Don't Let Negativity Warp Your Community

[#1]

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)

[#2]

---

ScottD wrote:

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

---

It would be helpful if some additional automation could be added around this with a warning function that puts the mod in a PM to the member that's pre-populated with a link to the problem message as well as logging it and the moderator's comments in the member's profile rather than relying on the moderator to remember to first send a PM and then backtrack to manually enter notes.  Same thing for automatically logging comments from both temporary and permanent bans.  That ensures we maintain a record that all the mod team has easy access to when they're trying to decide how to handle a situation.

Yes, I can cut-and-paste to get the message link into the PM and then information from the PM to the admin notes, but isn't automating that kind of thing what we have computers for?  I know that I have the attention span of a flea, so by the time I send a PM and then work my way back over to their profile, I've thought of 5 other things I need to take care of.

I have an idea submitted about this that doesn't seem to be getting much traction.  I may not be explaining this very well

Jane

[#3]

Jane:

Is this the idea you mean: Warning feature

That does sound like it would help moderators be more efficient in the community and facilitate best practices. Looks like it's in the top 10 today, so if anyone else thinks this is a good idea be sure to leave your comments and/or vote for it!

[#4]

Yup, that's the one - thanks!

[#5]

Scott,

I think it's a challenge to find the balance of allowing negative sharing within the course of the rules to encourage honest dialog and to hear a perspective of how things are landing with the customer.

We try to intervene in cases where the experience has taken a decidedly wrong turn because it is the thing for the customer, and builds creditability in the community for those times where one has to acknowledge a point of view, but may not be able to change reality, or agree with the member's perspective or account of things.

Your black hole is a great graphic, as the negativity can create a priority that diverts community management strategic efforts to deploy new capabilities, and to ensure that positive contributors are interacted with as well.   Imagine a parent who focuses all their attention on a problem child to the detriment of siblings who are well behaved and deserve recognition and a share of attention.

In an earlier discussion , Roxy was talking about some internally focused discussions in preparing to launch a community, but I think points #1 and #2 are great strategic points to consider in the operation of the community as well.  

The further I travel on my journey, the more I think Roxy got it right.  Great post Scott!

Mark

[#6]

Mark:

You're absolutely right, you need to spread the love! Don't let negativity pull you away from the rest of your community either. Get in, offer positive assistance, and then you have to let it go if it can't be fixed. It's a fine balance between letting issues fester and becoming entrenched in a no-win situation. Great point!

Also, it's worth noting that there's a difference in my mind between content that is negative and a negative tone - the former is valuable information about your products and services and an opportunity to improve (and an opportunity to gain a new advocate). The latter may be evidence of a problem, but to turn it around you need to shift the conversation to more constructive lines.