Why Community Management is NOT like Parenting

Community Management = Parenting? Really?

There has been a recent upsurge in community management/moderation blog posts comparing the care and nurturing of a community to that of a parent. As both a parent and someone who has helped companies build and moderate successful communities for over ten years, I couldn’t disagree more. Here’s why:

• The best moderators and community managers are passionate about the success of their community in meeting its goals. They are not passionate about or emotionally attached to the individual members.

Think I’m crazy? Look at the photo above. When two members go at each other in a community an emotionally attached community manager will take sides based upon who they feel is more important to the community or worse, based upon their interpretation of what happened. So rather than staying above the fray, they take sides. We’ve seen it time and time again. We work hard with our client teams to understand the downside of this behavior by the manager or moderator. What’s the fall-out from this behavior by the manager/moderator? Simple, it intensifies the problem rather than defusing it. Members want moderators who are impartial to settle disputes. So unlike a parent, the most successful community managers and moderators must remain emotionally detached.

• Getting too close to a member emotionally reduces your credibility as a moderator/manager in the eyes of the other members who aren’t close to you.

It matters what others think, even if incorrect. The most vocal and longest lasting problems in B2C communities that we’ve managed always revolve around the initial problem being compounded by claims of unfair treatment and support for one side over the other.  If you enter into a situation like this, your credibility will suffer in the eyes of many members. For example, at AARP the political action is fast and furious. We’ve seen members attack each other over many issues. (Liberals against Conservatives. Democrats against Republicans. Capitalists against Socialists. Wingnuts against Moonbats. ) Each time our moderators have stepped in, it has been to enforce the terms of service rather than take sides. While we are often accused by someone of taking sides, other members are quick to point out to the community that the moderators take action against them as well. That achieves a certain balance that while fragile is non-partisan. If you are emotionally attached to a member who is attacked, you are likely to over-react and set off a chain reaction. So unlike a parent you must stay above the fight and be partial. (Yes this sounds like a parental ideal, but in practice it’s almost impossible to pull off with your own kids because you are still too emotionally invested and want to settle the fight NOW!)

• The myth of not needing moderation continues to stay alive

This one is really interesting in my opinion. How can you compare community management to parenting and then say that:

“In fact moderation is rarely necessary where an effective community manager runs the community.” – Simon Phillips

Clearly, he’s never dealt with a two year old throwing a tantrum or a member doing the same in a community. As I mentioned in my comments:

“At the early maturity stage of a public community, the community manager must moderate in order to establish the community norms of behavior. That means removing offensive content or language or attacks. It also requires that the community manager contact the members whos content he/she has removed/edited. Otherwise the wrong example is set and the behavioral expectations are going to be harder to realize. If you don’t step in early, the bullies and soapboxers will dominate and reinforce the behavior that you don’t want to see (or that your client doesn’t want to see). Once that happens, your growth in realized value will slow as members join more to fight or spam or advertise rather than to contribute to a meaningful goal.

As the community matures, the need for behavioral moderation remains. Why? Because members don’t want to self-police and if they do, they often go after people they disagree with rather than true violations of the community norms or ToS.”

So here is the bottom line from Impact Interactions’ view of the online community world. In order to succeed in driving the results you want, act like a professional facilitator not a parent. Remain emotionally detached from your members to stay impartial. Focus on the results and in maintaining the norms and behaviors you want in your community rather than on the personalities. And don’t act like a parent, act like a professional.

Here are a few other takes on this idea:

Raising Good Communities – The Community Roundtable

You teach what you accept: As true in parenting as it is in online community management – FreshNetworks

Leading a Community is Like Parenting - Connie Bensen

Please feel free to add your thoughts on this analogy…

Mike Rowland, President

Social Media Monitoring Software – Welcome to the Emerald City

After four weeks of evaluating social media software vendors, we’ve come to some conclusions about the reality of these tools versus the hype that we heard along the way. Let’s just say that the parallels to the Wizard of Oz are pretty interesting…

Ever since I played the Wizard in third grade at Grant School,  I’ve really loved this movie, the books, and all things Oz in general. In fact, the head janitor at my town’s high school (Westfield HS in NJ) was one of the flying monkeys in the movie! But I digress…

Impact Interactions provides multiple types of social media services to our clients including consulting, moderation, and reporting. We’ve also been doing social media monitoring for several years for a couple of clients (although it was first called Brand Defense, then Reputation Management, and now Social Media Monitoring). It was a natural extension for our trained moderation teams to help clients. We’ve been looking for a good tool for our monitoring projects rather than relying on manual means of collection. We’ve spent several weeks talking with prospective clients for this service (and yes, it’s a service but more on that later). We’ve also been socializing ideas at conferences with other social media and online community folks to build our business case for adding this service.  So with all of that background, here is how the Wizard of Oz fits in…

I Am The Great And Powerful Oz!

