The Social Concept

4 Learnings On (Diverse) Community Management

November 28, 2008

I’m the last guy to write a book on community management. I’m not a veteran community manager, but I have frequently designed social spaces on the Internet for large, diverse groups to hang out in, and I’ve seen a number of communities unfold, mostly positively.

Recently I had the experience to work on two community implementations where my clients were surprised at the amount of dissent within the communities.

While dissent against a brand is common on the Internet (think: negative feedback about an airline on Twitter), this same kind of negative feedback is seen as intolerable by most brands on their branded properties (think: someone dissing Starbucks on the branded My Starbucks Idea implementation).When I say “heterogeneous” in the header of this post, I mean a community that is geographically diverse and diverse in age. Also, when you’re dealing with environmental or political communities on-line, you’ve got to account for diversity within the group (e.g. “left vs. lefter”).

That said, I have some new learnings from my recent work:

1. Use Tools That Show The Way If you want to delineate best practices rather than debate best practices, community spaces (forums, boards, wikis, etc.) may not be the best way to have a conversation. Blogs with limited comment functionality or survey/poll-type activities may be more appropriate.
2. Size Matters The smaller the social media tool (status updates, micro-blogs) the higher the potential for dissent, because of the lower barrier to entry. But there’s a downside to taking away these low-engagement tools. If you only offer “long-form” modes of expression in your community (blogs, etc.), then a significant portion of users (75%+) will choose not to participate.
3. Identity (and Follow-Up) Matters If you want to have multiple strata of memberships in a community with multiple levels of access to community features (forums, blogs, etc), it may be worth the time to require members to fill out a thorough application in order to gain access to those features. A five-minute phone interview might even be appropriate follow-up, especially if you’re grantingjunior-level community management features to these users.
4. Content Is Still King If the community doesn’t have something good to discuss on nearly a daily basis, then they will post irrelevant or off-topic content because they’re bored. What holds true in a classroom full of tenth graders holds true in an online community of tenth graders (or 27-year-olds).

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