Determining Online Community ROI (Part 1: Community-Side Metrics)

by Matthew Lees

In recent months my research, writing, and client work has (happily) focused on one of the hottest topics in social media…calculating ROI. For a variety of reasons, determining quantifiable ROI of social media programs and online community initiatives presents a variety of challenges. There’s nothing new in this statement; people have been trying for years to make it easier to figure this out. But ROI keeps fighting back. It’s getting to the point, though, where business executives will be expecting a more quantified understanding of the impact customer communities, for example, are having on the bottom line. Knowing that it’s “the right thing to do” from a customer-centric perspective isn’t going to cut it much longer.

One of the challenges is the fact that some (or even most) of the information needed to measure ROI isn’t in a convenient location.

Last year in a post called “B2B Communities – What Works,” Mike Rowland discussed a handful of essential best practices for B2B communities. He wrote: “You can measure the ROI for B2B communities, but you cannot get there by using only community software metrics and/or web analytics packages like Omniture or Google Analytics. None of these provide true value metrics that have an economic value associated with them. To get to ROI, you must build relationships within your organization so you can obtain real data on customers, leads, ecommerce transactions, etc.”

Right on, Mike. To get at community ROI (whether for B2B, B2C, or any other type of community), you’ve got to track down data from several sources – particularly from sources that you probably don’t have direct control over or access to – which takes building relationships, making allies, and a bit of legwork.

Community-Side Metrics
The relatively straightforward part of the legwork compiling the data you do have direct access to. This is the information you can get from log files, your community platform database (often through an analytics dashboard), and, if you use one, a third-party analytics package (such as Google Analytics or Omniture). The types of things available from these community-side sources include:

•    Traffic and Usage. Pages served, page views, visits (and unique visits), time on site, etc.
•    Membership. Total members, new members, active members, reputation and ranks, etc.
•    Activity. Posts, comments, ideas, invitations, votes, ratings, subscriptions/notifications, downloads, views (e.g., of video clips), time between posts, etc.
•    Search. Both quantity of searches and specific search terms (such as top 20 search terms)
•    Other. Moderation (e.g., moderator touches), referrer pages, etc.

Ideally you’ll be able to break down this data based on important parameters, such as time and location within the community. For example, you’ll probably want to look at the all-time number of members, as well as the number of members over a given time period (typically week-over-week or month-over-month). And you may want to look not only at total pages served within the community, but also at pages served within particular areas (such as forums, blogs, idea sites, and so on).

Community-side metrics can be very useful, but, as Mike wrote, they don’t illustrate economic value. At least, not in and of themselves. They’re certainly useful in terms of knowing whether or not the community is healthy (three consecutive months of decreasing page views, for example, might tell you that something is wrong), but they only get you part of the way toward determining ROI.

Up next…building relationships and doing the legwork to identify the business-side metrics that get you the rest of the way there.


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This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Measurement & Reporting. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Online Community – Moving Beyond Metrics to ROI

We gave a presentation on building ROI models for online communities at the Online Community Unconference in Mountain View, CA on June 10th. It was added because so many of the participants stated that ROI and calculating the value of their community was the most important issue they faced.  So, we didn’t have time to build a true presentation, but rather lead a workshop for participants to learn more. It was lead by our president, Mike Rowland.

Here are the summary notes taken during the session:

  • Have to first identify what is the economic value of the community to the organization offering it: (Don’t confuse traffic or behavior metrics with value)
    • Cost Avoidance
    • Increased subscription rates or lower churn rate
    • More frequent purchase rates
    • Higher purchase level/amts
    • Faster close for large item sales
    • Reduce lead generation cost
  • Once you’ve identified your value metrics, break down your metrics into 3 buckets to look at communities:
    • Traffic – PV, visits, visitors, etc.
    • Behavior – What they do when the get there, who they are, download/visit, contribution/member, responses by employees vs. customers
    • Value – can attach an economic value to it. Need $ to get to a true ROI model. See above list.
  • You have to build relationships w/ the folks in your company. Need access to other systems. You cannot build ROI from community analytics provided by software vendors or from traffic and behavior metrics alone. 
  • ROI Frameworks:
    • Cost Avoidance
      • The person who proposes the question needs to verify the answer. This is a feature needed in the platform.
      • # of community support resolutions X $ complimentary support resolution (1-800 number) = total cost avoidance -> economic value
      • Track over set period of time (e.g. quarterly or yearly)
      • ROI = (total economic value – total costs to set up and run forum) / total costs –> over one period and as a percentage
    • Increased subscription or reduced churn
      • Customer database compared to community database
      • cust. database = Average churn rate (e.g. the number of months the avg user subscribes) X price/subscription = customer value
      • Community database – look at active members and see if the churn rate is better or worse.
      • Price will be the same, so you’ll have to see if the churn rate was more or less. If subscriptions are longer, than you have a higher customer value for community members.
      • Shows you slowed the churn rate down.
    • More frequent purchase or Higher Purchase level/amts
      • Use your eCommerce DB or CRM system
      • What is the avg amt customers spend/purchase?
      • go back to comm DB and parce out active members and compare to ecommerce DB (which ones spend more/purchase?)
      • Do comm members have a higher spend/purchase? active comm users X avg $ they spend = economic value
      • Need to trend this and see how it fluctuates.
      • what is the average number of items in completed shopping activity? (e.g. 1.6 items) Do comm members buy more?
      • Avg cost/item X avg # items = economic value
    • CRM decrease cost
      • Want to find what avg value of customer is
    • Faster close of sale (Good for large purchases like software or hardware systems)
      • How fast are organizations moving through your CRM system to sale?
      • Identify active organizations in community DB to compare them to avg organizations.
      • How long does it take the avg. organization to go through sale stages? What’s the cost/sale? Do active organizations in your community go through more quickly and spend more?
    • Lead generation cost
      • Similar to above, but use cost to generate a lead for average customer versus those which originate in community/social media campaigns
  • How can you tell if a user came to your comm and then bought your product through a 3rd party reseller? You can’t unless your resellers provide access to their databases which is next to impossible to get.
  • Users of support communities become brand neutral after their issue becomes resolved.
  • Hidden costs of community for ROI Analysis, make sure you count these:
    • Servers
    • development costs
    • customizations
    • widgets
    • maintenance
  • Make sure that you are amortizing your costs across the same time period as your economic value or you will skew your results.

One point to remember is that the value of communities really is derived from active members, not all members. So define your active members with criteria that meet your behavioral key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, an active member can be someone who posted in a forum, downloaded a featured whitepaper, uploaded content, or viewed a webcast in the past month. For B2B especially, it doesn’t have to be an activity within the past week as most B2B community members average 2-3 visits per month unless they are deep into the sales cycle.

The number one issue to watch out for when building your ROI framework is the use of proxies. If you cannot get the data, don’t guess at a proxy for the value because the more proxies you utilize the bigger the house of cards that you build.

Lastly, value can be a set of different items. For a subscription based community value can be both churn rate differential and purchase levels. ROI is not a single value formula, it is a multiple value formula in most cases as there is marketing value in support communities and vice versa. So make sure that you are at least attempting to capture as much of the value drivers as possible in your analysis.

Want to learn more about online community or social media ROI? Contact us today or leave a comment.


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This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 11:47 am and is filed under Best Practices, Measurement & Reporting. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

B2B Communities – What Works

We gave a presentation at last week’s Online Community Unconference (site is open to the public as of June 19th per Forum One) in Mountain View, CA on B2B Communities. We weren’t surprised by the number of attendees looking to learn more about the best practices for running a B2B Community, but were surprised a little bit by some of the misperceptions on managing them.

Top Best Practices for B2B Communities:

  1. B2B Community Members have higher expectations than B2C members. You must engage with them as they want to engage with your company just as much as they want to engage with their peers.
  2. B2B Communities require internal SMEs to engage early and remain committed to meeting member needs until external SMEs can compliment the internal SME efforts.
  3. Third party applications like Twitter and Facebook should not be used as external competitive communities, but rather should be utilized as beacons to drive traffic to your community and key information.
  4. You can measure the ROI for B2B communities, but you cannot get there by using only community software metrics and/or web analytics packages like Omniture or Google Analytics. None of these provide true value metrics that have an economic value associated with them. To get to ROI, you must build relationships within your organization so you can obtain real data on customers, leads, ecommerce transactions, etc.
  5. When budgeting for B2B communities, be realistic. For example, no single vendor of software or web design or implementation services will ever come in exactly where they quote when you want additional features or customization. So build a small cushion into your budget to be safe.
  6. To attract business decision makers, you must focus on how they will use the site… not how you want to market to them.
  7. The higher the level within an organization your potential members have attained, the lower the amount of time they will have to spend on your site. So don’t waste their time!