In listening to people speak about social media monitoring tools, they believe that they are an all powerful tool for learning where all active conversations about their brand are being held online. The content is fresh, vibrant, and oh so relevant to their business objectives. Many believe that they’ll be able to manage the flow of information with this great tool, driving insights into their organizations effectively through the export of reports from these all powerful tools. Blogs- check. Twitter- check. Article comments- check. Communities- check. Sentiment analysis- check.

Unfortunately some of the hype around these tools has put vendors in the position of trying to meet these expectations with tools that look great, work smoothly, and export reports in a single click.

Ignore That Man Behind The Curtain!

Just as the Wizard was discovered to be a mere mortal, many customers are discovering that they had expectations that were far too high for the tools. What they are finding is that the tools take someone to work with them daily to review the delivered content, decide which nuggets of information are relevant, build the trends in content sentiment, and create the report.  Just as Dorothy and friends put all their faith in the wizard only to be disappointed when Toto pulled the curtain back, many companies are finding out that Social Media Monitoring requires more than a tool… it requires a team to review the content and deliver what is relevant.

I’m Not A Bad Person, Really.

The software vendors on the other hand must shake their heads when they hear the expectations for their tools. In our discussions with many of the top vendors (and some start ups too), we found them refreshingly honest about the capabilities of their tools. This was especially the case when the hot topics of Sentiment Analysis,  Twitter, and Online Community searches came up.

Sentiment analysis is an art form, not an absolute according to every single vendor we spoke with. The range of accuracy claimed by the vendors we spoke to ranged from a low of 30% to a high of 55%. In our B2B and B2C report testing, that range seems about right. Since most if not all vendors use a similar algorithm to categorize content, that would make sense.

In essence these tools work by analysing the 2-3 words prior and after the associated keyword to determine sentiment. As we can demonstrate, there are many false positives and negatives. To counter that, most allow the end user to rate or assign sentiment to content they find with the idea of strengthening the algorithm for future searches.

Twitter is another interesting discussion. Since Twitter is the social media du jour, everyone is interested in their Twitter buzz. The issue is that these tools use the Twitter search functionality rather than getting a full read into the Twitter Database of Tweets. (Say that five times fast!) So even the top tools are not much better than doing a Twitter search on your own. But as we were told, everyone of the vendors is working on this. According to Microsoft, Bing will have this capability soon. (Kara Swisher broke the news on this one.)

When the subject of online community content was discussed we received the same honest answers from everyone.  If the community has an RSS feed, they can get the information. If it doesn’t you are out of luck. We also learned that several vendors are working on a new tact to obtain the deepest of relationship content. One of those vendors is Boardreader. They are a company to watch if your interest is in content from communities.

The Good News – The Wizard Can Help!

Just as the Wizard offered to help Dorothy return to Kansas, many of the vendors in this space will offer to help clients to structure the searches for their project. But in the end, Toto runs off and Dorothy is still stuck in Oz. All the best intentions cannot overcome the single point that organizations need someone to run and make sense of the volumes of data these tools provide.

How Do We Get Back to Kansas Now?

Sometimes despite visiting a Wizard and killing a Witch or two along the way, you still need help to get where you want to go. That’s where we come in. At Impact Interactions, we recognize that Social Media Monitoring is a service. The choice of tools is important without a doubt, but it takes a person to effectively use the tool and report the results. We offer Social Media Monitoring as a service for clients.

Impact Interactions - A One Stop Shop for Social Media Monitoring

Impact Interactions has a great social media team using a top notch tool to provide social media insight reports for our clients. We understand that you are interested in seeing where the conversations are happening, but don’t have the time to review 1,000 blog posts, 400 tweets, and 500 comments each day. By hiring Impact Interactions, you can concentrate on your strategy while our team provides your Ruby Slippers. And you don’t even have to drop a house on us to get them.

But we don’t stop there! Our team’s experience in online communities is deep. Our social media associates can help you respond to bloggers, commenters, and Twitterers too. We believe that a social media monitoring project should be integrated into your communication efforts. Our team can help you execute that strategy at a reasonable cost.

