FreshNetworks Blog

Guest post by Ben LaMothe

In June 2008 Shirley Brady joined BusinessWeek as its first community editor. In this first of a two-part interview, Shirley explains what the newly-created role of community manager means at BusinessWeek and how she engages with the magazine’s influential-yet-niche readership.

Before joining BusinessWeek, she was a writer/editor for the U.S. trade magazine CableWorld, where she launched and managed its website, Cable360.net.

Prior to that she was a writer/editor at Time Inc, working for Time in Asia (based in Hong Kong) before moving to the Time Inc mothership in New York in 1999 and working for Time and People. She’s also won awards for her work as a TV producer, writer and on-air presenter, including the Canadian public broadcaster TVOntario, Discovery Channel Asia and CNN International. She has been based in New York since 1999.

As community editor of BusinessWeek.com, what does your job entail?

Suffice to say I’m passionate about this role and truly have one of the greatest gigs in journalism! BusinessWeek is among a handful of media organizations that’s really putting resources and aligning itself to be open and responsive to readers, which is what attracted me to coming onboard last year. So what do I do, on a day-to-day basis? As part of BW’s senior management team, I manage our engagement efforts with the goal of increasing participation (quality and quantity) of participation by BW’s regular readers and online visitors. Rather than have users post comments and zoom off, we want to build loyalty by having them connect, collaborate and share – with other readers and with our journalists.

In practical terms, this entails overseeing BusinessWeek’s efforts to include readers and incorporate user-generated content (comments, suggestions, longer form opinion pieces) in BW’s journalism, elevating our readers’ participation on the same level as our journalism.

That includes soliciting reader participation in special issues, slide shows and other editorial projects; guiding BW’s journalists to respond to comments on their blogs and articles, which we feature on the “belly band” or scrolling bar on our homepage; helping point our writers to reader-suggested story ideas that they report for our “What’s Your Story Idea?” initiative; commissioning and editing “MyTake” essays from readers who’ve posted smart comments on our site, which provides more space to expand on their views, on the same level as a BW writer or contributor; produce our In Your Face series, which features thought-provoking reader comments on the BusinessWeek.com home page and across the site; produced our first list of the top 100 readers on our site (in tandem with our journalists, particularly our bloggers) and our first reader dinner, which gave us amazing feedback on our efforts from some of the most engaged (and vocal) members of our community; oversee BW’s social media outreach including Twitter ; serve as editorial liaison for the Business Exchange topic network; track and share insights into online traffic and other metrics, including BW’s reader engagement index; work with my colleagues in tech, art, interactive, edit, marketing, research and other departments to implement these initiatives and improve the user experience on our site; and in general, develop best practices and raise the bar for reader engagement and BW’s digital journalism strategy, internally and externally.

In the first year, we were pleased to see BW’s reader engagement index increase 31% with nods from PaidContent, Folio and other media brands, with John and me speaking on numerous panels and interviews such as this to discuss BW’s engagement efforts. But it’s only the beginning!

In addition to the above, I spend a great part of each day in our reader comments, across our articles and blogs, to gauge our online conversations and find/identify thoughtful commenters to follow up with. That reader zeitgeist gets fed back to our news editors and informs BW’s editorial. We don’t moderate comments on our articles (they are posted automatically unless something in our spam filter – an offensive word or a link – places a comment into the pending queue for review).

We also review any comments flagged as offensive by members of our community, and I’ll weigh in on whether a comment should be taken down. So a significant part of my job is monitoring and maintaining our standards, which helps elevate the conversation and helps make BusinessWeek.com a more engaging place for our readers to feel welcome, to share their points of view and want to come back on a regular basis.

I should add that reader engagement is by no means a one-person effort. For example, comments on our blogs are moderated by our journalists, who are encouraged to nurture their respective communities of readers who frequent their blogs.

I also work closely with BW’s online management team, news editors and channel editors to foster these efforts; Celine Keating, a veteran BW copy editor who assists me in reviewing user comments and flagging any discussions that get out of hand; Ira Sager, the online editor who manages our blogs; Francesca Di Meglio, a reporter on our Business Schoolsteam who has done a great job building our thriving b-schools community of lively MBA forums and guest writers for our MBA Journal franchise; Rebecca Reisner, who produces our popular Debate Room series (arguably, BW.com’s first foray into reader engagement); Greg Spielberg, who worked with me from January to August as our first reader-engagement intern; and BW’s business-side team (Ron Casalotti, Michelle Lockett and Maki Yamasaki) who oversee user participation and outreach on BW’s award-winning Business Exchange, which launched in Sept. 2008.

