The atmosphere or tone of your community is hard to measure. But achieving a positive tone is critically important to your community success. Like a massive black hole you can't see it directly, but a negative tone warps everything around it and pulls it down. That's why community management and moderation are so important: effective community leadership in your terms and guidelines, the welcome messages and content you create, and in every interaction online with your members influences the overall mood of your community. Each is an opportunity for you to positively engage your members to elevate your community tone.

Don't let negativity sap the energy and light from your community:

Be transparent: Establish guidelines for member behavior and cite them when taking action.

Be positive: Don't rise to the bait when a member is frustrated, and be twice as nice online as you are in person.
Be respectful: Warn your members politely and in private, not in public. There's no need to embarrass anyone.

Be consistent: Document the actions you take with members (and be sure to read the notes of others).

What are you doing to keep your community a warm and sunny place?

photo by Dana Berry of SkyWorks Digital (found posted on flickr by thebadastronomer)

Very few of us live to blog. It takes a special kind of effort to put yourself out there and express yourself on a regular basis. By way of example, here are a few responses I heard more than once while recruiting bloggers at Lithium:

"I'd like to blog, but I'm not sure I'd be any good at it."

"The last thing I want is to be boring."

"I'm not sure anyone would read it."

Bear in mind that at least one of these comments was from the same expert I've witnessed passionately and eloquently espousing the esoteric points of rating systems and their virtues in front of rooms filled with people, so I admit to being a little surprised.

I've often heard that a prime characteristic of a successful blogger is passion. We have very passionate people here at Lithium, and I expect you have your share of passionate folks in your organization too. But I've found that a person needs more than just passion to blog: you also need validation. You need to believe that your words matter, that someone else is interested in what you have to say.

So how do you foster that sense of worth in your future bloggers? Here's a couple of ideas we have to get over this hurdle:

• Ask your expert a question and let them know that you think they are the best person to address this topic. It is easier to respond to a question than to think one up on your own. And by letting them know you consider them THE expert on the issue, you've give them that validation to start writing. As new questions come in on this topic, it will become more and more natural for that expert to respond.


• Find an instance where they have previously expressed an opinion and ask them to clarify it in more detail. You have interesting conversations with each other all the time; after all, that's why you want these folks to be bloggers! Next time, continue the conversation via email and then ask the expert to use their excellent response as a blog article. The heavy lifting is mostly done at that point, and they already know at least one person (you) is interested and thinks others would be interested too.


• Start building a pool of topics that your bloggers can use for new ideas. Support and Sales teams are especially useful here, as they are constantly getting new questions from customers and prospects. Get those questions into a common area (maybe even an internal board on your forum) and ask the internal community who they would like to hear answer it.

It's not easy to blog with any frequency, but first you have to make it easier to begin. If you have a blog, what prompted you to start? What encouragement would you give to new bloggers?

Great article by Andy Sernovitz on addressing a customer's real need instead of their expressed desires. I always envy Andy's ability to get his message out so succinctly!

Too often community managers who strive to be the customer's advocate misinterpret that to mean they must be order-takers. But helping your customers should start with both listening and asking probing questions. "Why?" is a simple though blunt way to start; "How would that make things easier/better for you?" is a better one. Start a conversation and strive understand your customers real needs - it takes more time and effort, but you can make a real difference and build real trust if you do.