Things Learned in 15 Years of Tending Community

I am honored and thrilled to introduce you to Tarrant Figlio, a long-time community manager equipped with a huge arsenal of wisdom and experience. Tarrant has also been serving as a key contributor at our very own Culture Conductor, editing many posts and managing a big chunk of the publishing process around here. I asked her to speak to some of the things that matter most in her community work, and her answers were juicy, juicy, juicy. Ready to dive in? Read on…
~Sarah Dopp

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Confessions of a Reformed Control Freak

In the beginning, I thought managing community meant controlling the conversation. I had a hard line and while defensible, it had its ridiculous moments. (“NO! Don’t talk baby names here on the trimester board! We have a board for that!”)

I learned along the way:

• Lead with light reins.
• Encourage members.
• Listen, listen, listen.
• Teach members how to be a part of the community.
• Teach members to take ownership of the community. The most valuable asset in online communities are the members who lead conversations, take new members under their wing, point to site content, and invest themselves in building the community.
• Lead by example.

I take a laid-back approach to community policing. Yes, I enforce guidelines; however, I refuse to pull posts that might lead to a violation.

Community management boils down to how to help your community grow. Communities grow when you treat members as adults, not errant children.

When looking for a new place to live, you don’t want to move into that neighborhood with a cop on every corner and cameras watching everything. The same thing happens online. Even the rule abiding don’t flourish in a community when “big brother” seems to slam a mighty fist at the slightest hint of infraction.

I think many managers either think that their job starts and ends with reading and deleting posts, or starts and ends with the paperwork side of things. It doesn’t; those things indeed have their place (or in the case of paperwork and meetings, their inevitability). In managing a community, though, consider yourself the host of the party, the professional party organizer — not a ranch hand herding sheep.

“But what about trolls?”  I hear you ask.

My advice for “trolls” starts and ends with “Don’t feed the Trolls.” No, wait it doesn’t.

My advice: stop actively seeking out and suspecting trolls. Welcome an alternative point of view. Ask questions about it. Ask how the member came to that conclusion. If a member comes with a point of view eerily similar to another person’s point of view, don’t make your first stop crosschecking IP addresses and registration information.

In the past decade, I have come across very few true trolls. That wasn’t true when I first started working in online community. I know trolls still exist and plague some communities and that’s where “Don’t feed the trolls” comes in. If you don’t lose your cool and you have taught your community the proper response to true “troll” behavior, the trolls find reward elsewhere.

I talk a lot in my communities. I ask questions. I answer questions. I connect members with other members who can answer their questions or empathize with them.

I know the moods of my communities, the players and which way the wind blows. By participating in those conversations, I can steer a conversation before it turns bad in many instances. If I pull more than an isolated post, I post to the board reminding all the members how and why they should stop before they flame or continue to flame.

I do it in a way that isn’t casual and doesn’t call out the members in public. It also isn’t “A NOTE FROM ABOVE” where the members haven’t ever seen the mightiness that holds the power to pull a post. They know me. I remind them of the rules. I make it clear that while I know why they reacted like they did and I empathize, I want them to find a different way to react and stay in the bounds of a healthy discussion.

In order to manage a community, you need to know the community. Listen to them, talk with them, be a part of the community. Even on big sites with a community handling every topic under the sun, you can connect on some level with the smaller parts of that community. If you can’t, then you miss serving your community well.

Online Community Platforms: Your Options

So you want to build an online community, and you don’t know what platform to build it on. The good news is that you have a lot of options. The bad news is that (probably) none of them are perfect. Here are the likely candidates.

Sites People Already Use

These are great options when your main goal is to facilitate conversation and networking. These are not good choices when you need a lot of technical and design control over your community space.

Facebook — is more or less ubiquitous right now, so there’s a good chance your community members are already using it. You can either create a Page or a Group (look at examples of each to decide). The upside of Facebook is that you won’t need to ask people to sign up for a new account anywhere, and you’re using a system they’re familiar with. The downside is that Facebook has been known to change how they do things without warning.

