Who Needs It? Dealing with Unwanted Content and Conversations in Your Online Community
by Matthew Lees
Every day seems to bring increased buy-in and understanding of how social media and online communities can positively impact organizations. But there’s still pushback around certain things. For example, community platform vendors, consulting firms, and agencies still regularly hear concerns such as “What if someone uses profanity?” and “What if they say bad things about us?”
Most of the content in your community – and throughout the social Web, too – is stuff you want. These are the questions and answers your community members share with each other and with you. They’re their problems and solutions, their interesting and relevant comments (even their uninteresting and relevant comments), their ideas, wish lists, and perspectives.
But there will also be things that you really don’t want, the content and conversations that you and the community could surely do without.
These things should make up a small percentage of the overall content, but it’s all but impossible to avoid them completely. (You’ll typically find a smaller percentage of unwanted posts in B2B communities than in B2C communities, and you’ll usually see a smaller percentage of such things in support-related communities than in affinity and engagement communities.)
Thanks But No Thanks
To be more specific, the unwanted stuff is posts and content that contain…
- Inappropriate Language or Content. No surprise here…these are comments, images, or videos of a sexual, violent, abusive, or otherwise inappropriate nature. Note that this is about more than the use of foul language. There are a lot of mean and nasty things that can be said with perfectly acceptable words.
- Advertising or Spam. Some advertising may be fine in your community. Often, though, it’s not. And I can’t think of a situation in which any community would want spam. (Is there a Spam community? If so, that would prove me wrong.)
- Incorrect Information. You can’t fully control the quality of user-generated answers, solutions, and comments. Members will, on occasion, post information that’s incorrect. Usually it’s unintentional, but it can cause confusion or worse. Blatantly incorrect info is relatively easily fixable; gray areas can lead to disagreement, dissent, and (hopefully) healthy discussion.
- Sensitive or Confidential Information. Some customers often have access to inside information, as do your colleagues, of course. If people aren’t careful, or if there’s miscommunication on when and where certain information can be shared, they can inadvertently say things they shouldn’t. This doesn’t happen often, but the cat does sometimes get out of the bag.
- Off-Topic Comments. Such posts may be benign, but they’re either entirely irrelevant or relevant to another place in the community.
There are also a few types of posts that some may see as unwanted. But community managers and moderators worth their salt see these as acceptable, if not desirable (at least in low volume), since they demonstrate transparency and authenticity, and give community members opportunities to chime in on your behalf. These are post that…
• Say Negative Things about Your Organization, Brand, Products, Services, etc.
• Say Positive Things about the Competition
Be Prepared
So how do you deal with all these situations? Best is to have your ducks in a row beforehand. Here are some suggestions:
• Have a good moderation plan, and a great community manager and moderation team. When dealing with unwanted content and conversations, moderators should be observant, understanding, firm, and fair. And know what you’ll do when you get each type of unwanted post.
• Create appropriate community policies and guidelines, not only for community members, but for subject-matter experts and other internal stakeholders and participants.
• Make friends with colleagues throughout your organization. It’s worthwhile, if not essential, to check in with the folks in legal, corporate communications, and pretty much all other business units. They can help with the Action Plan items that pertain to them, and help deal with unexpected things should they arise.
• Have a library of stock replies at your disposal. This will help you respond to issues quickly.
• Leverage the tools in your community platform. The moderation tools and accompanying workflow are important here, of course. I’m a big fan of content filters (for catching obscenities and other text strings) that trigger email notifications. And the ability to enable or disable anonymous posts can be helpful, as well, since people tend to take more liberties when they can participate anonymously.
• Be aware. Be very aware. Technology won’t catch everything. There’s no substitute for paying attention.
Most online community best practices deal with how to engage with community members and get more of the good stuff. Knowing how to minimize and deal with the unwanted stuff is important, too.
And the best way to assuage execs’ concerns is to say “Yes, there will be some amount of unwanted and inappropriate content and conversations in the community. We can’t avoid that. But here’s how we’ll be handling them when they do arise…”
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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 10:38 am and is filed under Best Practices, Community Moderation, Social Media Trends. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
4 Responses to “Who Needs It? Dealing with Unwanted Content and Conversations in Your Online Community”
MRowland says: Thanks Matthew. I’d add another tool in the organization that is useful for moderation teams to utilize –> social media monitoring. For those companies who are very concerned about their brand and its online reputation, social media monitoring is a must have. But it also plays a role in effective moderation techniques as well.
In the old days, you know around 2005, communities were almost exclusively ‘walled gardens’ of information. As blogs grew, then social tools like Twitter entered the environment, information moved outside the organzation’s controlled area.
A good moderation team recognizes that and utilizes social media monitoring tools to see where the criticism is located and if it is directing visitors to the community. We’ve seen that with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News directing readers to AARP’s online community to “voice their concerns” about a bill or legislation pending in Congress.
Social media monitoring as part of moderation helps organizations to anticipate issues, confirm the source where possible, and then be prepared for it. Of course, you still have to have a plan to deal with it. Sure it can cost your organization a bit more, but in the long run if you have an issues based community it is well worth the extra cost in terms of damage prevention to your community.
MatthewLees says: Ah, the “old days” — way back in 2005. Amazing how quickly things have changed and continue to change.
Good point about the difference between monitoring (i.e., becoming aware of something) and dealing with it (taking action based on what you find out). Hmmmm. Might be a good topic to blog about soon…
Mike,
That’s a good point regarding anticipation of issues in the community. The AARP site posted an article only about fitness but, it was an update on Jane Fonda and her fitness routines. The community of users responded with a host of nasty comments about her, remembering her as Hanoi Jane, who talked to the enemy in Viet Nam. Certainly, this could have been anticipated, and avoided. Planning for negative responses has to be part of managing any community.
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