These folks are great, and they are in no small part a big reason a brand turns from great product into beloved experience. You need these folks, you want these folks, and you should love these folks.

But it doesn’t mean they’re always easy to work with. Consider the Red Shirt Guy:

[..] the epic story of Red Shirt Guy, the kid who stood up at Blizzcon and pointed out that Blizzard loremasters had left a secondary NPC (Non Playable Character) out of the expansion, and then, when video of his nervous demeanor went viral, responded calmly, reasonably, and in the same shirt to all the haters.

If you’re the Community Manager at Blizzard, having this kid stand up and ask about this level of minutia when you’re trying to launch an entire game expansion has to be frustrating. Sure, you may appreciate the depth of his enthusiasm, but it’s probably quietly on the inside.

Many community managers let this type of thing get to them and just blow it off. But this story, as Geekosystem rightly points out, went viral. What to do? Embrace it, love it, integrate it.

Don’t worry, it’s a happy ending. In reward for his dedication to the story behind the biggest MMORPG in history, Blizzard has not only fixed the omission of Falstad Wildhammer fromWorld of Warcraft: Cataclysm, but given the dwarven chieftain an addition to his retinue.The Wildhammer Fact Checker currently stands proudly next to his leader in the CataclysmBeta, and, as Blizzard confirmed, he will remain there when the game ships.

And yes, he’s wearing a red shirt.

Two things happen with this story:

1. The team at Blizzard shows that they’re paying attention. This wasn’t a casual brushing off of an otherwise easily dismissed story. They took it and ran.
2. They made themselves “one of the gang” within the fan community. Blizzard is proving that they’re not only listening, but that they’re as interested in the community discussion as anyone in the world.

Relatively speaking, this is a tiny amount of additional work for Blizzard. But it’s a huge win for their community and the conversation they have daily with fans. It’s hard to put this decision into a business case, but the results speak for themselves within the conversation of fans and non-fans alike.

(For what it’s worth, I’m bored to tears by World of Warcraft)

Netflix Inc. tried to bring a touch of Hollywood to its Canada debut Wednesday only to wind up apologizing for a botched publicity stunt.

Things backfired at a Toronto street celebration after reporters discovered that actors hired by the Netflix had been given written instructions to give media interviews gushing about the video subscription service’s arrival in Canada.

The actors also were urged to fill a variety of stereotypical roles, including “mothers, film buffs, tech geeks, couch potatoes,” according to the one-page handout given to them.

On its surface, this story seems like a cut-and-dry story about a company doing horrendous, non-social marketing. But wait! Take a look at the story that Netflix is pushing as an explanation.

Netflix never intended to mislead reporters, company spokesman Steve Swasey said. He attributed the mix-up to the bureaucratic hoops that Netflix had to jump through to get a permit to close an entire street for Wednesday’s event.

To qualify for the permit, Swasey said Netflix decided to film a fake documentary. That led to the hiring of a handful of actors who were only supposed to help drum up enthusiasm and attract a crowd before CEO Reed Hastings arrived on the scene. Swasey wasn’t sure who decided the actors should give media interviews under false pretenses.

“We are embarrassed,” Swasey said. “We regret that this put on a blemish on what should have been perfect day for Netflix.”

I’m inclined to believe this story, mainly because it’s just too random and detailed to be something you make up as part of PR spin cover. And as such by the time I was done reading this article, I was ready to forgive and forget.

See what happens when you’re honest and own your mistakes?

UPDATE: Carol LeBlanc commented about this post via Facebook. She had a fantastic point:

“because netflix has a history of being honest and customer-focused i found their excuse completely credible”

Exactly.

The Slideshare team posted an blog post (failing to understand the concern), but they failed to send another email (you know, the channel they originally used) to clarify the issue that way. When you say you want to be a professional network for professional people sharing professional content, screwing with things that should be off-limits just makes you appear to be a group of immature nerds hacking away in their basement. Imagine a teacher saying, “You got an A on the test! April Fool’s! You actually made a D”. What’s funny about that? Do you really expect me to invest time and professional content in a site run by Beavis and Butthead?

I’m all for a good April Fool’s joke, and encourage businesses to have a bit of fun every day, not just 1 April. But the Golden Rule of sites that depend on user generated content submissions is simple: Don’t mess with my profile data. Don’t jack with my stats, don’t change my username, don’t change my relationship status from married to single. That’s me you’re messing with, not just a bunch of information. It’s how I present myself online. It’s the stand-in for my physical self when all you can see is my activity.

