FreshNetworks Blog

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We’ve put the question to leading community managers across the world, and they have outlined the classic community clangers that we should all avoid.

Lack of engagement

Toby Metcalfe, Community Manager and Social Networker, is straight to the point on this: “The big mistake is to not be engaged – to have a forum and not be interacting with those in the community. Not listening to the community: building in features for your product, service, site, or forum. Not being honest.”

Game producer, Frank van Gemeren, agrees: “Having a CM who doesn’t post anything. When I asked the Forum Manager for a reason, it was ‘She’s reading and knows everything, she’s just too busy to post’. My reply was: ‘Why have her name listed as CM then anyway?’”.

Christoph Geissler, Podcast Author and Senior Forum Moderator agrees: “No communication = worst communication possible.

“I always had the impression that a community manager [or] moderator is meant to communicate with the people – I mean it’s probably the most important part of their duty.

“Saying ‘I’m currently busy, but I’ll get back to you later’ is, in my opinion, better than just saying ‘I’m busy so I won’t reply’.”

Lack of discipline and communication

Antonio King, Virtual World Community Manager agrees with Toby and adds “Inconsistency in discipline (can sort of fall under impartiality)” and “obliviousness to subtle community signs”.

By far the most cited error, was a lack of communication. Communication, explains Senior Moderator Christoph Geissler, is absolutely vital.

“As soon as the community get’s the impression that you’re just a press release-posting bot with no personality whatsoever, your reputation (which also means your success in maintaining and expanding your community) is doomed.

“In other words: Communities want to talk with persons, instead of bots.”

Not supporting moderators

Sue John, Online Community Manager at BritishExpats.com cautions that moderators must be supported.

“A community needs to know that its CM is behind the moderators and supports them. On occasion I’ve had a mod make a decision that I didn’t agree with but I’ve supported them publicly and then we’ve discussed the issue behind the scenes.

“I’ve haven’t had one make a really bad error in judgment yet, but as with most things in life we don’t always see eye to eye. However, I always listened to their comments, suggestions and feedback, because they are on the front lines and happy mods help make a happy community.”

Making unexpected changes

Betty Ray, Community Manager at Edutopia – The George Lucas Educational Foundation comes back to the message of communication: “One of the worst ones in my experience is rolling out a giant change in your product without warning the community first. (Nowadays, we don’t just warm people, but get their feedback on the decision in the first place!)”

“Would very much echo what Betty Ray said,” says Chris Deary, Community Manager at Gurgle.com.

“Not communicating upcoming changes is disastrous. There’s a common assumption that communities will love new tools and platforms just because they’re more up to date (which usually means trying to mimic Facebook), but most users are stuck in their ways and hate change. One of the things I’ve learnt is to make sure users have at least some involvement in the process of change, and ideally your most loyal users should be heavily involved. “

Inattention

“Inattention to building the vision/purpose of the community. Inattention to building relationships amongst the members. Inattention to enabling the free flow of information amongst the members and from outside membership.

“Every problem of a community can be traced back to these three simple community management principles,” believes Lisa Belsito from Austin.

Do you agree? What have we missed from our list?

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.

Day 6 - Night hunting by Mourner via Flickr

On a LinkedIn discussion about community management, a great comment was made about the importance of understanding foreign cultures when moderating international communities, such as those around football tournaments.

Very true. But I would expand it. As a good community manager, and especially as someone with a moderation role, you must think regional. Very regional.

When I was at school, I had a headmaster that was very proud of his Liverpool roots. One day, when talking to us about linguistics and on one of his lengthy preambles, he mentioned a ‘jiggerrabbit’.

Being a class of Devonshire teenagers, we stared at him blankly.

A ‘jigger’ is Liverpool slang for ‘alleyway’. A ‘jigger-rabbit’ is slang, therefore, for a cat.

It’s a great word, and a great example of how a word can simply not exist outside of a very tight radius on a map.

Now if I saw ‘jigger-rabbit’ in certain contexts, as a moderator who has been to Liverpool maybe two, three times in my life, I may well have thought it to be an insult.

