NETTING IT OUT

That said, issues do arise. To help you deal with them, we have identified nine types of inappropriate and difficult posts and discussions that appear in online communities. These are messages or conversations that are:

1. Offensive (language)

2. Offensive/Abusive (content)

3. Off-Topic

4. Incorrect

5. Negative (about your company, brand, products/and or services)

6. Positive (about the competition)

7. Sensitive/Confidential

8. Advertising/Spam

9. Other (including the unexpected)

Through careful planning and preparation, and prompt, professional action, you can minimize both the number and the impact of these posts/discussions on your company and your brand, and even leverage them to your advantage. These steps include:

The bad news is that it is all but a certainty that there will be posts and conversations within your community that you and your organization consider to be undesirable, inappropriate, and uncomfortable. Supporting an online community means opening yourself up to things you might prefer not to see at all, let alone enable.

But the good news is that, through (1) careful planning and preparation, and (2) prompt, professional action, you can greatly reduce the unwanted discussions, learn from them, and even turn them into your advantage.

Terms of Use

© 2008 Autodesk, Inc.

Illustration 1. The Terms of Use in Autodesk’s AliasDesign community consist of eight common-sense items (see http://aliasdesign.autodesk.com/discussions/forumguidelines).

Inappropriate and Difficult, but Not Necessarily Unwanted

Note that we use the adjectives “inappropriate” and “difficult” in the title of this report, as opposed to the words “unwanted” or “undesirable.” Some of the posts and conversations described here you do want—or at least don’t mind getting—as they indicate a healthy community and provide potential learning experiences. Some difficult messages air sore points (you’d rather have these out in the open than let them fester, right?) and let you know what your customers really think about your company (and your competitors). And some difficult messages give your customers the opportunity to come to your defense.

So think of the occasional four-letter words, the bit of spam, and the argumentum-ad-hominem rant as part of the price of being a customer-centric organization. They are things to be controlled and contained, perhaps, but not fought with an eye toward elimination.

Your Community Site

There are likely many places online outside of and separate from your own site where your customers are discussing your company. You might observe these external communities and perhaps participate occasionally, but you ostensibly have no control over them. This report, however, focuses on how to deal with inappropriate and difficult discussions in your community, the one you sponsor, administer, and manage. You therefore do have a good deal of (although certainly not absolute) control over what happens in your own community.

Text and Other Forms of Content

Although the focus here is on the written word, what’s discussed below applies to other forms of content as well. Inappropriate is inappropriate, whether it’s text, a video clip, photograph, picture, sound file, or anything else. Some specifics may vary, but the approach to dealing with any form of content or information should be the same.

It’s Not as Prevalent as You Might Think

Kellie Parker is the Online Community Manager at PC World (http://www.pcworld.com) and Macworld (http://www.macworld.com). A long-time community moderator and manager, she spent seven years at LiveWorld, doing live event and community management. Her specialty is large, public-facing, brand-oriented companies. (It’s often enlightening to discover what people studied at college, and see if/how, years later, that background relates to their work. I’m not sure what this means for a community manager, but, in addition to her MBA in marketing, Kellie holds a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice…)

In Kellie’s experience, the tough stuff is just part of the landscape. She says, “One of the mistakes people make initially is that they go one of two ways. They either think nothing bad will happen, so they don’t have any tools or procedures—and they don’t know what to do when something happens—or they go to the other extreme, and think it will be all porn and profanity, which cripples them from doing anything. The best approach is the middle ground. It will probably happen, but not as much as you think.”

Angela LoSasso, Community & Blogs Strategist for Hewlett-Packard, agrees. She manages HP’s Home and Home Office community (http://expressioncentersmb.wetpaint.com) and its Small & Medium Business Printing community (http://expressioncentersmb.wetpaint.com).

She says “In the ten months since we launched these communities, we’ve had only four or five negative comments, and nearly all have been around a customer having a usability issue and trying to fix it. I’ve been pleasantly surprised, because, before we launched, there were concerns that complaints could derail what we hoped would be a great customer experience. But there hasn’t been any of that. It’s been overwhelmingly positive. When problems have come in, we’ve been able to address them directly.”

TYPES OF INAPPROPRIATE AND DIFFICULT ONLINE DISCUSSIONS

We’ve identified the following nine types of inappropriate and difficult discussions within online communities. In particular, these are posts and/or discussions that are:

1. Offensive (language)

2. Offensive/Abusive (content)

3. Off-Topic

4. Incorrect

5. Negative (about your company, brand, products, and/or services)

6. Positive (about the competition)

7. Sensitive/Confidential

8. Advertising/Spam

9. Other (including the unexpected)

This report continues...