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

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. AARP’s online community (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 800,000 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 contact us.

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