Imagine seeing the phrase ‘black jigger-rabbit’. How does that sound to you? It means ‘black cat’, of course, but if you didn’t know the meaning, you could jump to entirely the wrong conclusion.

A good community manager gets to know their community inside out – and let’s not forget that communities themselves have their own little cultures and phrases too – and that includes letting yourself pick up on these nuances.

It’s impossible to learn every slang phrase across the world, of course, but you can pick things up, you can check unfamiliar words that don’t sit right.

The brilliant Urban Dictionary is one to add to your toolkit, as is www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk.

As a community manager, you need to develop a keen eye for these dialectical delights, otherwise they could turn around and bite you on the Queen Mum.

From HappyAbout.info

We were sent a review copy of ‘18 Rules of Community Engagement’ by Angela Connor, which contains very useful lessons for all businesses engaging with – or planning to engage with – their customers and potential customers online.

Angela Connor has boiled down a huge subject into an 18-step strategy. Think of it as an accessible masterclass by a pragmatist rather than a theoretical lecture or high-minded discussion.

Currently Managing Editor of User-Generated Content at WRAL.com, in 2007 Angela launched GOLO.com, the first online community for the top-rated television station in the state which has grown to more than 12,000 members.

Angela has a background in journalism that shines through in her written style, making it easy to follow, conversational and crisp.

Essentially, unlike some ‘gurus’ and ‘experts’ who perform a commentary, Angela has done the hard slog, learned the hard lessons and continues to grow her community day-to-day. Her thinking is fresh and grounded in reality.

Just like we do here at FreshNetworks, Connor returns again and again to the themes of interaction, engagement, conversation. Above all, the importance of getting in the mix, not performing a high-handed role from atop, but being a part of your community, regardless of what the community is formed around.

From the outset, Connor is clear:

“We are now living in the conversation age, where one-way communication is no longer acceptable or desired. People want to engage and discuss, react and interact.

“It is no longer effective to have an online presence without interaction.”

Key lessons:

•    “It takes a different kind of investment to grow community, and a major portion of that investment is TIME.”
•    Community managers need to have “a long-term strategy and a plethora of tools in your toolkit to turn lurkers into contributors and to encourage contributors to ramp it up a bit and move into the zone of those who post ‘very often.’
•    Engaging, asking questions, chatting to members and offering them something useful and interesting is all vital.
•    Look after your members and appreciate them: “stroke a few egos”.
•    Every community has its own culture and set of values.
•    Be open, honest, sharing – and accept and respond to criticism!

With this book, Angela Connor has put together a really handy overview with genuinely useful thinking points to steer community management efforts in the right direction.

Above all else, the breadth of activities she covers for community managers keeps us mindful of just how diverse a role it is, and how important it is to do it right.

ISBN: Paperback: 978-1-60005-142-5 (1-60005-142-1)
ISBN: eBook: 978-1-60005-143-2 (1-60005-143-X)
Published by Happy About®.

Read all our posts on Promoting Community Management.

I’ve loved putting together a series on debunking community management as part of FreshNetwork’s commitment to promoting best practice and sharing knowledge. The hardest part, of course, was boiling such a huge subject down into just five blogs. And they ended up behemoths…

So to help any time-poor, interest-rich readers out there, here is a summary of the key points from the series:

Introduction to community management

The what, who and why of community management. It’s a strange job to explain, and a challenge to do well. The way you splice your day depends largely on the community set-up, size and specific-goals, but there are general rules that cross all communities.

• Respect your members
• Retain good, safe boundaries and rules
• Be fair
• Don’t allow yourself to appear provoked (even when a member is driving you potty)
• Listen to the group, and the individuals within it
• Balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the group
• Keep records of everything

Read the full blog post

Champions, active users and trolls

We looked at who is using your community and how they are using it. The 90-9-1 principle has been a trusted favourite of community people for over a decade, but it’s looking increasingly dusty as new forms of micro-activity (such as rating, thumbs ups etc) come in and blur the edges between readers and editors.

