Last week’s bloggers open house at the Daily Telegraph was quite interesting because much of the discussion ended up being about that achille’s heel of online community management: moderation.
Participants in online discussions hate moderation. This is fairly easy to understand given that moderation often polarises website users and those who own or manage them into adversarial situations. A user who has had a post or comment removed will often feel that they have been unfairly censored. I’ve personally seen hundreds of instances where the author of a comment that has been removed for even a flagrant violation of the rules has continued to plead their innocence for weeks or even months.
As I’ve explained here before, moderators are a bit like the police – in many instances you don’t even know they’re around until you do something wrong and they catch you. Even if you’re on the other side, with the police dropping in to help you, the memory of the crime that’s been inflicted upon you will always outweigh the reassuring words of the police officer who turns up a few hours later to do the paperwork.
Moderation does, of course, have a role to play in ensuring the safety of participants in online discussions but, in my opinion, the positive reinforcing presence of a skilled discussion host is far more important – and many users prefer hosted discussion. So what does a host do?
1. A host does housekeeping and sign-posting:
To be of value to the hosting website, organisation or brand, steps must be taken to ensure that online discussions are kept relevant. Clear topic sign-posting, subject lines that give a strong indication of what the discussion is about, and hands-on discussion steering by a host are all useful tools. Topic sign-posting those who want to discuss Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe to the right place and sends people who want to talk about sheep sheering somewhere else. Subject lines that give a clear indication of the more specific topic of discussion, perhaps phrased as a question, continue the job of getting would be participants to the right place for them. If expectactions of what will and won’t be discussed are clear enough, the opportunity for random noise to drown out proper discussion is minimalised.
2. A host greets and welcomes participants:
It’s difficult for many of us to jump into a discussion that’s been taking place between people who have grown to know one another over a period of time. Being welcomed from the outset is a good way to ensure that new users don’t feel like outsiders. Those who feel they are a part of something are less likely to try to wreck it.
Being greeted on the way in also reinforces the idea that the online community has a face to it. It’s a bit like In retail, where many stores are experimenting with the use of greeters at the door:
“Family Dollar, a discount department store with 6,000 outlets nationwide, is currently testing greeters in a handful of stores with a high incidence of shoplifting. “We’re looking at greeters as potential deterrents,” said Kiley F. Rawlins, divisional vice president of Family Dollar, who said the greeters would work alongside traditional security guards. “The idea is that if someone looks at you and acknowledges you’re there, you’re less likely to try to steal.”
3. A host averts trouble by steering debate:
A skilled host can steer discussions away from trouble and, where participants start to drift, can bring the debate back on topic with a few words of encouragement, dropping in some new information such as a fact or statistic, or by asking the right questions. This sort of behaviour is reinforcing rather than negative which is an important difference between discussion hosting and moderation.
4. The wording of rules is important:
Rules should be clear and easy to understand. Each individual rule should be sufficiently narrow in meaning so as to avoid vagarities in both it’s interpretation by participants and application by those moderating. A well written rule is the online community manager’s best friend because it gives them something holier than thou to point to and fall back upon. Working with the community to develop the rules of engagement is often a useful way of ensuring buy-in from that community.
5. Be transparent about decisions you make:
People can much more readily accept that decisions are made if that process is transparent. I wrote in the past about how BBC News Online has moved with the times and am happy to say that they have continued to move in the right direction. Participants can now see how many comments are pending moderation, how many have been rejected for violating the house rules and more right on the discussion page.
I’m of two minds as to whether the application of the rules should be done by the hosts or the moderators. At the BBC, the roles are usually split but, with more options to add comment forms directly into content pages and blog posts, there might be a time where those who encourage discussions also become responsible for managing them. That worries me a bit since not everyone has the skills to manage an online discussion, nor does everyone wish to do so. Yet, at the same time, it brings journalists and producers closer to their audience in a way that is a lot more open and honest than just about anything else we do. If journalists are to be made responsible for hosting the discussions on their blog posts and articles then they will need to be trained in doing so and transparency is an important part of that training.
Which brings me nicely to the point of all of this:
If journalists and others involved in creating content are to become effective at managing online discussions, whether it’s comments on the bottom of stories, a message board debate or comments posted on a blog, they need to first take the time to learn the techniques from those with online community management experience. It would also be instructive to watch how some, but certainly not all, bloggers kick off then participate in discussions both on their own blogs and elsewhere (using tracking services like technorati and co.mments to follow the debate wherever it goes).
Long before we’ll be able to have proper participatory journalism, we’re going to have to get the basics of online discussion right.
(And I almost forgot, that doesn’t mean that the discussion has to take place on your own website but that’s another post!)