In short, B2B communities can deliver impressive results when managed properly with a focus on those segments who deliver the value to your organization. Don’t be all things to all people, that strategy is doomed to fail. To learn more about the best practices for B2B communities, please download our presentation , ask questions in the comments area below, or contact us.


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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Measurement & Reporting. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Why Does Everyone Believe Community ROI Is So Hard To Measure?

Just finished reading Jeremiah Owyang’s blog on ROI for online communities and social media. The entry is here. Jeremiah’s suggestions are accurate and some of the comments from our colleagues are really helpful. Here is our commentary which we’ve also posted on Jeremiah’s blog:

What I find interesting about this topic is the general disagreement of the relevance of ROI in the discussions of community and social media experts. We’ve attended events, webinars, and industry meetings, where people were unclear or downplayed the importance of this measure for social media and communities. Others in the Social Media space blog frequently that ROI is either tough to do or not relevant.

At Impact Interactions, we believe that ROI is a crucial element of the community building and management process. You must start building your framework before the community even launches, then refine it over time. But you cannot use just the metrics from your community, you must align them with additional data from within the organization (CRM records for B2B for example).

For B2B support clients, we measure technical questions answered by members as a cost avoidance measure to demonstrate the scalability of the community versus call center costs. We supplement it with survey data on customer satisfaction, purchase influence, and information utility. It all adds up to a large ROI.

For a marketing focused B2B community, we built a framework that demonstrated the influence that the community had in influencing sales of multi-million dollar contracts. We mined the transactional data and compared it with the CRM records to develop a pattern of influence on sales velocity, lead generation, and sales.

For a B2C automotive parts company, we compared sales transactions from the companies e-commerce database with community transactions to find the ROI for the community. It also reinforced the powerful notion that community members were buying more frequently than non-community members and that each purchase transaction was larger than those of non-community members.

For a B2C subscription based service, at Participate.com we demonstrated that community members churned at a rate 50% lower than non-community members, resulting in millions of dollars of revenue and profits.

Each of these clients had an ROI on their community of over 100% once their communities scaled.

It is not hard to develop the ROI framework, but it does take time and relationships within the organization to get the appropriate data. If you are a community manager, you need to build a network outside of the community area in your organization in order to align the community’s analytics with your organization’s focus and goals. Only then will you be able to tap into CRM or e-commerce databases to validate your framework.

We have some basics on B2B ROI in presentations available for free in our Social Media Resource Center on our website. Please feel free to visit and download the presentations. In our introductory deck on Impact Interactions, we have quotes from Cisco, Mercury Interactive, and ATT on their ROI from their online community efforts. Here is the link: http://www.impactinteractions.com/social-media-resource-center.html

What Jeremiah has posted is absolutely spot on. But is up to you as a community manager to act. In this environment, you cannot afford to have your community (and job) viewed as a soft application that doesn’t produce tangible, measurable results. If you’d like to learn more, please contact us.


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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Measurement & Reporting. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Online Community – B2B Return on Investment (ROI) During Recessions

As we move through a downward business cycle, smart companies are moving counter intuitively to engage more with their customers rather than decreasing their online community efforts. The slide below from a presentation during the height of the Dot Com implosion in 2003 shows that even in a recession, online communities still deliver impressive returns on their investments:

What is interesting about these quotes is that the communities referenced were launched in the 1998 to 2000 time frame when online community was a new offering on the web. To gain these results, our clients had to change the behavior of their potential members to include online communities in their work routines. While it seems old fashioned today when everyone knows what an online community is, these results demonstrate one of our best practices:

Online Communities must be managed to achieve key performance indicators (KPIs) which demonstrate achievement of business objectives

Too often organizations buy into the idea that the offering itself will be enough. The “build it and they will come” idea has been proven to fail almost every time. And yet, we see organizations thinking about cutting their community investment or launching a community and letting the community run itself. That is a recipe for failure as well. It also reflects the thinking that online communities and social networks are a ’soft’ application (meaning that they cannot prove their value quantitatively). It is for this reason that many managers move to cut online community budgets dramatically during downturns. This is exactly the wrong time to cut, this is the time to build.