Other Big Sites – Most large-scale social networking sites will allow you to make groups and foster your own community space. MySpace, for example, is still going strong. (And oh hey, remember Friendster? Okay, never mind.) Twitter, unfortunately, doesn’t have much to offer in this area besides general organic conversation (I don’t think “Lists” count as a community structure), but some of its third-party app providers might, if you dig.

Niche Sites – If your community is topic-oriented, go find out what other large sites exist to gather people to that topic. It’s entirely possible that it supports the creation of groups, and that your community members are already in the system. DeviantArt (arts) and LinkedIn (careers) are great examples.

Open Source Community-Oriented Content Management Systems

That title’s a mouthful, but it’s worth understanding: Open Source usually means free software that’s constantly being improved by the people who actually use it. A Content Management System (otherwise known as a CMS) is website software that lets you manage your content in an admin panel without touching code or your website’s design. And Community-Oriented is the kind you’re looking for (though they might not call it exactly that).

A word of warning: these systems require you to have a decent amount of technical knowledge, or to hire a developer. They may tell you they work properly straight out of the box, but most non-programmers I’ve talked to have been frustrated with the setup process. On the other hand, this software does come with a lot of functionality for free, and they’re constantly being improved by huge communities of volunteer programmers, so if you can get over the tech configuration hurdles, you have a good chance of success. Consider…

Drupal – The running favorite.

BuddyPress – Built on WordPress to act like Ning (more on both those names below), but still young and under-developed. I have high, high hopes for this software, but please don’t approach it without a fearless programmer at your side — preferably one who’s dealt with the system before.

OpenSourceCMS.com – for demos and ratings on the (literally) hundreds of other options out there.

Growing Your Own

If you’re very particular about the functionality you want — and you have the cash to back it up — you may want to hire a reliable development team to build it from scratch. It will cost you an arm and a leg (and you’ll need to keep an ongoing budget for maintenance and growth), but it’s really the only way to get exactly what you want. And if you do it right, (and you have a significant community to support,) (and your business goals can validate the expense,) then it’s absolutely worth it.

Classic Forums

Great for high-volume conversation spaces. Not great if your community doesn’t exist yet — it will feel like a large, cold, empty room. Bring in a forum when a community calls for it. Consider…

phpBB – the old-school favorite.

Simple Machines – the other old-school favorite.

Vanilla Forums – the younger and slightly cuter cousin.

Mailing Lists

Who needs a website for community when you live in your inbox? Mailing lists, if you can keep them small enough or establish some practical etiquette for them, are a great platforms for building community. The usual suspects right now are…

Mailman – an old-school software program that comes included with many web hosting plans.

Google Groups – my personal favorite. You can also view archives and interact with the discussion directly on the Google Groups site instead of receiving emails.

Blogs

Blogs aren’t always the first thing people think of when they talk about building an online community, but there are absolutely opportunities here. You can…

• have a group blog where all community members are authors
• accept and post content submissions from your community
• maintain a lively discussion area in the site comments

The major players for blog software right now are…

WordPress – There are two ways to do WordPress. One is to get the free software from WordPress.ORG, install it on a hosting plan with some basic tech skills, and customize the heck out of one of the thousands of themes available. The other option is to get an account at WordPress.COM, which is faster and easier to get started with, but can be very limiting in the long run.

Blogger - Easy to get started with, but very limited options for configuration.

Typepad – Lots of features, a long history, and likely to cost money if you plan to make it fit all your needs.

Hosted Community Software

If you’re short on cash and tech skills but want a full-featured community, your best option may be to use a hosted service. Take a look at…

Ning – a service that lets you build a stable, standard-featured community site (profiles, groups, discussions, photos, etc) about whatever you want, branded however you want, for a monthly fee. Those who use it tend to have complaints — little things that bug them that they can’t change — but to be fair, it’s probably the best service we have available right now.

What else?