We talked about that precious core of users that behave wonderfully, use the features, have the community’s best interests at heart and help keep it thriving and healthy: community champions. But what really came across in the comments is how not to underestimate the ‘lurkers’, as they are hugely important to the success of your community – especially if the number of page views is a KPI for your site.

Respect your ‘readers’ as well as your top contributors!

The toxic team, bores and trolls also got an airing. As delightful as it would be, it’s nigh on impossible to bring together a group of people without at least a handful of them behaving in a way you find aggressive, unpleasant or just really annoying…

Read the full blog post

Growth of a community

So you’ve got your community, now what? How do you know if it’s healthy? In fact, what do you consider to be a healthy community? If one of the core aims of your community is a vibrant and colourful debating space, the number of posts and replies plus the subjects being debated will be far more important than the number of overall members, for example.

How do you judge the health of your community, what should you measure? We talked about the importance of thinking about this way before you build anything. It should be central to your plans and your ongoing strategy.

But now you have your community, how to keep it vibrant, how do you recruit new members. Do you even want to actively recruit new members? Is it more important to you to increase engagement with the members you currently have?

We drew some top-line hints:

• Think open questions, talking points
• Keep it simple
• There’s more to engagement than posts
• Trust your own interests and be authentic
• Careful with current affairs

Read the full blog post

Moderation and safety

What are the risks to your company or name, health and happiness? How can you spot risks, and help eradicate them? What are the options for moderation, and the potential drawbacks of each type? You pre-moderate all content, and be sure of the quality of everything you let through, but this will create a very different (almost certainly slower and lesser used) beast to a post-moderated community, which in turn will behave differently to a reactively-moderated community where more of the control and responsibility is shared with the members.

The right moderation entirely depends on the community and its context, so we pulled together some thinking points to help your decision-making:

• Who is the community aimed at?
• Is it particularly at risk of malicious posting?
• Does your membership feel comfortable with self-regulation?
• Do you have the resources to pre-moderate quickly enough or will messages take too long to go live?
• Is the subject matter particularly legally-sensitive?
• Are children or vulnerable people going to be using it?
• Is there a high chance of defamation e.g. a celeb gossip community?
• How much control do you need rather than want?

But what about when the community doesn’t police itself very well, or show the restraint necessary to stay out of trouble?

In 2007, Mumsnet.com, an online community started and managed by a group of mums in North London, paid author Gina Ford a five-figure sum to settle a libel claim.

Gina Ford, a well-known figure in the baby book market, advocates strict, routine-based methods that some members of the Mumsnet community took exception to and allegedly defamatory comments were posted.

A legal fight ensued, with Justine Roberts, Mumsnet’s founder telling the press the site’s 15,000 daily comments were “impossible to monitor unless you have eyes and ears everywhere”.

Read the full blog post

Community metrics

Metrics are vital. Understanding the who, what, where, why and how many of your online community is vital. Understanding if you’re doing your company some good (or bad), is vital. Setting KPIs is vital and knowing whether you’re hitting them, is vital. Metrics are vital.

But which metrics are vital to you and your community? And how do you learn from these and share them with the wider organisation?

We spoke to various community managers, all of whom had a different favourite metric. And we also introduced some thinking about newsletters and external communications. In many ways, we argued, this is a more fragile relationship:

Mainly because unlike communicating within your community, where members have chosen to come to the space you have provided, here you are pushing your content into their domain. Their private space.

If you do it badly, intrusively, it could result not just in an unsubscribe from the mailing list, but a reaction on or an exodus from the community.

Put simply: You need to be as certain as possible how best to use newsletters. You need to know what works. And what doesn’t.

You need to measure everything that you do and be able to learn from it, because if you don’t, the health of your community is on the line.

Read the full blog post

Image by Balakov via Flickr

We’ve touched on metrics before, and how understanding what you need to measure can help you understand how healthy your online community really is.

Metrics are vital. Understanding the who, what, where, why and how many of your online community is vital. Understanding if you’re doing your company some good (or bad), is vital. Setting KPIs is vital and knowing whether you’re hitting them, is vital. Metrics are vital.

