The imitable Sarah Robinson recently spoke about the irony that daily deal sites such as Living Social offer incentive deals for new customers, yet it is even more important to reward your most loyal customers with your best pricing. That really stuck in my head. Mission-driven organizations have not really thought much rewarding loyalty by offering their very best deals to their most loyal online fans. And frankly, it's an oversight, because it's a game-changing idea for the nonprofit sector.

I had the privilege of joining three seasoned social media community managers on the "Personal/Personnel Policy: Social Media Boundaries" panel at South By Southwest this year. Vanessa Rhinesmith (Director of Outreach at Start Some Good), Jess Main (Director of Operations at National Center for Media Engagement), Amy Sample Ward (Membership Director at NTEN) and I presented examples of how we have negotiated the boundary between personal and professional involvement in social media. The panel offered a lot of great examples of these situations, and the engaged audience asked even more questions. Key takeaways from the session included planning for the future of your social media presence, sharing social media account information internally, don't be afraid of the customer service aspect of engaging online, and create a guidelines document for how staff should represent the organization online.

Measuring engagement is critical. If we don't know how engaged people are in our social spaces, we won't have a clue if our campaigns to move them to act will work. I think there are three kinds of measurements: status, engagement, and activism measurements.

Maintenance activities keep a company's presence alive. They don't increase presence, increase engagement, or even develop the community. What they do is buy you time. It's called feeding the dog.

Online community members with a lot of social influence within a community may be preventing full community participation. While groups welcome so-called "social media rock stars," these influencers can also weaken a group. The job of the community manager is to nurture full participation and ensure that the social media rock stars don't adversely affect community participation.

A Facebook Page is a community, but it is usually a loosely-tied community of lurkers and inactives who don't have the opportunity to interact with each other or the Page often enough. I believe that you can create community within a Facebook Page, but it takes a lot of work, discovery, and dedication. Here are 5 tips to creating community within your Facebook Page.

Active management of an online community on a registered site or social network translates into quantifiable value for the sponsoring organization. This blog post offers value data from two online communities that lost active community managers, and the subsequent effects on both the community and value from the community to the sponsoring organization.