Clicks don’t lie: people gravitate toward drama (and who am I to deny them?)
I wrote yesterday about the process of realizing that a community management tool I’d established in 2008 for the Offbeat Bride Tribe was no longer relevant to my community’s current needs. In a nutshell: my current community doesn’t need high-drama posts filtered. But more importantly, they don’t WANT them filtered out.
You know why? Because on a certain level, we all gravitate toward difficult emotions. As one Offbeat Bride Tribe member said…
Changing your tools to meet your online community’s needs
If I’ve learned anything from a decade of online community management, it’s that you cannot teach people how to use your community “correctly.” Your members will use the tools you make available the ways that suit them, and time spent trying to convince them to use them differently is just a waste of moderator energy. Your tools MUST match the needs of your community — if your members are not using the tools the way you intended, then you need to reassess the tool.
This situation gets even more complex because the needs of a community shift as it matures. A tool that might have been awesome at one era of a community’s development might be completely pointless during another era. You can’t get attached to your tools, because if your members aren’t using them, they’re useless.
Ok, ok. Less vague-blogging. Let me give you a very specific recent example from the Offbeat Bride Tribe: the killing of the Primal Scream Therapy section.
The 24-Hour Reply Rule
Stating the obvious here: dealing with drama when you work with an online community can get a little overwhelming. Whether it’s moderating comments, moderating forum content or internal blogs, or just dealing with contact from readers or members, there is a lot of potential for being in a situation where you’re dealing with really unhappy people. This is why I have my 24-hour rule…
Small, focused, and yes, exclusionary community sites flourish
Recently, I ran some numbers and realized that traffic on the Offbeat Bride Tribe (the private community component of Offbeat Bride) was down… like, significantly down. Down by half from where it was at this time last year.
As a publisher, of course my first reflex was OMG TRAFFIC DOWN = BAD BAD BAD! But as a community manager, I’m keenly aware that the Tribe is functioning and behaving better than it ever has…