Putting qualitative and quantitative measurements to the back of your mind – or worse, not considering them at all – is a little like setting up a restaurant, cooking a load of food, and not looking to see if anyone’s eating it.

Recording, reporting and analysing your data is as much a part of community managing as keeping the spam out and the conversation going.

But what should you record?

As ever, it’s a ‘piece of string’ subject. There are some established standards when recording any web traffic, of course:

• Hits
• Unique visitors
• Page views
• Time spent on site
• Pages per visit
• Entry points
• Exit points
• Most popular sections
• Most popular pages
• Referrers

And some fairly obvious community specific standards:

• Number of members
• Number of active members
• Number of blogs/posts/comments/images

But here’s where it starts to get interesting. Given that all online communities are basically a similar beast (a group of people brought together in one online space and communicating in a variety of ways), you’d think the list of key metrics would be pretty defined. You’d be wrong.

Lucy McElhinney, Community Manager at UKfamily.co.uk, has a couple of favourite stats. She tweets:

Return visitors – to gauge lurker/reader engagement, Active members (the number of members who ‘did’ something in the last month)

Ooh, and obviously advertising like the page views per visit metric as in communities it’s normally so high.

Ratios are also very telling. As well as the basics, Adam Cranfield, Digital Media Manager at CIMA likes to know the “ratio of responses to discussions,” and “ratio of comments to blogs.” He also introduces a lovely turn of phrase that I’m going to steal wholeheartedly: nuggets.

Also, I want to measure ‘nuggets’ – new knowledge, useful to the company, gained through the community.

Reporting on the current health and vitality of a community – especially when you’re community managing on behalf of a brand – is more than just a numbers game. ROI is more than just financial.

Great stories from the community can form positive PR activity; feedback (negative and positive) can inform improvements to customer services and spread learning about best practice throughout the company.

And as community manager, you are the gatekeeper to all this knowledge. Through recording it, filtering it and reporting it, you can affect real change. Frank van Gemeren, Game Producer and owner of Frag-em says you should pay attention to negative sentiment within the community:

There’s always action=reaction, so a lot of negativity means there’s something going wrong on some level, be it community involvement or policies, support, the actual product, or future expectations of your target audience.

For Frank, it’s not just about numbers:

I believe more in the qualitative arguments than in quantity. While quantity can be used to measure popularity and brand recognition, which is important for PR, you won’t build up a healthy, loyal community with a lot of hype and then failing to meet the expectations. That’s where the negativity comes in.

As with moderation and launching before it, monitoring stats and activity is not something to ‘just do’, something to just have a go at and see what sticks. If you are serious about creating a valuable, worthwhile community, you need to think about recording and reporting metrics and activity before you’ve received even one visitor.

As we’ve said before so many times, planning is the key. Really thinking about what you want from your community proposition and how you will measure if you have it, is essential.

Newsletter metrics

So what happens when you communicate with members outside of the community platform, through newsletters or mailshots?

At FreshNetworks we’re increasingly working to co-ordinate and strategically plan all newsletter communication in the most effective way for the members and the brand owners. There is a lot more fragility in the relationship here.

Why?

Mainly because unlike communicating within your community, where members have chosen to come to the space you have provided, here you are pushing your content into their domain. Their private space.

If you do it badly, intrusively, it could result not just in an unsubscribe from the mailing list, but a reaction on or an exodus from the community.

Put simply: You need to be as certain as possible how best to use newsletters. You need to know what works. And what doesn’t.

Newsletter metrics are a whole other blog post (and one we hope to bring you soon) but one lovely little formula I want to highlight is the Disaffection Index, first mooted in a 2005 MediaPost article:

Rather than unsubscribe/delivered, the Disaffection Index (DI) is calculated by dividing unsubscribes by the response rate: unsubcribes/unique clicks

Calculated this way, the DI tells you how many people either a) clicked on your email for the sole purpose of getting off your list or b) were so dissatisfied with the payoff (promise vs. delivery) that they chose to unsubscribe.

