FreshNetworks Blog

In online communities it is the content that matters most. People talk to and with each other not because they know each other or are already connected. Rather, because they share a similar interest, question, concern, ambition, query, challenge or other issue. People engage with each other on content and not on connections. You can meet and share ideas with strangers because you are both interested in the subject.

I love stories and storytelling, and in this environment they are all important. From the short stories on Twitter and other micro blogs, to the stories you share with people on message boards or the longer stories you might post on a blog or in a discussion. Social media is about stories that people share with each other.

This great presentation from Jenni Lloyd at NixonMcInnes highlights the importance of storytelling and of the storyteller in social media. Showing the role that stories play in the discussions that happen in social media and why they are critical to any brand to understand and to harness if they want to make the most of what social media has to offer them.

A good friend of mine started a new job for the new year – working in social media for a UK charity. She asked me what reading I could recommend for somebody looking to learn more about online communities and how they can be launched and grown. There are a whole range of great books out there on how social media is used and the impact this is having on society (anything by Gladwell or Shirky would be a great starting point), but she was interested specifically in things that help managing and growing communities online.

Here’s the very short list I shared with her (and a few extra ones added in). There are many great books, articles and blogs out there and we’d love you to share your favourites in the comments below. But this is a good starting point and we would consider them essential reading for online community managers.

Books

• Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities, Amy Jo Kim (Amazon) – a great text explaining the how to grow online communities, and explaining through examples why they grow like this.
• Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards, Patrick O’Keefe (Amazon) – another great textbook of how to set-up and manage online forums and discussion boards.
• 18 Rules of Community Engagement: A Guide for Building Relationships and Connecting With Customers Online, Angela Connor (Amazon) – a pragmatic approach to planning and building online communities, you can read our review of this book here.

Blogs

• FeverBee – a great blog from practical community-builder Rich Millington.
• Community Spark – a community-building blog from Martin Reed.

Articles

• Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities (2005) – a look at how to combat under-contribution to your online community, examining how social psychology impact when and how people will contribute online.
• Understanding Community: A review of networks, ties and contacts’, Working Paper, Real Life Methods (2007) – an interesting perspective on and review of the different ways communities form and bond online

This is purposefully a short list – what would you add to it? Let us know your essential reading in the comments below.

image coutesy of shutterstock

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

Lack of engagement

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

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

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

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

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

Lack of discipline and communication

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

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

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

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

Not supporting moderators

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

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

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

Making unexpected changes

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

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

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

Inattention

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

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

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

As online professionals, like any profession, we have a set of words and terms relating to our job. We talk about moderation and trolls and forums.

We talk about features and modules and fields. But unlike many other professions, we also expect the lay people using all those things to recognise what they mean.

We use a very unnatural language, and I’m concerned that it puts up false barriers between users and the platforms they’re engaging with.

Why do we use these funny, clunky words?I think it’s two-fold. The first adopters of online communities were tech-enthusiasts, of course. They were – and I use this term fondly – geeks. And as a geek I can attest that geek-language is not Joe Bloggs’ language. But the early lingo got stuck, and when the Joe and Joanna Bloggs’ of the world started to find their way to email discussion lists, instant messenger, and ultimately online communities, the lingo was set.

Early community managers tended to be the person that had been their longest or showed most interest (again, likely to be a geek), and naturally, the lingo would remain and be dished out top-down. Let’s start with ‘community manager’.

On our recent blog, What does a community manager do? I included a word cloud of all the one-word suggestions we’d had in answer to that question.Not one of them was ‘manage’.

So are we really community managers? Am I really Head of Community Management? Do we manage communities, or do we do something else? By far the most popular words were ‘facilitate’, ‘enables’ and ‘connects’.

None of those are really anything like management.

What would be a better job title? What do we really do?

Community Connector?
Community Enabler?
Communication Facilitator?

All rather ugly… what do you think?And then we have ‘Trolls’, as @SueOnTheWeb suggests. Yes, offline we have insults of course, but these don’t normally become professional parlance. I’m sure the police don’t have handbooks about dealing with ‘crims’, even if they say far worse than that in the locker room.

