The role of an online community moderator is a relatively new one. And like any new role, it's going through its developmental stage right now. It is most often confused with the role of Community Manger which has more to do with the overall direction that the community is taking in terms of content and features rather than moderation. I took a quick look for this role on simplyhired.com and there are currently a wide range of job titles that overlap in this area (http://www.wordle.net) pointing to bit of confusion in the market:

Dawn Foster did a nice job of distinguishing roles (and by community size) in her blog post Community Roles: Manager, Moderator, and Administrator. I also like the slideshare Best Practices For Moderating Your Online Community by mZinga. We find more mature thinking like this published every week; however, we still  a lot of questions about community moderation and what to look for in a good community moderator.

One question that companies are asking prospective community moderators is “what online communities are you an active member of?” We like this one because it gets after both experience and passion for online community. Online community participation is an important attribute in a solid community moderator. Active community

participation provides insights into successful use of Web 2.0 effects, facet-based browsing designs, and helpful techniques being employed by other leading professional network communities.This has ramifications to 1) enhancing the feel of the community that they are moderating, 2) positioning the community for ongoing activation, and 3) supporting member retention. The community moderator needs to be on the pulse of what is going on in the online community space – what works and what doesn’t work. Here is a sample of the type of participation that is needed in a single individual:

• Active participation in LinkedIn including various groups for professional networking
• Facebook fan-page and business-page participant for both personal networking and professional brand affinity
• Knowledge and use of vertical or niche search engines
• Presence and participation in popular, topical social media outlets like Slideshare, Delicious, Digg, Vimeo, etc.
• Professional and/or personal blogger
• Active membership in professional and/or personal communities that are aligned with their interests
• Personal Facebook account with rampant, ongoing use
• Personal and professional twitter accounts with active participation
• Youtube channel with follower-ship
• You get the idea...

Finding and hiring the right Community Moderator is important. In addition, there are other moderation strategies that important once that individual is on board:

• Create a community overview that summarizes the community’s purpose and tone. Include a list of goals for members that can be realized by joining your community. Then, moderate the community in a fashion that keeps the tone and direction on par with the community’s intended use. Some communities audit moderator contributions against that community summary, providing the moderator with useful feedback that helps them stay on track.
• Moderation should be moderate (pun intended!). Some communities launch with the presupposition that they can hypo-activate the community. They presume that all they have to do is “get members” – assuming that once members show up, things will start to happen. Do not assume the members will do all the work from the start and that they don't need assistance after they have joined. On the other end of the spectrum, do not excessively moderate all user generated content (UGC) either – that is a major turn-off as well.
• Get an experienced moderator. We see many communities launch where the moderator is chosen based on who just happens to be available. Under-utilized employees do not make good moderators! Here are some important items to consider so that you are enabling your moderator while managing the outcome as well:
  • Provide a certain level of autonomy. This is not a science yet and there will be specific learning that happens with your community. Don’t jump on the moderator when something goes wrong. Let them experiment, fall down, get up and move on.
  • Have a clear job description.
  • Create community moderation guidelines so that expectations are clear. And then don’t forget that they are guidelines.
  • Afford your community moderator and other community leaders opportunities to stay abreast of the latest trends in their role/space by encouraging them to join other communities.
  • Plan to sponsor a couple of key events per year where they can flock together with others in similar roles.
  • Provide time and avenues for them to accelerate their subject matter expertise in your topical community. Do this before the community launches and then keep it going during the beta period and after launch.
• Membership is a good measure of successful community activation. Engagement is a good measure of effective moderation. This is a very community-specific measurement. The focus is on the conversations or discussions that people are having in your community. The moderator can help make some of these connections.
• Monitor your community for both key participants and content. Then feature popular content and contributors on a regular basis. Look for the number and type of interactions that people are having with other community members to find members to feature. For content, typical measures would include the number of views, sharing, ratings, comments, replies, and more.