Want to learn more? Please contact us or give us a call at (410) 604-3304 to discuss how your organization and team can get the most out of social media monitoring services.

Invasion of the Marketers – How to Deal with Paid Promoters in your Community

THEY’RE HERE…….

That’s right, the brand cheerleaders have infiltrated your community and are destroying the ‘authenticity’ of the dialogue. And guess what? IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE AS MORE MARKETERS USE THIS TACTIC AS THEIR ‘VIRAL’ MARKETING CAMPAIGN.

In a recent “scandal” running through the online community world, Royal Caribbean has been using sponsored members to promote its cruises across many communities such as Cruisecritic, TripAdvisor, travel blogs, and other sites where potential cruise customers might be lurking. While Consumerist has a great write-up of the details, and Tripso.com’s Anita Dunham-Potter has more details, the tactic is not new and will always be with us. And even though folks like Jeremiah Owyang are identifying the sponsored conversations in blogs, the trend towards using online communities and social networks is increasing each week.

As a professional moderation company, we see the campaigns hit across the multiple communities we manage for our clients. We see the trends quickly, whereas a moderator working for a single community may spot the campaign a little slower. Either way, you must act because these campaigns, like spam are not going away anytime soon.

The real issue is how to deal with this issue in your community when it happens.

Early on in the 2008 Primary Election season, we noticed a large number of posters in the AARP Issues & Elections community supporting Rudy Giuliani. No matter what the criticism by the Democrat/Liberal members of the community, these folks came back cheery about how wonderful Rudy was and what a great President he would make. While not as rampant as the “Royal Champions” of Royal Caribbean, they were persistent nonetheless.

We’ve also seen product supporters for Life Alert, The Scooter Store, and every multi-level marketing program on the market today in the community.

In each instance we’ve used several steps to push back on these folks and out them as the marketers that they are. Your moderation team should see the trend before your members start to complain and take action.

Steps to Take to Clean Up Your Community:

1. Start by checking out when the ‘cheerleaders’ registered. Most marketers who use this tactic do not have enough control over their posters/viral team. So, what ends up happening is they all start registering within a few days of each other. If you see a pattern of registrations, the marketers have hit your community and you must take action.
2. Get your own hyper-affiliated enthusiasts up to speed with what is going on. Give them the okay to confront these posters with questions about are they receiving anything for their posts, are they sponsored by the brand they promote, etc.
3. ENFORCE YOUR TERMS OF SERVICE! In the case of the Life Alert and Scooter Store cheerleaders, they continually posted links to the store where you could purchase the product. They violated the TOS for advertising in the community, so our moderators were able to remove the posts.
4. TRUST YOUR MEMBERS TO RECOGNIZE THE CHEERLEADERS FOR WHAT THEY ARE! Most folks recognize that someone who never is critical of a brand/product/service is biased. In most communities, those folks lose credibility among your longer term members. Some of these members will call out the cheerleaders in public, reducing the credibility of the cheerleaders.

Despite their best efforts, many of the brands who use this strategy are not that sophisticated in selecting who they use for the job. For example, in the “Royal Champions” case, the cruise line worked with Buzz Metrics to identify its promoters and then recruited them with trips and perks. But they recruited a 14 year old! (Cruiserccl, who at the ripe age of 14, professes that program hasn’t changed his posting habits.— Yeah right, he’s a good example of the quality that some brands go to for finding cheerleaders.) How many cruises has a 14 year old gone on which would qualify them as a cruise expert?

We see most of these efforts fail because they follow the same patterns as spammers. As a community moderator/manager, you must watch the trends in your qualitative content and be ready to act. The text may not always be similar, but the tone and message in these campaigns will be. Use the tools that you have and the top members in your community! If you let these campaigns in, your members will begin to think that you are getting paid something for the campaign. This can only have a negative impact on your community.

Just as with spam email, some marketers think that paid cheerleaders as a viral campaign is a great tactic. But in the end, most of these campaigns are run poorly and have the potential to actually damage the brand that they were set up to promote. Along the way, they can also damage your community if left unchecked. To learn more about dealing with cheer leading campaigns run in your community, please contact us.

Community Myth Busting – OCUE2009 Presentation Notes

This entry is a summary of a presentation we made at last week’s Online Community Unconference East meeting in NY. The session was attended by roughly 20-25 members and lead by our president, Mike Rowland.

