FreshNetworks Blog

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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.

Image by ecstaticist via Flickr

What constitutes a healthy community?

This is a big question. A really big question.

In short (although we’ll deal with the long version too), it depends on what you (or your client) wants the online community to be doing, how the community feel about that, how much churn and spam there is, how the numbers reflect the KPIs set and how ‘happy’ the membership is.

When we say ‘happy’, it’s important to say that we mean happy as members of the community (happy that they are safe, respected and encouraged) rather than happy as people, even the best community manager in the world can’t enforce that!

Perhaps it’s easier to look at what constitutes an ‘unhealthy’ community? Here’s what my vision of an ill, ailing community looks like:

• Members’ questions and opening posts go unanswered, by both other members and the community manager
• There is a visibly high amount thinly veiled spam (a loosely connect reply to a post that is stuffed with links) and a splattering of out-and-out ‘buy these diet pills now’ spamola
• Feuds and fights have escalated, crowding out genuine discussion; with even mild-mannered members turning decidedly Lord of the Flies
• People are leaving, loudly
• The original purpose, theme or appeal is unclear, or lost, and the community is in the throes of a panic-stricken identity crisis
• OR worst of all, it’s totally and utterly barren

Notice at no point did I mention quantities, traffic or ratios of active users.

Sure, your online community should have KPIs but one person’s page view target is another’s irrelevant number. The number of members a broad-interest lifestyle community has will – and should – differ from a special-interest, academic knowledge-sharing community.

That’s why it’s very important to work out – right at the very beginning of the planning stage, ideally before – why you want to launch a community and how you hope people will use it.

There is solid value in having numerical targets and understanding how many members need to be engaging to keep momentum, but there is no definitive ideal traffic goal any more than there is one topic area for all communities to be built around.

Tara Hunt, author of The Whuffie Factor, has a lovely bite-sized definition:

The health of a community is the gauge of where various qualitative and quantitative metrics lie in relation to the goals you set.

How to encourage engagement

It’s all very well promoting the community in all the right places and sweet-talking potential members into joining, but the real challenge (and the real trick) is making sure that they engage once they’re there.

Think open questions, talking points

If you want to get a conversation flowing, don’t ask “do you wish you were 21 again?” because the answers are all likely to be “yes!”.

Instead, ask, “if you could talk to your 21-year-old self, what advice would you give?” or “If you were 21 again, what would you do differently?”. The answers will be varied; they’ll contain talking points that will lead to more questions and more talking points.

Keep it simple

You don’t need to think up dazzling forum talking points that will show everyone how clever and well-read you are. In fact, the chances are this would frighten off all but the biggest show-offs. Keep it simple. Ask questions or start conversations that you would ask your friends over a drink, or like to know people’s thoughts on at a dinner party.

There’s more to engagement than posts

Don’t be led down the path of thinking posts are all that count. Sure, having a healthy number of bloggers and posters is fantastic, but there’s more to engagement than this. Have members rate each others’ posts, upload photos, comment on blogs or even respond to images with images.

Trust your own interests

Unless you know it’s a complete diversion from the interests of your community, start conversations and write blogs about topics that interest you. You won’t be the only one interested and because you’re speaking from your own experience, it will come across as far more authentic. Community managers are allowed to be real people too, your members will appreciate it.

Careful with current affairs

Legal matters are a whole other guide and there are many books on media law available if you want to brush up. But remember these top level rules:

• Don’t play with fire. Reporting restrictions of current court cases or investigations includes message boards, blogs and forums. Do not encourage debate around ongoing court cases, except with extreme care, because once you have pulled the tiger’s tail, it’s very hard to get it to stop the tiger typing when it crosses a legal line.
• Defamation laws still apply to community platforms. If a newspaper prints a story saying a named known celebrity is a love rat, and it’s untrue, they are subject to the same laws as if a blogger on your site claims that their named neighbour is cheating on his wife.
• Naming and shaming. It is not acceptable for any community members to talk about a named person (that they know or do not know) and tell untruths, or give away that person’s private information.
• Clamp down on risky behaviour. You are giving your members a platform to communicate, to chat and to engage. They do not need (and should not want) to give out their personal email addresses and mobile phone numbers. Perhaps they just don’t realise how open communities are, perhaps it’s a testament to how safe and friendly you have made your community feel. Either way, you need to give gentle but firm guidance on personal safety and personal information. Eventually your community champions will take on the baton themselves and report unsafe behaviour, and set examples of good behaviour, all by themselves.

A sobering example: In 2008, a record payout was made to a social housing firm in Sunderland after seriously defamatory comments were repeatedly posted and published on an ‘anonymous’ news and discussion site, called DadsPlace (sic). Eventually, the owners and administrators of the site were revealed through detailed investigation and they were found to be responsible and made to pay £100,000 to the victim of the defamation.