Paul Stillmank
7Summits

We’ve talked (and we’ll keep talking) about the need for a strategy to apply social media to your business.  The islands of Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter accounts, Youtube Channels, and one-off blogs need to be reigned in and managed. A strategy integrating them into an overall marketing and execution plan is needed.  These new media components can become important to how your organization grows its business, or they can become paid hobbies for fervent employees leaving you to ask later on whether any value was gleaned from their activities.  Even after your strategy is developed, even after HR and Marketing have aligned your brand with your employees’ online behaviors, even after you’ve figured out how to reach a relevant target audience in their media; you need one last item to activate your social media strategy.  You need to find your social spark.

Time and again, we see overzealous companies trying to ignite a fire, but with no real spark. They’re trying to build a bonfire that can be seen all across the social web. They want to attract as many people as possible to their brand, their product, their service.  They’ve amassed their best content and product information (the wood for that bonfire); they’ve even stacked the cards in their favor and dumped a little kerosene into the mix with some blogger outreach and paid blogger programs; yet things just aren’t igniting as they’ve planned. They still don’t have any fire. So what’s your spark? 

We’re finding that the answer can be different for different organizations. For Zappos, it was a Twitter aggregation model. For Siemens it was a focused Info-Center for employees to channel their social power. Dell lit a fire with IdeaStorm and @DellOutlet. Starbucks lit several raging fires starting with mystarbucksidea.com and then adding a blazing hot Starbucks Fan-page. Blendtec lit their fire with a viral youtube series Will It Blend? It takes a little creativity to find your spark, but it starts with a mindset change.

We see traditional corporations that move into Social Media adopting a defensive posture.  They take the standard PR position of trying to manage the message.  They might hire a PR Social Media Agency. This is the mindset change that needs to occur.  You don’t want to manage the message, but engage the conversation.  Think of it as a party with a room full of people.  Don’t worry about the two people in the corner talking trash about you.  Get the rest of the room to look to you as the conversation catalyst.  Have everyone else want to get into your conversation. There will always be negative noise in the digital world.  Don’t focus on snuffing it out.   Focus on building the positive, collective voice so big that any negativity gets drowned out.

Sure moderation needs to occur, but it’s not the focus.  Every time I see a job posting for a ‘Social Media Moderator’, I wonder how much different that organization would be if they hired a ‘Social Media Catalyst’ or a ‘Social Media Evangelist’ instead.

In the book, Groundswell by Charlene Li, Charlene lays out the requirements for sustaining a social networking site.  She suggests that to be successful the site must:

• Enable people to connect in a new way
• Be effortless to sign up for
• Shift power from institutions to people
• Provide an open platform that facilitates partnerships

These points are all true, but they alone are not enough. Twitter had everyone one of these, but that fire smoldered along for over a year before igniting when Ashton Kutcher competed with CNN for the most followers.  That event brought Twitter’s bonfire to life. Of course, the answer isn’t to go out and engage a movie star for your strategy, but asking these questions may help find your spark:

• How do you monetize all of the user-generated content out there about your products/services?
• What will spark the conversation?
• What’s your ‘pick up’ line?  What do you hope the response to be?
• How will people even know about your conversation to begin with?

In your quest for the answer to these questions, you will hopefully discover your Social Spark.

Paul S.

7Summits

We are now meeting with dozens of prospective clients and we are seeing a pretty wide range of approaches being taken when it comes to Social Media. Many companies feel somewhat behind and they are tryin to "catch up" by throwing up fan-pages, twitter accounts and Youtube channels hoping that something positive will happen. We also see some companies starting to “listen” online by using online tools like SocialSense and Radian6. That’s good. Online listening should be one of the first Discovery steps when planning your Social Business Strategy. Overall though, one theme stands out more than any other: companies are applying social media without a solid plan for doing so. Even those companies listening online aren't sure what to do next. Here is a sample of what we see every day:

• Facebook pages that are virtual islands with no integration to other marketing efforts and no links into or out of the pages.
• Youtube videos shot by high-end ad agencies (that’s expensive) with no more than 40 or 50 views over 6  months.
• Companies with fan-pages for every sub-brand, but with no plans to moderate them and no forethought on how to handle an irate comment.
• Twitter accounts launched without a full understanding of the range of tools available, without knowledge of how to drive a relevant follower-ship, without a hash-tag plan, and/or without understanding how to really leverage this channel to reach consumers.
• Solid product reviews on sites like ePinions, Yelp, InsiderPages, ViewPoints, and MerchantCircle that are not being pulled into the parent website, fan-page or other web property.

