Celebrities in your Forum

Do you have some?

[viggen]

Well first i must get the record straight, i do not have celebrities that everyone knows, however in my little world (niche) of blue dotted widgets, they are superstars and very well known by our visitors...

How do you handle those kind of people? Do you just leave them alone? Do you encourage them to get involved?

Those celebrities are very different, some post with their real name, some anonymouse (but it relatively easy to spot them for me), would that already give me a clue how they would like to be treated?

...in any case, do you have those kind of celebrities in your little world and how do you treat them?

cheers
viggen

[linear]

I have done the following at various times:
* granted custom user titles
* sent personal welcome private messages
* done full-blown "introduction" posts in the general purpose board
* Escalated to "faux moderator" status as a courtesy

[nathanso]

I give them their own Q&A forum with limited mod powers (which few of them ever try).

[rogerd]

How about celebrity spammers? Well-known names who take every opportunity to say things like "e-mail me" or "visit my site"... I've had a few of those, and it's been a challenge to keep them on board but not self-promoting.

In one forum, I established a special user class that was sort of an "official blessing" that indicated the member was who he/she claimed to be. (We verified by offline contact or email address/IP.) We've had impostors, too.

[M_B_Walker]

Since many of my board regulars are celebrities in my admittedly very small niche, new celebrities tend to be treated the same as anyone else. On occasion I have sent private emails or done some behind-the-scenes confirmation just to keep out imposters (we've had those, too), but for the most part we don't do anything out of the ordinary.

I would think that the issue with treating celebrities different is that you'd then have to treat every celebrity in a similar special way. In a small niche, how do you decide who's a celebrity and who isn't, anyway?

[cornwall]

You would have to say "GoogleGuy" has been important to the traffic growth at WebmasterWorld. Mind you he does have a blog too ;). Then you have AdWords and AdSense with "semi official" input from G.

Also a fair number of company reps ride shotgun at WebmasterWorld, like Tim Mayer from Yahoo!. And I think I have seen (spasmodic) inputs for a dozen smaller search engines and directories, usually reactive, rather than proactive.

As a punter, it is difficult to see sometimes whether they are voicing personal views or merely their personal opinion

[Pfui]

I verify celebrities in a number of ways and then leave them be, akin to any other poster.

Actually, it's not how the celebs behave but the other posters. (Our celebs are in film and television.) At first, LOTS of noise: "WOW! Is that really you? Cool! I LOVED you in (movie name)!" and the like. Then the backlash wave: "I thought your movie sucked." Etc.

I admit, I get as much of a kick out of celebrity posters as the next person -- and luckily it's just enough to compensate for the extra work wrangling their grown-up fans:)

[rogerd]

Yep, sometimes they draw a mix of fawning sycophants and insulting critics. It can get messy.

The other problem I see is when members start overwhelming the celeb with posts like, "Hey, ___, what do you think of this?" That can be very discouraging, as some feel obligated to try to respond to all reasonable queries. I usually remove those.