It’s simple maths but it’s packed with insight:

DI = (unsubscribes / unique click) *100

More on this to come…

Some more reading

• Is time-on-site a useful measure for online communities? (freshnetworks.com)
• Building the business case for online communities (freshnetworks.com)
• Social Media Measurement – Without Myopia (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Are You Measuring the Right Things? (thecustomercollective.com)

Image by ian boyd via Flickr

Why moderate?

“Why moderate?” says Sue John, Online Community Manager at Britishexpats.com. “Well mainly for the benefit of the community. It helps to keep things on topic, keeps information and conversation flowing, helps keep a lid on troublemakers and trolls. [Moderators] help and assist new members by welcoming them into the community.”

Alison Michalk, Editor & Community Manger at Fairfax Digital agrees: “I think mods are akin to Traffic Control. They welcome and direct members to the best area… They have three roles – friendly participant, leader/rule enforcer and member advocate.”

Moderation is essential to a clean, healthy, vibrant community. A good moderator has a light touch, barely noticeable, and a well-moderated community is spam-free, troll-resilient and buzzing.

Moderation options

Most things in online community management are fluid, shades of grey (opinion, approach, even what metrics are important) but the options for moderation are fairly static:

• Pre-moderation: This is where content added to a community needs to be approved by a moderator before it goes live. This is particularly apt for communities aimed at children and vulnerable people. Webchats and ‘live’ Q&As will often be pre-moderated, with inappropriate questions or comments being weeded out before the chat subject ever sees them.
• Post-moderation: This is where all content added to a community goes live straightaway but is then reviewed by a moderator and removed if necessary.
• Reactive moderation: Where members and visitors flag up inappropriate content for moderators to review. This is more suitable for a community of adults, where topics aren’t particularly sensitive and the route for flagging content is simple and clear.
• No moderation and self-moderation: Where no formal moderator reviews content and the community self-governs (or doesn’t as the case may be).

Which is the best form of moderation?

“Reactive – ownership in hands of community,” tweets Mark Sheldon, Engagement Manager at Pluck, “requires less internal resource. Provide a ‘thumbs down’ to minimise abuse reports.”

He explains: “Thumbs down tends to weed out subjective abuse reports, but still gives the user the sense of having stated their dislike.”

Which is a valid point, for a community of adults, seasoned online community users and aware of their ability to self-regulate and the methods by which to do so.

I particularly like the idea of a thumbs down function, to stop people reporting posts just because they don’t like them, rather than because they break any rules. However, balance is key, and a complimentary ‘thumbs up’ function should, in my opinion, always accompany.

But for a community designed for children for example, reactive moderation would be unsuitable.

So the type of moderation really does depend on what kind of animal your community is:

• Who is the community aimed at?
• Is it particularly at risk of malicious posting?
• Does your membership feel comfortable with self-regulation?
• Do you have the resources to pre-moderate quickly enough or will messages take too long to go live?
• Is the subject matter particularly legally-sensitive?
• Are children or vulnerable people going to be using it?
• Is there a high chance of defamation e.g. a celeb gossip community?
• How much control do you need rather than want?

Again, we come back to the importance of planning, and thinking strategically and honestly about why you are building a community, who you are building it for and how it should (and will) work.

To edit or not to edit

One potential tool in the moderator’s kit is ‘editing’. You have a fantastic, long, detailed post chock-full of conversation starters and open questions. And then one paragraph happens to include a couple of lines of pretty toxic accusations against another community member. You don’t want to lose the value of the whole post just because of this one paragraph, so you edit the bad bits out.

Do you?

If you do, you are running the risk of being held responsible for the content of the post as if you, yourself, wrote it.

Not only do you – as a moderator and the organisation you work for – become an editor, responsible for the content, but you run the risk of changing the meaning of someone else’s words and upsetting the community, making them feel invaded and trampled over.

