The event was held @ Lonely Planet on Friday March 13th (thanks also to my colleagues for surrendering my favourite meeting room for a full day).

Our attendees included Community Managers representing Essential Baby.com.au [Fairfax Digital], Pool.org.au [ABC], Red Bubble.com, Habbo Hotel, Network Ten, EMC, South East Water, Lonely Planet and more. Other attendees were about to begin the work of building communities and were keen to learn about the people that make them tick. Big applause! Too many are tapping consultants instead of practitioners (or practitioner/consultants).

The work of Bill Johnston, of the Online Community Report, inspired the event and Bill made a cameo appearance to introduce the concept and explain how it can be valuable. If you’re a CM practitioner or just interested in this stuff, I highly recommend exploring Bill’s site and resources.

You’re what?

I asked our attendees to capture what they do every day. At the end of the Roundtable, we’d see what we had. The responses were wildly variant (no surprise to anyone in the online community space).

They include: writing code, writing reports, keeping insurers happy, dispensing chocolate, drafting FAQs, liaising with lawyers, summarising legislation, trend and competitor analysis, shaping policy, customer service (in public and via email or phone), mediating virtual disputes across country borders, designing community platforms, educating everyone around us, talking to the media, hosting live events, arranging events (on and offline), introducing users to one another, managing content, blogging, mentoring, training, bug testing and QA, mitigating risk across varying UGC, articulating and agitating for user/member POV, setting tonality, recruiting ambassadors, responding to cease & desist notices… all in a days work.

A few themes were captured repeatedly: education (our users, our organisations, ourselves); oversight (moderation, governance, risk management, making sure the relevant legalities are deployed to protect users and community hosts); and communication (we use highly sophisticated communication to meet member and organisational needs, ducking and weaving around volatile environments, minimal resources and duelling stakeholder priorities).

I found it interesting (and refreshing), that marketing didn’t appear anywhere on our four large sheets of paper. Is this a shortfall between how our managers/organisers see us and how we see ourselves? One CM reported having to clean up after colleagues who market within her community and create havoc.

Many of us were both Community Manager and Product Manager (for community platforms and ‘Community’ as a philosophical strain of our organisations). While this is the perfect way to fold community needs directly into a product iteration loop, it’s also tough. Product development, even at its most agile, is time-consuming work, which takes us away from our core business – our people. This can diminish our voice and standing. If you’re the only one tending community, it’s even worse.

Boundaries

We need them, and we struggle with them. Whether we’re obliged to clock in 24/7 or not, we often feel the need, particularly if we’re under-resourced, and/or our communities are experiencing distress, serial pests, or any other incendiary scenarios. For many of us, our users are most active in opposing time-zones. Few of us are adequately resourced to manage this.

Capturing community ideas

Permitting negative feedback is essential. Shut it out and perish. But be careful not to create a space for ‘complaints’. That’s what you’ll get.

One attendee reported success in transforming a conventional ‘feedback’ forum into an ‘ideas forum’ where users contributed meaningful suggestions anchored around particular needs of the organisation (as well as throwing some spaghetti to the wall and seeing what stuck). Other attendees reported an existing desire to move to a similar model.

The ideal system also lets members help each other more than you help them.

There was recognition that expectations need to be managed very carefully around this sort of platform so users are clear about what their contribution means; will it result in an action or outcome? How, if at all, will they be involved if it does? What is the time frame?

An ideas lab can be a poweful talisman for engagement and collaboration,but if users see their ideas piling up with no consequence or response, they’ll switch off or bite back. You can’t realistically act on all ideas. But be respectful and transparent about how you intend to review them.

Moderation

A hot topic, if ever there was one. It’s the underbelly of community, where ethical, legal, privacy and personal concerns intersect. While the legislation (child protection, safe harbor, privacy, defamation etc) we must craft our policy around is largely binary, people are nothing but ‘gray’. If you run a truly global community you’re managing a massive cocktail of cultural, social and political mores each day. They won’t always mix, and it won’t always be fair.

For example: a member posts content that’s offensive or prohibited in one country (let’s say it could get you thrown in jail), but not in most and not where your server box lives. How do you responsibly manage reports and concerns about that content? Everyone involved is a member of your community, and you don’t want to alienate anyone, or worse still, create the possibility of risk to person.

