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

Confessions of a Reformed Control Freak

Tarrant Figlio

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.

Group Voting by Email List: Now with more nuance!

Photo by Rachel Titiriga

About a year ago, I needed to ask the volunteer staff at Genderfork to start making group decisions about certain issues.  Our staff had been growing, some members were becoming more talkative than others were, and I wanted to make sure everyone had an equal say in final decisions. We needed a way of voting.

I wasn’t excited about the voting method I’d seen on tech community mailing lists in the past (“+1″ means yes, “-1″ means no). It seemed a bit too flat — missing all of the enthusiasm or hesitation you’d be able to gauge if your group were all in a room together. But, I hadn’t heard of any other options.

“0 – 5″: More than just yes and no

Stuck, I ran the issue by my friend Melissa, who had just started a new job at a nonprofit organization. She told me about a method they used in meetings to “take the temperature of the room” before a final vote: asking everyone at the table to hold up a number of fingers, 0 – 5. Here’s what it means:

Holding up four or five fingers is a green light. It indicates you approve of the idea, and you don’t have any major concerns. (Five fingers shows a bit more excitement than four.)

Holding up one, two, or three fingers is a yellow light. It means you have reservations about the plan, but you won’t try to stop it from happening. Everyone who holds up fewer than 4 fingers is asked what changes they’d like to see made to them plan, in order to take their vote to a 4 or a 5.

Holding up no fingers (a fist) is a red light. It’s a signal that you want to block the plan. In the case of Melissa’s organization, if two people hold up a fist, the plan is vetoed and will not happen.

For a not-too-large group, this method creates a nice hybrid of two kinds of decision-making: consensus and majority rules.  It’s not really majority rules because the plan can be blocked by a minority. It’s not really consensus because not everyone has to agree. It is efficient (like majority rules) and it considers the needs of each individual (like consensus), and it seems to get things done.

Shifting the Method from Meatspace to Mailing List

I carried it over to the Genderfork mailing list and explained the method.  Instead of fingers, volunteers can just send in emails, each with a number, 0 – 5. If they put down anything less than 4, they need to explain what would make the plan better for them.

An unexpected result was that it provided the less-talkative members an easy way to share their input without needing to engage in the full conversation.  If they approve of the idea, all they need to send out is an email saying “4″ or “5″.  One character, “send”, and they’re done.

The other nice result is having a sense of how much enthusiasm there is for an approved plan.  An all-fives group is offering a different level of support than an all-fours group, and that’s useful information to have.

Since our group is mostly in alignment with each other most of the time, votes for less than 4 are rare, but they do happen — usually because a proposed idea seems underdeveloped.  These are usually requests for us to work out more details and then come back for a new vote.

The result of using this method, for us, is that it allows us to our gauge level of agreement while still getting things done.  It works.

Have you also put this method to use? Do you have other voting methods that allow people to express degrees of enthusiasm? Tell us below!

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

Thanks to Flickr user m&m2009 for submitting
this photo for the Offbeat Bride Flickr pool.

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

Thanks to Kate DePalma for submitting this photo for the Offbeat Bride Flickr pool.
Photo by Stephanie Saujon Baltz at La Photographie.

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!)

Blogging w/ Volunteers: The Genderfork Jumpstart

Genderfork.com, a community expression blog about gender-nonconformity and androgyny, is one of my own projects. Here’s how it turned from a solo art blog into a community project. It was all about the volunteers.  – SD

Before Volunteers: The Solo Year

Genderfork started as a solo project, and I wrote one rule in stone for myself on Day One:

This will not require more than two hours a month of my time.

If I chose to spend more than two hours a month, that was fine, but the bare minimum amount of work needed to keep the site consistent and stable would have to fit into that time slot. I could commit to two hours a month. If the project needed more than that from me, it was too likely to die.

For a year, I blogged a photo a day, and I kept my time commitment promise to myself by doing the work in batches. I would dig through Flickr once a month, find 30 photos, blog them all as “draft” posts, and then schedule them to appear one a day, every day, at 10am.  It took about two hours a month to maintain, and it was beautiful.

But when people started gathering around the site in larger numbers and asking for ways to connect with each other, “two hours a month” began to sound idiotic.  I started adding new ways to contribute and increased my time commitment to two hours a week. (“But that’s it!”)

That plan lasted, oh, about three days before I realized I was screwed.  Not only were the new contributions turning into a disorganized pile, but blogging photos was becoming much more time-consuming — I had found all the easy photos, and now I had to dig deeper. In order to go any further down this path, it was clear that I needed to ask for help.

(Sidenote: I should add right now that Genderfork has always been a money-free [or money-super-minimal] project, and that this simplified any ethical question around “paid vs. volunteer staff” for me considerably. We’ll talk more about that potential can of worms sometime. It’s an issue that needs a lot of careful thought.)

Volunteers: Phase One

On a whim, I put up a blog post explaining that I wanted to do more with the site, but that my time was too limited to handle all the work. Would anybody like to help? Three people I had never met or heard of before (Adisson, Erica, and Jakk) emailed me right away to ask what they could do.

I divided the photo blogging work between them (“please blog 10-12 photos each per month”), and made the requirements very concrete, basing them on everything I had learned from doing the work myself.  This meant I had to write out everything from our editorial guidelines, to how to set up the Flickr-to-Genderfork account connection, to how to avoid accidentally offending photographers.  It was a lot of writing, but it was worth it.