Trolling apparently dates back to early 90s Usenet group, alt.folklore.urban, but its meaning has been adapted and is standard community/moderation speak. It doesn’t – and shouldn’t – mean anything to a happy community member though, perhaps time to give up the geek-speak?

Moderation, of course, is the backbone of a healthy community. Whether it’s reactive-moderation, post-moderation or simply a culture of self-censorship amongst users, such as with many mature email communities, it’s vital.

But does the word ‘moderation’ really mean anything to most people? When we write our disclaimers and use the word, does it mean what we think it does to community users or is it just another word to gloss over?

Do we not need something a bit better, a bit more ‘human’?

Of course we have the abbreviations, the ROTFLMAOs and the LOLs and the IYKWIMs… and that’s fine, that’s a snowball that’s melted across all social media and even seeped into emails and txtspk so that non-community connected people (like my mother-in-law and mum) will use it.

And for many people that’s part of the fun of using social platforms. But it can also be very exclusive to people new to the experience. We probably can’t do anything to prevent the spread, in fact, embracing it is part of the community management experience at many communities, but if we run abbreviation-heavy communities, the least we can do is slap up a dictionary, like iVillage do on their message boards.

So again, what’s missing? What lingo remains solely to divide people? What should be replaced with more human words and what can community managers do to ensure language-use doesn’t create unhealthy cliques?

We wrote last week about the rise of social web literacy – how people are having to get used to a new way of communicating and a new way of using language to share information and ideas. It’s not just the technology and tools available to us that are different, the real change comes when people use these tools, adapting what they say and how they say it.

In short, as we make more use of social media, be it personal or for business, we need to hone our social web literacy. We need to practice and develop how we communicate. How do you enter a discussion in a forum? How should your brand talk differently in social media to in other, more traditional, media? How do you engage people online?

At FreshNetworks we work with brands who are engaging strategically online often for the first time. We help them to improve their social web literacy so that they get the most out of these interactions. And we find the following three steps are a simple and easy way for people to do just this.

1. Write comments

In social media and, particularly, in online communities, people share and develop ideas based on a common area of interest, concern or a goal. They may not know each other, but will happily share thoughts with each other to develop an idea or solve a problem.

A great first step to improve your social web literacy is to get involved in discussions just like this. Find a news article, blog post or forum topic that you are interested in and comment on it. Subscribe to updates so that you can follow what others say and make a conscious effort to go back to the same discussion and develop what you said first time around.

By entering these kind of discussions you will learn how people discuss and debate in comments and forums. By taking part you will start to develop your own style in forums, learn how to respond to people politely and how to express your opinion even when others may not agree with you

2. Use Twitter (even if nobody follows you)

There are many benefits of Twitter, but one clear benefit is the focus that comes from 140 characters. Having to express yourself in such a short space is a great way of learning the kind of direct and concise language that often works well in social media. The restrictions that this character limit brings means that you need to think carefully about exactly what you want to say and how you want to say it. How do you express your opinion in such a short space, without being unnecessarily ambiguous or causing offense.

Getting used to expressing yourself like this is a great way of developing your social web literacy skills. That’s why we encourage clients to start using Twitter (even if nobody follows them). It’s a way of learning a new way of expressing yourself and the impact that a restriction on message length can bring. Many people are comfortable expressing themselves at length, when they have time to set out their opinion, ideas and supporting information. Conveying a similar idea in a very short message is a skill that is good to develop.

3. Get tagging

One aspect of social web literacy is developing the skills to tag and categorise information. Social media involves users organising information for themselves and for others. And how this information is organised dictates how easily it can then be found by others. Tagging content and then using these tags to find information relevant to you is a great way of accessing the vast quantities of information that is available online. One of the best ways to learn and experience how this works is to get involved and do it. To get tagging.

Set up an account with Delicious, and bookmark content your see and enjoy online. Choose relevant tags for this content and then see what else others have tagged in the same way. Learn and refine how you use tags, using more or less and choosing your words carefully. Learn how to tag content in a way that is useful for you and for other users. Find out what tagging typologies work for you and why.