By Jesse Coombe, Community Manager at eModeration
Working in social media, you may have noticed that occasionally people on the internet talk nonsense. They respond to your perfectly sensible content and messages with comments that read like a foreign language. You hover over the "hide" button and wonder if you can muster up the courage for an Urban Dictionary search to find out if any of those words are slang for one kind of genitalia or another. Before you know it, the user's comment has 20 likes and a series of replies, all just as indecipherable as the first. What could any of it possibly mean? How do you deal with it? Don't worry, I'm from the internet.
eModeration has a wealth of talented staff with a very broad range of interests. Every possible area of expertise is covered. I can only think that the reason they've kept me around for the last two and a half years is that I'm the biggest nerd. There are probably a few who think they could topple me from that dubious throne, but I bet I could find a 20-sided die before they could.
As a nerd I've spent a lot of time on internet forums. It's actually how I got into the industry in the first place. Who'd have thought you could make money from building and maintaining things like that? We were happy enough doing it for free! (Hope the boss doesn't see this...)
Through about 15 years of deep immersion in web culture I've managed to pick up a bit of the language. I can order a beer, get directions to the library, or ask if I can has cheezburger. More importantly, it's given me a knack for explaining the internet's countless memes and obscurities to my colleagues. They know their jobs inside out, but some of them missed out on all of that time lurking on forums in favour of wasting time on less important things like learning how to get the most out of social media for our clients.
Though I sometimes have to question the choices I've made, the benefit we can all share is this ability to decipher memes. I plan to make this a regular feature on the blog, in which I'll sum up the latest memes and trends doing the rounds of the web in terms anyone can understand. Then, if you see the references start to appear in your community, you'll have the knowledge to make an informed decision on whether the content is appropriate for users to see on your page. Perhaps it will even help you to communicate with your community.
I'll start off with an example. Recently our moderators started seeing a strange pattern of comments on one of our clients' Facebook pages. It's a page for a very popular TV show, and the admins had posted some content relating to an old episode with a thumbnail image of a child in a gas mask. The comment thread filled up very quickly, as it always does, but a large number of the comments didn't appear to have much relevance to the original post. Users were commenting to each other about "the pyro" and quoting lyrics from the 1965 The Lovin' Spoonful song "Do You Believe In Magic." How do you moderate something you don't understand? Is it all spam? Should the social media manager try to engage with the users, or is it something the brand doesn't want to touch with a barge pole?
In this case the comments were ultimately pretty harmless. They related to a
video that was posted on YouTube the previous day and had been quietly accumulating millions of views from fans of the online multiplayer game Team Fortress 2. The Pyro is a character from the game with a resemblance to the TV show's child in a gas mask, and "Do You Believe In Magic" was the video's soundtrack.
The page's users were just engaging in the call and response formula of internet memes: "See what I did there?" "Yes! I do see what you did there!" - Ultimately, internet memes are reference humour for the comment threads of 2012. Ten years ago the same conversation would have happened in the office kitchen about last night's episode of "I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!" And yes, that show did start ten years ago. Anyone else feel like a decade's gone missing?
I'll be back in the not-too-distant future to start explaining the latest memes appearing in your communities. Together we will all find out what gersberms are and why everyone's so excited about them, why Neil deGrasse Tyson wants to warn us about badasses, and maybe, just maybe, we'll finally figure out why some people just have to have the first comment.