On last night’s episode of SuccessfoolTV, I came on to talk about online community, forums, social media, the book and more. I thought it went really well and that it was really informative, so I wanted to share it. You can check it out below.

Live TV by Ustream

Thank you to Alejandro for having me and to everyone who stopped in, helped to spread the word through Twitter and had kind words to say, during and after. I really appreciate it.

One phrase that I hear sometimes from community staff (not really mine, but others) is “we are human.” It’s often used as a means to excuse some sort of inappropriate behavior.

A staff member treats a member disrespectfully in public? We are human.

A staff member takes the bait a member gave them and reacts? We are human.

You remove a post you shouldn’t have removed? We are human.

Why can’t staff members be held to a higher standard than members? We are human.

Sometimes, it’s OK to say this, but a lot of the time, it’s just an excuse and it makes it sound like what happened, had to happen. When I make a mistake or my staff makes an error, yes, we’re human. But, that’s not what I want to say or what I want to hear people say to me. What I want to know is that we’ll work to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

While we’re all human, saying so too much can render personal accountability non existant. Yes, mistakes happen. Yes, accidents happen. But, when you treat it like a neccessity, you do a disservice to your operation.

People have to be accountable for what they do. Am I going to string an otherwise great staff member up the flag pole for saying something off color to a member? No. But, I expect them to understand when I tell them what should have happened and I expect them to acknowledge it, indicating they’ll do what they can to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

When it comes to dealing with public situations, while I’m not completely against invoking “we are human,” it has to be used in rare cases when it really has meaning, to have any effect. If you say it all the time, it just becomes a tired excuse.

Words are important. What you say is important, but how you say it is just as important. The words you use shape how your message is interpreted and how people react to it. I always stress this to the staff at my community. Communication is key. We need to be able to communicate our objections and what we must get across, but we need to try to do so in a manner that is not unnecessarily combative.

For this reason, I’ve been known to study my words on meaningful private messages or conversations with well established members, as well as important announcements and policy changes in general. I’m human, but that’s not an excuse (we’ll cover that in a post in the future). You have to consider what you say.

I believe that a great way to showcase this would be to give you a couple of examples of a private message that you might send to a member who had made a spam post on your forums. Here’s the first one.

Ryan,

I pulled your post below because you were being a jerk. If you’d like to keep posting here, don’t do it again.

“That’s your opinion? OMGLOL. YOU ARE A FOOL!”

Patrick

Here’s another one:

Hello Ryan,

Thank you for visiting KarateForums.com.

Unfortunately, I have had to remove your post quoted below as it violated our User Guidelines as inflammatory.

“That’s your opinion? OMGLOL. YOU ARE A FOOL!”

Generally speaking, an inflammatory comment is one that doesn’t add much to a thread outside of hostility.

Please keep this in mind to prevent further violations in the future.

Thank you for your time and cooperation.

Sincerely,

Patrick
KarateForums.com Administrator

The first private message may not seem too bad. But, there are a few issues that jump out at me immediately. “Being a jerk” is very combative and basically makes the issue personal. “Inflammatory” means a similar sort of action, on their behalf, but it’s easier to swallow and understand.

I don’t know if I’d call it “traditional wisdom.” But, I encounter people who feel that, in order to be a moderator on a community, you must actually be an expert in the subject matter of the community. I find that, in general, the people who hold this belief tend to be people who participate in communities as a member, rather than as an administrator. Two good examples:

To moderate at KarateForums.com, you must be a seasoned martial artist.

To moderate at phpBBHacks.com, you must be a phpBB programming or styling expert.

These types of statements are more often untrue than they are true. The main area where it is true is if you run a support community of some kind and you have a support team that is also your moderation team. Part of the requirements of supporting people is having knowledge that can help – but, at the same time, that doesn’t mean being an expert.

When it comes to moderating a community, the greatest assets are personality and character based. Who they are as a person. Communication is key, patience is key, team skills are key, attention to detail is key. Being an expert? Not key. Generally speaking, my moderators are picked out of the community. They are already there. They already have some level of knowledge or interest in the subject.

I don’t want know-it-alls. I don’t want people who feel their knowledge is supreme and infallible. I don’t want someone who is incapable of admitting they don’t know something and asking for help when that happens. That person is worthless to me.

I remember banning someone from phpBBHacks.com (this has happened more than once) who knew phpBB pretty well. But, they were banned because they were, more or less, jerks. Knowledge is worthless in someone unable to kindly communicate it. Knowledge used to make people feel bad or as a matter of ego isn’t actual knowledge that can be benefited from.