If a post is fabulous, apart from one crucial bit, then it comes down to two options:

1. If the dodgy content is time-sensitive i.e. it needs to come down NOW: take the whole post down.
2. If it breaks your rules, but no laws, and you don’t feel it’s doing much damage, give the original author the option to edit it within a determined timeframe. If they don’t, take the whole thing down.

Good guidelines

• Ensure that you have very clear, plain English guidelines, so that any moderation decisions are backed up by the rules that govern all members’ use of the site.
• Contrary to myth, rules are there to be kept. Members agree to the rules of the site when they sign up, so don’t feel guilty or awkward about enforcing them.
• Make sure the rules are clear – this makes it easier to be fair and consistent. It also stops it being personal i.e. as community manager you can legitimately say, “hey, it’s the rules, it’s not me!
• Situations will arise that aren’t covered in your guidelines. Use your intuition, talk it over with your team, then use the experience to inform adaptations and additions to your guidelines. Next time you’ll know what to do!
• Record everything. Any warnings, any relevant contact with members, record it all – you never know when you’ll be asked to show your reasoning. Don’t worry about it, if you have nothing more whizzbang just keep notes on a spreadsheet with a date and description.
• At FreshNetworks, we suggest a three strikes and you’re out policy, with immediate bans for serious offences. This is another reason notes and records are important. People will try to quibble!

Tough calls

Solid rules and guidelines help cut down grey areas, but touch calls will still present themselves. Often in the form of a new user, who takes the time to write lots of very detailed, helpful, friendly posts, that all contain a mega-whopping link to their eBay shop or affiliate program or an active user who usually behaves impeccably and starts trying to agitate other members and slowly divide and conquer…

1. Use your judgement – if a post doesn’t sit right, if you feel uncomfortable with someone’s language, the chances are that other community members will feel the same. Included with your judgement will be your recall of history and your records. If you’re unsure, check your records for previous activity like this, spend a little time looking at how the member is currently behaving, and how the community is reacting to their content.
2. If you’re still unsure, ask for a second opinion. Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes and chatting it through will make all the difference. If it’s not time sensitive, give yourself five minutes, do something else, make a brew, and then come back to it calmer.

Fights and feuds

An arbiter of good sense in community management, Rich Millington blogs at FeverBee. He says that fights are good.

Wha…?

No really, fights (not malicious activity, but clashes of personality) he says, show that you’re doing a good job:

“Fighting is good for your community. It means that members care what other members think of them. You’re doing a good job. Seriously. If members are fighting you’ve created a close community…

“Remember why most people leave communities. Few leave a community because they get into a fight, most leave a community because it’s gotten boring. “

While I wouldn’t recommend provoking fights (nor taking part, an absolute no-no, these are not your fights) encouraging healthy debate and highlighting vibrant discussions isn’t something to shy away from. While the debate rages within the confines of the rules, your community is functioning well.

Dealing with feuds on an online community will test anyone mettle. They can go back years (particularly in mature communities), can be brought in from real life relationships, can be the result of online relationships becoming offline relationships, may involve cliques, troublemakers, deliberate campaigns… We didn’t say being a community manager was easy!

Big fat no-nos… there are a few

There are certain situations, certain content, that undeniably must be moderated. Largely common sense will prevail and almost any community manager or moderator would remove:

• Illegal content
• Explicit content (unless this suited the nature of the community)
• Blatant spam
• Clear defamation of a celebrity or known person

But what about repeating a well-repeated rumour about a celebrity? Or accusing a TV expert of not knowing enough about a subject?

It is not the same as repeating well-worn gossip to a friend in a bar. This is a no-no too.

Case in point: In 2007, Mumsnet.com, an online community started and managed by a group of mums in North London, paid author Gina Ford a five-figure sum to settle a libel claim.

Gina Ford, a well-known figure in the baby book market, advocates strict, routine-based methods that some members of the Mumsnet community took exception to and allegedly defamatory comments were posted.

A legal fight ensued, with Justine Roberts, Mumsnet’s founder telling the press the site’s 15,000 daily comments were “impossible to monitor unless you have eyes and ears everywhere”.

In this case, the reactive moderation was not reactive enough and it proved costly.