What about a review written by someone in broken English that reads like spam but you think it’s more likely a genuine offering. Do you remove it if the rest of your commnuity cries ‘spam’ and reports that content – recognising that doing so horribly sabotages that posters user experience (the one you’re protecting and enriching?) Even spam detection isn’t foolproof.

Let’s say you run a photography community featuring artful nudes of yourself but you’re forced to ban a user for posting pornography? How do you manage the perceived conflict of interest – and the fact it might be thrown back at you as ammunition?

Employ smart, robust policies and the rest boils down to in-the-moment judegement calls based on expertise and community intelligence. Draconian protocols are untenable in reality (and they’ll kill your community colour).

We need to look after our moderation professionals – ensure their roles are understood and respected; make sure they’re exposed to good, healthy content as well as the dark stuff (reviewing racist, pornographic or worse content for many hours a day impacts your wellbeing). Find ways you can enrich and branch their role as resources permit (working on highlighting community editorial for example, ‘panning for gold’).

Profanity filters work if it fits the community, but they’re best if creative and fun, i.e. turning a list of assigned swearwords into gibberish. ‘Frak you, get frakked’ can turn a problem into an amusing feature – but it can backfire and prompt more foul language if it’s too glib.

Avoid editing user content – there are complex interpersonal consequences that take up valuable time to manage. Changing posts on a forum might also corrupt internal linking systems from users. The preferred option is to delete – and it’s a serious decision. Some communities accomodate discussion with the user about why their content was deleted, but for others, size and workload make it an impossible luxury.

Moderation is a misunderstood, undervalued career. Moderators are expert risk mitigators – policy wonks with sterling communication and diplomacy skills. Cynicism is their big stick, a sense of humour their airbag.

No, this isn’t high school.

Our organisations don’t understand us. We’re a teenager (Emo, punk?) We’re the ignored child, except when there’s candy (user content, website traffic) to be snatched. Our members are also seen as ‘children’, not flesh and blood adults. We can fan this problem if we slip into school teacher mode too readily.

When we explain community concerns to our organisations we feel like we’re recounting a drama from high school: “then he said… and she flounced and did…”

Credibility is a battle, even if you’re trotting out kick ass business cases, products, metrics and policies.

Users suffer from this. Feedback on a forum isn’t weighted like feedback from a letter or phone call. While this might sound logical at first, it invokes risky assumptions about barriers to entry and brand loyalty. Our job is to educate and achieve reasonable balance. The movements of media and participatory business models demand that organisations invest in flexible resourcing around community now, to win big in coming years. A strong relationship with Innovation/R & D in your organisation is a strategic galvaniser. You desperately need each other. Your other best friend is your legal department (if you’re lucky enough to have one).

Bribing people with chocolate is sometimes necessary.

What motivates?

Why do your members join, stay, and contribute? Why do you have a community to begin with? What keeps you showing up to wrangle the bad, the ugly, and the great?

The table agreed there’s a nebulous, mobile relationship between motivation and reward. Many times those contributing the most valuable responses are users/customers with problems [questions|needs|explicit goals] versus staff, or ‘community performers’.

Take up of sophisticated reputational systems depends on the community and its members. There’s no right way.

Some seize on an endless array of badges, gold stars, points, rankings and rewards, donning them and divving them ‘like posters on a bedroom wall’. Others reject virtual flair and express desire for simple, ‘real‘ reward (praise from a peer, or a useful gift from the organisation).

Gaming theory will always come into play, consciously or reflexively. Sub-groups of members (regulars, trouble-makers and provocateurs, trolls, ambassadors, newbies, etc) will game the system to their ends. You can’t avoid it, so be smarter and let it work for you. Community history is a potent force – tinker with “old trophies” as a last resort (like post count), preferably never. If you’re introducing rewards, reflect historical efforts.

Introduce like minded members (and build tools to make this happen without you). This allows community members to share their expertise as your proxy and motivate each other (unsolicited peer praise is golden). Automate for sanity, but still keep the humans!

