Marie Connelly is not a Guru.

Or, what happens when your face shows up on Cult of Mac.

Maybe you’ve heard about this app, Girls Around Me, that has been getting some attention recently for being, well, creeptastic. If you haven’t, let me Google that for you, because I’m not really interested in linking directly to John Brownlee’s post, the one on Gawker, or any of the other ones that people have linked me to since Friday.

Go ahead, pick an article, read up – I’ll wait.

So, turns out John lives in Boston and I’m guessing he spends some time writing over in my neck of the woods, because when he put together some screenshots for his post, my face ended up in one of them.

Fantastic.

I first found out about this on Friday afternoon while I was finishing up lunch and getting ready for a conference call — a notification popped up that someone had mentioned me on Facebook. I went over to see what was up and found a link to the article, along with a message from a high school friend I hadn’t heard from in years, also pointing out the article.

I’ve gotten a number of messages, emails and texts since then, all from very well meaning people, most containing some version of the message: You’re in this creepy app! Check your privacy settings!

It looked a lot like Twitter DM spam, only it wasn’t. (Many thanks to my friend Sean for keeping things light and pointing out: at least it’s a good picture.)

My first reaction to this was, “I guess that’s what I get for checking in at my office.”

My second was, “wait, WHAT? What I get? For checking in at my office?”

Let me preface this by saying, yes, I think this is a creepy app, yes I’m glad that Foursquare revoked its API access, and yes, it has made me think long and hard about what value I find from using Foursquare publicly, and whether that’s “worth” whatever the trade offs are. For now, I’ve changed my settings on Foursquare to private, because I haven’t quite made up my mind.

On the one hand, I’ve made some Twitter-friends with people because we’ve both been checked in at the same concerts, and I’ve found it pretty useful at meetups and other social media conferences and events. On the other hand, mostly I just use it for myself, with a relatively small group of friends, so maybe there’s no reason to use it publicly.

I will say that the only “bad” thing that’s ever happened to me from using Foursquare publicly is that my face ended up in John’s article.

Here’s what’s getting at me though:

Moreover, the girls (and men!) shown in Girls Around Me all had the power to opt out of this information being visible to strangers, but whether out of ignorance, apathy or laziness, they had all neglected to do so. This was all public information.

That’s a quote from the Cult of Mac piece. And now I have a problem, because I’m not ignorant, apathetic, or lazy.

I’ve made a choice to participate publicly in the internet. I try to be careful about what I make accessible and what I share with everyone, and for the most part, I think I’ve found a balance that works pretty well for me. Have I slipped up? Sure. But, it’s important to me that I try out new tools and apps and that I understand how various social networks work, what features and functionality they have to offer. Some of that’s because I’m an information junkie, but mostly it’s because I’ve spent the past four years working in online community management and social media, so staying on top of this is pretty relevant to my career.

Now, I can understand why a lot of people don’t want to put any information out there about themselves, or why they only make it available to a select group of people. I also understand that you look at this app and the article and your first reaction is “Thank GOD he’s not talking about me.” I know when my friends and family reached out to me, it was only with the best intentions.

The whole tenor of this, however, has been that if you are in this app, if you have been posting information publicly, especially if you’re a woman, you’re doing something wrong. Shut it down, ladies – someone on the internet might see you. Kashmir Hill shares some good insight on this over at Forbes in her piece, “The Reaction to ‘Girls Around Me’ Was Far More Disturbing Than the ‘Creepy’ App Itself.”

This is where I get stuck. Checking in at your office, or a coffee shop, or The Independent (which is a great bar, by the way), whether publicly or not, doesn’t mean you’re “asking” to get stalked, or mugged, or anything else. People generally don’t ask for bad things to happen to them, and by and large, I don’t really believe anyone deserves to have something bad happen to them. At the same time, I don’t believe that most people are stalkers, or thieves, or otherwise out to do me harm, and the amount of mental energy necessary to view the world that way is quite simply more than I can spend.

Of course, I think it’s important to take precautions, to do what you need to do to feel safe when we live in a world that feels increasingly unsafe. But I also think it’s important to take a step back from time to time and think about what we’re actually saying. I couldn’t remove all the information about me on the internet if I wanted to, and it really wouldn’t be in my best interest to do that.

I don’t believe that having a public persona online needs to be a risky enterprise, and it seems like plenty of people are able to manage that without being attacked, stalked, or otherwise targeted. If we’re saying that’s only true for one half of the population, then I don’t think this is really a conversation about internet privacy as much as it’s a conversation about whether it’s safe to be a woman and live in public.

If the answer to that is “no”, then I think we’ve got bigger problems than ‘Girls Around Me.’

The topic of training for community management has been coming up quite a bit lately, and after a #cmgrchat back in November, it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about.

As you likely already know, The Community Roundtable, WOMMA and ComBlu will begin offering training and certificates for three levels of community management later this month. (Full disclosure – I recently joined The Community Roundtable, and while I haven’t been involved in this project, it probably goes without saying that I wouldn’t be a member if I didn’t think they were providing a valuable resource to the field of community management.)

It seems as though reactions to the new training program have been fairly mixed, at least within our own little bubble. Jeremiah Owyang and Connie Benson (who’s an instructor in the program) have some good posts about why this program matters, and what it is or isn’t setting out to accomplish. Without belaboring the point, there are a few things I want to add to the conversation here:

First, don’t worry about the certificate.

All due respect to everyone involved, but I think the certificate part of all this may end up being a bit of a red herring – what really matters is the training itself. Plus, I think certification implies a level of technical competence in a field that may not be as relevant for community management as it might be in other areas, especially on the web.