As a side note, it’s been fascinating to see how Twitter has informed our efforts and my job. Many of our readers post their Twitter handles in their comments, so we continue the conversation between our readers and journalists by being active in the conversations that bridge BusinessWeek.com and Twitter. We’ve now got more than 60 staffers just from BW editorial on Twitter; incorporated Twitter widgets on some of our blogs and within Business Exchange, which earlier this year enabled users who linked their BX profile with their Twitter accounts to simultaneously comment on both platforms – the first Twitter integration by a major media brand, as far as we’re aware. We also recently launched an official BusinessWeek Twitter feed.

In Part Two of this interview, we deal with the interaction between the Community Desk and Editors, and how Community Management in news is changing BW’s evolving strategy.

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.

We sometimes analyse things too much. We spend too much time thinking about what we’re going to do and too little time actually doing it. Don’t get me wrong – we are big believers in planning and strategy at FreshNetworks. When we are building an online community for a client we spend a lot of time on planning, more so than some might, but enough to mean that when we do launch and build the site, we know how to make it a success. At this stage the detailed planning is important – you should try to make as many decisions as possible up front, consider all outcomes and plan for what you will do in different circumstances.

But sometimes you can get too wrapped up in planning things to the smallest detail when really your time is better spent just doing it.

In an online community, copy in forums, newsletters, polls and features is important. It is one significant way in which you can engage the community members, highlight what is happening on the site and how they can benefit from and add to this. Newsletters, in particular, can be a very effective way to engage people and draw them back to certain types of online community.

There is a lot of analysis that you can do on the effectiveness of copy – do certain articles attract people more than others? Do some headlines get more click-throughs and greater time spent reading the particular article once people are there? Do some newsletters have lower unsubscribe rates? All of these are valid and really important measures. They help you to monitor the health of what you are doing and identify things that are not working. But the beauty of online communities is that they are changing and organic environments – you can benchmark what you know typically performs best, and you know what works for an individual community. But there are many unpredictable factors in an online community and with community members. Sometimes it’s best to just get things written and see what the impact is.

The benefit of having a strong online community manager is that they get to know the community and its members. They live and breath it day in and day out. They know the key members, the ones who contribute most and those who are starting to become more engaged that they want to nurture. They understand these people and what makes them tick. They take part in discussions with them and they know when these discussions have gone too far.

A good online community manager will develop an innate sense of what works for their community. They will know how to talk to them, what to talk to them about, and how to engage them in a new idea, discussion or piece of functionality. In short they will know what to write to get the impact they want.

This kind of knowledge can be augmented, refined and enhanced by statistics and measurement. But they are not a substitute for the intimate knowledge that an online community manager will have. Sometimes, rather than spend forever planning, writing, testing and rewriting copy it can be best to trust your community manger. They know what works and test and refine this knowledge with the data from what actually happens. Trust them to get it right. And trust them to get it written.

I had to privilege of seeing Craig Newmark of Craigslist taking part in a discussion at Reboot Britain on Monday.

Ostensibly talking about meeting the biggest challenges for public services now that Britain is broke, Newmark spoke about the impact that ‘little nudges’ rather than forceful do-gooding can have on people.

He compared these little acts with the “organisational inertia” that many large organisations and people in power get locked into through fear of doing it wrong.

What really stood out to me, though, were Newmark’s remarks about people and communities. And these remarks come after 14 years of Craigslist, making the Craigslist community one of the most mature across the net.

Craig Newmark’s ‘thing’ is that he calls himself the founder and customer service rep of Craigslist. He is so famous (in nerdy circles anyway) for this claim that I was staggered when an attendee yesterday asked him about this, as if it wasn’t true and in fact he had a huge team of staff. (The same excitable attendee hopped up on to speakers’ table for a photo opportunity with a befuddled Craig at the end).

But after hearing what this customer service involves, I dispute his claim slightly too. Craig Newmark is doing customer service, that’s absolutely true, but he is doing it in the role of a community manager.

He talked about ‘trolls’, and suggested that they sat within a group increasingly talked about in US politics: Noisy idiots. Dealing with this group brings you eyeball to eyeball with…

“…some of the worst of what people will say to get attention”.

And that’s something any community manager reading this will recognise.

Among his various bad jokes, he liked to drop relevant names and quotes, my favourite of which was a paraphrasing of Jon Stewart:

“You hear more from the extremists and crazy people because moderates have too much to do”.

But he kept coming back to a point that it’s very easy to overlook – especially when you’re dealing with noisy idiots – there are “very few bad guys out there”. Far more people are “interested in talking together”.

“Most people,” Newmark observed, “are inclined to do the right thing, they just need a little nudge”.

For me, this perfectly sums up community management at its best, at its most natural. Nudging people to do the right thing, clamping down on noisy idiots but recognising that most people are good and helpful and want to talk.

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