FreshNetworks Blog

by net_efekt

My husband’s been reading John T Cacioppo’s Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection and as usual when he’s enthralled by something, I’ve heard about it at great length.

While I have yet to read it (I’m too cheap to buy a second copy instead of waiting for his) it has made me think a lot about loneliness and online communities at Christmas.

For some people, through physical and perceived isolation, online communities and social networks are a main or even sole route of social interaction.

Detailed 2004 research by Dr Vladeta Ajdacic-Gross of the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, at the University of Zurich found that suicide rates actually decline dramatically in the run up to Christmas Day – Christmas Eve has the lowest suicide rate for the whole year.

The trouble starts after Christmas, suicide rates increase dramatically, with a peak in early January.

So it’s important to know what the realistic risks are, and when, before putting any plans in place.

Any seasonal suicide sensitivity needs to continue into the New Year, and your process for dealing with a suicide threat needs to be written and ready all year round.

No-one wants to write a will and it’s no different as a community, no-one relishes writing a suicide policy. But every community needs one, even the happiest, most sunny side up communities.

Why?

1. Every community needs to be supportive, not just support communities.
2. Every community contains people. Where there are people, there is unpredictable behaviour.

Several professions are at particularly heightened risk of depression and suicide, and consequently even a professional community aimed at sharing knowledge and best practise could be a platform for lonely, isolated people.

On one of our communities, which is mainly a place to discuss health and beauty, sometimes life gets in the way. During a product trial, a happy-go-lucky community member experienced an unexpected and upsetting event in her life. She came to the community, to a place she felt safe, surrounded by friends and she shared her news.

It wasn’t health and beauty news, it was real, personal news and she found comfort and support amongst online friends.

How could we ever assume that someone in their darkest moments, considering something terrible, wouldn’t come to a place they regularly spent time and felt safe? We couldn’t assume that. That’s why every community we run has a suicide policy, regardless of their membership or topics.

Writing a suicide policy

There are several factors to consider, and you must consider them properly:

• Could there be minors using the community?
• Do you have means of contacting community members?
• Do you have real names and locations for community members?
• You will need a templated (but customisable) message containing links to supportive organisations such as the Samaritans and any specifically relevant organisations (such as a professional benevolent society with counsellors available).
• Do you have functions within your community that could be used to post images or videos of an attempted suicide? It is incredibly rare, but it happens.
• Do you have an in-house legal team to discuss this with?
• Is there a reporting function for other members to flag content they’re concerned about? Do members know this is not just for spam or offensiveness?

It’s a tragic subject, but as community managers we have a responsibility to try and keep our members as safe as possible.

Having a plan in place won’t cause any problems if it’s never needed, but not having a plan in place could leave a community manager with a scenario that haunts them for a very long time.

As online professionals, like any profession, we have a set of words and terms relating to our job. We talk about moderation and trolls and forums.

We talk about features and modules and fields. But unlike many other professions, we also expect the lay people using all those things to recognise what they mean.

We use a very unnatural language, and I’m concerned that it puts up false barriers between users and the platforms they’re engaging with.

Why do we use these funny, clunky words?I think it’s two-fold. The first adopters of online communities were tech-enthusiasts, of course. They were – and I use this term fondly – geeks. And as a geek I can attest that geek-language is not Joe Bloggs’ language. But the early lingo got stuck, and when the Joe and Joanna Bloggs’ of the world started to find their way to email discussion lists, instant messenger, and ultimately online communities, the lingo was set.

Early community managers tended to be the person that had been their longest or showed most interest (again, likely to be a geek), and naturally, the lingo would remain and be dished out top-down. Let’s start with ‘community manager’.

On our recent blog, What does a community manager do? I included a word cloud of all the one-word suggestions we’d had in answer to that question.Not one of them was ‘manage’.

So are we really community managers? Am I really Head of Community Management? Do we manage communities, or do we do something else? By far the most popular words were ‘facilitate’, ‘enables’ and ‘connects’.

None of those are really anything like management.

What would be a better job title? What do we really do?

Community Connector?
Community Enabler?
Communication Facilitator?

All rather ugly… what do you think?And then we have ‘Trolls’, as @SueOnTheWeb suggests. Yes, offline we have insults of course, but these don’t normally become professional parlance. I’m sure the police don’t have handbooks about dealing with ‘crims’, even if they say far worse than that in the locker room.