Communicating all of that to them and helping them get their first photos blogged took about a week or two. But once they got into it, they handled the responsibilities easily. Blogging photos was officially off my plate.

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Lisa Williams, Placeblogger, and the return of the Local Community

Photo by JD Lasica

Lisa Williams has extensive experience as a online community organizer and builder. Her current project, Placeblogger, support blogs about geographic communities. Through generosity and a light touch, she’s able to bring readers, funding, and a broader context of belonging to many communities at once.  And she’s damned thoughtful about how she approaches it.  Read on!  ~Sarah Dopp

Q: How would you explain Placeblogger to someone who’s never heard of it before?

Placeblogger is the largest searchable index of local weblogs.  If you want to know who’s blogging in Timbuktu, we’ve got ya covered.

Q: What’s your role in the project, and in the community?

I started the site in 2007 as a way to answer a simple question:  how many blogs really were doing journalism and online community for geographical communities?   At the time I started looking, in 2006, we found that 1 in 7 Americans lived in a community served by a placeblog.  Now it’s 1 in 2.  I don’t know of any other form of community media that’s had that kind of explosive growth.

One thing I’m not:  I’m not the pope of placeblogging, nor is Placeblogger the Vatican.  I’m really against efforts to “professionalize” any placebloggers who don’t want to do that.  Most placebloggers run their sites as a labor of love, and I think we have to respect the kind of authority that gives them to run their sites however they please.

There are three ways I want to help:  One, I started the Placeblogger Angel Fund to fund investigative reporting at grassroots news sites.   Two, I want to get placebloggers connected with each other.  Three, I want more people to find and participate in their local online communities.

Q: What do you love most about the community?

I love that placebloggers have dug underneath the bland, big-box chain retail surface that’s encrusted so much of the earth to the deep magic and humor that resides there, that is still under there, and will always be there.  Placebloggers get that communities are the ultimate inside joke.

Q: What makes the Placeblogger community stand out, to you? What makes it special?

In a strange way,  Placeblogger is an anti-community.  Over the years I’ve been running it,  I’ve had countless approaches from large media organizations, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs who wanted to enhance their own professional standing or make money off the thousands of people serving their local communities by writing blogs, ferreting out news, and being a local watercooler.   Some wanted placebloggers to abandon their own sites and write for theirs; others wanted to indoctrinate them into the values and standards of their own profession.  My least favorite of these were people who wanted to give placebloggers ethics training, as if somehow they were inherently untrustworthy.

Placeblogs don’t look like each other, and that’s good.  They don’t look like conventional news organizations, and that’s great.  What’s happening isn’t a community where shared values and practices are being passed back and forth — it’s a giant pool of simultaneous experiments aimed at figuring out how to save journalism and civic engagement for the next century.

Someday, the day will come when we have a professional organization and get together and have panel discussions.  But that day hasn’t come yet, and when it does, I’ll be a little sad about the end of the great florescence, the great gold rush, of competing ideas and ideals.

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Denise Tanton Speaks Community from BlogHer.com

Photo by Laurie White

Denise Tanton is the Community Manager for the women’s blogging network site, BlogHer.com.  She’s been rocking this role at BlogHer throughout some major growth and changes at the company, and has picked up a great deal of patience and wisdom in the process. I hope you enjoy her reflections as much as I did.  ~Sarah Dopp

Q: How would you explain BlogHer to someone who’s never heard of it before?

BlogHer.com is an online community for women who blog, enjoy reading blogs, want to discuss (and debate) topics that are important to them, or are looking for a community of women to connect with.

Q: How would you describe your role in the community?

Oh good (and complicated) question! My role is to make sure that BlogHer.com reflects the diversity of our community.

Q: How do people interact with each other and express themselves at BlogHer.com?

Community members have a lot of different tools that they can use to connect with each other or showcase their writing. Members can create blog posts, join groups, create discussion posts, and comment on all of the BlogHer.com content. We also provide a 140 character on-site microblogging tool called Chatter that allows small groups of BlogHer members to talk to each other (filtering out some of the noise of Twitter) or promote their work quickly on BlogHer.com, while at the same time also sending their message out to Twitter.

Q: What are some things you do as a community manager that help keep the space so supportive and interesting?

Way back in the early days of BlogHer.com, I read every single word that was published on the site – every comment, every blog post, every link – to make sure that members (and potential members) were confident that they were participating in a site that was welcoming, inclusive and free from spam or hate speech. I still read almost every word but now I’ve got a wee bit of help so I can skip a few words here and there.

I answer a ton of email – every email that comes across the Help Desk is answered by a real person and that person is generally me, especially if it involves questions about how to use BlogHer.com tools, or serious questions about our Community Guidelines.

Answering questions posted by members, on BlogHer.com, is one of the most important things that I can do for the community, so I monitor areas where members most often ask them.  I also try to interact with members of the community by responding to blog posts that they write, by visiting blogs that they list in the HerNetwork directory, and talking to them in Chatter.

As part of the editorial team, I’m always the first person to ask, “Where’s the alternative point of view?” when we’re talking about assigning or syndicating content. We aren’t just moms, we’re also childfree by choice. We don’t all love bacon, a whole lot of us are vegan. We aren’t all straight, we’re GLBTQ and polyamorous too.

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