Thinking about becoming an online moderator? Are you ready for parenthood?

There are all kinds of excellent resources out there about community moderation, but the absolute best practice is effective parenting. Both kids and community members need to know where their limits are in terms of their behaviour. Rules make us feel safe. As much as we like to think all we want is freedom the limitless unknown doesn’t bring out the best in most people.

The role of a moderator is not to spend their time hunting down every instance of bad behaviour. Just like the role of a good parent isn’t to monitor their children 24/7. The best way to teach is to lead by example. When a person is micro-managed they learn that they aren’t perceived to be capable of making good decisions. Consequently a person who is suppressed from forming their own better judgement hasn’t any.

Modelling is by far the best way to lead a community. Instead of focusing all the moderation time on tracking down rule-breakers look for the best examples of community participation. Spend your time reinforcing these members and rewarding their contributions. The more you push forward good behaviour the less reward there is for members to abuse the community. Just like teaching a toddler not to throw a fit community members need to learn the right way to voice their frustrations.

Time-outs are effective. The time to intervene is when negative behaviour affects you personally. Only when a child’s problem becomes a parent’s problem should they get involved. Members need to learn how to manage issues on their own and shouldn’t be encouraged to report abuse instead of speaking up for themselves. If a child hits another child it’s important for a parent not to take on the anger or emotion of the victim. Instead hitting should be discussed and use leading questions to allow the child to reach their own decisions about how to react. By reacting on behalf of the child a parent is taking the child’s ability to think for themselves away from them. No one learns from lectures or emotional reactions. We all learn best when able to form our own opinions through supportive guidance.

We guide and lead as moderators. We’re not a Gestapo or private police force. Raising responsible kids who are considerate and thoughtful isn’t hard when parents get out of the way and let kids learn from their mistakes. Swooping in to rescue members doesn’t teach them how to take care of themselves and moderators waste too much time solving other people’s problems. Managing an online community is extremely rewarding – just like being a parent, but the value isn’t from how strictly you enforce the rules. The value is from enabling empowered individuals with common values to work together to solve problems for themselves.

Johanna Blakley: Social media and the end of gender

Monetizing Online Community

Monetizing online communities

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Stories of Women in Tech by GGDMelb

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Telligent - APAN - How Governments are Harnessing the Value of Community and Collaborative Technologies: A Haiti Case Study

This is a fantastic representation of a real-life situation. Every community is unique with unique challenges. Managing an online commmunity is not a cookie-cutter type of process.

I think this presentation helps to shed some light on all of the variables a company needs to think about when envisioning their own online community. It goes much further than likes and good reviews.

It's important to understand the lifecycle and the story your community needs to share. Understand the needs of the people participating and the ways they express themselves.

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Telligent - APAN - How Governments are Harnessing the Value of Community and Collaborative Technologies: A Haiti Case Study

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The Digital Advertiser

At a recent GGDMelb (Girl Geek Dinners Melbourne) we casually discussed digital advertising and many around the room were on opposing views regarding what metrics to track in order to serve up contextual advertising. I ineptly attempted to discribe a video I’d seen on YouTube titled, ‘The Break Up’.

The video was created in 2007 by Microsoft for the company’s Digital Advertising Solutions. An ad for advertisers that illustrates where things are moving. The concept of looking at consumers in a new way deserves our attention.

What if we could go beyond counting hits on a page? What if we could think outside the box treating our customers as individuals rather than stereotypes? What if instead of guessing what a consumer wanted to buy we could ask them and deliver a product that fulfils their expectations?

I think the answer comes from a few leading philosophies- these being: the long tail, permission marketing and more intelligent algorithms. Since we’re no longer looking at websites, but platforms –how can we do better than banner ads and one off promotions? Why are we trying to sell things online like they do on TV? They are not the same media- not even close!

A few years ago I attended NextMedia, a conference in Toronto, Canada that was extremely influential with how I arrived at my current frame of mind regarding Digital Advertising. The first lecture was about marketers learning about word of mouth advertising from the Grateful Dead.

In an article by Gareth Rees reviewing a book on this very subject he attests, “The Grateful Dead knew this as far back as 1965, as David Meerman Scott and Brian Helligan reveal in Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History. According to the authors: “The Dead pioneered a ‘freemium’ business model, allowing concert attendees to record and trade concert tapes, building a powerful word-of-mouth fan network powered by free music.”

By encouraging fans to share bootleg copies of live events the band was able to reach out to an ever growing audience. The fans felt apart of the legacy and held a sense of duty to share their experience. This is why decisions for regulating digital media are so controversial. By restricting what users can and can’t do with copyright protected media (such as music and movies) companies are restricting fans ability to fully envelop themselves in the brand. Fans want to share not because they want to commit an illegal act, but because they want to go beyond the current limited experience. Quite simply, there is too much control and not enough listening.