This is standard fare out there. However, it does not (should not) have to be that way. Our last few posts resonate with one theme: social media should be integrated with your other marketing efforts. Our Strategic Framework for Applied Social Media illustrates how social media has taken its place in all phases of consumer engagement: awareness, relevance, conversion, involvement and ongoing engagement. Offline marketing, online/web marketing, social and ecommerce all come together here. An integrated approach simply garners the best results. Interactive Marketing has matured to the point that it has its own department in some larger organizations. Perhaps the word “integrated” should be substituted for “interactive” – it is a more powerful concept.

Another way of thinking about integrated marketing is to think about connections. Here, we mean connections that consumers perceive among your marketing efforts.

• ATTRACT prospective buyers and make them aware of your products or services.
• INFLUENCE the prospective buyer by using both search and social to establish relevancy for your product or service.
• ENGAGE your prospective buyer by directing them to the appropriate channel for conversion including the possibility to transacting in their desired media.
• RECRUIT new customers to get involved with your product, service, company and brand. Encourage ongoing engagement by inviting them to join your own community or relevant social venue.

To illustrate this point, we’ve tipped our Strategic Framework on its side.

In this model, you can see how all of the consumer touch-points across the social web come together around your product or service, from the initial search or word-of-mouth reference to the satisfied customer advocate.

At the beginning of this cycle, a consumer becomes aware of your product or service. They may have been struck by a need and then gone online in search for a solution. Or your may have worked to ATTRACT them. Yes, you can drive awareness by using both search and social to attract prospects. They might have been prompted by any number of stimuli including an offline ad, a radio spot, a TV commercial, a press release, a referral from a friend, or a host of other motivators in a range of appropriate venues.  A well-integrated plan begins with these earliest stimuli in mind. A product, its genre and targeted key-words are strongly correlated from the very beginning. The connection is planned from the start. Now when your audience moves online, the initial behavior is biased –they will be searching with a specific genre or terminology in mind. Those companies with savvy SEO and SEM execution will affect their product being presented near the top of the search results.

From this point onward, a prospective customer will be comparing the results of their search. Your product’s relevancy is established through combinations of ratings, reviews, blogs, discussion forums, and other user-generated content (UGC). They may also consult their “social graph” meaning the fans, friends and followers across their own networks. This is what we refer to as Social Commerce: using your social graph to INFLUENCE your buying decision.

To help perpetuate the cycle, one more connection is made. RECRUIT new customers by asking them to join a community, fan page or other venue and submit a product review when they are ready. These product reviews are an important step toward getting your new customers involved, but they also represent fresh content that will influence the purchase of other prospective buyers. In time, some of these customers may become advocates for your brand, lauding its attributes, products and innovation. Consumer advocacy is a much sought after aspect of the social web and an entire science is springing up around Social Influence Marketing. Mining for this information and elevating it through social venues sways future customers. This is what we mean by “connected”. Now we are back to online listening and making sure that all of this is working as planned – and this is making more sense.

I’ll close this post by pointing out one remaining aspect of this model: measure and refine. Social Media has made it easier to measure online consumer behavior. This allows us to create models that connect both conversations and activity on the web to business results. The right data can be collected and analyzed to provide insights on the value of your content as well as your products and brand. Consumer behavior is monitored and refinements are made throughout the cycle. This helps to get prospective buyers the right information at the right time to speed the process along. It also helps determine which venues and user-generated content are the most relevant toward affecting that transaction.

Social Media can be a powerful accelerator when properly integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts. Think about Connected Social Campaigns^SM as the outcome of a well orchestrated Integrated Marketing Strategy.

Paul Stillmank - 7Summits