The idea of the session was to drive discussions regarding many of the common ideas around community that have been published/promoted/blogged about as if they were absolutes rather than the experiences of a few. The topics covered the following:

1. 90-9-1 Rule- Comes from concept of Participation by Jakob Nielson. Worked pretty well in early 1990s when published. Major impacts on this idea have been adoption of online communities since 1990, broadband adoption, social networks, etc. We find that the numbers don’t hold and should not be relied upon in selling a project to management or in goal setting due to the wide variances we’ve measured with over 40 communities over the past eight years.
   - At Participate.com, we modified the rule to use as an outreach rule of thumb.
   - At Impact Interactions, our clients have ratios all over the map
   - It’s more important to measure the quality of interactions as it relates to your objectives instead of trying to work towards a specific ratio
2. Self-Policing Communities – Using volunteers to moderate and report violations is a hot trend for organizations to buy into right now. But it’s been that way since at least 2000 when we spoke of hyper-affiliates and enthusiasts. Our experience has shown that most community members cannot be relied upon to keep the community moving forward.
   - Volunteers will catch some violations, but mostly report content that they don’t agree with. This forces community team to review content twice or more which is inefficient
   - Volunteers are good at defensive work (spam, porn, etc.) but do not align with your organization’s objectives in most cases and won’t faciliate most B2C communities (B2B support communities, they usually will keep the conversations moving forward towards a resolution.)
   - Data in our presentation that we’ve been tracking each year for clients shows that members generally report about 20-30% of all violations in any given month. You still need moderation…
   - Our surveys of multiple community members (both B2B and B2C) over time shows that members don’t want to be classified as a tattle tail, nor do they believe it is their responsibility to keep the community free of junk, nor do they want to handle being attacked for removing or editing members’ content for violations.
3. Personas – There are strong feelings around this topic. The term authenticity comes up quite a bit when discussing personas when what is really meant is transparency.
   Great conversations on this one, with no conclusion reached about using personas or not.
   - Most personas get blown by members because the host creating the persona doesn’t think through the process and character, misuse the persona to cheerlead the organization and its products, is so unbelievable (master of health issues, political issues, computer technology, astrology, etc.), or is used to sell in the community. All of these are wrong and should be avoided.
   - Where personas work well is very, very limited. In new communities, personas can help seed conversational content and help demonstrate norms. In a flame war, they can help diffuse the situation (especially in the case of unjust attacks). Over time, as the community grows, the role of the persona should diminish.
4. Volunteers/Hyper-Affiliates as Good Guys – Beware the myth that your top people will always love and support your community.
   - The more volunteers/hyper-affiliates you have is not always a good metric
   - They don’t always follow the rules and have no objectivity
   - When a volunteer or hyper-affiliate turns against you, the result is a much larger confrontation than you might think.
   - Once enabled, it is very difficult to make changes to your site/community without a large time commitment to deal with the criticism of your volunteer network.
   - Letting volunteers and hyper-affiliates run the community demonstrates favoritism on the part of the host organization in the eyes of many non-recognized members. It is a double edged sword which if not carefully managed can have very negative consequences on your community’s conversion and engagement ratios.
5. Community ROI cannot be measured – Everyone is familiar with the cost avoidance argument to measure ROI. But after that, the conversation usually stops because the thought is that it is too hard to show the economic value of the community.
   - Don’t confuse value with ROI… they are not the same!
   - You can measure the economic value generated by your community using multiple data sources and methods. We’ve measured the online community ROI for sales (influence on purchase & intent), Marketing (awareness and loyalty), lead generation (development and qualify leads faster), and e-learning (higher achievement and registrations). They all require certain data that doesn’t come just from the community’s metrics.

We’ve uploaded the presentation as a pdf on our web site in our Social Media Resource Center.

Hey! Who’s driving this thing?: Online Community Unconference East 2009

At the Online Community Unconference East, there was a broad range of conversations from ROI and community benchmarks to the psychology behind using online communities. Throughout these sessions I noticed a common theme brought up several times was super user engagement and incentive programs. That in itself is a topic that I was not surprised to hear about. Engaging and encouraging your hyper-affiliated members to contribute regularly drives better content, activity, and engagement throughout the community. Asking these members for feedback, to help out other users when they can, and highlighting them as role models for community behavior is a standard best practice. Where this conversation ventured off path was when I heard the question (I’m paraphrasing here) “My team does not have the time to deal with all of the violations in our community and in this economic climate we just can’t bring more staff on board. Can I get my super users to take on this responsibility?” Simple answer to this one. No.