Lifecycles

Our members have them and always will. People become a member of a community and this relationship never stops moving. Sometimes it evolves into stasis, and ultimately, departure.

Though our organisations might be crying for growth at any cost, accepting this natural churn is responsible community management. Growth can be stimulated by catering to more – and different – life cycles, provided your resources can sustain this.

When community leaders impose their own life cycle changes on the community, it can breed conflict (i.e. a group administrator might abandon their group without transferring ownership, a resident expert might lose passion or interest in the subject matter, etc).

Managing changes in your community (new software, new staff, new features, new rules) can butt heads with these cycles, enraging members who feel the rug has been pulled out from under them. If your change is asynchronous to theirs, you’ll hear about it. Several attendees had witnessed an explosion of ‘spin off ‘ communities created by members who rejected organisational changes.

Life cycles also apply to moderators and community custodians. One CM who has engaged user moderators proposed a ‘retired moderators’ forum to give former volunteers sustained recognition for their efforts and allow relationships with fellow moderators to continue on familiar ground. The private forum takes them out of the public space and prevents moderator stasis or roguery.

Community Manager is one of those roles you have to be a sucker to sign up for.

The job demands a subtle and intricate set of literacies, extreme elasticity, and a passion for protecting and enriching people’s experiences and relationships online (and off). The blinder the passion the better, because the work is frequently exhausting, always stressful, and occasionally caustic.

(Cue the sucker) This makes it one of the most fascinating, dynamic and important roles of 21st century participatory industry.

Businesses and marketers keen to ‘add community’ – these are the people you need.

It was obvious we needed to do this again – and again. Next stop, a couple of months, probably in Sydney.

Watch this space, and our Australian Community Manager Facebook group, for details. Way to get the ball rolling!

The recent fracas over the Facebook terms of use revision, user revolt, then re-revision raises interesting questions about who owns community content?

The company paying to warehouse it? The person who uploads it? The whole community? No one has it figured out, and there’s a range of opinions. My sense is that it’s a reasoned, practical combination of all three.

I’m no defender of exploiting users. It’s mean, bad for business and all round inexcusable, especially when there are smart alternatives. My perfect world is filled with innovative, collaborative business models between enablers and communities that gives commerce, passion and citizenship equitable weighting (and spawn a new economy of awesome t-shirts and life changing micro-loans, among other things).

But I feel for Facebook. I’m not convinced they did anything wrong and I’m impressed at their prompt response to user backlash. I know what it’s like when users turn on you, and they often forget there’s real people pulling the levers behind the curtain.

Most major online communities have sweeping licences granting them expansive rights and privileges with user content. You know them – those catch all, perpetual, give us your first-born, ominous sounding agreements that make you grimace, but you sign off on anyhow.

There are some good, fair reasons for these terms. If you’re sinking considerable investment into building and resourcing a digital enclave, you have a stake in the content people publish within it. I’d argue you’re entitled to benefit from it.

User content as public history

You also need to preserve collective rights to content, and the shape of these should be dictated by the nature of that community.

The custodians of an online community dedicated to sharing advice or answering questions cannot reasonably permit every user to delete and remove every one of their contributions from that community if that user leaves. The purpose of the community collapses, discussions would be irreparably cannabalised and the greater harmony compromised.

User content is part of the public history of your community, and I’d argue every community member has a stake in its preservation, and a right to access.

A community devoted to artists uploading and selling their creations mandates different preservational groundrules. A social network like Facebook (a cluster of sub-communities) probably demands yet another approach.

Remember too that even ‘amateur’ communities are often bound by content policies – seen or unseen. A user run fan community on a popular blogging or community platform may not have its own EULA or licence agreement, but they are beholden to the terms of the site they exist upon, and whatever that site has to say about the content they upload.

How do you treat content in your community? As a community member, how would you prefer your contributions be treated? And as a Community Manager, how does this debate impact your mediative role between organisation and users?

I don’t buy into conspiracy theories about Facebook making an underhanded content grab and I’m loathe to second guess them.  Generally speaking, they were levelling the playing field with their competitors, who don’t offer the ‘expire upon exit’ clause. The battles they fight with spam, scams and other disruptive user behaviour may have forced them to pivot on ToU to retain data for legal purposes. Either way, it’s not the end of the world, nor even Facebook as we know it.

