I’ve spoken with several organizations in recent weeks around getting their community up and running… in short, what they will need to launch and what kind of an ongoing/maintenance workload lies ahead. A theme that surfaces repeatedly (regardless of whether it’s an internal deployment for collaboration or an externally-focused site) is Community Management/Moderation.
I’ve worked with hundreds of companies over the years around their online communities, and I’m interested in learning more about how you’re approaching community management today; if it’s fulfilling your needs, what has worked and what hasn’t, and how you think the role could/should be.
Below are some of the variations I have seen in recent years, with differing levels of success:
- By-the-hour, outsourced to a firm – typically moderation only – delivered as a service
- IT handle the application/fully managed hosting and business handle the moderation
- In-house expertise, typically prominent personalities within the community who blog, seed content, motivate the user base, reach out to power users, moderate, perform site management and administration, etc.
- Contracting an individual or firm to act in the role of in-house expertise
I’d love to hear from all of you who have gone through this process in recent years, your successes and where you ran into obstacles. I’d also love to hear how many community members belong to your online community, if it’s internal collaboration or an external community and any “real-life” examples of how your community management strategy has played out in reality.
For example: A customer I worked with recently hired a firm to perform moderation services. The customer’s reputation was that they would be concerned about any implied slight, and as a result the Moderation company were overly enthusiastic, deleting several posts that were in fact not in violation of the customer’s policies. As a result, they had to work through the relationship together to make sure that there was better communication regarding appropriate moderation going forward.
Email or DM me if you don’t want to share publicly!!
