Category Archive

Community Management

Instagram and the shifting social media landscape

This past year, I’ve been fascinated by the growing influence of Instagram. Of course Offbeat Bride has been on Instagram for years, but it’s always been a relatively small following — we’re talking 17k Instagram followers as compared to 155k on Facebook. Let’s talk more about what this means for biz dev…

“Yeah, Totally!”: Don’t confuse interest with commitment

When you’re doing something big and interesting (like, oh, say, organizing an online community) and are looking for people to help, please, for the love of niches and all that matters to you, understand that not all yeah totallys are created equal…

RIP Offbeat Bride Tribe: 2007 – 2015 (+ bonus musings on running leaner)

Fall of 2007, after dozens of requests from blog readers, I decided to set up an Offbeat Bride community on Ning.com.

“It’s an experiment!” I said.

“We’ll see how it goes!” I said.

“If it doesn’t feel like a good fit, I’ll shut it down!” I said.

That was eight years, two platforms, two community managers, dozens of volunteer moderators, and over 45,000 members ago. November 2015, the Offbeat Bride Tribe quietly shut down.

Forums are dying

For the last four years, the Offbeat Bride Tribe’s traffic has been in decline.
Across the web, forums are dying as we all increasingly default to social media like Facebook. What does this mean for the future of the Tribe?