In times of economic uncertainty, your customers and prospects will perform more due diligence than ever prior to buying your product or service. Online communities and social networks are valuable tools in that process. Will a community without a strong company presence be able to influence the purchase decision? Probably not. This reinforces a second best practice:

In B2B Communities and Social Networks, members come to build a relationship with your company more than with their peers

So how does this tie into the ROI argument? Simple… if your organization is not prepared to engage with the community members by answering their questions, providing documentation, linking them with content, and asking their opinions your community will wither away during the downturn. If your organization is ready to engage with your community, you will build additional brand loyalty among members. Your community will be vibrant in comparison with your competitors who are pulling back. You will be demonstrating the value of working with your organization over the competition. By providing correct information rather than partially correct information (community managers facilitating conversations do this part), you help your prospects learn more about your products/services/company and build confidence in them that you’ll be there to help.

Remember that in most B2B communities, the ratio for those visitors who read versus those who add content is roughly 25 to 1. This means that every successful interaction potentially influences another 25 visitors on average. Depending upon the product or service, it can be much higher. Influence is correlated with purchase intent. When your community is functioning properly and is well managed, the influence it wields is tremendous.

By mining your registration database against your customer database, you’ll be able to prove the value of your online community. By using a proxy of 2-5% of sales made to community members were influenced by the community, you’ll be able to calculate a basic ROI. To refine the proxy, survey your members about the influence the community has had on their purchase decisions. You’ll be surprised how large a percentage of community members have been influenced by something they read or received from the community. But if you are not investing in your community, you will not get the growth needed to generate a positive ROI.

And that’s just the sales/marketing ROI. For those B2B communities engaged in self-service customer support, the cost avoidance equation is easier to figure out and measure.

Want to learn more? Visit our website (Impact Interactions) to download our free presentations on online community best practices.


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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Measurement & Reporting. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Online Community Metrics & Reporting- Another Viewpoint

Matthew Lees of the Patricia Seybold Group and Robert Dell’Immagine of VMWare presented the topic of Metrics and Reporting to the Santa Fe meeting last Monday morning. Several of Matthew’s comments were interesting from the perspective that it appears many organizations continue to have trouble measuring the true value from their communities. A couple of his comments from his research:


But the most important message from Matthew’s presentation was: What are you going to do once you’ve measured the impact of your site? Too often, organizational managers say “Great, our numbers are up or our metrics are okay.” instead of trying to understand why the metrics look the way they do and what they can do to improve them.

Measuring activity is easy. Measuring business value is hard.Out of the box platforms’ reporting tools will not give you value/impact metrics.

 

What are your customers using to measure their success vs. what does success mean to your organization?

 

(An example of using metrics for advancing a web site was demonstrated by our client SAP. In reviewing landing page metrics for multiple countries, we noticed that one country was not converting its visitors to registered members at anywhere near the same rate as our other country pages. Because of this data, SAP reviewed its page in the context of navigation and contextual language and discovered that the text was unclear as to the real benefits of registration for the targeted country’s population. The pages were then re-written with a different call to action and tested. Over time, as the metrics came in, further adjustments to the call to action text were made and the overall conversion improved.)
The process that Matthew recommends for measurement and action is as follows:

Hypothesis –>Baseline–>Action–>Evaluation–>Moving the Needle

Robert’s presentation was a good reminder for everyone that metrics evolve over time and that one set of metrics agreed upon at the outset of the community may not meet the needs of all stakeholders. For example, Robert’s community team reports to multiple stakeholders including the community team, support, product management, marketing, and executives. Each has their own requirement for information and metrics to back up their own ideas. As Robert stated, “our metrics viewed have evolved over time.” I couldn’t have put it better.

Are you interested in learning more about reporting and metrics? Impact Interactions is the leading online community strategy firm helping clients to measure the impact of their site offerings. From your pay-per-click campaigns through your ROI, we can help you understand how visitors/members are using your site and how it ties to your organizational/business goal. To learn more, please contact us.


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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Best Practices, Measurement & Reporting. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Online Community Expert Dan Bruhn Joins Impact Interactions

Dramatic growth in High Tech clients focusing upon user generated content on web sites has increased the need for experienced executives who can bring strong real world business processes to manage the submitted content. To help our clients in this sector, Dan Bruhn has joined the Impact Interactions team as our Senior Consultant for High Technology engagements. A graduate of Bradley University, Dan brings over seven years experience in online communities, marketing, technical support, and analytics to our client engagements.

