I've loved putting together a series on debunking community management as part of FreshNetwork's commitment to promoting best practise and sharing knowledge. The hardest part, of course, was boiling such a huge subject down into just five blogs. And they ended up behemoths...
So to help any time-poor, interest-rich readers out there, here is a summary of the key points from the series:
Introduction to community management
The what, who and why of community management. It's a strange job to explain, and a challenge to do well. The way you splice your day depends largely on the community set-up, size and specific-goals, but there are general rules that cross all communities.
- Respect your members
- Retain good, safe boundaries and rules
- Be fair
- Don't allow yourself to appear provoked (even when a member is driving you potty)
- Listen to the group, and the individuals within it
- Balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the group
- Keep records of everything
Champions, active users and trolls
We looked at who is using your community and how they are using it. The 90-9-1 principle has been a trusted favourite of community people for over a decade, but it's looking increasingly dusty as new forms of micro-activity (such as rating, thumbs ups etc) come in and blur the edges between readers and editors.
We talked about that precious core of users that behave wonderfully, use the features, have the community's best interests at heart and help keep it thriving and healthy: community champions. But what really came across in the comments is how not to underestimate the 'lurkers', as they are hugely important to the success of your community - especially if the number of page views is a KPI for your site.
Respect your 'readers' as well as your top contributors!
The toxic team, bores and trolls also got an airing. As delightful as it would be, it's nigh on impossible to bring together a group of people without at least a handful of them behaving in a way you find aggressive, unpleasant or just really annoying...
Growth of a community
So you've got your community, now what? How do you know if it's healthy? In fact, what do you consider to be a healthy community? If one of the core aims of your community is a vibrant and colourful debating space, the number of posts and replies plus the subjects being debated will be far more important than the number of overall members, for example.
How do you judge the health of your community, what should you measure? We talked about the importance of thinking about this way before you build anything. It should be central to your plans and your ongoing strategy.
But now you have your community, how to keep it vibrant, how do you recruit new members. Do you even want to actively recruit new members? Is it more important to you to increase engagement with the members you currently have?
We drew some top-line hints:
- Think open questions, talking points
- Keep it simple
- There's more to engagement than posts
- Trust your own interests and be authentic
- Careful with current affairs
Moderation and safety
What are the risks to your company or name, health and happiness? How can you spot risks, and help eradicate them? What are the options for moderation, and the potential drawbacks of each type? You pre-moderate all content, and be sure of the quality of everything you let through, but this will create a very different (almost certainly slower and lesser used) beast to a post-moderated community, which in turn will behave differently to a reactively-moderated community where more of the control and responsibility is shared with the members.
The right moderation entirely depends on the community and its context, so we pulled together some thinking points to help your decision-making:
- 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?
But what about when the community doesn't police itself very well, or show the restraint necessary to stay out of trouble?
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".
Read the full blog post
Community metrics
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.
But which metrics are vital to you and your community? And how do you learn from these and share them with the wider organisation?
We spoke to various community managers, all of whom had a different favourite metric. And we also introduced some thinking about newsletters and external communications. In many ways, we argued, this is a more fragile relationship:
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.
You need to measure everything that you do and be able to learn from it, because if you don't, the health of your community is on the line.
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