So where do we go from here? I believe the answer is in personal recommendations, personalised customisation, transmedia and exclusivity. If a brand can cross multiple forms of media there are more places to sell a niche product which is what consumers are looking to buy. There are lots of examples that prove when a band distributes content for free and diversify their offering they earn more in sales. The authors of Wikinomics, describe prosumption as a non-passive consumer who wants to participate in the creation of products and services. Allowing fans to create their own video clip is only the tip of the iceberg.

Modern advertising is about relationships and that takes time to cultivate. It also takes more time for marketing to be able to create more than one newsletter and more than one special offer. The hardest part is letting go of control and providing tools allowing consumers to take on the role of authority. But the benefits of personalization mean that your brand wins more loyal fans because consumers appreciate being part of a conversation rather then disruptive ads. It’s harder and more time consuming and that’s why businesses don’t try harder to do a better job, but that short-sighted thinking will see their demise in the years to come when competitors sneak up from behind with a more authentic selling proposition.

When you switch your thinking from my website to my platform you'll begin to see that it's not as important to currate content as it is to allow users to customise their own experience. The more you allow a user to create their own content stream the more you'll know about them. The more users rate, review and talk to you about your brand the easier it will be to sell to them. That's the fantastic business model that is Threadless. Stop trying to tell consumers what they want and start listening to them.

So how do you get in front of consumers in the first place? Check out Hunch and Get Glue.

Your Community Manager is an Artist: Let’s Celebrate CMAD

January 24^th, was Community Management Appreciation Day (otherwise known as CMAD). It’s a new role in many companies and there isn’t lots of information out there about best practice, etc. Many companies hide their online community team for fear of disgruntled customers pulling a Travis Bickle. (I’ve never heard of anything like that happening, but it seems to be a common ‘security’ measure.) So it’s really important to celebrate these vital individuals who are commonly unseen.

An interesting thing about being a community manager, or a moderator, is that every company views this role in their own unique way. A community manager might be a part of the marketing or PR team at one company and a part of the customer service team at another. Jeremiah Owyang has created a great post about the corporate view of a community manager.

In truth, the community manager is neither marketing nor customer service. The community manager is something entirely unique from traditional departments. I believe that the community manager is a storyteller and an artist. A storyteller who understands how to lead groups of people down a common thought. An artist who inspires people to participate and share their own content.

If the community manager is to sit in any particular department it should be within an innovation team. Thought leadership is very important because too often the tools cripple an online community to reach greater heights. It’s sometimes hard to see the dollars and cents behind registered users the tools provided are minimal and horrible to use. Businesses are thinking, “now that I have an email address I can push products and potentially sell something”- wrong. This assumes that you know what the registered user wants, but in actuality; the registered user is a guide to brand longevity.

For a community to work there has to be a purpose for it, i.e. cultivating trust (sharing personal information), collaborating on editorial content, creating a tool, designing products, brainstorming ways to improve software, sell something, etc. The community manager’s job is to spot the top contributors and give them support. To build new chapters of the story which inspires members to flesh out details and develop the plot.

When regular users get bored of the same old conversation things turn negative quite fast. Regular members need another layer of engagement. Too often the loudest and most negative members end up sucking all of the energy and inspiration out the community. The focus gets lost in the reports of bad behaviour, spam and negative feedback. The individuals who are contributing to the story are the heart of the community.

Community management is about setting up a plot for fans to role play. Once the rules are outlined participation becomes a game. As an example, one of the first forums I managed was for a short lived Canadian TV series called Falcon Beach. Fans of the show loved to chat in the forum, but there needed to be a subtext–otherwise; the discussions quickly inflamed into arguments about who knew the most about the show and its stars. I decided to create a section for fan fiction; which gave the die-hard members a project that other members could rate and comment. Following my analogy I gave the fans a new chapter to write on their own. Although we don’t know what the story will be about we know the rules of creating the story. This made the fans feel like their participation was leading them to uncovering the unspoken thoughts of the show’s characters and helped the writers see their characters through the eyes of the audience.

Communities need a purpose- this is why Wikipedia is such a success. There has to be a common link beyond the initial motivation to participate; as well as, recognition for quality contributions. Otherwise, the vibe of the community turns feral and you’ll have a Lord of the Flies scenario on your hands. With the example of Falcon Beach it was very important to use the ideas from fan fiction and explore ways to involve the fans into the storyline of the show.

A community is a story that is never really finished; the real-time version of The Never Ending Story. This is why marketing or public relations cannot “own” an online community- you can’t influence it with promotions. Essentially, the community guidelines are the prelude to the story. The purpose of the community must be clear and sandboxes need to exist to house members who don’t expand the plot. The intention has to be very clear and the community manager becomes a gardener attending to the weeds and beautiful flowers. The result is a story that has a pulse and its own unique purpose.