Here’s where I need your input. Have you found other affordable (or better yet: free!) solutions that seem reliable and functional, and don’t require advanced tech skills to set up? Let’s pool our research. Please comment below with your findings.

A List Apart: Articles: Anonymity and Online Community: Identity Matters

This older article provides an understanding of why online identity matters and offers six steps to help you build stronger online communities. In the world of Facebook and Twitter integration, this may not hold as true but many mainstream sites still wrestle with the anonymity question.

What if you Sold Headbands?: How to Keep Your Community Focused

There’s nothing more exciting than having an online community that’s growing to the point where your members are invested and excited about your brand. So excited, in fact, that they start sharing their ideas for what you could do next.

“What if you sold headbands?”

That was the gist of an email I recently received from a reader of my site, Offbeat Bride. “I make these headbands,” her email went on to say. “I’d like to partner with you to sell a custom line exclusively for your readers.”

To be fair, they were lovely headbands. My readers and community members would probably really like them … but I’m a web content producer. I am not a retailer. I had to stop and ask myself, “Do headbands help me achieve my mission of helping non-traditional brides plan their weddings?”

Suggestions from readers and community members can be a wonderful gift. It’s remarkable to have a hive mind of members giving you clear feedback about what they want from you and your community. That said, with larger communities (I’m at 15,000 registered members and 200,000 monthly readers) the sad truth is this:

You can’t be everything to everyone. It can feel like an admission of defeat, but instead view it as a rallying call to do what you do with impeccable laser focus. Be your one thing to a few people.

Print it out. Repeat it to yourself often: You can’t be everything to everyone. I hope that anyone even considering an online community knows this simple truth, but it’s one of those things that’s easy to say and hard to live by, especially when you’re in a community growth cycle.

My members have made it clear that they enjoy my online wedding community because I work hard to maintain it as a positive, constructive environment … an atmosphere that can be difficult to find in online communities. Because of this, some members wish the community’s tone could be applied to non-wedding topics — recent suggestions have included a sub-group dedicated to discussing medical and health conditions, and a sub-group about home decor.

These subjects would doubtless make for fascinating discussions, and I have no doubt that a few of my members could really benefit from them — just like a few would love headbands. But ultimately I’m in the wedding business, and my skills are aligned to that work.

If I broaden the focus of my community to include medical issues and interior decorating and headbands, the purpose of my community starts to get lost. Suddenly the on-topic discussions are buried in a sea of chatter about fibromyalgia and shag carpeting — both interesting subjects, but not related to my mission of supporting women in planning their non-traditional weddings.

When I get receive these requests and suggestions from members, I always take the time to acknowledge them. I thank them profusely for taking the time to share their idea with me, and then explain that, in order to keep the community functioning at its best, I’ve chosen to keep it (and me!) focused. I always make a point to acknowledge that this doubtless means I’m missing out on wonderful opportunities, and encourage them to pursue the idea on their own.

In one instance, an article on my site Offbeat Mama prompted a reader to ask me if I would start a community dedicated to nontraditional military families. I explained I didn’t have the resources or background to do so, but offered to link a Facebook group, if they decided to start one. (Which they did!)

Because, repeat after me: you can’t be everything to everyone. It can feel like an admission of defeat, but instead hold it up as a rallying cry. Stay focused on being one really great thing to a few dedicated people.

…Even if the headbands are pretty.

Co-rumination: why you can’t let commiseration drag down your community

Editor’s Note: I’d like you to meet Ariel Meadow Stallings, the unstoppable writer behind Offbeat Bride. She’s generously agreed to write a series of articles about her experiences managing the large online communities that have gathered around her work. I hope you enjoy this first post as much as I do! ~Sarah Dopp

In 2007, I created an online community component for my website, Offbeat Bride. The goal was to give women planning nontraditional weddings a venue to network, share inspiration, and compare notes … and it quickly grew to 15,000 members.