Trolling apparently dates back to early 90s Usenet group, alt.folklore.urban, but its meaning has been adapted and is standard community/moderation speak. It doesn’t – and shouldn’t – mean anything to a happy community member though, perhaps time to give up the geek-speak?

Moderation, of course, is the backbone of a healthy community. Whether it’s reactive-moderation, post-moderation or simply a culture of self-censorship amongst users, such as with many mature email communities, it’s vital.

But does the word ‘moderation’ really mean anything to most people? When we write our disclaimers and use the word, does it mean what we think it does to community users or is it just another word to gloss over?

Do we not need something a bit better, a bit more ‘human’?

Of course we have the abbreviations, the ROTFLMAOs and the LOLs and the IYKWIMs… and that’s fine, that’s a snowball that’s melted across all social media and even seeped into emails and txtspk so that non-community connected people (like my mother-in-law and mum) will use it.

And for many people that’s part of the fun of using social platforms. But it can also be very exclusive to people new to the experience. We probably can’t do anything to prevent the spread, in fact, embracing it is part of the community management experience at many communities, but if we run abbreviation-heavy communities, the least we can do is slap up a dictionary, like iVillage do on their message boards.

So again, what’s missing? What lingo remains solely to divide people? What should be replaced with more human words and what can community managers do to ensure language-use doesn’t create unhealthy cliques?

Sounds like a stupid question, no? But actually it’s a valid one, especially in this time of flux. If you ask some people what an online community manager does, they’ll describe a moderator.

If you ask others, they’ll detail a curator. Others liken it to being a gardener, keeping the weeds at bay and encouraging conversation to flourish.

In our recent community predictions for 2010 post, many of our contributors thought that 2010 would see a tightly-defined, standardised ‘community manager’ role, with various spin-off roles taking on the work that’s currently supplementary to many of us running communities.

So what are the skills that should make up this core community management role? Well, looking at the communities I am currently responsible for and have run in the past, I would suggest the following ‘job spec’.

Managing moderation and moderators
That’s right, as communities mature – and some of the first communities are veritable grandparents now – it’s simply not sustainable or sensible to have community managers spending all their time moderating.

With a sensitive or particularly ‘lairy’ community, post-moderation (or even pre-moderation) of every piece of content can be a full-time role, possibly several full-time roles.

If this is the case, community managers should be managing the work of moderators, possibly even moderation software, not doing all the grunt work themselves.

Welcoming new members
Whether you personally greet every new member, make it your business to encourage particularly shy members when their first post goes unanswered, or put together an amazing ‘new members’ pack’ to be emailed out when anyone joins, welcoming members is very important.

Engaging stakeholders
Building a flourishing community is fantastic, but if you’ve built it as part of an organisation, and that organisation isn’t committed to it, isn’t prepared to listen to it, the people that make up the community could well fall out of love with it.

Promoting good behaviour
This starts with the community management team, continues through fair and transparent guidelines and is enforced by consistent moderation and through taking tough decisions for the good of the community.

Monitoring and reporting
A good community manager understands how healthy his or her community is, they know it instinctively, they can sense it, but they also have the figures to back it up.

Reporting and statistics aren’t unpleasant monthly (or weekly) pains in the bum, even if they’re often treated as such. If you really want to know your community, and if you really want to prove that there is a point to all the work you’re doing – and the organisation is funding – then you need to know how your community is behaving, feeling, and moving around.

Be an advocate
For your community, for the members that make it up, for your organisation, for community management in general. If you don’t feel you can, this is not the job for you.

This list is not exhaustive, what shall we add?

As is traditional at this time of year, we’ve been looking back over 2009 and all the enormous leaps of innovation and learning that have happened in the social media space. For some of us old, creaking community managers that have been around longer than broadband, it’s slightly dizzying that the role of ‘community manager’ is creeping into the general lexicon. My mum suddenly understands what it is that I do!

So if 2009 has finally galvanised the concept that online community spaces need managers, is 2010 going to be the year when the role is formalised and ranked as highly as other CRM roles? Will the old broad term ‘community manager’ be split into various roles with tighter definitions and remits?

