photo credit: Unhindered by Talent

If you offer a product or a service, you have a community. It may be small or large, local or international and you may not even acknowledge it, but understand this: you have one.

Your community is comprised of those who use, enjoy and support whatever it is that you do. There was a time when engaging your community was a costly endeavor. Telephone? Postal mail? Yeah, fan clubs were cool and they were better than nothing, but they were bulky and required, in many cases, substantial investments with sometimes limited returns. The internet changed that.

Now, you can readily engage with your fans, your supporters, your community through communities that you host and through communities at other sites, like Facebook and Twitter. You can now easily communicate with masses of people with the press of a button. Or, a handful of people, if that is the size of the community.

The question isn’t whether or not you have one, the question is: what do you do with it?

photo credit: david.orban

I organized and moderated the “Social Media: The Bad and The Ugly” panel at Blog World & New Media Expo last October (see my recap). It had a wonderful lineup featuring Amber Naslund, Director of Community at Radian6 and blogger at Altitude Branding; Wayne Sutton, Partner at OurHashtag and blogger at SocialWayne.com and Robert Scoble, Managing Director at Building43.com at Rackspace and blogger at Scobleizer.

If you’ve attended a lot of panels or presentations in this space, one thing you notice more and more is the backchannel and the influence it has (or doesn’t have) on the presentation in question. Sometimes this is beyond the speaker’s control, perhaps they are surprised by a massive scrolling screen of messages behind them. These days, this is often powered by a Twitter search.

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photo credit: Gusjer

You’ve got a brand new community on basket weaving. You badly want people to come to your site. So, you go to the largest basket weaving community on the internet and start discreetly inviting members. Maybe you instant message or e-mail them off site, so that the people running the established community won’t notice. Maybe you use the private message system. Perhaps you even post on the community, too, to appear as a well meaning member. You’re really on your way now, right?

No, you’re not. Instead, I would say that you’re building your site on an old burial ground. And you know how that ends up. Bittersweet success haunted by the ghosts of the past that you’ve violated. Not everyone will agree with me, some will tell you that this is fair game or that it’s not hurting anybody. That it’s simply competition. But, not me.

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PostRelease, the forums-based advertising platform, and research company Synovate have released the results of a survey aimed at determining the influence of people who contribute to online forums, as opposed to those that do not. They polled 1,000 citizens aged 18 and older in the lower 48 United States from November 19 through 23.

They found that one in five Americans contribute to an online forum and that those that contribute to online forums are far more likely to help a friend or family member make a purchasing decision, recommend a specific product, post reviews and ratings online, share advice offline and online, share links about new products, take an active role in organizing an offline event and more. For the highlights and exact percentages, see the table below.

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photo credit: Beatriz_Mojica

I feel like I need to say this: there’s nothing wrong with a community being “just” forums. Nothing at all. There’s this push in some circles for them to be more and that’s cool. I love when people try new things. I encourage everyone to explore their ideas. That’s how we get better, that’s how we learn. But, problems arise when we think that forums by themselves need anything else. They don’t.

First, this is nothing new. People have, for a very long time, had sites with forums that weren’t simply about forums or whose focus was not forums. So, that’s not new. Either approach can be awesome. They’ve always been a great complement to other things – and they’ve always been fine by themselves.

MySpace grows leaps and bounds. Facebook hops in next. Twitter’s all up in this. Various other buzz brands pop up, as well. vBulletin starts developing into more of a social network application. That’s all great, there is plenty of room. I love all of it, please keep going. But, don’t use this as a means of saying forums are not good enough by themselves or that they are better with more things.

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photo credit: Rob Shenk

I was talking to a member the other day, in what was a very serious conversation about that member’s future on the site. Part of that conversation was an attempt on my part to get the member to refocus on what the community is about and not to get out of hand in discussions where people disagree with you.

This veteran member had been challenged many times by a new member. The new member disagreed with a lot of what they said. Instead of taking it as he should have, and setting an example for the new member as an established member, he took it as a battle, as if discussion on our forums was some sort of war. And this carried over into numerous other threads. This was very disappointing to me and my staff.

Now, there are plenty of communities that are basically militant debate clubs. And that’s totally cool. But, that’s not what my communities are. We aim to be a friendly discussion community. Friendly doesn’t mean that everyone agrees. It means that when people disagree, they do so politely, respectfully and thoughtfully, focusing on the points of the discussion and not on attacking the person who made the points.