Inevitably, I knew some of the notes being compared would be frustration and anger. Planning any wedding can be a difficult process, but when you’re planning a non-traditional wedding, there’s the added challenge of family conflict and swimming upstream against cultural norms and traditions.

I knew that I wanted to keep the community from spiraling into a cess-pool of negativity, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. “Let’s keep things constructive!” I’d shout into the growing storm of venting and rants. I worried that new members joining the community would be walking into the digital equivalent of a grumpy shouting match, and that instead of inspiration they’d be finding a chorus of people shouting “Everything suuuuucks!”

It wasn’t until I read a New York Times article about a psychology concept called “co-rumination” that I finally had a word to attach to spiral of negativity that can drag down online communities:

The term researchers use is “co-rumination” to describe frequently or obsessively discussing the same problem. The behavior is typical among teens — Why didn’t he call? Should I break up with him? And, psychologists say, it has intensified significantly with e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging and Facebook. And in certain cases it can spin into a potentially contagious and unhealthy emotional angst, experts say.

The research distinguishes between sharing or “self-disclosure,” which is associated with positive friendships and positive feelings, and dwelling on problems, concerns and frustrations. Dwelling and rehashing issues can keep women, who are more prone to depression and anxiety than men, stuck in negative thinking patterns, psychologists say.

While the article specifically addresses how young women are prone to the dangers of co-rumination, I strongly believe that the concept can be applied to any online community.

Co-rumination is highly contagious. When your members see each other using your community as a platform to vent and rant, they want to join in either by chiming “me too!” or by practicing grievance one-upsmanship, with members crowing, “Oh, you think YOU’VE got it bad!? Take a listen to this…”

Before you know it, your online community can morph from a platform for sharing and networking, to a circle jerk of complaints and anger, filled with tooth-gnashing and arm waving at the awfulness and injustice of absolutely everything.

Now of course there are some communities where this kind of conversation is perfectly appropriate — groups supporting people in times of grief or loss, or consumer communities about tracking frustrations. In some communities, commiseration is just fine.

But in many online communities, co-rumination can lead the tone of the group into a downward spiral, creating a grumbling, grinching negative space where more interesting conversation is ignored in lieu of “Yeah, I hate that too!” and “Listen to how bad *I* have it.”

I dealt with the challenge by creating a very specific sub-section of my online community for negative discussion. The sub-group is called “Bridal Bitching,” and I’m clear with all my new members that THAT’S the one place where they can vent and complain all they want. I wanted to recognize that there is some community value in commiseration — the “us vs. them” mentality isn’t always great, but there’s no denying it can foster a sense of camaraderie.

So while the bulk of my community remains focused on brides supporting each other and celebrating inspiration, the “Bridal Bitching” sub-group is the darker corner of the website that members can enter at their own risk. They know what they’re in for when they click into the group. And when members post negative rants outside the sub-group, my moderators have a place to direct them — it feels important to have a release valve, rather than just saying “YOU CAN’T DO THAT HERE, AT ALL. EVER!”

No denying, this method requires pretty hands-on moderation — especially initially. I found that if I explained my motives to members (I even linked the co-rumination New York Times article!) people generally understood the logic behind the policy, and within a month or so most members were self-policing, directing new members to the “Bridal Bitching” sub-group when needed.

In a bit of divine comedy (because how the fates do laugh at my attempts at moderation. HA HA HA!) it shouldn’t be any surprise that “Bridal Bitching” is the most popular sub-group in the Offbeat Bride community.

But by keeping the negativity in its own little corner, I encourage members to focus their frustration in constructive ways. For instance, instead of complaining, “My mother-in-law doesn’t understand me! Why does she want me to spend $10,000 on the flowers when I just want to use blooms from our garden??” I encourage members to focus on what they’ve learned from their challenges, i.e., “When my mother-in-law wanted us to go big-budget on our flowers, I found that talking to her about why I wanted to for a more sustainable, less flashy option wasn’t working. Instead, I needed to show her a spreadsheet of our budget.”

