Our community manager, Eric, and I sit across from each other. Every day, we have a myriad of (often entertaining, sometimes frustrating) conversations about how to deal with the variety of issues that arise when managing online communities. It seems to be an art that everyone on the Internet is still figuring out, but thankfully, there are people we can all follow as models of this new art form.
One of the best models to follow is Flickr’s head of community, Heather Champ, who was just profiled for the San Francisco Chronicle and SF Gate Web site.
I really enjoyed the article by Chris Collin about the subtle (and not so subtle) complexities of managing the Flickr community.
One of the bits in the article that resonated with me is the part that details why community managers (and a good set of rules) is necessary, why it’s essential for communities to have advocates when community members start getting contentious:
“The amount of time it would take for the community to self-regulate — I don’t think it could sustain itself in the meantime,” she says. “Anyway, I can’t think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own.”
In this sense, Champ doesn’t just shepherd along the Flickr ethos; she’s a larger advocate of intelligent growth in an often chaotic zone.
Community management shouldn’t be about trying to control everything nor letting things run wild. It’s a balance which requires doing dozens (or hundreds) of little things every day to keep things humming. Sometimes all that’s needed is to bring some humanity into a conversation.
Heather went on to say:
“People become disassociated from one another online. The computer somehow nullifies the social contract,” she says. In other words, people sometimes go nuts amid the anonymity of the Internet.”
Great point, Heather. Social media works when it brings us closer. But we often have to create proxies for the physical connectedness we have when we’re in the same room. It’s for this same reason that we encourage using your real name and photo when possible on Get Satisfaction. We believe that the more you represent your real self, the more likely you are to behave as you would in your off-line life. (Of course, that doesn’t guarantee that all people will behave well. Some people are jerks in real life too.)
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