photo credit: Guru Sno Studios

The holidays represent a great opportunity to express appreciation for your community’s moderators and staff members.

My moderators are volunteers who help because they have enjoyed the community and want to help maintain and give back to the thing that they have benefited from. There may be some other benefits, as well, but that should be the core.

What I have done in the past is send a Happy Holidays card, taking the time to write some honest thoughts, explaining how I appreciate what they bring to the team. I have also included gift certificates for small amounts to Amazon.com.

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photo credit: craiglea123

Moderators can be a very important part of your online community. I know that mine are. I select them very carefully.

But, I thought it would be interesting and fun to throw some numbers behind this. So, I took KarateForums.com as an example.

KarateForums.com was launched on May 21, 2001 and has 12,424 registered members. From doing some research, it appears that, over this space of 10 years, 6 months and 2 weeks, there have been a grand total of 75 different people who have held a spot on the staff, give or take a couple.

That means that 0.603% of registered members have held a position on staff.

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photo credit: Lars P.

In my last article, I discussed the danger of letting community guideline violations slide and how, if you let a violation go without the proper attention, you may be risking one of the most important elements of community management: consistency.

On Google+, Justin Kozuch, Lead Researcher at Pixel to Product, Community Manager at OSL Marketing and Host of 49Pixels Live, shared the article and started a discussion, asking community managers, “what tactics have you employed to create a consistent experience for your community members?”

I took the question down the moderation route, because that was the subject of my article and, also, moderation is, perhaps, the most important thing that we can do to ensure a consistent experience.

When it comes to moderation, there are a number of things that I do to help this process. Here are some of the big ones.

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photo credit: OttoKristensen

We’re getting toward the end of of the latest round of new staff members on KarateForums.com, which is an established online community that I have run for over 10 years.

Many communities, mine included, feature a staff of volunteers, who complement the person or team that is primarily responsible for the community. Volunteer staff members have low requirements placed upon them and they join the team for differing reasons.

The biggest, and perhaps most important, reason is that they themselves have derived benefit and enjoyment from the community and now they want to give back and help maintain the thing that they enjoy. There are other positive benefits, as well.

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photo credit: jsheehan200

Josh Barraza asked: “How [do you] transition [a] community after an acquisition?”

Online communities, like any website, can be very valuable. They take a great deal of time to run and manage and, in that light, can be looked at like any other venture or full time job.

Everything must eventually come to an end and there will come a time to close the community, to pass it off to someone else or to sell it.

But, they can also be quite delicate. In most cases, a portion of their value is tied to current activity and, if you go in with the wrong mentality, you could erode a substantial amount of value by making unfavorable changes or lacking the proper sensitivity when you first enter the community.

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photo credit: ClatieK

Staff tenure is a great thing to track, acknowledge and celebrate on your community. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, but it truly is a case of “it’s the thought that counts,” that you cared enough to remember and mention it.

It’s simple enough to track. As part of the process of adding people to your team, maintain a document of some sort where you note the day that they officially joined your team. At the start of the year, I enter all of these dates into my calendar for the next 12 months so that I don’t have to constantly refer back to the document, but will instead be able to see when a particular staff member has reached X number of years on the staff, when it is getting close.

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Today, I would like to take some inspiration from Dr. Dre’s “I Need a Doctor” featuring Eminem and Skylar Grey. It’s a personal record for Dr. Dre and Eminem and a motivational one, as well. I love it.

I’m going to discuss some community management related takeaways from the song, which you can listen to at the bottom of this post by playing the music video. I should warn you, it is explicit and I quote some explicit lyrics in this article.

Give People Opportunities and Mentor Them

The biggest underlying theme in “I Need a Doctor” is the relationship that Eminem and Dr. Dre share. Dre is his mentor, someone who gave him a chance when others wouldn’t, who believed in him and helped him to reach the level of success that he has achieved.

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photo credit: Chrissy Olson

Among the many traits that I value in a moderator, one of the most important is a strong attention to detail.

Details matter. A lot. Details are the difference between a post that violates your guidelines and one that doesn’t. Details are what ensures consistency in the application of those guidelines and in the handling of questionable content.

As administrator, I like to think of myself as moderation quality assurance. My staff removes the content that they feel is in violation of our guidelines, in line with our system of training, previous actions and our staff guidelines and manuals.

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It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how kind you are, how much common sense that you have, as a manager (community manager or otherwise), if the people that you have on the front line are ignorant, poorly trained and unable to communicate clearly and respectfully.

If these people mess up a relationship with a fan, client or customer, the damage will have been done and, by the time that person reaches you and your level of authority (if they reach it at all), they will already be angered or disappointed.

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Earlier today, the new music video for “Play Your Part” by Wale featuring Rick Ross, Meek Mill and D.A. Wallach of Chester French premiered on MTV.com. I really like this record and like the music video just as much – you can pick up a free download of the mixtape that the song is from at Ross’ website.

At last year’s Blog World Expo, I developed a panel featuring D.A. alongside rapper Asher Roth, my friend Wayne Sutton and myself. D.A. is a really cool guy – very nice, talented and smart - who has a great understanding of building community.

Anyway, in the new video, which I have embedded below, D.A. sings, “you think you’re using me, like this game’s new to me, but you ain’t confusing me … we’ll be cool as long as you just play your part.” So, today, I want to talk about how important it is that all members of your community play their respective parts.

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