photo credit: jczart

I think there is this temptation with some community owners and administrators to select moderators and then not monitor them closely; to let them do what they think is appropriate without any sort of review of those actions.

Whether they are volunteer moderators who help out for a few hours a week or paid moderators for whom it is a part time or full time job, you can’t set and forget them.

This post was inspired by a comment by Rebecca Newton on the e-mint list.

Think of a restaurant. You have servers and they interact directly with your customers. They are front line representatives and have a powerful ability to directly impact how the customer thinks of your business. Not just in how they act, but in how they communicate things that are out of their control.

photo credit: Ktoine

In my last article, we discussed how playing “Call of Duty” online can tell you whether or not you might be cut out to be a community manager.

In it, I talked about how some players don’t play to the objective – they play to pad their own numbers, ignore the objective and toy with competitors. In the end, the team that first completes the objective, whatever that may be, is the actual winner.

As you can imagine, there are times when you are utterly dominated in this game.  When this happens to me and my brother, we will sometimes be the best players on the team that got crushed – the players who scored the most points on the losing team.

I would always rather be the third or fourth best on a team that wins the match, then to be the best on the team and lose. I won’t lie, being the best on the team is fun, but it is so much more rewarding when the team wins. It’s hollow when you lose.

photo credit: Vivian Chen [陳培雯]

Private forums are meant to be private – the information contained within is supposed to only be for the people who have access to that forum.

But, people don’t always respect this fact and eventually, you may have someone leaking private information to people who shouldn’t have it. The question is: what can you do about it?

The short answer: not very much. It is an incredibly frustrating situation.

Unless you have clear cut evidence on who is leaking the information, the main thing that you need to do is resist the temptation to go crazy and go on a witch hunt. You need to maintain your cool, keep your eyes open and only make decisions based upon good information.

photo credit: Guru Sno Studios

The holidays represent a great opportunity to express appreciation for your community’s moderators and staff members.

My moderators are volunteers who help because they have enjoyed the community and want to help maintain and give back to the thing that they have benefited from. There may be some other benefits, as well, but that should be the core.

What I have done in the past is send a Happy Holidays card, taking the time to write some honest thoughts, explaining how I appreciate what they bring to the team. I have also included gift certificates for small amounts to Amazon.com.

photo credit: craiglea123

Moderators can be a very important part of your online community. I know that mine are. I select them very carefully.

But, I thought it would be interesting and fun to throw some numbers behind this. So, I took KarateForums.com as an example.

KarateForums.com was launched on May 21, 2001 and has 12,424 registered members. From doing some research, it appears that, over this space of 10 years, 6 months and 2 weeks, there have been a grand total of 75 different people who have held a spot on the staff, give or take a couple.

That means that 0.603% of registered members have held a position on staff.

photo credit: Lars P.

In my last article, I discussed the danger of letting community guideline violations slide and how, if you let a violation go without the proper attention, you may be risking one of the most important elements of community management: consistency.

On Google+, Justin Kozuch, Lead Researcher at Pixel to Product, Community Manager at OSL Marketing and Host of 49Pixels Live, shared the article and started a discussion, asking community managers, “what tactics have you employed to create a consistent experience for your community members?”

I took the question down the moderation route, because that was the subject of my article and, also, moderation is, perhaps, the most important thing that we can do to ensure a consistent experience.

When it comes to moderation, there are a number of things that I do to help this process. Here are some of the big ones.

photo credit: OttoKristensen

We’re getting toward the end of of the latest round of new staff members on KarateForums.com, which is an established online community that I have run for over 10 years.

Many communities, mine included, feature a staff of volunteers, who complement the person or team that is primarily responsible for the community. Volunteer staff members have low requirements placed upon them and they join the team for differing reasons.

The biggest, and perhaps most important, reason is that they themselves have derived benefit and enjoyment from the community and now they want to give back and help maintain the thing that they enjoy. There are other positive benefits, as well.

photo credit: jsheehan200

Josh Barraza asked: “How [do you] transition [a] community after an acquisition?”

Online communities, like any website, can be very valuable. They take a great deal of time to run and manage and, in that light, can be looked at like any other venture or full time job.

Everything must eventually come to an end and there will come a time to close the community, to pass it off to someone else or to sell it.

But, they can also be quite delicate. In most cases, a portion of their value is tied to current activity and, if you go in with the wrong mentality, you could erode a substantial amount of value by making unfavorable changes or lacking the proper sensitivity when you first enter the community.

photo credit: ClatieK

Staff tenure is a great thing to track, acknowledge and celebrate on your community. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, but it truly is a case of “it’s the thought that counts,” that you cared enough to remember and mention it.

It’s simple enough to track. As part of the process of adding people to your team, maintain a document of some sort where you note the day that they officially joined your team. At the start of the year, I enter all of these dates into my calendar for the next 12 months so that I don’t have to constantly refer back to the document, but will instead be able to see when a particular staff member has reached X number of years on the staff, when it is getting close.

Today, I would like to take some inspiration from Dr. Dre’s “I Need a Doctor” featuring Eminem and Skylar Grey. It’s a personal record for Dr. Dre and Eminem and a motivational one, as well. I love it.

I’m going to discuss some community management related takeaways from the song, which you can listen to at the bottom of this post by playing the music video. I should warn you, it is explicit and I quote some explicit lyrics in this article.

Give People Opportunities and Mentor Them

The biggest underlying theme in “I Need a Doctor” is the relationship that Eminem and Dr. Dre share. Dre is his mentor, someone who gave him a chance when others wouldn’t, who believed in him and helped him to reach the level of success that he has achieved.