Anyway, in one of these cases, I remember the person saying, something like “Patrick has such and such on his staff and the guy actually had to ask for help for this! See: .” As if asking for help is a weakness and invalidates you from joining my team. The person he was referring to was actually a phpBB expert and a friend of mine who could run circles around that guy and who helped a countless number of people in the phpBB community. A genius. In knowledge and in character. True genius is knowing you don’t know it all and asking for help when it happens.

Asking for help represents willingness to learn, not weakness. And that is a concept that this banned user couldn’t grasp. As such, he was not someone who would ever be able to join my staff.

Just recently, I had someone at KarateForums.com tell me that such and such was not fit to be a staff member because they didn’t know about some seminal martial arts book. He even remarked publicly about it, sarcastically. “Shouldn’t a staff member know about this?” I wasn’t having that. Forget that the staff member in question is a good person who talks to people with respect, contributes to the community and helps to maintain it. He didn’t know about this book, so obviously, it makes no sense for him to be a staff member.

I’ve seen, a number of times, where there is a community where all of the moderators are supposedly experts. But, there is one problem: they don’t know how to be moderators. Moderators need to be kind, helpful people who can work within a team and take direction. They don’t need to be experts. It’s about good people. If they are an expert, cool. If they are not, fine. But, surround yourself with good people.

In managing online communities for the past eight years or so, one of the many, many things I’ve come to realize, accept and understand is the fact that people will hate me. Not all people, not most people – not even a noteworthy number of people. But, assorted people will hate me. That’s the burden of leading a community and being the person “in charge.” You make decisions, you accept blame and you take criticism.

One of the primary responsibilities of community leadership is, essentially, telling people what they cannot do on your community. People don’t like to be told they can’t do something. But, you have to defend your community, you have to deal with violations and manage the atmosphere. You have goals and everything that you do needs to be in pursuit of those goals.

So, you have members who you have to contact regarding a violation. You send them a polite, respectful message making them aware of the violation and asking them to keep it in mind for the future, to prevent further violations. And they don’t like it. Some people deal with this respectfully and some people are literally out of their mind crazy. I’ve been called all sorts of names. It’s fairly normal to have your sexual preference questioned, too. There was even one fellow who described all of my many character flaws and then decided it must be because my parents had sexually abused me. You get used to it. And, of course, the old stand by: I’ve been called Hitler, Stalin and/or Gestapo on any number of occasions. One was just recently.

We had a fellow come in our forums and start a post with the F word in it, with an asterisk (our word censor will not allow it to be posted without an asterisk). As this word is not permitted on my forums, in line with our user guidelines, the post was removed and the member was politely contacted and made aware as to why, to prevent it from happening again.

His response was to go on rant that, personally, was hilarious because of what he said, which was just nuts. I won’t get into that, beyond saying that he compared me to Stalin.

The thing about these Hitler, Stalin, and Gestapo type comments is they are so disrespectful. Those people and/or groups did awful, unspeakable things. Let’s be real: I removed a single post you made from an Internet forum, from my family and work friendly community, that had the F word in it. That’s what I did. As I joked to a friend, “Stalin must not have been such a bad guy if all he did was stop you from saying the F word.” In other words, to invoke the images of those people or groups in such a manner is to show an extreme lack of respect for the people and the families affected by the things that they actually did.

Here is what I’ve found to be true, though. If no one was saying these things to me or about me, if no one was making these comments and attacking me, I must not be doing my job to the best of my ability. Either that or my communities are private and for a select group of people, not large enough yet or not moderated in any meaningful way (i.e., anything that isn’t blatant spam is allowed). Real, hands on community management requires the ruffling of feathers. Not on purpose, not intentionally – but naturally. It’s just a fact of life. With the exceptions above (and probably a few others), if no one hates you, you aren’t doing everything you can.

(Note, I’m not saying that this is the only way I know I’m doing my job, that I want people to say these things or that it makes me happy. None of these things is true. It’s awful that these things are said. But, it’s a natural by product, unfortunately. So, we have to embrace it for what it is).

In light of a recent post on CommunityAdmins.com by Rocket 442, I thought that I would share, update and expand a post that I made on my personal blog last November that discussed spamming forums as a marketing strategy.

There are companies out there who essentially sell a service that is “pay to spam”. In search of a more attractive name, some label it “social media outreach” or “advertising.” Whatever it’s called, I think it’s bad business, it’s disrespectful and it’s a problem for community administrators.

Basically, what you have here is a group of individuals who aim to create what I try to prevent on my communities. We get this sort of stuff with frequency and it’s always shut down right away. If someone joins and their first post (or one of their first posts) contains a somewhat suspicious link, the post is removed and they are contacted, making them aware of our user guidelines.