Giving members of the community the ability to flag content and users that violate the community rules is a valuable tool that allows moderators to identify problems and act more quickly. This is a function that is built in to the majority of community platforms today. But giving members the administrative power to make actionable decisions on the behalf of your organization begins to border on the edges of shirking your own responsibilities and will inevitably leave you asking yourself “Hey, who’s driving this thing?”

No matter how much your members love your product, your brand, your cause; they are not there for your company. They have their own reason for participating in your online community and that reason is often not to uphold all rules and requirements set out by the sponsoring organization. You will find some volunteers that have a great helper mentality and want to do all that they can for the community but can you risk your brand reputation on hoping that one of these members won’t steer the company into oncoming traffic? Remember that these highly active users already have a tremendous sway over the conversation in your community because they are very visible and have built up a reputation to where other members will follow their lead. Handing over administrative tools will only amplify this power.

The level of freedom that you give your members will obviously depend on the type of community and the audience but the ultimate responsibility for running the community needs to lie in the hands of the organization. Volunteer super users cannot take the place of a dedicated and objective moderation team. In our experience of moderating an online community with over 50,000 users and many members that have been deeply involved with the organization online for over 10 years, we find many members that are active in reporting objectionable activities. Despite this, we still see that on average 75% of the terms of service violations are being reported by our moderation team where only 25% of violations are noted by members.

When the internal resources in an organization are stretched too thin to bear the brunt of moderating their communities, contracted moderation services become a viable and cost effective alternative to the expense of hiring additional staff.

If your organization needs help handling the moderation load or are looking for proven moderation best practices, leave us a comment here or Contact Us.

Jen Graziani

Online Community Leaderboards – A Competitive Edge or Disincentive?

I just finished reading an entry on Leaderboards Considered Harmful on the Building Web 2.0 Reputation Systems: The Blog by Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass. As positioned, the authors are correct in saying that the overemphasis on competitive measures can actually harm a community rather than enhance the experience. The major assumption in the article is that leaderboards must be a fixed, cumulative measure of activity that do not measure quality only quantity. But as a community leader, you can move beyond that simple use of leaderboards to truly recognize quality if you want to do so.

As part of a recent client engagement, we surveyed more than 30 B2B community sites to uncover how leaderboards and recognition features were being used to build loyalty and reward members for the quality of participation. We were shocked to find that almost all of the communities awarded icons based upon quantity only with no recognition for quality. These communities were using software from all the major vendors including Telligent, Lithium, Mzinga, KickApps, Jive, Small World Labs, Leverage Software, and others. Even where the software allowed some additional quality measures, most communities were not using the feature or if they were, they were not actively promoting its use.

While most leaderboards are set up poorly, it is due to the software more than to a lack of creative thinking. For example, we helped the Intel Software Network a few years back on a project to recreate their reputation/loyalty program for their community. In the course of our analysis and recommendations, we strongly recommended flexible leaderboards which could be updated to show members from all strata of membership, from long term members to newbies to those who selectively participate with excellent content. The response from their software vendor… “We can only do that if you pay X thousand dollars to allow us to develop this as a feature for our roadmap.” A poor answer if their ever was one… this software company for a modest investment could have developed flexible leaderboards into its product and sold it as an upgrade for its client base, making money for itself while helping its clients. Instead it wanted its client to pay for all development costs upfront, then be able to sell it to its clients. Needless to say, Intel backed away.

We manage the Cisco Networking Professionals community (NetPro). We’ve been involved for more than eight years in one way or another. In that time, we’ve seen our leaderboards grow with members who have dedicated their time to the community for several years and been awarded the member recognition points for their efforts. A new member today might be intimidated to try and get on the leaderboard recognizing that it would take years to even crack the top twenty. But that’s why we offer a second leaderboard that shows our top NetPros for the month. We even go one step further and rank each NetPro on quality. We do this by giving the original member asking a question or starting a thread the power to add a check mark to the response which solves or best answers the original post. These red check marks are the quality measure for all NetPros. By viewing a member with thousands of points, you see activity. By viewing a member with hundreds of check marks, you see quality.

One of the software packages on the market today that is moving in this direction is Jive’s Clearspace platform. By allowing members to award points for correct or helpful answers, Jive’s platform promotes the leaderboard approach. But since it also allows a check mark system to recognize a successful interaction, it measures quality as well.

So, in short, don’t let the leaderboard issue trip you up in your community management strategy. Leaderboards are a good tactic when used properly. Flexibility is the key, make the scoring useful to members rather than simply a competition for members. (And don’t be afraid to push your software company to develop more flexible approaches to this feature, it benefits everyone.)

