Community Guy – Jake McKee

Gizmodo and Comments

Comment and content moderation is a much discussed topic amongst our clients. Hell, it’s much discussed across the entire socialsphere. Most moderation systems, sadly, remain pretty analog: A group of people are hired to review content and give it a yes/no status which allows or bars it from being published.

Gizmodo posted recently about how their system works and it’s worth the read.

There are three levels of commenters: Unapproved, Approved and Starred. You basically have to audition for the right to comment, by leaving a smart blurb—if it’s good, you’ll get approved by an editor, one of our moderators, or a starred commenter, and then people can see your comment. Your comment is also approved if you sign in through Facebook Connect, since it’s tied to an identity. Truly excellent commenters earn stars, which grant them moderation powers, and makes all of their comments featured (more on that below).

There are three levels of comments: Unapproved, Approved and Featured. Unapproved are only seen by moderators. Approved can be seen by everybody, but a casual reader will have to work a bit to see them. Comments that moderators think are awesome—as well as comments left by star commenters—become featured, which means they’re in bold, and right up front on every post. Think of it as a super version of the karma scheme that Slashdot’s used forever.

More and more companies are building and launching projects that allow users to post/share/comment/upload. Even “small” projects can generate thousands of pieces of content. You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) hire enough staff to handle everything manually. Creating smart moderation systems isn’t just smart financially. Smart systems help drive site usage and increase overall user satisfaction. The build culture.

So what about your projects? Are you thinking of moderation as a protection mechanism or as an integral part of the success of your project?

Honest Negotiation

A couple months back, I had the pleasure of attending the Online Community Unconference. One thing that really struck me was how many people, many relatively new to community as a job function, struggled to understand how to balance working in social media with a certain desire to keep at least some part of their life private. Being new to the industry, the social media douchebaggery apparently dictates that you can’t be successful in social media unless you open up every aspect of your life and career and personality to the entire world. Anything less is the mark of the uncommitted.

Bullshit.

The answer to the question of privacy vs. openness isn’t about what’s “right” or “wrong” according to the wonks and pundits. The answer is what you and the community work with decide on together. Whether this decision is an open discussion or an unspoken agreement, the answer comes out of Honest Negotiation.

It’s very likely that the community you work with doesn’t expect you to tell them what you had for dinner last night or to give them your bank account number. It’s easy to get caught up in discussions about transparency and openness, only to start to believe that if you don’t share this level of detail you’re somehow failing.

But community work needs to come with boundaries. When my daughter was born, I dialed back on a lot of the personal information sharing I’d done prior to her birth. Never once did anyone say anything about it. I’ve heard many female community managers tell me that that they use a pseudonym rather than their real name because they wanted that level of protection. I’ve know many community builders who purposely don’t live their lives in the public eye.

These aren’t wrong decisions. They’re the right decisions for the people involved. The trick to maintaining a comfortable level of privacy while also being a successful social media/community worker is to be upfront about the decisions you make, when and how you need to be. Using a pseudonym in a community with very little personal sharing (such as a question/answer based tech support forum) probably doesn’t require you to talk about the fact you’re using that pseudonym. While other communities where you know people personally through online and offline activities (such as a crafting community group) may require you to share your boundaries as part of a profile or open discussion.

My point here is simple: Do what’s right for you and your community. Find the place that makes you feel comfortable and safe. If you don’t have those two things, your work as a community manager will absolutely suffer. And giving up comfort and safety in the hopes of being a better community manager rarely works out that way.

The Community Manager Role

Yesterday I wrote about the “LEGO is…” meme that I ran across on Flickr. I actually found this meme thanks to a Google Alert on my name. Much to my own humble satisfaction, I loved seeing this quote:

“LEGO is seeing Jake McKee @ BrickCon and being simultaneously star struck and yet feeling like he is a friend I know well.”

That single quote makes me feel better about my 5+ years as a community manager than anything else. What a great synopsis of the goal of community manager: to be personal while also creating a persona that drives people to work on behalf of the company. It really is that simple.

LEGO is… a fantastic meme

I left LEGO 4 years ago, but I still love it. It was more than a job, it was a life’s dream come true. Not only did I get to work for the company of my childhood dreams, I got to play a small part in helping bring the company back from the brink of disaster.

But it wasn’t the job that so excited me. It was the people I had the pleasure of working with, for, and on behalf of. I noticed this meme a few weeks back and it warmed my heart to see that the adult LEGO community has grown to a size that it has its own history.

Here are a few of my favorites, but you really should take some time to read the thread.

LEGO is building the worst NASA Space Shuttle ever out of Galaxy Explorer parts and still being proud of it.

LEGO is discovering, as an adult, the box with your old collection in deep storage. LEGO is passing that box on to a younger generation–minus some Classic Space parts that don’t exist anymore.