What will online communities look like in 2010? What will community managers be talking about? What legal changes are bubbling away? We asked some fantastic community managers for their 2010 predictions, and if their thinking comes true, 2010 is going to be a very exciting year.

Roles and responsibilities

Vincent Boon, Community Team Leader at Sony Computer Entertainment agrees thinks roles and responsibilities will become more targeted and defined: “The role itself will become less broad, with community managers trying to cover all the bases, but instead companies will employ different community managers, for their different areas of communication.”

Vincent suggests new roles will spring up around:

• Social Media
• Forum Specific
• Creative Media 
• Conflict Resolution 
• Shaping Conversation/Interest 
• Age group specific 

“Maybe my categories are incorrect, or you can think of many more, but with the role of Community Manager maturing, I believe the role itself will diversify into areas of expertise. Although whether this will happen in 2010 already, might just be wishful thinking.”

Wendy Christie from eModeration tweets: “Earlier involvement/consultation/hiring of CMs in new sites/products, maybe? I’m starting to see that, I think.”

She expands by email: “I think we’re starting to see a more widespread involvement of Community Managers at the early stages of project development. So rather than “we’re most of the way through developing the site which will involve some sort of interactivity – oh bugger, how do we manage that side of it?” we’re starting to see more cases of CMs identified from the beginning as vital members of the team.”

Community and moderation company, TemperoUK, agrees: “Trend = CM will take on a bigger customer service/CRM role”

Moderation

Tempero’s founder, Dominic Sparkes says: “For social media management, 2010 is going to be a year of realising moderation is vital, sentiment tracking will prove ROI (hopefully!) and platform integration will be second nature.”

Ilana Fox, head of Social Media at ASOS says more retailers will be getting into social media. She tweets her prediction for “more personalisation on news and retail sites. Google will cause problems.

“Issues with UK sites launching international versions in terms of moderation and media law.”

Community in Enterprise and Research

Stuart Glendinning Hall points me to Dion Hinchcliffe: “I reckon that Dion Hinchcliff may be right in seeing the role of community manager becoming increasing important in Enterprise 2.0 projects in 2010. Particularly in markets which are already leading on E2.0, such as Germany and the US.”

Andy_buckley tweets that he sees a: “Blurring between panel and communities.” He expands, “as more later adopting clients think about having a community I think they will want both qual (community) & quant (panel).”

Community as a force

Ed Mitchell, Network and Community expert, sees: “Purposeful communities – active groups using collaborative tools to do stuff in their neighbourhoods – like the hyperlocal stuff, transition
towns etc.”

Monitoring

A favourite community manager of mine, Alison Michalk from Fairfax Digital predicts: “The rise of social media monitoring is going to have an impact. I’ve already seen reps start jumping in to respond to statements in my forums.

“I think ‘platform-neutral’ brand involvement is on the rise (clearly there are benefits towards this approach over attempting to build their own community) – and just how this impacts communities is yet to be seen… will we need ‘protected spaces’, how will the merging of people’s personal/professional roles impact the online space in years to come…”

My prediction

I agree with our experts here, 2010 will be the year of more roles, with distinct remits, and a more ‘conversational’ approach within all but the least enlightened organisations. I believe that a studious approach to community will deliver greater understanding of how to measure success and monitor effects, and I believe there are likely to be more community-based roles than real experience out there to fill them.

But at risk of sounding like a doomsayer, my real prediction for 2010 is one of caution. This last year has been great fun, community is (rightly) at the forefront of the best of the web, conversations and connections are starting to be taken seriously and proving their worth at enhancing so many other areas  of business.

Now it’s time community grew up.

All eyes are on us, and there are still grey areas to be ironed out. Every community manager, publishing, curating or editing content from users, needs to have a handle on all the relevant laws and liabilities.

Every community manager needs to understand the business aims of their organisation, and how community fits to them. To be a community manager within an organisation is not to be a renegade, it’s to be a diplomat.

For me, 2010 is going to be the year that we took ourselves more seriously, tooled up legally, and set clearer principles for moderation, and expectations from us and of us.

Agree? Disagree? We’d love to hear your predictions for 2010.

