Panelists: Heather Champ – flickr, Mario Anima – CurrentTV, Matthew Stinchcomb – Etsy, Jessamyn West – MetaFilter (aside – LIBRARIANS ROCK), and Micah Schaffer – YouTube
Excellent – Jessamyn introduced the Metafilter part of her jobs, then mentioned I’m a public librarian in my day job. Awesomeness.
Metafilter didn’t have moderation for about the first 5 years. Started out as some dude’s blog, and grew from there. They recently added flagging, to mark content as breaking the guidelines.
Youtube – harder to perceive trends as they grew. They’re figuring out how to do it by slicing metrics in different ways
Etsy – Challenge – how to grow big but to stay small at the same time. A goal – make sre they’re having a dialogue. Have to remember the community is king before they do anything.
CurrentTV – they have different types of communities, ie., viewers and producers – they have to balance that.
They all mentioned mean names their communities have called them at times.
The YouTube guy – probably speaking the truth about YouTUbe – but he’s talking about bikinis and sex a lot. His point was that their site has a diversity of content, and sometimes you might not want, say, a bikini to mix with your hedgehog videos.
(aside – dude – don’t sit by two women and say “the internet’s about sex” and talk about liking bikini videos. Just sayin.
CurrentTV guy talks about content of conversations. IE., your comment will be taken down if you say “I will hunt you down …” etc. They actually say edit that out, and we’ll put it back up.
YouTube – criticism is good. They have to balance good, constructive criticism with crazy person criticism.
Flickr – Heather has learned when NOT to respond. She lets craxy people “dig their hole to crazy town” by not responding – it allows the community to notice and ignore the crazy person.
CurrentTV has multiple ways to deliver feedback – email, twitter, video responses, etc.
Etsy agrees – communicate in as many ways as possible.
YouTube – realize you’ll have to adapt your policies and guidelines as your site and your product evolve.
Etsy – people use site and communicate in ways you don’t expect – because of that, they have to revisit their policies every few months.
Metafilter – be able to explain your rules, and why you think that rule is a good one
Q&A now:
Q: How do you get community engagement in flickr?
A: You get what you give. You have to participate in groups for example. I’d add that you have to have a real community / network first – they’ll view and comment. Also wondering if he’s actually ASKED for comments?
Q: Does YouTube delete comments?
A: Their community guidelines apply to comments. Comments are the lowest barrier to entry at YouTube – it’s easy.
A: Allow members to determine what’s ok and what’s not.
Q: question about being logged in and being stupid …
A: Etsy – login name is same as their shop name, so your reputation follows you big time.
Q: Clay Shirky asked a question – funniest thing with community disagreeing with them…
A: Jessamyn – they banned someone, community started an “unban this user” …
A: Etsy – the Etsy 5 thing …
A: CurrentTV – a guy constantly complained a lot, then “asked for a divorce”
Q: what happens when another user community invades your own
A: flickr … you have to protect your own community first, really watch it – she gave a few examples. She calls them community crashers
{ 0 comments }
Dealing with Comments on your Website
by David Lee King on August 7, 2009
Guess what? People have been sharing back. Quite a few (check the comments! It’s interesting reading). That one post, so far, has gathered a whopping 89 comments (a first for us). Comments by 36 people, mostly from customers (there’s about 7 library staff who have chimed in, including me). One customer has posted 14 comments! It’s been a rather hot blog post for us.
Here’s how we’ve been handling our comments:
Otherwise, we let it go – after all, we created an open forum, and people can say whatever they want (for the most part). I am also working on some online Community Discussion Guidelines. We’ll probably put a link to them somewhere around our blog comment box. It’s been an interesting lesson in online forum management for me!
Why are we putting ourselves through this? Why don’t we just close comments and move on? Because we are in control of the conversation. Think about it. If people were talking about this issue on their own blogs, the library might or might not be able to respond. If people were discussing this on the newspapers editorials/comments (which they have been), we’re not in control of that conversation either – the newspaper is.
But when the conversation happens on our website … then we’re in control. We can correct misinformation easily, and point to the correct answer. We can add phone numbers, email addresses, etc. We can even email the commenter individually (assuming they used a valid email address).
This allows us to hold the conversation in “our building” – on our digital branch. One of my co-workers recently said she was putting on her fireman’s hat when we started getting negative comments. I reminded her that she was right – but we were doing a “controlled burn.” Because we’re in control of the conversation.
Have you had similar experiences with your organization’s blog and/or website? If so, how have you handled:
I’d love to know!
Pic by Vetustense
Tagged as: commenting, comments, community management, digital branch, forum managment
{ 15 comments }