And by the way, had this not been a joke, this would have been a very cool thing to do and the comments I shared below are still relevant to those companies not wanting to pull a dick move on their users.

UPDATE 2: Slideshare posts a “lessons learned” blog post. Clearly they’ve seen the light, and kudos to them for the openness and honesty.

–

I just noticed this message in my inbox today:

Hi communityguy,

We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team

You think I headed back to the site to check out what was going on? You think my ego was stroked enough to be reminded to post more items to SlideShare.net in the future? I absolutely did.

The only thing that could have made this outreach any better would have been their community manager (assuming they have one) reach out personally. What a great way to connect to real people, to make the company even more human.

But either way, this is a great concept that can be easily automated and provide huge returns on the efforts to increase repeat visits and usage.

Oh, and by the way, the presentation driving the traffic was my presentation “How LEGO caught the Cluetrain“.

Nothing.

No video, minor hard drive spinning, nothing. After winging it during the talk, I headed to the Apple store. The next Genius Bar appointment was nearly 5 hours away. After mentioning that I was going to be getting on a plane to Copenhagen in a matter of hours, the Apple employee took pity and ran my laptop to the back for a quick assessment of what needed to be done.

Apparently the logic board had gone bad and would take 5-7 days minimum to be fixed at a minimum cost of $310. Since I can’t be off my computer for that long, especially for an overseas trip, I ended up escalating my upgrade plans. (I have been planning on replacing my very, very well worn MacBook Pro, just not so quickly)

When I arrived back in my office, I plugged my Time Machine drive into the new MacBook Pro and left it to copy files to the new computer.

When I returned two hours later, I had a new computer that was setup exactly as I’d left my old one. Preferences, settings, applications, documents, and everything else exactly where it should be.

Apple’s “brand promise” has been “It just works”, and this experience certainly proves that to be true.

What’s your company’s brand promise? How well are you delivering on it?

Enough said.

In January, Sean and I announced that we were merging forces to launch a new and improved Ant’s Eye View. 2009, as we coined it, would be The Year of the Ant.

Our business is focused on companies and their customers play out the mantra “everybody go home happy”. We are working to change the world. To properly kick off the year, we decided to do some charitable giving at the start of our year (and the first part of our journey), rather than waiting until the end of the year. We wanted to pay it forward and make a difference at the start of our new venture.

But we didn’t want to do it alone. After all, we run a company focused on social connection, so we had to figure out a way to get our clients and friends in on the project.

We developed a pretty cool project that ended up donating $1000 USD to FIRST LEGO League. And whether the clients and friends realized it, they were learning a few things about social groups and communities too. More on that later, but first, here’s how things went down:

• Sean and I knew we wanted to do something charity-focused to start the year. We brainstormed some ideas for how to best get our clients and friends involved in the process.
• We decided to send postcards (front & back) and reply cards to a select group of about 150 people. These cards announced our new company, as well instructions for recipients to select one of three charities on the reply card and send it back to us.
• After about 4 weeks, we had 50 reply cards come to us and a number of people contact us directly to talk about the concept.

The concept was quite simple, yet we had a pretty impressive response from our group. We’d formed a small scale social activity, and interesting there were a number of lessons between our project and most community strategies we develop. Allow me to share a few of those lessons.

“Social Media” and community building isn’t always about the internet.
While it might be more fun to focus on the cool new internet tools when we talk about social activity, it’s amazing how much power the offline, tangible experiences still hold. Most of the feedback about this project focused on how fun it was to get something in the mail. In your “social” projects, are you truly considering the concept of “social”? Using twitter to gain customer insights might be a great idea, but have you also thought about attending fan group meetings? Have you considered buying beers for your influencers at dinner the next time they’re at a conference or event?

Low tech tools are often most effective in starting conversation.
One of our recipients called us after receiving the mailer and asked “Why didn’t you just send an email with the info?” Bingo. She called us up because we’d reached out in a way that was more compelling that what she was normally used to. Email can absolutely be engaging and compelling, but printing and sending a physical mailer created an artifact that generated interest.

Providing low impact participation helps get people involved.
It’s easy to create content, right? YouTube makes uploading video quick and easy, right? Perhaps. But in an age of User Generated Content, don’t forget that creating good content is still time consuming and often above the skill and/or interest level of a vast majority of your audience. Interestingly, most people don’t equate the amount of participation to successful participation. An activity that takes 5 seconds and one that takes 5 hours still give a sense of engagement, where participants at both ends of that spectrum feel like they’ve “participated”.