Prior to joining Impact Interactions, Dan worked with Cisco Systems’ award winning Networking Professionals Community (NetPro). In his role with Impact Interactions, Dan will continue to lead all engagements within Cisco, including the ongoing moderation engagement for NetPro. Additionally, Dan will provide best practices for Impact Interactions’ business-to-business clients pursuing online community-based interactive strategies.

“Dan provides our clients with an additional level of online community expertise. He and I worked together in the early days of NetPro at Cisco and his experience in using online communities to drive measurable results is significant,” states Impact Interactions president Mike Rowland. “With the addition of Dan, Impact Interactions continues to build the strongest database of best practices in the online community world for our clients. His deep knowledge of technical support, marketing, and partner communities brings tremendous expertise to Impact Interactions which in turn will help our clients succeed.”

For additional information regarding online moderation or user generated content strategies, please contact us at ImpactInteractions.com.


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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Online Community: Just what is a copyright violation? Viacom vs. Google

In case you missed it, there is a great explanation of the two views of the world of online copyright being fought over right now by Viacom and Google. At the All Things Digital Conference held a couple of weeks ago, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman gave his outline of what is covered and not covered under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) regarding copyright and how he views Google’s YouTube violations of that Act. Giving equal time, there is also an interview with Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, the founders of Google’s YouTube.

Summing it up, Viacom believes that YouTube is violating the DMCA because YouTube is a media company that has knowledge of the copyright violations. The DMCA is written to protect companies involved in the building blocks of the internet such as routing, ISPs, etc. not media companies such as Google and YouTube. Mr. Dauman also states that his company, Viacom was spending large sums of money on a team that was manually going through YouTube (and probably other sites as well) looking for Viacom content which was posted/uploaded to the site by users in violation of the copyright. Those costs in addition to the money that YouTube was making on the ads shown on the site are real money that is coming out of the revenue stream of Viacom.

Google and YouTube on the other hand argue that the DMCA applies to them and that they complied with the law because when notified by copyright holders, they removed the copyrighted materials. Eric Schmidt goes so far as to state that the dispute is about “whether there is a shared responsibility around the take down provision or not.”

The folks at Google understand and clearly state that this is about money… but they want to make the money at someone else’s expense. The DMCA is going to be tested here and hopefully through case law, clarified as to exactly what constitutes a hosted site allowed to store copyrighted materials and what is a media site. Common sense would say that if a site is making money from unlicensed copyrighted content, they should have to pay for it or remove it themselves. In our opinion, it does not make sense to allow sites and companies to earn revenue on copyrighted content for which they don’t own or license the right to show.

Your local cable access station cannot let you sign up for free air time and then show an episode of the Colbert Report you recorded at home, why should the internet be any different? As companies such as Apple and Microsoft work to bring television to the web and help define the industry, sites allowing video uploads should be held to the same standards as local cable access television stations. The principles are the same. It will be very interesting to see how the courts rule. Of course, given the money involved, there will most likely be a deal announced in the next couple of months between Viacom and Google so the law will not be examined as it should.

In terms of the uncertainty right now over the DMCA and online user generated content, we advise our clients to scan their site and remove blatant copyrighted materials uploaded as they find them. For example, message board posts that contain images from Warner Brothers or Disney cartoons are edited. Videos and photos from television shows or movies are edited or removed. When community managers make a “best effort” to remove copyrighted materials, the firm has a defense against the inevitable lawsuit. With copyright confusion, the best defense is a good offense.

Want to learn more about protecting your company and keeping your members happy? Contact us, we’d be happy to discuss the successful best practices we’ve developed in this area.


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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 10:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Online Communities: Will Online Anonymity Survive?

There is an interesting lawsuit working it’s way through the courts right now in New Haven Connecticut that may impact everyone who runs an online community. The case and arguments are detailed in the article “U.S. Internet defamation suit tests online anonymity” from Reuters on June 16, 2007. The issues are similar to what many of us in the online community/social media business deal with every day:

  • Member A attacks Member B
  • Member C, D, E, F & G join in the attack on Member B
  • Blogger Z and Y post entries which repeat the attacks on Member B

The question becomes, if what Member A posts is a fabrication and defamatory to Member B’s reputation can Member A be held responsible? What about the other members and the bloggers? And more important to the organization who owns the community…are they responsible and/or liable for damages?