If you’d like to learn more about community strategies and tactics for recognizing and rewarding members, please contact us. We’re happy to help.

Beware the 90%-9%-1% Myth of Community Participation

Over the past year or two, it has been very fashionable for social media consultants to push the 90%-9%-1% community participation breakdown as the benchmark for all communities to reach or surpass. We’ve seen this statement be presented at the Community2.0 conferences, Forum One’s community conferences, in blogs, and now in a new site 90-9-1.com. While we do not doubt the sincerity of our competition in trying to develop a benchmark that is easy to remember and use, we do have an issue with this one.

Let’s start with the generalization across all communities and social media. Do active blogs and wikis really have 1% superusers and 9% active users who are adding content? I doubt it. Take out the company sponsor/employee who is employed to maintain the blog or wiki and the numbers drop in a big way. Most of the blogs we’ve seen metrics on in the B2B space have a ratio closer to 99-.9-.1. That’s a lot less than the ‘benchmark’ being touted as the industry standard. Go to any of the major blogs whose audiences are the high users of social media like AllThingsD or TechCrunch to see how low these ratios actually are. I don’t have the metrics, but a casual glance reveals that even at TechCrunch, the ratio is closer to the 99-.9-.1 than 90-9-1.

What about online communities? There again, the ratios are dependent upon the purpose of the community. With most community consultants failing to distinguish between a B2B and a B2C community, most advice provided is based upon B2C communities. But that is a major mistake. B2B communities are very different than B2C in terms of function, objectives, members, and participation. In our experience managing and measuring many B2B communities, the participation results are all over the map. One client offers an open B2B technology community with a ratio of 70-25-5. A previous client offers a closed B2B support community that achieved a ratio of 60-30-10. Another B2B client had a ratio of 98-1.9-.1.

Even the B2C communities we’ve managed have a different ratio based upon their targeted audience. One that we are managing currently has a ratio closer to 99.9-.07-.03. Using the myth of 90-9-1, this community would be considered a failure. But with a membership of over 300,000 new members in the past year and the demonstrated success in meeting the organization’s online goals, it is far from a failure.

Why is there a difference between what we are seeing and the myth of 90-9-1? Our experience has proven to us that there is no magic number to reach for when building and managing your community. Rather, the results are dependent upon several factors:

1. What are the demographics of your audience? Older audiences read more, participate less (with the exception of political communities and blogs). Male dominated audiences tend to participate at higher rates than female dominated audiences with the caveat that men usually try to dominate the participation in mixed audiences. Audiences who are more comfortable with technology will usually have higher participation rates than non-technology audiences.
2. What is the focus of your community? Support communities have much higher participation rates than any other type of community we’ve measured. General entertainment communities without a purpose usually spike, but then show declines in participation as they age (usually due to dominant members who use the community as their bully pulpit).
3. Are you B2B focused or B2C focused? B2B communities should have higher participation levels because members come to find information and build relationships with the company offering the community. If they find what they want, they return. A well run, facilitated B2B community will bring members back again and again.
4. What level of outreach and marketing are you performing? Unless your community becomes the next viral success, your participation rates are directly related to the amount of success you have in marketing your community.
5. How engaged is your organization in the community? In B2B communities, the higher the engagement of your employees, the more members will participate. In B2C communities, the moderators must be visible, yet not play in the community as members. They are the referees. When B2C moderators become too friendly with members in a community, new members see favoritism not balance. They then have a disincentive to participate.
6. How much content is available? Without content, there isn’t much to discuss.
7. Does your organization practice the “If we build it, they will come” method for managing communities? If so, your participation rates are doomed to be low (as will your conversion and other engagement rates). You must actively manage your community. We recommend personas as well as employees to demonstrate desired community norms and to establish the member to member interactions model for the community.

If you’ve read down this far, hopefully you’ll agree that the 90-9-1 ratio is a myth not reality. Where is your community with regards to this ratio? Does it matter? Not really.

What does matter is what are the measurable results for your community or social media offering. Are members getting what they need? Is that successful interaction benefiting your organization? These are the questions that are important, not a ratio.

We’ve helped many organizations achieve stronger results with their social media projects than they thought possible. We have created the best practices for B2B and B2C efforts that can help meet both the needs of your audience and your organization. We’d be happy to help your organization move beyond basic social media tactics to a more strategic method to engage members and achieve business results. To learn more, please visit our web site.