Guest post by Ben LaMothe

Last week, we posted part one of our interview with Shirley Brady BusinessWeek’s first community editor. In this second part, Shirley explains how she interacts with BusinessWeek’s news desk and how the BusinessWeek community management strategy is changing, including how BusinessWeek utilises crowdsourcing.

How much interaction is there between you at the Community desk and the editors on the content-producing side? Do you advise on what you believe will get the desired reaction from the BusinessWeek community?

I’m constantly interacting with my colleagues to parlay reader feedback and suggestions to editorial. Part of this job involves standing up for the reader and voicing their concerns and desires (enough of them know me by now, and on Twitter, to email or DM me to express their views. My email address is also listed on our featured readers page.

And another part is almost media literacy – involving readers in our journalism, opening up our process while inviting and respecting their opinions on a subject. You’ll see our reporters on their blogs and on Twitter, for example, posing questions and gauging the sentiment on a story as they’re reporting it. They’re not only cultivating sources and building their own communities, but getting more informed about each story, and their beats, in the process. We create hashtags, put up daily polls and ask a lot of questions – it all helps inform editorial decision-making in terms of what will resonate with our readership.

Community management is becoming increasingly important in the news industry as organizations begin crowdsourcing aspects of coverage. How is BusinessWeek’s community management strategy evolving? What’s next?

How BusinessWeek’s community strategy will evolve will depend on the new owner, assuming McGraw-Hill reaches a deal to sell the brand (bids closed on September 15th). Hopefully whoever acquires BusinessWeek will value community-building and reader engagement as much as we do now, if not more. There’s a ton to still be done and ideas to take this to the next level, which I won’t detail for competitive reasons but hinted at above.

As for other news organizations starting to embrace reader engagement: hear, hear! It’s been gratifying to see the New York Times name its first social media editor, Jennifer Preston, earlier this year; and impressive to see the variety and inventiveness of strategies employed by my peers such as Mathew Ingram at the Globe & Mail in Canada, Andrew Nystrom at the Los Angeles Times, or Andy Carvin at NPR, or to see what the Wall Street Journal is doing with Journal Community and the NYT with TimesPeople – all smart media organizations that understand the need to foster their communities in ways that breathe life into their brands, engage people with their content and enhance their mission and value proposition to the reader. Everybody’s trying something different, and while it might not always take off with readers, this inventiveness and entrepreneurial spirit is clearly invigorating journalism at news organizations such as the ones I’ve named above and countless others, including beyond North America (I’m inspired by, for instance, the BBC’s Have Your Say and the Guardian’s Comment is Free initiatives).

As for crowdsourcing, as noted above, we actively solicit and value our readers’ involvement and “invite them into our newsroom,” as John Byrne puts it, to inform our news decisions and editorial process. But I also believe that excellent journalism (reporting, writing and editing) has to be at the core of what BusinessWeek and other news organizations do, even as we open our doors to our readers. We’re building community around our content, injecting readers into the mix, and shaking up any old notions (if they ever existed) that journalists have the market cornered on analysis and reporting – the Internet put paid to that idea, gladly.

As John’s fond of saying, it’s about treating each story (blog post, slide show, photo-essay, interactive graphic, podcast, video) as a spark that creates a camp fire, or in John’s words, “the journalism then becomes an intellectual camp fire around which you gather an audience to have a thoughtful conversation about the story’s topic.” I love that metaphor, as it really embodies what I love about journalism – the storytelling.

In addition to being a reporter and writer throughout my career, my first full-time job in journalism was on the TV side of this business as a producer for TVOntario 20 years ago. Even then, I jumped at the opportunity to set up forums and discussions on early BBS platforms (Genie, Prodigy, CompuServe) as I was eager to engage our viewers in what we were producing and get their feedback as we shaped our programming, lined up interviews and planned our on-air schedule. It also helped build buzz and interest in seeing the final product, and always sparked additional ideas for us to pursue.

It’s not far off from what I do now, although the technology has advanced, as the online community is just as lively and eager to get great content and contribute to what you’re doing: they’ll share ownership in your success if you’ll let them in. Give them a stake in your process and they’ll come back, especially if they’re treated as partners and not just pageviews. I think it also helps that I approach this as a journalist, which helps elevate and promote the smart conversations around what’s going on in the news, on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, around the industries and business topics that matter most to our readers.