Managing Online Communities

This is a particular topic that I find very fascinating. For years I had been growing my site into a community. I believed the influence of the group as a whole was much more interesting and effective than what a company or small team could produce.

I decided a good exercise would be to study up on one of the world's largest communities... eBay. I bought the book The Perfect Store that told the story of eBay. Aside from the incredible climb to the top of the online auction world, the aspect of the story I found most interesting was how they went about building their community. eBay learned over the years that their site was not about them, or the service they provided, it was about the users, and the services THEY provided. eBay began building more community-based tools, like forums for keeping in touch with each other, online feedback areas, user rating systems and more. They held periodic online meetings where all members could attend and voice their gripes or suggestions. They started to really listen to what the community wanted. Once the community realized their voice was being heard, they become stronger advocates for the site. They were now a part of the growing phenomenon called eBay.

It was this idea community idea that I wanted to build into my site. I started adding new features: User blogs, user added images, community and feedback forums, user rating/reward system, etc. I wanted the users to feel they had a home on my site. A place where they could setup shop, customize it, and make friends. At the same time, as more people created a home for themselves on the site, it benefited all the users since the community was growing. The more users that returned, the more interactive and helpful the site became.

But with all the benefits of a growing community comes some negative too. It is an unfortunate way of the world that there is ALWAYS a bad seed in the bunch. As my community was growing and prospering, an opposite effect was occurring. An anti-community set of users were starting to make a home on the site. Posting spam, name calling, harassing other users and defacing the site's value. Spam had been one of the main driver's for my opt-in registration system I had put in place a few years earlier. In order to post, new users had to register and then get their initial password through e-mail. This put stop to about 99% of my automated spam problems. This type of registration system was helpful in this new problem as well, as I could control/limit users ability to quickly create multiple userids, etc. If I banned a user from the site, they could find their way back, but they needed to create another email address, which would often take more work than it was worth.

Over time I developed a entire tool set for helping manage the community. Problem users could be completely removed and banned from the site with a single click. I could manage/moderate post on the fly as I browsed. I built reports to keep me updated on the latest posts/activity. The single most important addition was the decision to add moderators to the site. Even with all my tools, the site had grown to a point where I could no longer keep up with managing the community. I had a number of trusted power users that would often ask if there was anything they could do to help. I developed a system where I share my moderating responsibilities with other users. I then invited a few of the top users on the site and crossed my fingers. To my surprise, every single user I invited accepted. I now had a team of moderators watching over the site. And the most amazing part, they were all doing it for free! They wanted to do it. They appreciated the usefulness of the site, and they wanted to help protect that usefulness. Over the years I would (and still do!) periodically send out gift cards or presents to the moderators as a gesture of my appreciation for their help. You should never forget about the people that help you. Recognition, even in the smallest form, can go a long way in building a solid relationship with your users.

Next up... Quitting My Day Job...