Buzzing Communities

guide to online community management for professionals

Make community building your ultimate business growth strategy In Customer Communities: Engage and Retain Customers to Build the Future of Your Business, Nick Mehta and Robin Van Lieshout deliver an actionable playbook on how to cultivate meaningful communities that fuel quantifiable business growth. In the book, you’ll learn how to capitalize on this new growth strategy to scale your company and develop excitement around your products and your firm. The authors outline the 10 foundational Laws of Community, explaining why community development does not need to be expensive and how to integrate community in the heart of your customer journey. You’ll also find: Strategies for creating a cross functional customer engagement team Techniques for building community in places that aren’t the web or on social media Ways to bring your organization’s culture and values into your community with a human-first alignment An essential roadmap to community development for customer success, marketing, support and product teams, and other entrepreneurs, founders, and executive business leaders. Customer Communities will earn a place on the bookshelves of anyone with a stake in organizational growth and resilience.

The Game Production Toolbox focuses on the nuts and bolts of producing interactive content and how you can organize and support the creative, technical, and business efforts that are all part of interactive game development. This book isn’t going to tell you how to design a game or what technologies to use. Instead it provides techniques for and insights into managing, from concept to release, all the pieces that must come together in order to get a game into the hands of a player. Readers will learn about each phase of game production: prototyping, defining the requirements, assembling the team, making the game, and releasing to the players. Interviews from professional game developers give a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to make a game. Key Features A framework for how to get an interactive game from concept to release, including information on financing and pitching to publishers and investors. Techniques for working with the game development team to get effective prototypes and documentation to prove out game concept and mechanics. Concrete information on how to plan and execute the different aspects of game production, such as audio, localization, testing, and software ratings. Advice from industry experts on managing teams, project management, communicating effectively, and keeping everyone happy. Information about working effectively with marketing, PR, and other people that are involved with the publishing and release process.

Learning Environments by Design deeply explores today’s workplace learning. This book empowers you to customize learning for your workforce and unearths the answers to the questions you’ve been asking: How does learning happen? What is the future of instructional design? What makes learning environments work? Since the boom of e-learning, informal learning, and social learning, the learning environment landscape has changed dramatically and now offers a wide array of options for supporting knowledge and skill development at work. In this book, learning strategist Catherine Lombardozzi describes practical ways to customize learning experiences by creating a curated approach to skills development—one that features informal and social learning, developmental activities, experiential learning, as well as formal training. Authored by a career learning professional with more than 30 years’ experience, Learning Environments by Design is filled with useful examples, resources, and suggested learning environment blueprints to help you continue to be successful in a field that is forever changing. In this book, you will learn to: design a learning environment that supports learning and performance deliver more focused and impactful solutions to learning needs scaffold self-directed and social learning.

Twelve visions of living in a climate-changed world. We are living in the Anthropocene—an era of dramatic and violent climate change featuring warming oceans, melting icecaps, extreme weather events, habitat loss, species extinction, and more. What will life be like in a climate-changed world? In Tomorrow’s Parties, science fiction authors speculate how we might be able to live and even thrive through the advancing Anthropocene. In ten original stories by writers from around the world, an interview with celebrated writer Kim Stanley Robinson, and a series of intricate and elegant artworks by Sean Bodley, Tomorrow’s Parties takes rational optimism as a moral imperative, or at least a pragmatic alternative to despair. In these stories—by writers from the United Kingdom, the United States, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh, and Australia—a young man steals from delivery drones; a political community lives on an island made of ocean-borne plastic waste; and a climate change denier tries to unmask “crisis actors.” Climate-changed life also has its pleasures and epiphanies, as when a father in Africa works to make his son’s dreams of “Viking adventure” a reality, and an IT professional dispatched to a distant village encounters a marvelous predigital fungal network. Contributors include Pascall Prize for Criticism winner James Bradley, Hugo Award winners Greg Egan and Sarah Gailey, Philip K Dick Award winner Meg Elison, and New York Times bestselling author Daryl Gregory.

The world is wrought with risks that may harm people and cost lives. The news is riddled with reports of natural disasters (wildfires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes), industrial disasters (chemical spills, water and air pollution), and health pandemics (e.g., SARS, H1NI, COVID19). Effective risk communication is critical to mitigating harms. The body of research in this handbook reveals the challenges of communicating such messages, affirms the need for dialogue, embraces the role of instruction in proactively communicating risk, acknowledges the function of competing risk messages, investigates the growing influence of new media, and constantly reconsiders the ethical imperative for communicating recommendations for enhanced safety.

The Online Journalism Handbook offers a comprehensive guide to the ever-evolving world of digital journalism, showcasing the multiple possibilities in researching, writing, and storytelling provided by new technologies. In this new edition, Paul Bradshaw presents an engaging mix of technological expertise with real-world practical guidance to illustrate how those training and working as journalists can improve the development, presentation, and global reach of their stories through webbased technologies. Thoroughly revised and updated, this third edition features: A new chapter dedicated to writing for email and chat, with updated case studies New sections covering online abuse, news avoidance, and trust Updated coverage of accessibility, inclusivity, and diversity in sourcing, writing for social media, and audio and video New formats, including social audio, audiograms, Twitter threads, the “Stories” format, charticles, and “scrollytelling” Expanded international examples throughout The Online Journalism Handbook is an essential guide for all journalism students and professional journalists and will also be of interest to digital media practitioners. The companion website for this book further enhances student knowledge through regularly updated case studies, real-time development reports, and in-depth discussion pieces from cutting-edge sources.

This book is a collection of thoroughly well-researched studies presented at the Eighth Future Technologies Conference. This annual conference aims to seek submissions from the wide arena of studies like Computing, Communication, Machine Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Ambient Intelligence, Security, and e-Learning. With an impressive 490 paper submissions, FTC emerged as a hybrid event of unparalleled success, where visionary minds explored groundbreaking solutions to the most pressing challenges across diverse fields. These groundbreaking findings open a window for vital conversation on information technologies in our community especially to foster future collaboration with one another. We hope that the readers find this book interesting and inspiring and render their enthusiastic support toward it.