If they start off with more than one post that does this, their posts are removed and they are most likely banned. New users are not given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to these matters. Once someone is established in our community, they will be given more leeway, however it is not appropriate to create threads or posts to bring attention to something that you are affiliated with and this is something we actively watch for.

Spamming is not a strategy that respectable individuals employ. If you want to post your website on a community, you check their guidelines to make sure that it’s allowed. If you are unsure, even in the slightest, you ask a staff member and then proceed as they outline – and only as they outline. If a particular website is a persistent offender on my network, they might find their link banned from the network as a whole. That is, their link is not allowed to be posted on any of my communities in any instance.

Some of these people create multiple accounts in order to make their spam discussions appear more active. Regardless of what the guidelines say (unless they specifically permit it, which is… suffice to say, highly unlikely), covertly creating multiple accounts to boost up your discussion or talk amongst yourself is universally looked at as uncool.

Really, it’s embarrassing behavior that no respectable organization will want to be associated with because if it should come to light, they’ll be roasted and lose major amounts of credibility. Once you are labeled a spammer, it is very challenging to shake such a rep. If “avoiding detection” is part of the pitch, that’s a good indication that something is not right.

Personally, I don’t want to be associated with anyone who finds this sort of practice acceptable. There is always a group of people who don’t care how they get something, they just want it. And there can be serious consequences for that. It’s good for us to know that people like this exist so that we can know what we’re up against.

For me, it’s about creating something of quality and doing it the right way, through hard work and dedication and through respecting others’ space – in other words, having a semblance of ethical values to adhere to. Communities that you do not own are not yours to advertise to. If you think “this is business” and there are no ethics, that’s just not true and, to me, that’s a terrible way to think. You always have a choice. You don’t have to do unethical things.

Consider that if you are a client of a company with this philosophy – if they are not above manufacturing false interest in your company, why would they be above manufacturing views, favorites, replies, comments and whatever other metrics you are tracking, in order to meet their quotas to fulfill their contracts and make you feel like you’ve really received your money’s worth?

Funny to consider that the company you are paying to do this could actually extort you because they are one of the people who could out you for this behavior through a “leak.”

Be careful. These sorts of strategies are just all around bad, for everyone, except for maybe the company being paid to do it.

I love when people spam and say something like “I’m not trying to steal any one’s traffic.” I love it even more when they are spamming something that is either exactly what we do or similar to what we do. For example, spamming a sports community on SportsForums.net.

“I’m not trying to steal your traffic.” Well, that’s funny, because that is exactly what you are doing!

The AP’s Anick Jesdanun writes today on the topic of online communities and how they enforce their guidelines/terms of service. She talks about different issues, including how these matters are handled, documented and resolved. I read the article with interest, as someone who manages online communities and someone who is a big believer in having goals in your community and actively aspiring to them, in everything that you do.

The article is aimed squarely at community managers and is just a bit too slanted against us. It’s very, very easy to talk about “censorship” or the “big guy picking on the little guy” and get a reaction from a majority of people who view it, against the person doing the “censoring” or against the perceived “big guy,” who could just be an individual community manager running his site as a hobby or small business. Anyone can do that. Too many people are predisposed against these things. However, that doesn’t mean that the community manager or managers have done anything wrong. A good chunk of this article amounts to: “corporation decides fate of individual behind closed doors.” That’s a great, dark picture, sure to attract some outrage. Of course, it’s not that simple.

The moment that anyone – namely, the government – tells me that I have to allow people to say whatever they want on my communities, or that I have to allow people to say whatever the government says they can say, that’s the moment I stop managing online forums and communities. You can throw my book away (that may be a little dramatic – it still has value, fear not! :)). I’ll go get a “normal” job or do something else because that won’t be a livable situation. The minute I am forced by law to allow lunatics to run roughshod on my communities, is the minute I stop doing this.

But, the good news is, I don’t see that happening. I mean, it could happen, in a doomsday scenario, but realistically, I see it as unlikely. So, this is all hypothetical.

Online communities are, almost all of the time, privately owned. It is for the people who own the website to say what happens on that site, within the scope of the law. If you want to allow people to say the F word, you’re choice. But, if you want to allow people to infringe on the rights of others, that’s not your choice. This is, in general, a good thing. Could be better, will never be perfect, but could be much, much worse.

One concern the article raises is that when a community enforces it’s guidelines and a member disputes it, those disputes are handled behind closed doors. This is said like it’s a bad thing. It’s not. It’s professionalism. This isn’t the court system, this is a privately owned community. People forget that people in “authority” (from the major corporation to the small community administrator) are held to higher standards than your average Joe.

Example: if average Joe says, “Company X is evil,” no one cares. But, if Company X says “Joe is evil,” then they are out of line. “Did they have to say that?” “It’s unprofessional.” “No one likes to see people air their dirty laundry.” People who make decisions are held to different standards. Airing dirty laundry is usually a bad idea; it usually creates more trouble and it is, above all else, not the most professional way of going about your business.

