Community Moderation Nourishes Success
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.