Online Community: Best Practices in Moderation Techniques

There is an interesting entry on Jeremiah’s blog about “Job Hazards of the Community Manager” which is generating a lot of comments from newer, less experienced community managers. What is fascinating is that what Jeremiah is blogging about never has to happen, nor should it.

Specifically, the entry is about the ‘cyber-stalking’ of community managers outside of their own community on places like Facebook and MySpace (and for you B2B folks, LinkedIn). Many community managers are shocked to learn that members assume that the relationship extends outside of the community. When these relationships are good, it’s not so bad. But when relationships are bad, it’s really bad.

In our nine years of managing online communities and social networks for clients, we’ve seen all types of reactions by members towards community managers. A strong, sometimes intense relationship can occur in active communities and should not be discounted. These relationships can be extremely tight and formed over years. But they should never go outside the existing community ecosystem. Here is why this is true and it might surprise you because there are two sides to this…

1. When a community manager or moderator can be located outside the community, too much personal information can be found which may reflect poorly on your brand. For example, we know of several community managers using their own names in B2C communities who had information on Facebook that was not appropriate. That information was used against them in the community. Similarly, in one of the communities we currently manage, we have a disgruntled member searching all over the net for anyone who has ever been associated with the community within the client’s team and sending threatening emails. Do you want these people to find you and drag you into their soap opera?

2. When a community manager is known personally (Tom Smith), what do you as an organization when that person leaves? We’ve seen former community managers who were let go by companies, blog complaints about their treatment. And guess what? The community members found the blogs and then brought the subject up in the community and fired off angry emails to corporate legal departments. This tied up all kinds of resources unnecessarily for several weeks.

So, here is the best practice for companies launching communities and for community managers:

NEVER USE YOUR REAL NAME IN A COMMUNITY!

Seems simple right? But in the misguided thinking of building relationships that are true and honest with the community members, too many community managers are using their real names & pictures in their community. And the sponsoring companies aren’t thinking about what could go wrong and impact their brand online. Everyone needs to remember that there are bad guys out there too… not everyone buys into the uptopian experience of community as detailed in many of the leading community management ‘theory’ books and articles. So beware the false best practices being pitched by many consultants and focus on those best practices that make sense in the long run.

We recommend that community managers use a name that is ‘generic’ such as Community Host, HostTom (instead of Tom Smith), etc. That way the privacy of the individual acting as a community manager is protected, while allowing the company to replace the community manager if needed without stirring up the community too much. When you are building out your strategy and processes, you need to think long term with a bias towards protecting your brand against unnecessary attacks in the future.

Want to learn more about our best practices and how our real world tested methodology can help your organization sift through the misperceptions about running a community? Contact us, we can help you build a stronger community or social network based on our nine years’ of experience.

Can Community Members Police Themselves?

The criticism question or fear is always the 1,000 pound gorilla in the room when discussing communities with new clients and prospects. The idea of someone bashing your product or brand in public is still a very uncomfortable idea for many executives. Unfortunately, too many of our competitors whether they are consultants or software companies, answer that the criticism will be answered by members, so don’t worry about it so much. But that is entirely the wrong answer.

In our nine years experience in working with online communities and social networks, we’ve developed the slide below to help organizations understand the stages of the community lifecycle from a moderation/facilitation/member contributions standpoint:

The trouble with most community advice being given today is that it assumes that most communities are starting at the higher end of the Middle Maturity level or in some cases at the High Maturity level. In our experience, this has never been the case. All communities launch at the Low Maturity level. It is up to the organization offering the community to understand the needs of the community and get involved early to help the community mature. If you sit back, the community will never get to the High Maturity level shown above.Regarding criticism in the community, our experiences vary. But in short, if you rely on your community members to police themselves and respond to criticism you will be disappointed.

In nine years of working with over 40 online communities and social networks, we’ve seen very few communities that had reached the stage of maturity where they could police themselves. Here is what we’ve learned about this from surveying multiple communities about the idea of members policing the site:

• The majority of members in most communities will not report violations. Sure a couple of your top members might, but members believe it is the hosting company’s responsibility to keep the community clean and working.
• The overwhelming reason why members won’t report issues is the fear of being labelled a ‘tattletale’ or company employee or company shill by other members ruining their credibility online.
• While members have an affinity for your brand, they don’t have a responsibility to defend your brand and many will wait to see how you respond as an organization before jumping on board to support.
• Members in B2C communities actually enjoy a good flame war from time to time. They want to see the community management in action to reassure them that the organization cares about the conduct within the community and that the management is aware of the member needs. Because of this, in many B2C communities, members will not step up to prevent or stop a flame war, but rather actively participate in it. This is especially true of your most devoted members.