Develop programs that allow anyone to easily get started, while also providing additional methods of engagement for the truly enthused. Our mailer had a very simple dynamic – read card A, check a box on card B then mail it back. Everyone who received it could quickly participate. We had a number of people who even wrote comments on the card to share their enthusiasm for the concept.

Every social group has it’s One Percenters.
What impressed me the most about this program is that despite not having a space for it, a small percentage of participants in our project found space on a small, business card size card to share handwritten comments. Even in our offline program, we found our One Percenters!

Decision making can be done without outsourcing the process.
We’ve all heard that tired old saying “think outside the box”; but that’s really a pretty dumb idea. Thinking outside the box really means that you’re approaching your design challenge haphazardly, void of real world context. If people instead said “think in a large, flexible box”, I could get behind that. Constraints are good to have; constraints inspire thinking and move the process along more quickly.

One of the biggest fears of working with communities is that by engagement is an all or nothing approach. Either you turn over your entire product strategy and roadmap to the masses or you simply wall off the company from the customers and never engage. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Imagine if we sent our a card that said “Please write in the name of your favorite charity”… how many response cards do you think we’d have gotten? In our program, we did the hard work of narrowing the choices to three that we were happy with, then asked our community to pick one. We didn’t turn over the program to the community, we turned over the part that mattered to them, based on a structure that mattered to us.

Make the group part of something bigger than either one of you.
It’s easy to get caught up in thinking about your own business needs, but your business needs are not what inspires, interests, or excites your community members. We created an idea that was more grand that our business or the businesses of our community. We focused on the idea of paying it forward, doing something good to generate good karma for the year. Who wouldn’t want to participate in helping us achieve that?

Paying it forward is the rule of law in communities.
I’ll be honest – I hope that we get some new business out of this program. But that’s a side effect of doing something cool for and with our community of clients and potential clients. Great community and social activity happens when you set aside your own needs and do something to helps those around you. And the funny thing, as any successful entrepreneur will tell you, is that when you do that, business comes to you.

Have a good time, pay it forward, help your community do something good for them. Incredible results will track you down.

If you were living under a rock you might have missed our 2.7 release, which included the most significant interface update in WordPress’ short history and has been pretty well-received.

It’s also been pretty bug-free, which is why there was a longer-than-normal period of time before an update.

We won’t fault you for the rock thing, but for rockers and curmudgeons-who-never-upgrade-to-a-.0-release, our latest and greatest (2.7.1) is hot of the presses:

http://wordpress.org/development/2009/02/wordpress-271/

If you were on 2.7 already you might be able to just press a button (Tools -> Upgrade) and be on the new version in under 10 seconds.

I hope your Valentine’s day was filled with love and luv and chocolate,

Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://wordpress.org

P.S. Plugin search no longer sucks:

http://wordpress.org/development/2009/02/new-and-improved-plugins-directory-search/

Fantastic tone, helpful tips, and a reminder that Automattic knows what they’re doing.

That is remedied here, as well as a reminder of the link. Thanks again to Randy!

(Interview and transcript both after the break!)

Online Community Interview – Randy Farmer

JAKE: Hi. Hello. Thanks for joining us on this OCRN interview.

RANDY: Hi.

JAKE: Tell us who you are and what you’re up to and what you’re working on these days.

RANDY: Hi, I’m Randy Farmer. I’ve been building online communities for over 30 years. I’ve built one of my first multiplayer games, all text-based, 300 BAUD [30 characters per second], one of the first chat systems and message boards. I’ve dedicated my entire career to helping humans interact with each other as the computers as the mediating technology. Most recently, I was working at Yahoo as their community strategic analyst and I’m now independent as a consultant helping many early and mid-stage startups with their online community strategy and I’m also writing a book on the topic.

JAKE: Excellent, excellent. I’m hearing more and more people are writing books these days about online community and there’s nothing wrong with that.

RANDY: And they’re getting much better too.

JAKE: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Well, today’s topic is focused on online moderation and sort of the role of good community management and online moderation as part of any good community strategy and part of the reason that I wanted to bring up this topic even though it seems sort of obvious and standard is because more and more businesses and brands are getting into doing online community stuff whatever that means—some sort of user involvement, user engagement, using the web and social tools to do stuff and do stuff together. But it’s really surprising to me how much this discussion of maybe outsourcing online community moderation has played a role and in the desire many brands have to try and filter content, right? So get rid of the spam, get rid of the hate speech, get rid of all those basic things you need to do, it seems very common that they tend to lose their footing on what good moderation is about which is about setting culture and I’d love to hear your thoughts on what the right way to do online community moderation is.

