Hackers and Moms and Financiers (oh my)

I recently attended a Community Manager event (roundtable) hosted by nextNY where people from a wide range of sites and forums – from hackers to moms to financiers – sat down to talk about the state of online community. Some bullet points from my notes follow and if you are in the NY area you should definitely try and attend future events!

• Top response to question “what is the goal of a Community Manager” was “increasing engagement”.
• One of the attendees stated that their community grew quickly, had to focus on keeping people in compliance, trying to get to the point of being proactive rather than reactive – participate instead of policing; sparking positive discussions, running discussion group (sub-forums), etc.
• Another has online “office hours” and “video conferencing” to encourage positive behavior and personal interaction instead of disciplining and policing. Hoping to move to community moderating itself.
• As you build a community, you start to have problems in the community… larger social networks have changed what people expect online.
• “Policing” forums may cause accusations of being a “police state” but the “quiet majority” often will privately message thanking the CM for “cleaning up” the forums.
• NextNY community wrote the guidelines together early on – community was small at that point – email and blog guidelines were all put on a wiki to edit. People in the community wrote the guidelines, not the CMs… open to revisit them if people complain.
• Most forums seem to follow a system of warning, 3 day mute, 7 day mute, (maybe) 21 day mute… then permanent. Warnings kept private, “cases” not discussed in public. Accidentally banned someone on Friday, person went to all the people who wrote positive things in press and told them – now the policy is “don’t ban on Fridays”.
• Tools to Further Communication: WIKI, IRC, IM, Yammer (“Twitter for business”), CoTweet (based on Yammer/Twitter), search.twitter.com (for customer service feedback), Get Satisfaction (tab on the browser – easy integration – better for finding things broken on server). Important thing is to stick with one solution.
• How to monitor forums for “bad words” – have to read each post, forum software has report feature; no one using community moderation (like Slashdot) where users can vote down a post/thread for fear of “vocal minority” abusing it.
• “Ground Report” lets users flag and gives ethical users mod powers and growing their own moderators. Based on original AOL chat rooms – 4 or 5 overall group moderators who managed leaders of the community.
• People have tried mentoring (established members paired up with new members); virtual currency (helping others, good posts) – just added it, didn’t tell community who generated good behavior on their own; karma points for incentive (virtual economy) – self-moderating systems – needs to have a positive AND negative side. People love getting points… hate losing them (“fear of the bad”).
• “Tribes” by Seth Godin – There are pre-existing communities, our role as CM is not about trying to segment but to let people interact with each other and creating spaces and enabling the community. Charlie of NextNY is the arbiter, says he “does not run” the email list.
• CM role blurs – CM/support, CM/marketing, CM/evangelist. One CM does informal guerilla marketing by going to other boards and helping people and then talking about her site only when they ask where she works. Not overtly marketing. Don’t have marketing people do it, need someone who is part of the community (she doesn’t have prior CM experience – figured things out based on her knowledge of the community).
• Difference between community support and customer support. Issues posted in forums will be responded to by other people in the community before CM has a chance to respond. Volunter moderators also help in this regard. Forums broken up into General Help, Product Launches, Announcements, Member posts… Support forums help when people ask the same question over and over and established members (or moderators) will link to previous answer without CM getting involved.
• Company transparency is a good way to gain peoples’ trust. Even if you can’t answer every question, you are sharing information (like why shipping late, etc.). People respond positively.
• Forum threads are harder to use to get concrete information. Community chats to discuss issues, get feedback
• Post “top 10 features we are adding” but tell them “adding #11 based on your feedback”.
• Limited options aren’t enough, need to get comments/dialogue.
• How do you measure success of your community? Web metrics? Number of posts on forums? A lot of measuring success depends on the goals of having a community, type of product. How do you justify the investment (especially these days).
• Challenge is to get people who are usually quiet to get involved. Engage newbies (some forums have a “newbie” section).
• Empowering community to handle customer support is one way to reduce customer support costs (less support calls, cost of a bad product experience).
• Zappos is a “customer support company that also sells shoes” – best word of mouth marketing. Different company, different experience; every person at company has a Twitter; customers enthusiastic and tell their friends – metric is answer to “how did you hear about Zappos” question. Community is marketing/generating revenue.
• Innovation lasts for two seconds. Hard to build a sustainable advantage. A good customer experience is key to success. Everyone in company should be trained on making a customer experience a good one.