Even so, sometimes, members get carried away, as we all do. Where disagreeing with someone becomes a petty game or a battle. That’s not what I want. And so I told this member, exactly: “Discussions are not warfare; this is not a battlefield.”

I continued to tell them that this wasn’t about the member, the person who disagreed with them, me or our staff: this was about the community as a whole and what it stands for. And we don’t stand for this. I believe the member got the message and hope that we turned a corner.

photo credit: Daquella manera

Part of being a good community administrator is believing in yourself. It’s always easy for an outsider, someone who doesn’t know what it means to manage your community, to say “look in the mirror” and consider how you could do better – without actually thinking of actual situations or moments. That’s too easy. Far, far too easy.

If you care about your community, believe in yourself. That doesn’t mean arrogance, it doesn’t mean that you’re always right, but it does mean that you’re trying hard and that you consider your decisions carefully and when you do something, chances are it was actually required. Caring is that powerful.

There is this train of thought that if someone else doesn’t understand you or doesn’t do the right things on your community, that it isn’t their fault, it’s yours. While may sometimes be the case and  you can always be looking to improve, do not allow that to turn into needlessly blaming yourself for the actions of other people.  People will take warnings the wrong way, people will not like having their post removed or edited, people will not like being told they can’t do something… that doesn’t mean that your actions are wrong. That doesn’t mean that you should change a single thing. Meaningful change doesn’t come from knee jerk reactions to singular events.  Meaningful change comes from witnessing trends and adjusting to ensure your community handles them in a consistent manner.

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I just sent a very frank, but polite message to a member who contacted me, mentioning a piece of spam that was posted on the forums, but using it to say that even with spammers like this, I have time free to bother good members who are trying to help (not his exact words, but close enough) by removing their posts that violate our guidelines and contacting them and how he and some other members are tired of it. It was a condescending message.

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this, and it won’t be the last. But, it did get me thinking of the member/staff dynamic and how it is sometimes compared, by me and others, to a customer service relationship. This is true in some ways, but it is not the complete story. Community members are sort of like customers… they are your visitors, your clientele, the people who partake in the community that you are cultivating.

But, whereas the goal of customer service is most often to please, community management is a different game. We want people to be happy, yes, but not at the cost of violating community guidelines, standards or norms because those things are a part of the foundation of the community and what you’re all about. Sometimes, when interacting with a member, you must be direct and frank, in a polite and respectful way.

You have to tell them that what they just said was wrong, that this is the problem, that you must do this and that there could be consequences if you don’t. It’s about being honest and setting realistic expectations. Not challenging them to push them, but letting them know that they exist.

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As a community manager or administrator, the situations we have to deal with are as varied as life itself. For all talk about the online and offline worlds being different, at the end of the day, they have more in common than they do dissimilar. Unfortunately, this is not just the fun, easy parts of life, but also the difficult, challenging ones.

Though it may not be one of the more enjoyable parts of our job, it’s smart and important to ponder what circumstances we may face, even if we haven’t yet faced them. This leads me to what I’d like to talk about today: suicide on our online community, and how we can most effectively help and protect everyone involved. This isn’t about suicide in general, why people think about it, the repercussions of it or anything of that nature – this is strictly about how we should approach it on our communities.

When we think about suicide on an online community or social space, the two recent examples that will probably jump to your head are Abraham K. Biggs’ suicide on Justin.TV and the suicide of Megan Meier, apparently driven by messages exchanged through MySpace.

Before I jump into this subject, I want to be clear that I believe that we are all responsible for our actions as individuals. I don’t think it’s fair to blame Justin.TV, MySpace or any community or social site for the actions of an individual in this sort of case. The nature of communication itself dictates otherwise.

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In life, we meet people who dismiss resources that could help them as being for beginners or “newbies” or whatever, as if learning from said resources was somehow beneath them. Whether it be books, websites, conference talks or something else, it happens. Perhaps those who are brand new to a particular craft stand the most to gain from a resource, but that can be said for anything and does not invalidate the value that it can be provide to the experienced. Community management is no exception.

If someone has been doing it for a while and they have some great experience – that’s awesome. But, you don’t want that to make you thumb your nose at additional opportunities to learn in fear that, if you say you are learning from something, you think it makes you appear weak or not the expert you want to be seen as. Just the opposite is true.

I learn everyday, from all sorts of people. Members, my staff, my peers. Whatever. I want to keep learning and to keep getting better. I’m open to any opportunity for that. That does not make me weak or anything like that. I believe that it makes me smarter and stronger and that this is the way that a community administrator should be.

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