LEGO is reading posts like this, and realizing that this is what makes the LEGO Community a community…not just a group of people.

LEGO is finding out how deep the rabbit hole goes. Its finding out I’m not the only one. LEGO is a hotel room in Seattle talking about the dream project until the wee hours of the morning with people I admire and am proud to call my peers.

LEGO is dominating my bedroom, living room and dining room and being too busy building to clean it up. LEGO is teaching my roommates the proper way to swoosh a fighter. LEGO is mocs in every room of the house everywhere I look.

LEGO is good friends I’ve never met in different continents with little plastic brick as our common language.

And while you’re reading the thread, ask yourself if your product/service moves your customers to think about it like the LEGO fans think about LEGO. No? Why the hell not?

Social Media ROI Is Meaningless

Social Media ROI is meaningless.

There, I said it.

OK, maybe that’s not entirely true. But if you product or service isn’t relevant or isn’t up to snuff, then concerning yourself with your Social Media ROI is the wrong place to start your planning. More on this point in this video:

Worry Less About ROI – Worry More About Being Relevant from Ross Kimbarovsky on Vimeo.

Guest Post: There’s a Whole Lotta Crap Out There

My friend Randy Farmer recently co-authored the new book Building Web Reputation Systems. I’ve just started reading the book, and if first impressions are anything, Randy and Bryce Glass have put together one hell of a worthy read. In order to celebrate the launch (and encourage you to go buy what is almost certain to be a great read), I’ve invited Randy and Bryce to guest post here, specifically riffing off the moderation post I recently wrote.

Be sure to leave a comment – maybe they’ll come back for another guest post!

Find Randy and Bryce at: http://buildingreputation.com
You can also check out my interview with Randy back in December 2008.

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There’s a Whole Lotta Crap Out There

Sturgeon’s Law:

Ninety percent of everything is crud. — Theodore Sturgeon, author, March 1958

In Building Web Reputation Systems, we describe a number of content-moderation models specifically geared at high-volume, high-contribution web sites, but many of these same concepts scale down to lower volume sites as well.

Regardless of where your site falls along the spectrum of contribution volume, you are likely to find out that much of what’s contributed just may not be that good. Filtering and sorting the best and most relevant content is what web search engines such as Google are all about. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is a multibillion dollar industry.

Think of user-contributed content in your community as if it lies along a continuum of quality:

The great content typically is identified by reputation systems, by local site editors, or by a combination of the two, and it is often featured, promoted, highlighted, or rewarded. These contributions are the superstars of your site, and should be showcased as such. On YouTube, The Evolution of Dance was just such a breakaway hit, and Red vs. Blue is a long-standing, quality fan-favorite.

The primary goal of a social media site should be to make user-generated content of good quality constitute the bulk of what users interact with regularly. To reach that goal, user incentive reputation systems are often combined with content quality evaluation schemes. Again on YouTube, you will find thousands upon thousands of good, solid contributions. So many that good examples are hard to find in isolation: but here is a nice ukelele performance with a modest number of views and crowd response.

Like an off-color joke delivered in mixed company, seemingly inappropriate content may become high quality content when it’s presented in another context. The quality of such content may be OK, but moving or improving the content will move it up the quality scale. On an ideal social media site, community members would regularly only encounter content that is OK or better. Depending on your tastes, this video is either OK, or not. But you won’t find it highlighted on YouTube’s homepage!

Unfortunately, when a site has the minimum possible social media features-such as blog comments turned on without oversight or moderation-the result is usually a very high ratio of poor content. As user-generated content grows, content moderation of some sort is always required: typically, either employees scan every submission or the site’s operators deploy a reputation system to identify bad content. Simply removing the bad content isn’t usually good enough-most sites depend on search engine traffic, on advertising revenue, or both. To get search traffic, external sites must link to the content, and that means the quality of the content has to be high enough to earn those links. (No YouTube example provided—it’s too painful to go looking for them.)

Then there are submissions that violate the terms of service (TOS) of a social web site. Such content needs to be removed in a timely manner to avoid dragging down the average quality of content, degrading the overall value of the site.

Finally, if illegal content is posted on a site, not only must it be removed, but the site’s operators may be required to report the content to local government officials. Such content obviously must be detected and dealt with as quickly and efficiently as possible.

For sites large and small, the worst content can be quickly identified and removed by a combination of reputation systems and content moderators. But that’s not all reputations can do. They also provide a way to identify, highlight, and reward the contributors of the highest quality content, motivating them to produce their very best stuff.

Twitter Followers vs. Influence

File this under: “Concepts we know, but are glad to have data and research to back it up”….

A group of researchers have proven something we already expected to be the case: your Twitter follower count is somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence. To reach this conclusion, the researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be “popular” Twitterers, but that’s not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don’t always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways.