RANDY: Sure, I can talk a little bit about the kind of taxonomy I developed for Yahoo in this area and one of the confusions that a lot of product managers have and a lot of people building [communities] is they don’t realize that community moderation covers a broad range of tasks and you shouldn’t confuse them. I’d like to make this dichotomy – that your referring to – I’d like to call it the difference between Terms of Service enforcement and Quality of Service. I used to refer to a QoS. This is a QoS issue, not a ToS issue. In a large company like Yahoo, ToS issues were actually handled by a different group of people. Those ended up being the Customer Care agents, the people who have the power to suspend your account, and there are also the ones that if you violated certain Terms of Service agreements, would forward your information to the law enforcement in the appropriate country. I’d like to think of community moderation primarily as Quality of Service management so you need to be able to tell the difference between an illegal or violating post, let’s say, when you consider text posts, for example, where just one that violates the community guidelines, or just needs to be highlighted as a good example. When we bought Flickr, that was a good injection of people and moderation staff who were focused on Quality of Service, finding good ways to reinforce the behaviors and specifically model the behaviors that you want users to take because they will follow the example. I’m a big believer in online communities with a concept of broken windows which is if you have a community which – let’s use the example of text posts on message boards or on a group or blog and there’s just garbage lying around because people haven’t been cleaning up the Quality of Service or kind of online gardening, then people feel free to throw garbage around. Windows are broken and there’s graffiti, people think it’s all right to break windows and leave graffiti. Community managers are in the business of helping to keep the windows clean and nice and graffiti off the walls. Some of that ends up being really problematic and some is just appropriate window dressing and Flickr has been a really good example of that.

JAKE: That’s great. That reminds me of the story from the Tipping Point, of course, where in the turnaround of the New York City subway system. One of the things that they focused on to try and solve that was repainting the subway cars. Every time they get sprayed with graffiti, immediately they’d wait for the people to finish spray painting them and then they’d walk up with these big buckets of gray paint and as these guys were walking away, they’d start to clean it up and before you know it, it just wasn’t worth the time [for the vandals] anymore.

RANDY: So we did that with Yahoo Answers using mechanism. For that Terms of Service violating problem: one of the things is to not use [paid] humans, or [instead] to distribute it. Make it a distributed human’s problem. With Yahoo Answers, I worked with their team on the reputation model that we applied to get rid of trolls and spammers on Yahoo Answers.

The way Yahoo Answers works is a front … kind of like when you think of a forest fire. It spreads outward consuming everything leaving ash behind in the middle. Supposedly, you want the questions and answers that are in the activity of the past to be useful. That’s a Quality of Service issue but as the fire spreads, there’s more and more questions than answers and on the outside of experience on the home page where people interacting with it, that’s where all the hot activity is. That’s where all the trolls go. They don’t care about being left there forever. They just want to irritate people that are trying to tweak and so what they’ll do is they’ll post really horrendous questions so leave their spam there, just really garbagey questions to the home page. What would happen with those that have fallen with the standard customer care model, they get a report and they go into a queue and there’s a human being somewhere on the planet takes it out of queue and looks at it, decides it’s a violation, removes the content. Typically, this would take over 12 hours. After twelve hours, it is back in the ash somewhere. The flame has long since moved on. The graffiti did all the damage it was going to do. It was too late. It’s closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. We worked to build a reputation model that let the users who were paying attention to this and reporting it, suspend it immediately and when we compare the reporting percentage accuracy of the people who reported the error if ever there was a violation against the reputation of the host since trolls typically have no reputation. This allowed them to suspend the content immediately and then we implemented an appeals process so that we would contact the person and say, “Hey, your post has been taken down. If you want to appeal, go here.” Appeals then went to customer care where a human being would look at them. They said the net effect of reducing the 12-hour, 95% of the stuff that was suspended. It used to take 12 hours to suspend 95%. It got down to less than 30 seconds. So what’s happening is, you’ll be put out as soon as… the same thing about your truck, your story about paint. As soon as it was visible, it was taken down. An interesting thing happened, which is the trolls left. After a while, the reporting count went significantly down. It was because they stopped trying, the graffiti guys paint somewhere else. The place that’s always being abated is no longer the interesting place, it’s [the story of] broken windows.