The article speaks of Flickr enforcing an “unwritten ban.” The bottom line is that you to have guidelines or terms of service written out, as comprehensive and clearly as you can. But, vagueness has it’s place and is necessary to ensure accurate wording and proper coverage. You want to be specific, but the danger of being too specific is in the people who want to read what you have as your policies and then think that, if your guidelines don’t cover it, it must be OK. People searching for loopholes, in other words. Again, this is holding corporations and managers to a much higher standard than everyone else. Why must we think of every single bad thing that someone could do on our communities? That’s not fair.

Many, many communities have an introductions forum, to allow new members to introduce themselves to the community. Generally speaking, they can talk about their personal background – where they’re from, what they’re interests are, what they are doing at the site and so on. I would say that most communities are even fine with them mentioning what they do for a living and linking to that site.

But, where a certain line can be crossed is when an introduction of a person becomes an introduction of a company or organization or a recruiting letter. That’s where it can get a little bit tasteless and can lead to violations of the community’s guidelines. When you are using an introductions forum, you want to always remember that you are introducing you, the person – not whoever you work for or whatever you do for a living. (There may be some exceptions, but if you’re new to a community, it’s always a good idea to check with the staff if you want to do something like that).

Here’s an example of a good, normal introduction I might make on a sports forum:

Hi,

My name is Patrick O’Keefe. I’m 23 and I live in Harbinger, NC. I own the iFroggy Network (http://www.ifroggy.com) and I have a personal blog at http://www.patrickokeefe.com.

I’m a big sports fan. Specifically, I’m a big fan of the New York Yankees and Miami Dolphins since birth. I listen to a lot of music (big Diddy/Bad Boy Entertainment fan). For TV, I watch The Simpsons, Family Guy, Prison Break, 24 and House. Into gaming, as well, when I have time.

Any questions, feel free. :)

Thanks,

Patrick

To be honest, someone doesn’t need to be that detailed to be OK with me. They can still mention their sites, like I did, but introducing yourself, however trivial it may seem, helps.

And now, here’s an example of what not to do:

Hey,

My name is Patrick and I run SportsForums.net (http://www.sportsforums.net). It’s a great sports community and we’re always looking for new people. We’d love to have you over there. So, please check it out! Also, we’re looking for moderators, so if you are interested in that, just PM me over at the site. My username is NoBrain.

Thanks!

Patrick

Would you like to take my first born, as well, while you’re at it?

Whether you are an individual or a corporation, if you are looking to tastefully integrate yourself into a community and derive real value from participation, it has to be about a person, an individual, a personality, a character – not a website, organization or company.

On my forums, it is our policy that we don’t edit member posts. When a post violates our User Guidelines, it is removed. Even if it is one line out of a long post. Once in a while, we do have a member who will ask, “why didn’t you just edit that post and leave it?” I can understand this question, certainly, and I always answer it, of course. Here are our reasons:

Sloppy Documentation

Editing posts makes for sloppy documentation of violations and actions taken. When you remove the post, you have the entire post as the member made it – forever. This includes the time stamp and the IP attached to it. It counts as irrefutable documentation in that this is the actual post, this is not the staff member quoting the post or saying that someone said this – this is the very post that violated the guidelines.

It’s also great to be able to search through posts that have been violations to search for sites that have spammed before, etc.

Harder Mistake Correction

Sometimes, posts do get removed that shouldn’t and those mistakes have to be corrected and I or we have to apologize for them. If you remove the post, it’s very easy to correct the mistake. But, if you edited the post, you have to hope that what was removed was documented very well – otherwise, it’s not going to be easy. Assuming your software doesn’t have some sort of “revert edit” feature that maintains forever.

This would also relate to a situation where you have one member violate your guidelines, supposedly, and then five replies that include that violation by quoting it. You have to edit all of them.

Staff Members Aren’t Proofreaders

If you can violate our guidelines and a staff member will fix it for you, would you care less about violating the guidelines? You may or may not, but at the end of the day, I don’t want my staffers to be looked at like proofreaders, who members expect to read their posts and make adjustments so that they are OK.

Recognizing the Value of Posts

At the same time, and in conclusion, while I see that removing posts is definitely the way to go – I recognize that it is frustrating to spend a lot of time on a post and have it removed for what might seem like a small reason. Because of this, it is included in our guidelines that we are glad to send any member a copy of a post that they made that has been removed, as long as it wasn’t so bad that we wouldn’t just rather them start over. That way, they can retrieve their work and adjust it and repost, rather than creating it from scratch again.