How to Develop Robust Moderation Methodology

Moderation, at its core is about ensuring that published content on a particular site, typically submitted by the site’s users themselves, meets the terms of the site’s Terms of Service (ToS). This function is, all too often, seen as an analog task: groups of moderators site at terminals clearing content submission queues asking simple yes/no questions like “Is this porn? Is this hate speech? Does this content have personally identifiable data?”

The problem with approaching the moderation task as an analog, queue-clearing activity is that it simply doesn’t scale. What if you have hundreds of thousands of content pieces being submitted every minute? (YouTube, for example, has 24 hours of video uploaded every minute!) Your company simply won’t be able to afford the sheer number of bodies needed to clear those queues.

Therefore, it’s important to stop thinking about “moderation” as that analog activity of reacting to full queues and instead look at the primary objective moderation is trying to fulfill: an overall reduction in inappropriate content being published. This means reacting to bad content that’s been submitted, but it’s also about reducing the amount of negative content developed in the first place. It’s about getting your moderators smarter, as well as getting your community more active. The goal is not to reduce moderation clear rates any more than the goal of customer service is to reduce call times.

No, the goal is to improve the community health overall by providing positive, safe environments using every method you can. To that end, here are nine methods that you should be applying as you develop any community. The question isn’t which one of these methods to apply, the question is in what ratio do you apply each.

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Governance
The starting point, and all too often the stopping point with preparing moderation processes is the governance piece: Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, and other formal documents meant to define the concept of “appropriate behavior”.

Alison Michalk has a great overview of how to approach the creation of such documents. By far, my favorite governance example is Flickr’s Community Guidelines. Fun, clear, and shareable.

Engagement
General community management practices, development of culture, encouraging positive and discouraging negative activities, and participation from the company.

Engagement is a common discussion with message boards/forums, but is also highly effective, though implemented differently in all three levels of your Presence Framework.

As I’ve written about before, the moderation activity can, and should be used to help build your community’s culture.

Processes
Community moderation activities – generic approval processes, from one individual to multiple levels of approval.

This is where traditional in-sourced or out-sourced vendor moderation processes play. Straightforward concept of human approval before/after content is posted.

Positioning
Moderation is as much about providing a sense of security and safety as it is about simply deleting inappropriate content. Social experience have a culture and when the culture is one of positivity, the experience overall tends to have vastly more positivity. It’s not enough to simply have great moderation processes, you need to prove it out as well.

Algorithmic Tech
Using technology to discover and utilize patterns of tone, structure, users, response times, and other such data points to automatically identify potential problems and/or filter those problems out before moderators even see them.

• Crisp Thinking

UX Tech

Improved methods of user-facing technology like like buttons, report abuse, on-topic buttons, and other tools that give users a chance to actively participate in the identification and reporting of problems.

• Amazon’s “was this helpful” buttons
• Get Satisfaction’s smiley faces

Reputation Systems
In any online social experience, reputation is crucial. Whether that’s simply a culture reputation amongst community members, or specific points/badges collection, reputation can help with a range of activities in community building. Moderation efforts can be significantly helped by applying UX Tech and Algorithmic Tech together with reputation status. Yahoo Answers is extremely strong in this area.

For more on reputation systems, be sure to pick up the new book, Web Reputation Systems .

Tool Consistency
Undedicated moderator resources (moderators who don’t work on just one property day in, day out) spend a surprisingly large percentage of their time simply wrestling with poorly design moderation tools that lack consistency across properties. Moderators can clear multiple pieces of content per minute, so every minute lost to a struggle with the bad content is time spent in entirely the wrong way.

I would love to see a company like Yahoo or Google or any other organization who has a vast array or moderation-necessary properties lead the industry by creating a set of moderation tool standards, a UI/UX library of sorts, that any and all properties that use moderation tools are required to use. Yahoo already has experience with this type of concept through the YUI Library, for example. Let’s see that same thinking applied to moderation tools.

Programs
Specifically designed programs such as the Facebook Community Council that grant additional powers to select groups of partners, customers, or users.

• Facebook Community Council
• Disney Mom’s Panel
• Wikipedia is adding moderator approval
• Online MMO games – users given more power both inside and outside the games

After the AOL Community Leaders and About.com court cases a few years back, companies have been very hesitant to engage users to do anything that can be perceived as a “real job”. Even the Facebook Community Council is small and invite-only only because they are beta testing before rolling out to anyone who wants to participate. Programs can be successfully and legally implemented, they just need to take proper precautions and do proper planning. It’s actually quite simple: If you’re going to develop a program that treats volunteers like paid staff (only without actually paying them), stop it.

The fine folks at TextsFromLastNight.com recently added a “Moderate” feature to their iPhone app. You can pay 99 cents for the privilege of moderating content submitted by users. Hey, I bought it…. what can I say? I love my TFLN nuttiness!