If the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs in this case, the owners of the community may be liable for not taking action to prevent or remove the offending content. From the article, it is clear that the site is not well run nor does it follow any clearly defined rules of use or terms of service which spell out how the site will be run. That won’t protect them in this case. Here are a couple of the excerpts from the case which were posted and left on the site:

  1. According to court documents, a user on the site named “STANFORDtroll” began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit, entitled “Stupid Bitch to Enter Yale Law.” Another threatened to rape and sodomize her, the documents said.
  2. Some posts made false claims about her academic record and urged users to warn law firms, or accused her of bribing Yale officials to gain admission and of forming a lesbian relationship with a Yale administrator, the court papers said.

It’s pathetic that a company employee did not think that a threat of rape or sodomy was inappropriate on a site for law school students.

Many people getting into the industry now would say that the First Amendment covers speech on the internet… but I would reply that there are limits and defamation of character is not covered in the case of private persons. We are still in the infancy of the case law which will be applied to user generated content. From the article:

  • The two, who say they suffered substantial “psychological and economic injury,” also sued a former manager of the site because he refused to remove disparaging messages. The manager had cited free-speech protections.

What I find a little sad is that a site manager allowed comments about threatening another member to remain on the site. There needs to be a zero tolerance policy regarding threats in any online community.

This case and the company being sued represent a text book case study for how not to run an online community. Any organization that is going to offer an online community needs not only a clear terms of service/rules of use agreement but also a well trained team to moderate the user generated content. Moderators must fairly enforce the rules and be quick to act when the level of discourse sinks to the threat stage.

We’ll see how the court rules on this. It’s impact could be widespread.

Contact us to learn more about the best practices for moderation of online communities and user generated content.


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This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Planning for Incivility – Why your online community needs moderators

We’ve seen an upswing in blog posts and articles related to the growing issue of incivility on the internet and in online communities. The most recent article from PC World’s John Dvorak sums it up nicely:

“Nastiness is an earmark of many bloggers, podcasters, and members of the herd; a few insane people; and those who feel that being an out-and-out mean and profane presence on the Internet is cool or funny. The level of nastiness that floats around the Net in various forms, forums, and Web sites is incredible.”

We think that this is not so incredible, but is just the way the world is right now. When you look at other media such as television what do you see? Nastiness. Whether it’s political (Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann), social (Jerry Springer, The View with Rosie O’Donnell), or even legal (Judge Judy) the overwhelming tone is nasty. Why? Because it attracts people to engage with the show. And the internet is the same. Nastiness gives visitors a reason to engage.

Because of this nastiness, some folks like Tim O’Reilly have called for a Bloggers’ Code of Conduct. Okay, that would help the folks that actually blog perhaps. But what it really is, is a set of very good moderation tips for online communities as a whole.

We know from our experience that there are always going to be members who are visiting only to disrupt, argue, and complain. Most of these members only come to attack those who have differing opinions. They do it with strong language and abusive comments. They also are the first members to bring up “Freedom of Speech” and my “Constitutional Rights” as soon as a moderator steps in. When their commentaries and attacks are edited or deleted they attack the moderator and host organization rather than looking inward. Then they enlist their online friends to continue the attack on your organization. You will never please these people.

So you had better have a plan for how you deal with them. And that means having professionally trained moderators ready to deal with this situation. Moderation is a thankless job. Your moderators will never keep everyone happy. But they need to be consistent and strong willed while being able to communicate clearly to all members.

But what about the members themselves reporting violations and problem members? It is a myth that is far from reality. From our experience, here is why:

  • Many members don’t like to rat each other out. It’s not their problem, it’s yours.
  • One side of the fight will report the other repeatedly (and vice versa) over every comment they perceive as a slight or violation. That means that the same comment will be reported multiple times by a group while ignoring other violations because it becomes a game.
  • The average site visitor doesn’t care about violations.
  • Most people do not understand copyright law or the fair use provisions. (Just ask YouTube)
  • Actual violations will always be under-reported versus actual violations which need to be removed.

Our experience shows that for every legitimate violation reported by members, our moderation teams edit or remove an additional four comments which violate the community’s terms of service. We believe that allowing a community to self report issues will eventually kill the community as the groups start slugging it out, providing a strong disincentive to new visitors to join. Eventually, the fighters will tire and leave your site resulting in a dead community which will not help your organization’s goals.

If you have questions about moderation, best practices in working with disruptive members, or setting up processes and guidelines for your online community, contact us. We’re happy to answer your questions.


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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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