine.

While the host was disconnected - we tried to connect to the host directly with SSH and the vSphere client - both worked.

While the host was disconnected - we tried to ping the vCenter server with its IP - there was no response.

While the host was disconnected - we tried to ping the external network - replies were fine.

We then looked at the settings on vmk1 - and I noticed that the user had not set the VLAN49 tag on the VMkernel interface. Obviously this was not set correctly, and by adding VLAN(49) to vmk1 - everything worked correctly. The Host reconnected to vCenter.

So the problem was solved - VLAN(49) was missing on vmk1.

I was puzzled and tried to understand why this misconfiguration would cause the host to disconnect from the vCenter - then I realized why, and therefore the reason for this post.

When configuring a VMkernel interface, a new entry is added to the routing table. There will only be one default gateway - and that will the one defined on the Management interface. The additional VMkernel interfaces will not have a gateway defined.

This was the printout of the esxcfg-route -l from the Host.

Just to explain the output in plain English.

Anything on Network x.x.4.0 on that subnet will go out through vmk0.
Anything on Network x.x.6.0 on that subnet will go out through vmk2.
Anything on Network x.x.49.0 on that subnet will go out through vmk1.
Everything that does not match the above - will go out the Default Gateway x.x.4.254 through vmk0.

So the user had configured vmk1 on x.x.49.0. That meant any traffic trying to go out to the vCenter server - would go out through vmk1 - it was on the same subnet.

But… the user had not assigned the appropriate VLAN(49) tag to the interface - which meant that the interface would send out packets onto the network but without the correct VLAN tag on the packets, and therefore the Host could not communicate with the vCenter.

Always follow the route..

Lego Movie poster (Credit: IMDB)

An ordinary LEGO minifigure, mistakenly thought to be the extraordinary MasterBuilder, is recruited to join a quest to stop an evil LEGO tyrant from gluing the universe together.

Last weekend I went to NYC with Patrick, my sister and her husband to celebrate my birthday. This was Dylan's Candy Bar, where you can get candy-flavored cocktails!

Summer is always a tough time for me when it comes to blogging. This year is even worse than usual, what with me still getting up to speed in my new job, freelancing on the side, and trying to grasp the fact that I"m now the mom of a high school senior/kid who can drive. It's all a bit much, to be honest, which means that I'm doing my best to distract myself with other things. The upside is that I'm reading a ton and it's summer movie season; the downside is that it's depressing to know you have a blog just sitting there, doing nothing and feeling pressured by something that's supposed to be a fun hobby.

Anyway, now that I've overshared, how about some summer fun suggestions?

Movies: Have I mentioned that I love Letterboxd? I plan to obsessively plow through the summer movies and review them in my Letterboxd diary, so if you're wondering whether the blockbuster you're thinking about seeing is worth the price, chances are I've already seen it. In short: The Purge sucked; The Internship rocked despite the critics mostly panning it.

Books: I'm loving my new Kindle Paperwhite (Patrick is the best birthday gifter ever). I'm reading The Painted Girls and A Week in Winter (on Audible during my commute to/from Bethesda). Also loved The Storyteller, even though it isn't exactly light summer reading and is depressing as hell. For all the books I read, you can check out my Goodreads profile.

Outings: Despite the longer commute, I'm loving working in Bethesda. A billion restaurants--so far, my favorites are ramen at Satsuma (although it could be cuter looking--my kids and I are obsessed with the ramen in the movie Ponyo and were hoping it looked just like that), grape Fanta Zero at California Tortilla (sorry but ever since they stopped offering the greek chicken burrito the food just doesn't do it for me), and pizza at the Corner Slice. And I love Reddz Trading--it's like an upscale Value Village within walking distance of my office. Score! For weekends, I'm obsessed with Hillwood and will definitely be checking out Living Artfully and the French Festival.

TV: I'm making Patrick's life a living hell by insisting we obsessively go through all eight seasons of Weeds at once. We're almost done; after that it will be on to Game of Thrones--I"m curious to see what all the hype is about. The iPad/Netflix/treadmill thing is still working for me as a carrot to regular exercise--I'm obsessed with House of Cards and can't wait for season two. Lately I've been watching Blue on YouTube, and think it's interesting that while network TV seems to be fixated on reality shows which are losing steam, IMO, YouTube and Netflix are the ones putting out really high quality scripted series. I will say the YouTube iPad experience leaves a lot to be desired when trying to watch a series of episodes--navigating to the next episode while on the treadmill is a chore and I hope they move to a more Netflix-like navigation at some point.

So that's all that's thrilling about me lately...what are your summer plans?

A single circle is born, grows up, meets a mate, has a small circle which itself grows up, moves away, then both partners fade and pass away.

These shapes I use now are absolutely the same for sighted and visually impaired; there is no information hidden or more information for either reader.

Comic book for the blind

Comic book for the blind: the markings in the frame corners are numbers to show the reading sequence

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The first thing which discourages us from borrowing a loan is perhaps the high interest rate. Most of the loan products available in UK come with high interest rates. Another deterrent is the short repayment term of most of the high-priced loan products which increases the monthly instalments considerably. It is to attract people those who get discouraged by the high interest rate and the short repayment term that some lenders in UK have come up with cheap loan plans.

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So you went to a university, got a great degree, armed yourself with enough credibility to enter the job market, had the time of your life meeting fantastic people that will be lifelong friends and probably drank too much. In the hangover that follows you have suddenly realised your education has cost you a pile of cash that needs to be paid back somehow, and guess what your salary just isn't going to cut it, if you are lucky to get one.

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