Gaming/Application
Moderation functions wrapped in a shell of activity that users can enjoy as a game or useful secondary application

• Google Image
• recaptcha

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Remember: The question isn’t which one of these methods to apply, the question is in what ratio do you apply each.

The mind of a Community Manager

During a recent hotel stay at the wonderful Hotel Zaza in Dallas, I noticed two quotes written on the wall of my room. Both struck me as being particularly relevant to explaining the mindset a successful community manager has to own in order to do their job.

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’ve talked about how the Community Manager role is the “loneliest job in business” – it’s a job caught between customers and colleagues, where both expect that you’re on “the other side”. But the truth is, great community managers are great because they don’t choose a side, they understand, advocate, explain, and support both.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

- Antoine de Saint Exupery

A good Community Manager supports the activities a group of fans/customers are already doing. A great Community Manager has an ability to look at a situation and see below the surface. They find the people who are true leaders, not just talkers. They offer support that is more or different from what is being asked of them because it’s what matters. They constantly look at groups and social engagements and people who, to the execs on the 24th floor just look like “unwashed masses” and see something revolutionary.

Viva la Community Managers!

Linchpins and Community Managers: The artists of the business world

My colleague, Jackie Huba interviewed Seth Godin about his latest book, “Linchpin“. It’s a great interview, but in particular two things stand out to the community guy in me.

Q: You talk about linchpins being artists. What’s the difference between a conventional marketer and one who thinks like an artist? Can you give an example of a marketer who is an artist?

A: Art, by my definition, has nothing to do with painting and everything to do with connecting with people in a generous way and causing a change to take place. A movie director is making art when she makes you cry. A product designer creates art when the UI is better than it needs to be and it creates efficiency or even joy. Marketers can find plenty of Dummies books and manuals and insider PDFs that demonstrate, step by step, how to follow the rules. That’s easy and not particularly valuable. A marketer becomes an artist when she goes out on a limb, does the unexpected or the risky and makes a difference. I’d argue that you two do art when you stand up and give a talk about the 1%. Or Biz Stone was an artist when he figured out how to launch and scale Twitter’s marketing. Or Scott Monty at Ford when he does a car show rollout that bypasses the cocktail parties at AutoWeek in favor of individual interviews with social media mavens. The second time someone does something, it’s a copy. The first time, it’s art.

Social engagement/community building work is absolutely an art form. You’re taking complex, deep seated business practices and personal emotions and bending them into something new and amazing. As Seth mentions above, Scott Monty is doing something pure, unique, and quite amazing. Art doesn’t “just happen”. Art takes work, work that may not be obvious. I recently attended a lecture by a well-known art curator who talked about a number of projects that he had overseen. At first glance, the projects seemed obvious: create a theme, open a space, invite artists in to fill a theme. But as he explained the details that went into the creation of each project, it was obvious that there was years of skill, hours of thought, and months of preparation that each event was based on.

And nearly all of that time was impossible to track, much less apply an ROI calculation to. And that’s OK. Look at how Seth describes the idea of quantifying this art:

Q: We love this quote in the book: “The easier it is to quantify, the less it’s worth.” Can you tell us, and our MBA friends, why this is true?

A: If you can quantify it, then probably someone before you figured out a why to grind it out. And if you can grind it out, someone can grind it out cheaper than you can. On the other hand, the really valuable stuff, the stuff we pay a lot for, is unquantified. Things like creating joy or security or happiness. No easy measurements for those, thus they are art, and art is always worth more than the predicted. We measure the quantified because we can. But we should create the unquantified because it’s so rare.

To be clear, branding something “art” and therefore giving the artist an excuse to create junk is unacceptable. I went to design school, so I know that far too many artists get away with saying “You just don’t get it” when people rightly look at a lazy piece of junk and wonder “WTF??” Amazing art is the distillation of a complex concept into a unique and emotionally satisfying form. If I don’t “get it”, the artist has failed, not the viewer.

Community management is a tough gig because it’s primary function is to create art in the form of experiences, products, or relationships that satisfy an emotional need. Even though a customer might not understand their own emotional needs enough to ask for them, the Art of Community Management is understanding customers enough to distill that emotion into an amazing form. Apple, Amazon, Zappos, Alice.com, and many others understand this and have succeeded because of it.

As with truly great artists, community management is about way of thinking that allows you to find beauty in a variety of places. It doesn’t end when you walk out of the office, nor do you ever really stop thinking about projects (or relationships or programs or interactions) you’ve built in the past.

Community management and interaction, like art, doesn’t have to always be “good” or immediately understandable. It doesn’t always have to have a specific objective beyond the process of creation. And it most certainly doesn’t discount passion in the face of measurement difficulty. Community management, like art, is simply the process of showing enthusiasm for giving joy where you can and explaining the process you attempted when you can’t. Most importantly, it’s about picking up the brush and giving it a shot.