Online communities aren’t places to allow dubious behaviour to claim sanctuary.

More on this next week in the ‘Moderation and safety’ section of our Community Management series

Read all our posts on Promoting Community Management

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As an online community manager, you will have a ‘gut’ understanding of who makes up your community. Their rough interests, probably the gender split and a fairly good grasp of age. But this will largely be based on who is posting, what they’re posting and how often. The real shape of the community will be far more nuanced.

The 90-9-1 rule

The 90-9-1 rule, or 90-9-1 principle, is a really handy way of remembering who does what on your community.

It’s also a helpful way of gauging how traffic visiting your site will translate to people posting on your site and engaging with the community.

In brief:

• 90% of community users are passive members. They ‘lurk’ and read, without contributing.
• 9% of community users are ‘editors’ that will modify content or add to an existing thread (by posting a comment or replying) but rarely create any content from scratch.
• 1% of users are ‘creators’ that will participate a lot, including adding photos, starting new discussions and taking part in activity across the community.

With more low-effort forms of activity becoming commonplace, such as clicking to rate a piece of content, the ratio of editors to lurkers is likely to rise. However, the likelihood is the number of creators adding lots of fresh stuff to your community will always be a tiny percentage.

Community champions

As your online community grows, you will see a handful of members that not only create a lot of the content, they also seem to take a real pride in the community and take extra tasks upon themselves.

They are likely to:

• Welcome new members, replying to introductory posts and helping to signpost useful content to them
• Report any activity that breaks the rules or disrupts the community
• Try and calm down disputes and appear to have the community’s interests at heart
• Be very active in creating new content
• Have ideas on the future of the community and promote the community externally
• Encourage ‘good behaviour’ and show others how to behave through their own actions

These are your community champions. They will save you a lot of groundwork and help you to keep the community growing and safe.

Nurture them and appreciate them, but make sure you keep clear the boundaries between you and them. You don’t want them to get too big for their boots and become problems, splitting the community into them and us, nor do you want to feel beholden to them and uncomfortable making decisions that will affect them – such as removing iffy content they have posted.

The methods by which you reward and involve them is largely dependant on your specific needs, resources and the limits and possibilities of your community platform. But whether it’s a fruit basket or a cheerful personalised email every once in a while, you must show you appreciate them.

Active users

There will always be a large number of lurkers. Even if yours is a closed, private community where everybody knows everybody in real life, there will still be some who choose to eyeball without ever tapping the keys.

Everybody in between lurker and champion is an active user, in other words, users that do something on a fairly regular basis are active.

A good community manager will strive to entice lurkers out of their passivity – perhaps through polls and minimum effort functions – and convert active users into champions. What is vital to the health of the community, however, is keeping active users active, and keeping their activity levels high.

The Toxic Team

You will, of course, find that there is a small core of moaners and gripers. They’re not trolls or troublemakers for the sake of it, but they’re sceptical, easily affronted and standoffish. They’re also your best friend.

While it may not seem like it, and sometimes you’ll wish you could just ban them and be done with it, the members that are moaning but keep coming back time and again can help make a community.

Think about it:

• they keep coming back so they feel that they are stakeholders
• they care about the community and the experience
• they want to engage
• they’re telling you what is wrong and what can be improved
• they’re probably saying what politer and more forgiving members are thinking
• if you can turn them around and prove you respect them, all that sounding off will now be in your favour – they will be community champions.

Take them seriously. Don’t indulge their ideas if they’re ridiculous, but consider why they are saying what they are saying – do they have a point? Is there mileage in trying something new? Have you done something you should apologise for or explain? Perhaps they have misunderstood your actions, and if they have, then others will have to. Be transparent, honest.

Your toxic team will force you to be a better community manager, and the whole community will benefit. They also show you just how involved you need to be, because they will keep you on your toes!

Trolls and troublemakers

And then there are those that really are trolls and troublemakers.

PC Mag‘s encyclopaedia has a good definition of trolling:

Surfing, or browsing, the Web.

Posting derogatory messages about sensitive subjects on newsgroups and chat rooms to bait users into responding.

Hanging around in a chat room without saying anything, like a “peeping tom.”

Trolls are pains, plain and simple. They try and wind up other members, create negative, dramatic situations and are deliberately provocative. They will do their level best to crank your tail too, but obviously you’ll never show them they’ve hit a nerve!

There are several possible types of troll (it may be a cry for help, they may be being picked on in their own lives, they may be desperately lonely), and while the effects are still the same and there are no excuses for rule-breaking, understanding the motivations can help you deal with them. But do not underestimate their determination, or potential power, just ask The Scotsman.