Encouraging members to focus on what they’ve learned keeps the tone of the group more positive, and I hope I’m making the group more useful to members. People love complaining and sharing their frustrations, and it would be a thankless task to try to eliminate negative discussion completely. But by giving your members a safe way to approach it, you can avoid dragging the rest of your community down.

Mitosis: Big Communities Creating Little Communities is Okay

There’s a great article on Mashable today called “HOW TO: Manage a Sustainable Community,” which introduces the concept of Community Mitosis:

Mitosis: Core community members become disenfranchised with new participants who don’t share the same values. These core community members seek more focus as they gravitate towards specific topics and relationships. Successful communities enable this and allow the community to split into smaller nodes, thus returning to an Established phase and repeating the life cycle process.

While the value of the community to its creators increases as membership increases, the value to individual members may diminish. Disregard for, or lack of understanding of these behaviors can lead to the failure of a community.

The author, Rob Howard from Telligent, offers a community lifecycles infographic and everything:

This is absolutely real and true and okay. When something gets too big, it stops being what a lot of people were looking for. You can either stop caring about those people and let them leave (and probably blog angrily about what a sellout monopolizing set of jerkheads you are), or support them in creating new, smaller spaces within the eco-system. The latter is more awesome.

Howard also lays out the three cardinal sins of mindset, often committed by community builders:

• “If you build it, they will come.”
• “Once I’ve launched it, I’m done.”
• “Bigger is better.”

Any of those can break you.

Go read the whole article. It’s good.

(Sent my way by Jenka of Social Creature. Thanks!)

Set the tone, and the tone will maintain the tone.

This is an excerpt from my essay, Aikido Moves for Online Community Management, written last fall. It may not be relevant to every community situation, but it worked for me. I’d love to hear your version. -sd

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Okay, so lack of hate isn’t really “magic” — it’s the tone we set from the beginning.

Have you ever shown up to a conversation that was already in progress? What did you do? You listened to what was going on, how people were interacting, and where they were in the discussion before you joined in. You drew all sorts of conclusions about expectations and protocol just by taking a quick inventory of the situation, and then you went with the flow, adding your perspective in a way that seemed to fit.

That’s what people do when they show up to online communities, too. They take a brief scan around, they pull in whatever cues they can gather, they decide if they want to join in, and then they do so in a way that fits all the factors. Think of the quality of comments on Flickr versus YouTube. Flickr takes community management very seriously, and people have gotten the message over time (whether consciously or unconsciously) that being respectful in comments is important. On YouTube, the expectation is more or less that people will be idiots. So people are idiots.

Take note of what kind of conversation people are experiencing when they show up to your site. If you monitor it carefully enough in the beginning, it will begin to (mostly) monitor itself.

How do you set the tone? By contributing in the style that you’d like others to contribute. By offering some simple, clear guidelines on how people should treat each other and why. By suggesting to the people in your inner circle that they engage in a certain way. By showing up and being personally involved to positively redirect things when someone goes off course.

Don’t punish people for stuff they haven’t done.

This is an excerpt from my essay, Aikido Moves for Online Community Management, written last fall. It may not be relevant to every community situation, but it worked for me. I’d love to hear your version. -sd

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Be careful about comment and moderation policies, and make sure they’re addressing real needs rather than pre-emptively striking against imagined ones.

I anticipated that Genderfork would get a lot of hate mail, and I strongly considered turning on the “you have to be pre-approved to leave comments” setting to guard against it. If you’ve ever left a comment only to see a “now waiting for moderation” message, you know what a slap in the face that setting feels like. Fortunately, I decided to wait and see if I really needed it. 70,000+ total visitors later, we still don’t get a single shred of anti-queer hate in our comments. ZERO. NADA. GOOSE EGG. (Okay, well there was that one day, but it was super-isolated, and there was a miscommunication, so I say it doesn’t count.) I now have it set up so that people can even comment anonymously — no name or email address required — because I know they appreciate the option, and they respect the privilege. Still no hate. Magic.