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.

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.

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.