JAKE: Wow, that’s very cool. Well, so when a brand manager or a client comes to you and say, we just don’t have the time or the resources but we can’t hire people. We don’t have the head count to hire people to do what you’re talking about but we’ve got a check we can write to some firm. Is there a good way to outsource this kind of stuff or is this a… How do you build a great culture when you can’t necessarily involve the people who are putting the tool in place?

RANDY: So I actually recommend the opposite. I have no problem if someone can put together this split I made between community management and customer care meaning handling the dregs. If they can specify it cleanly in such a way that they can farm out the latter, that’s fine. I’m not sure they can but if they can, great. Yahoo runs a whole department which is separate from each one of the properties that handles that. The community management, you can’t outsource. In fact, most of the clients I’m working with, I recommend they increase the dialog with their customers directly. If they don’t have a community manager, that they get one and if they have a community manager and they’re just doing customer care, I suggest they promote them and have them run the company blog. This is not a big insight for anyone [OCRN memeber] that’s watching this interview. Corporate dialog is critical for at least all the clients I’m working with. If you’re talking about having an online community, you have to have a dialog between the company and the community. Otherwise…

JAKE: (overlay) Perhaps more importantly, how do you get that conversation to happen between colleagues? A lot of times, one brand versus another may not really communicate but there’s great lessons to be learned in what somebody’s learning about how they’re developing reputation system. How does that get across you and smaller companies?

RANDY: Well, the good news is, smaller companies are small. Hopefully, so the way I always used to put it – even before I worked for Yahoo – is when working with online games, there will be a very similar split as there is now on social sites. You would have that product people were designing a product, operational staff were kind of keeping machines running and making sure controlling – throttling logins, that’s where you handle a lot of the trolls then we’d have the engineering staff. Typically, those would get separated and I always saw it as the kind of community stewardship role which usually falls in a senior community manager to actually be connected to all three groups to attend critical meetings and do communication. They are an advocate for the user to the company. And who needs to know about what’s going on with users? Well, pretty much everybody at the senior level of the company. I know it’s been a long term discussion on the Online Community Research Network. I’ve never had a problem with it because wherever I work, there’s someone like me. At Yahoo, I played that role. I was a free-floating strategist. I was in the platform group but I was both defining… I was meeting with the direct customers (the individual properties) and writing specifications for platforms which I would then meet with the engineers and making sure it was being designed properly, implemented properly and then when they were deployed, we were tracking all the metrics all the time to see if they were actually working. So in a situation, like I said, whenever you have communities as an important part of your revenue stream, direct or indirect, you need a community manager because you need that dialog and you need to facilitate all those interactions that are generating the virtual circle for you to be reflected up into the product groups and engineering.

JAKE: Got you. I couldn’t agree more. Okay so we’re about out of time but I’m curious, what is the one thing that you feel just doesn’t ever get paid attention to enough in these kind of conversations about designing a good online Quality of Service or Terms of Service moderation system? You find yourself saying over and over again but it’s new for everybody you talk to but not necessarily new for the conversations you’re having with them.

RANDY: Believe it or not, it’s the dialog between the company and the users that almost always gets forgotten. You’re right. The community managers are often thought of as customer care agents and they’re just taking care of the worst but they don’t focus on quality of service and when they’re gonna start talking about quality of service, what’s the kind of stuff we want to happen on the site, you need the word we to mean something, we as the company. What is the company looking for? I like to describe three participants in the win-win-win cycle. If you want a successful social site, you have those that are producing the content, so those are the bloggers or the videographers or the life streamers, or the people who are reviewing restaurants or whatever it is that they’re doing and interacting with each other. We have these consumers, those people who just got there through a search link or reference or they clicked on a video in a blog comment that was now hosted in YouTube and they all need to find benefit. They need to find the strong benefit, but the company also needs to find benefit. Everyone seems to think, well, as long as I make the consumers and the producers happy, everything’s fine. We crashed the dot-com era on that. We’re about to crash another one on it. Users don’t have a problem with participating. If you look at all of the crowd-sourcing stuff, if you set it up right, people are not gonna have a problem with the company earning enough money to keep doing the cool thing that they want to. And the company needs to spend some of that money on keeping those three groups happy, having someone that communicates between them.

JAKE: Excellent. Well, thanks for your time. Where can we find more about you or more about the pending book later on?

RANDY: Sure. I blog at a blog called Habitat Chronicles. If you search for that on Google or Yahoo search you’ll find it. Yeah, that’s probably the best place to track me. There’s going to be several news items coming out soon.

JAKE: All right. Thanks for your time.