FreshNetworks Blog

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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

Image by massdistraction via Flickr

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)

Image by gerlos via Flickr

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

FreshNetworks and e-mint last hosted a community manager meet-up in our very own Holborn last night, and it was great to hook up and talk shop (and other stuff) with some really interesting social media professionals.

Community managers were well-represented, but we also hosted a couple of curious print journalists, CEOs of exciting new start-ups wanting to learn about UGC and social media integration and product managers.

The wine flowed and the nachos and snacks went down easily (a little too easily in my case) and even the shyest attendees were circulating and meeting new friends and contacts.

Hosting meet-ups like this is an essential part of promoting community management, collaborative working and helping bring people together to share experiences and knowledge in an informal, relaxed setting.

The nature of social media work means that a higher proportion than in most professions are home-workers, which is fantastic, but missing out on water cooler conversations and the novelty of looking someone in the eye when you’re discussing the impact of iPhone apps, out-of-hours moderation or greater broadband penetration in all socio-economic groups is a welcome treat.

We’re planning on running a similar event in a few months time, and will be arranging a speaker and tweaking the organisation on the basis of feedback – in this modern world, good old paper nametags are still a requisite we’ve learned.

If you attended, would like to attend or are interested in speaking at our next event, please do drop us a line.

Cover of Mix Tape

As is the way with epiphanies, someone has probably got there first.

I drove home on Friday night, pondering the car stereo as everything clicked into place. I had no idea that someone had already had a very similar idea, expanded it into a book and got it in the shelves.

And a cooler someone too: Thurston Moore. Yes, that Thurston Moore, the one from Sonic Youth.

Anyway, his book, Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, deals with the aesthetics, the nostalgia, the life-affirming, self-indulgent nature and the optimistic kindness of pouring your musical taste into 60 minutes of delicate black tangley tape, and passing it on to someone special, hoping they understand that all your Smiths and Joy Division tracks mean you’re cool, interesting and in need of a little kiss, rather than terribly depressed and socially awkward…

But expanding on the cassette culture that Generation Y and Generation X grew up surrounded by, you start to see very clear patterns, parallels and even direct copying of the cassette approach in the current explosion of social media, mashups and distribution models.

I give you, C60 = web2.0.

Playlists

Where the mix-tape dominated the 80s and 90s teen experience, now you can demonstrate everything you need to display about yourself and your selection skills with your last.fm playlist. You can use iLike to broadcast your landscape of tastes and find new tastes, and you can use these playlists and tastes to navigate the swathes of potential new friends, and find whole new lists of playmates.

Or, just like tape enabled you to press play and record at exactly the right moment during the Top 40 countdown, now you have Spotify, where a little bit of effort (listening to some ads once every few songs) easily makes up for really handy access to a better back catalogue than yours.

DIY

With the advent of tape, came new possibilities for wannabes of all walks to showcase their stuff. From demos to bedroom-produced ‘radio shows’, the tape removed the financial barriers and opened up possibilities of reaching influencers (DJs, record execs, agents) with proof of talent (or not, as the case often was).

And now we have podcasts. We have blogs. We have online communities and social networks. We have online CVs and online ‘magazines’ that are produced at a fraction of the cost of old media production – even at a fraction of the cost of DIY Xeroxed fanzines.

And as with tape, sometimes the online DIY projects are for the sheer joy of themselves, of the doing, the making, the sharing, and not a platform for promotion at all – something once made possible by the low entry price of tape, and latterly by free open-source platforms and tools.

Creating for free and sharing gratis comes naturally to our generation, because this is how we have behaved musically for decades.

Distribution and copyright

As with VHS to the adult industry, the arrival of tape immediately democratised music distribution. And with the ability to replicate and share, came copyright fear and loathing. Those with the copyright, of course, were very nervous – downright angry in many cases – that a kid with a tape-to-tape stereo could make copies and distribute the originator’s work with no financial benefit ever reaching the original copyright holder – and the middlemen.

Fast forward 20 years, and you have a recording industry very late to the web party because it spent most of the early web days eye-bulgingly and vein-poppingly angry.

Control and opportunity

With tape before, and then with online file-sharing (starting with Shawn Fanning‘s Napster in 1999), those who previously held all the cards (licensees, controllers of hardware, controllers of radio waves etc) saw the challenges and panicked. And they got angry.

They didn’t want to relinquish control, and this anger clouded their vision so they didn’t see this expansion of distribution as an opportunity. They started to sue their customers. Yet here was a technical development that could turn fans into free sources of promotion; amateur bootleggers becoming ambassadors, spreading the word.

Since the latter half of the decade, we’ve started to see a tipping point in the music industry’s approach to online. It’s less of a curiosity, with the canniest players seeing iTunes and last.fm as they should be seen: a distribution network and a promotional platform that helps to push people into a state of discovery.

Thanks to the humble cassette, the general public was shown how to be generous, creative and innovative, expecting anything less in the digital age is trying to shove a cork in a bottle that’s already way out at sea.