One example we have where a member stood up against a trolling competitor in a B2B community was with a large technology community back in 2002. In this case, a competitor trashed the product being looked at by a member of the community. Our moderation process was to leave the criticism up and respond after 2 business days. Within a day, we saw a member respond with a long comparision of the products mentioned which clearly showed the benefits of our client’s products over the competition’s. But this was a single instance out of many… and in a community that was already moving towards High Maturity, not in a new community.

In the B2C communities that we are moderating, we see that roughly 85% of all violations of the terms of service are found by our moderation team. Even worse, 50% of the violations reported by members are not violations but rather cases where they disagree with the member’s point of view (so we restore the content). When members of the community criticize the organization, they ridicule members who support the organization. After several of these discussions, members stop coming to the aid of the organization.

So what should you do? You must leave the criticism up if it’s valid and respond. Just don’t expect your members to do it for you. Part of running a community is getting into the mix and interacting with members…. too many companies are being told by consultants to sit back and let the members dictate the community’s operation. That’s just poor advice. Process and moderation/facilitation are very necessary in any community. Letting members dictate everything ends up in chaos which does not result in achieving any significant objectives for the organization offering the community.

Want to learn more about moderating and facilitating in your online community? Visit our web site to download our free presentations and contact us with your questions.

Has Viacom Gone Too Far?

Very interesting take on the recent court decision regarding Viacom’s request for user records from Google/YouTube by the District Court for Southern New York Judge Louis Stanton. In his article “Viacom Has Gone Too Far” author Lance Ulanoff gets a bit upset by what he sees are the implications for users of YouTube. Among his chief complaints? Viacom will now probably go after millions of members to try and get them to pay for the copyrighted videos they viewed on YouTube because they are greedy. Well, he says Billionaire Sumner Redstone is greedy…

Read some of these blurbs from the story:

“Once Google delivers the terabytes worth of data, you and your minions can pour over it looking for copyrighted content and those who watched it. Oh, I know you say you just want to understand if people watch more illegal content than legal—like it’s all some academic exercise—but I say there’s more to it than that. You want to go after the viewers. You want to find people who consume too much Colbert Report and MTV on YouTube and find a way to levy a fine on them. “

“With those logs in hand, though, Mr. Redstone, Viacom has the will and means to do all sorts of nasty things. It will learn what copyrighted videos still exist, whether or not people still watch them, and who the watchers are. A witch hunt could ensue.”

What a bunch of nonsense. What did Viacom get the judgement to obtain? User records which can identify which users uploaded the copyrighted videos. Google can and probably will appeal the ruling. Why? Certainly not because they are interesting in protecting their members. Rather they will appeal because once they provide that information, it will no longer be cool to upload videos on YouTube and they will lose advertising revenues. Viewers are only attracted if the content is good….lose the content and you lose the viewers, the ad clicks, and their associated revenue streams.

But the bigger question remains in the author’s mind… “When will they go after the viewers?” Answer: Probably never.

Why? It’s not going to be cost effective nor is there any legal reason to do so. The DMCA is all about those who upload or transfer copyrighted materials, not those who only watch. User data including the transactional metrics for users is very valuable information to have when pursuing a copyright infringement case using the DMCA.

But not because of the information on the viewers separated from the videos uploaded…

The reason to get this information is to isolate the members who uploaded the most copyrighted materials, then build the trail of users who viewed them in order to have metrics backing up the amount that Google/YouTube owes you for the copyrighted content. Secondary reason is that if you lose this suit and Google/YouTube is found to be protected under the Safe Harbor Provision of the DMCA, then you have the data through discovery to go after the individuals who are now responsible for the lost revenues. (Not that they will collect the money, but it will send a strong message.)

We continue to hear so many people say that there is no harm in letting the members of a social network or community upload what they want and control the norms of the site. It’s the Internet for goodness sake! But unfortunately, these folks have had a bit too much of the internet communist Kool-Aid. This case is proving that these people (and many of them are consultants in the online community/social networking world) are on the wrong side and mis-informed. We hope that this case continues to move towards a judgement rather than a settlement in order to provide clarity for any organization that offers its members the opportunity to upload content to their site.

Looking for a better way to deal with all of these issues? Contact us. We’re not lawyers, although we have slept at Holiday Inns from time to time….