Read all our posts on Promoting Community Management

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Brilliant and thrilling though it is, managing an online community is a strange and unusual job. Community managers will find they often fluff their words when describing what they do. That’s because they do so much.

Sometimes, as a community manager, you will feel like a primary school teacher, despairing at squabbles and laying down the rules. Sometimes you will feel like a grief counsellor, as members lay bare their deepest feelings, and you give them a safe place in which to do it.

Sometimes you will want to join in, but know you need to hold back to retain good, safe boundaries. Community members will enlighten you, amuse you and sometimes drive you a little bit crazy. (Which is why it’s great to be able to meet up with other community managers and ‘talk shop’).

And you will be trying to increase the number of members that you have, and encouraging the right kind of members to get involved and become active.

Maybe they’re the right kind of members because they fit a certain demographic, or have an interest in a set niche.

Sometimes they’re the right kind of members because they want to engage and they get the rules.

Sometimes they’re the right kind of members, because they will use a breadth of features and encourage others to do the same.

In a handful of cases, you will get members that tick all these boxes and more. They’re your community champions, they will spread the word about your community and bring in others like themselves – more about them and their fellow members in upcoming blogs.

Community Champions will back you up and support your work and they will make the community their community.

Who can run a community?

When online community forums first arose – perhaps as the natural follow-up to an email list, or face-to-face meetings or even a paper newsletter – naturally a lot of people ‘fell’ into running them.

The early community managers tended to be the practical organised ones that had always ensured the newsletter went out on time, or the good Samaritans that always listened to griping, or waded in when emails got personal.

We’re several ‘generations’ in now, with some of the newest community managers barely old enough to remember a world without mass access to the internet. But the core skills are essentially unchanged, see: The ten commandments of managing online communities.

Humans have always created communities that congregated around a place (such as a school or local pub), around a shared interest (a Bay City Rollers fan club or a football team) or a shared need (new mums, wanting to support each other over coffee and cake or sufferers of the same medical condition).

These communities have either been self-motivated and self-governed (informal but frequent meetings), gently organised and formalised (an unofficial fan club) or rigidly controlled (i.e. school).

The same skill-sets needed to shape, manage and keep-safe these communities (and by keep safe, we mean safe from spats and trouble-makers, just as much as safe from any more serious offences) are displayed by community managers online.

Chris Brogan put together a hard-to-beat list of the essential skills of a community manager.

Lingo and buzzwords

If you’re new to social media and community management, some of the language may seem a bit obscure.

Your community members, especially those who engage in social media a lot, will probably use text speak and standard community abbreviations without blinking. You’ll quickly get the hang of these, but here is just a tiny sample:

• DH – Dear Husband
• DW – Dear Wife
• DP – Dear Partner
• DS – Dear Son
• DD – Dear Daughter
• BBL – Be Back Later
• ROFL – Rolling on the floor laughing

The full list runs to the hundreds, probably thousands, but as with Twitter hashtags and text-speak, it is usually fairly easy to pick apart the meaning.

You’ll find that your community develops its own quirks of language too, for example a pregnancy community will use abbreviations like TTC (trying to conceive) while a niche scientific community will use even more nuanced abbreviations – but as a good community manager, you’ll be soaking up the syntax daily and speaking it like a native.

Next week we’ll be looking in depth at user type and behaviour.

Read all our posts on Promoting Community Management

Some more reading

• How to Demonstrate the Value of Social Media to Your Boss – Chris Brogan (slideshare.net)
• Top Five Skills a Community Manager Must Have (talkitup.typepad.com)

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To continue our dedication to Promoting Community Management, FreshNetworks is launching a new community management series. The posts will be aimed at existing community managers, those new to the role and anyone who wonders what a community manager is, does and should do.

Previously we’ve looked at community management from various angles, and you can read through just some of the entries from this year

• Why your online community should work offline as well
• The ten commandments of managing online communities
• How word of mouth grows online communities
• Defining community management – a starting point

On the back of this, our new community management series will look at:

Introduction to community management

The what, who and why of community management. We’ll look at the weird lingo, the essential skills and the history.

Champions, active users and trolls

Who is using your online community and why. What is the 90-9-1 rule and does it still stand? What are your members doing on – and to – your community. How to recognise community champions, how to encourage active users and damage control when dealing with trolls and troublemakers.

Growth of a community

What constitutes a healthy community, how big is big and how big should you aim to be? How can you grow your community and encourage conversation?

Moderation and safety

What are the risks to your company or name, health and happiness? Why moderate and what are the options? What are the big no-nos that you must always stamp on and how to handle the tough calls.

Community metrics

What can you measure and, more importantly, what should you measure? What does it all mean and who should you share the data with? What lessons can be learnt across your business?

We’ll be kicking  things off next week, so let us know about anything else you’d like us to include.

Read all our posts on Promoting Community Management