Where Facebook did fall down was talking to users before and during the update. For whatever reasons (and I won’t presume to know them), the amendment occured with minimal deliberative fanfare and apparently no attention to managing user complaints or queries around that change. I will assume they were worried about creating an uncessary panic or fuss. Clearly, that didn’t work.

If they had only handled the language amendment as they did the rollout of their new layout. That change generated considerable blowback, but the Facebook team went out of their way to signpost when, where and how things were occuring, talked to people along the way, and even gave users the chance to wean themselves into the new environment.

The wrong fight

The dramatic reactivity to the notion Facebook suddenly owned personal data was intriguing to me.  The outcry suggested a wide-spread sense that ‘something’ significant had changed or transformed; that this step was unexpected, frightening and signalled a troubling precedent. Surely this is dangerously naive. The precedents are everywhere already. Facebook is a soft, lazy target.

Are we worried about unflattering photos living long and large online? Or a serious threat to privacy and dominion? Conflating the two infantilises the argument.

Social networks are not our parents. They are made and run by people with goals that include making money.  Those agendas, and the leadership that sets their course, can change on market whim.  As they change, a particular ethos or attitude to user generated content can be rewritten. Ideally, companies adopt a forward thinking roadmap and forge fair, reciprocal, collaborative relationships with their users (evidence suggests this is better for eveyone). But many aren’t, and won’t.

One blogger cuts to the quick: if you were honestly worried about companies grabbing at your content in the wild, why are you publishing a relentless stream of intimacies to indexable social network warehouses? And I would add, are the people who were furious about the Facebook terms in any way disturbed by the data other digital entities aggregate and own about them? (Google, as an obvious example).

Furor is good. It’s activated and engaged. It means you’re paying attention to the epic changes to information and society going on around you. I’m for an empowered, wised up cyber-citizenry, but I’d prefer to see the energy directed at the bigger issue: a handful of companies will own and manage a great gob of our personal data in coming years. Are we ok with this? What do we need to agitate for now to ensure something truly damaging doesn’t occur?

Let’s focus on making sure that, as businesses aggressively pursue the monetising might of social capital, they don’t lose sight of those investing the capital.

Matt Cashmore (Lonely Planet’s Innovation Ecosystem Manager and all round awesome guy) and I attended a lunch with Ben this week in Melbourne, facilitated by the Internet Industry Association of Australia (IIA). An MIT graduate and visionary logistician, Ben talked to us about the now world famous campaign from his firm Blue State Digital.

The campaign, which involved a sophisticated data management makeover and drew widely on the power of social media, was instrumental to Obama’s victory and a game changer for 21st century politics. 

Though Community Management isn’t officially his thing, getting people fired up is. His story offers valuable lessons for user engagement and community management. Here’s some that I walked away with.

It’s about me

The creation of MyBarackObama was a touchstone in Self’s campaign. By recontextualising the message of his client to resonate on a personal level with individuals, Obama’s cause became a cultural and social text rich for repurposing. This is a golden lesson that all community custodians learn (and should playback to their employers). It’s not about you, it’s about the Community.

If you’re sending the community a message (check this out, vote for me), it’s unlikely to succeed unless it’s relevant to the orbit of the community member. What do I care if you’ve released a new product? Does it help me do what I want to do while I’m on your website? Have you made any progress on that feature we’ve been asking for? You’ve been good to me so I’ll listen, but you need to tell me why this is about me and why I should invest my valuable time.

MyObama gave agency to users. It provided tools to enable every imaginable level of engagement. Whether a member wanted to have updates emailed to them, be set up to give money regularly, step up and organise a rally, door-knock in their neighbourhood, or produce a campaign video, a rich suite of tools (and humans to support them) were available.

The community construct lets people decide how involved they wanted to be, and supports them in that choice. The community architects allowed members to define themselves and their relationship to Obama and created content and function that informed that relationship.

If you’re a community member, this feels good. This feels like winning. This is addictive.

Stay in touch. Often.