I also think fears that a certificate or some kind of formal certification will have a significant impact on the way community management positions get filled are probably unfounded – as anyone who’s hired a community manager can tell you, experience counts for a lot.

No really, you can teach empathy.

I won’t pretend my English degree qualifies me to dive into the nature vs. nurture debate, but I really was surprised by the “you can’t teach empathy or compassion” reaction to the idea of preparing people for a career in community management.

I’m not trying to be glib, but I honestly can’t think of that many people I would describe as completely devoid of empathy. Perhaps I’m grossly underestimating the number of sociopaths interested in a career in community management, but I think by and large, the first step to being a successful community manager is, you know, actually wanting to be a successful community manager. (Okay, maybe that was a little glib.) It’s by no means the only necessary skill or qualification, but it does strike me as a pretty important one.

In all seriousness, I think empathy is often a function of context, both in terms of setting and subject matter. Health is something I’m pretty passionate about, and I’ve spend a lot of time immersing myself in the world of patients and practitioners, attempting to understand the challenges they face here in the US, and around the world. That’s not something I knew anything about when I started working in this field as perfectly healthy 23 year old, but the more I learned about the challenges and obstacles people encountered in accessing and providing care, the easier it became to empathize with situations outside of my own personal experience.

So, yes, there is some basic kernel of empathy that you need to have in order to be able to say to yourself, “Wow, that must be hard,” but I’d like to believe that most of us do possess that, and if someone wants to activate it, and spends the time and energy identifying opportunities to exercise that skill, I really do think there’s a strong likelihood that they’ll succeed.

Why not help them learn how to identify those opportunities?

Speaking of which, let’s stop reinventing the wheel.

When I first heard about this program, I thought, “I really wish this had been around four years ago.” Many (if not most) of us who have been doing this work for a little while are largely self-taught community managers. We learned from our experiences and our failures, and from whatever we could find out there on the web from other community managers. If you were lucky (and I was very, very lucky) you may have had an opportunity to learn from managers, coworkers and employees who all had some experience in the field as well.

Here’s the thing about experiential learning, though – it’s invaluable and hard won, but it is hard won. And honestly? Not everything needs to be hard. Let’s help make it easier for people trying to figure out things like what metrics they’ll want to track, or the basics of social listening tools, or how to put together an editorial calendar that’s appropriate for their organization.

When you have to figure out–and advocate for–all these things on your own, it takes a lot longer to get them done. That’s time not being spent on your Someday list of to-dos and features.

Selfishly, I want to see more of what’s on that list for other community managers. In my mind, that’s the biggest potential for a program like the one The CR, WOMMA and ComBlu have put together: it can help all of us move forward as an industry. We all learn and benefit from innovative community solutions and creative implementation ideas – so let’s get more of them.

What’s next?

Clearly I’m a fan of the idea of “community management training” generally, but it’s worth pointing out that the syllabus for the WOMMA Community Specialist level is pretty impressive – it looks like three weeks of solid fundamentals from people who really know what they’re talking about.

It’ll certainly be interesting to see what’s covered in the Community Manager and Community Strategist levels and where things go from there, but on the whole I think training is something we should all be talking and thinking more about. As our communities and organizations grow, our community teams will need to grow with them, and how we build our own teams and mentor those new to the field matters: the success of our industry depends on us doing it well.

One of the things I find most interesting about the field of community management is the wide range of backgrounds and experiences that people are bringing to the table in this role – there are a lot of different ways to prepare for a career in community management and social media, and I think it’s encouraging to see such a wide range of perspectives represented.

While most of what I learned about community management came from, well, being a community manager, there are a few things that really helped me out along the way.

In (roughly) chronological order:

Having lawyers for parents - few things prepare a person for making logical, persuasive arguments better than a lifetime of practice debating with lawyers.  It sounds a bit silly, but I’ve realized that everything I learned from years of trying to convince my parents to let me take the car, or extend my curfew, were the same skills I use now in working with community members and companies looking to get involved in social media – anticipating concerns, seeing multiple sides of a situation and proving yourself to be a trustworthy mediator are all important tools in the community manager’s kit.

Wearing an apron to work – Most community managers I’ve met have had some prior experience with customer service.  Mine was working “rush” at a college bookstore.  I had the apron, the nametag, and a whole slew of people angry at me personally for denying their requests to return books without receipts. Turns out, working in a customer service role is always an adventure – and that’s true whether you’re talking to people face to face, over the phone, via email, or on Twitter.

Studying English in college – Spending four years answering the question, “What are you going to do with that? Teach?” wasn’t a blast – but over the past three years, I’ve been consistently surprised by how relevant my degree has been to working as a community manager. On the most basic level, four years of writing essays is pretty good practice for finding an effective written communication style.  But one of the most important things I learned as an English major were the analytical skills necessary for close reading: identifying key themes and making connections between texts, authors, and different time periods.  As a community manager, I’m still reading closely, it’s just that now I’m looking for common themes and conversations about specific health topics, or for connections between different health communities.

Of course, there’s nothing like learning by doing, but it never hurts to have a good foundation to build on.

I’d love to hear from other community managers out there – what do you think best prepared you for this role?

Let it be Alexis Madrigal’s response to Zadie Smith

As an English major, and an occasional student of linguistics, I was particularly fond of this quote:

“If your vision of the past language is mostly Melville — the stuff that’s endured — then, yeah, English seems like it’s in damn sorry shape. But if it includes all those other low and middle-brow writings, the bad letters, the telegraphs, the stupid poems, you end up with a spikier, less formal take on language. Consider that in 1870, 20% of the population was illiterate. Surely, on that basis alone, we now live in a far better place for words.”

While I find myself having less and less interest in Facebook personally, Madrigal’s points are both compelling and well written.  It is not an article to be missed.