Community managers know you often need to get out of the way of your members and let them do their thing. But reminding people you’re there on a regular basis is essential if you have goals you’re working toward with your community.

If you were on Obama’s mailing list you were contacted almost daily. Messages were personal, respectful, authentic and purposeful. They didn’t whitewash bad news. They weren’t marketing messages or press releases. They were a conversation.

Whether joining in the conversation, offering an update about technical issues, or some cool thing that you think your members would like to know about, talking to your community on a consistent basis reminds them you’re dedicated to showing up, with them in mind.

When times are tough, this becomes even more important. Absence will be open to interpretation. If you don’t tell them what’s going on, they’ll start guessing. Conspiracy theories, trolls and troublemakers thrive when the parental unit is too busy to pay attention.

Loss of control is not bad, just different

For organisations accustomed to tightly managing their universe, the notion of prying open the hood to let a community of invisible web users see into your world, let alone talk back to you on your own turf, is deeply confronting. As Ben explained, Obama’s decision to support FISA, a bill unpopular with many in his base (due to it’s immunity protection for telecoms complicit in Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program), generated an outpouring of critcism from his supporters. Tens of thousands organised against the move on Obama’s own website.

Because the campaign had actively forged a welcoming hub for their constituency, the dissent was both visible and manageable. Obama could respond directly to those protesting his decision, in his own way and in his own time.

By handing over control to his community, Obama is saying two things. One, we are confident in ourselves and you. Two, we like you speaking up, we’ll listen and respond as best we can.

If the campaign hadn’t cultivated an empowered community, or worse still, moderated the complaints away, they would have lost control of the debate, and fallen into the trap of following controversy around the web to other communities. By deepening member investment, setting high expectations for engagement and interaction, and owning the problem, Obama and Ben were able to champion the chaos, mitigate risk and steer focus back to the reason everyone was there to begin with.

As organisations are learning (sometimes the hard way), conversations about you and your work are already playing out online. They won’t all make you happy. The control you’re fighting for is only perceived. Join the conversation, encourage and support a community around it, and you’re out in front.

When the rule is an obstacle, write a new rule

Sometimes it’s good – incredibly important even – to swim against the tide. Innovating your way through and around resource challenges, competing priorities, stakeholder demands and day to day micro-crises is stock and trade for the community manager. Shaking things up might make all the difference when the conventions you’re surrounded with aren’t letting you reach your goals.

Obama and his team honestly sized up the obstacles they faced. They lacked the network of established donors other candidates enjoyed. They would have to get creative to beat instutitional muscle. Understanding how shared experience can move mountains from his work as a Community Organiser, Obama gave Ben the job of gathering a mass of funds through social technologies which until then, had been considered an afterthought, a novelty or a distraction.

By talking to and with people often excluded from a community of elites and by focusing on small victories, the campaign achieved a mind-blowing ROI.

A conventional tactic in incentivising donations is to awe the individual with the gravitas of the giant. For every dollar you give, X corporation will match and double it. Instead, Ben and team took cues from Community.

Small donors were asked to mobilise and inspire larger donors. Individual donors were connected to potential donors and invited to make their case for Obama. The newcomer would agree to pledge if they were persuaded. The voice of the guy that stepped up to give five dollars was rendered as or more important than the voice of a fundraising executive emailing an uberlist of potential givers. The power of simple dialogue was understood, and maximised.

Building bridges to go further and in new directions

Young, small town, rural, grass roots, minority – these groupings are usually marginalised in the political game. Using social media tools and the force of community Ben was able to cohese disparate groups, collapse historical boundaries and degrees of separation – between individuals, and between those individuals and an estranged political process. Mountains were moved.

The importance of extending community offline was recognised and exploited. Obama supporters were constantly alerted to campaign events in their vicinity and drafted to hold their own events. These analogue gatherings affirmed online connections as people hooked up with virtual peers. Reassembling online, the bonds were more palpable than ever.

Yes We Can

Deeply embedded in the pop-psyche, Obama’s catchcry was inclusive and a community bottom line. Optimism and hope reigned supreme. The exhuberance and vision of Ben and his colleagues is a reminder that, though the odds may be daunting and you’re the resident pinata, your world can be a force for change.