Overview: Communications Strategy

Content moderation "will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the "proper" level of moderation of anyone".any moderation will upset the moderated no moderation will upset those who don't like spam, harassment, etcpushing moderation to the users puts th…

social distancing ... led us to reconsider how we reach our audiences at scale ... through events... already conducted more than 15 large-scale virtual events... partner summit for over 4,000 attendees ... employee town hall with our CEO... Here’s what I’ve learned ...people show up to events to learn, network, and discover... to enable ... on a d…

Most current definitions of engagement are bimodal – someone is either engaged or they ‘re not...a limited view that hampers our ability to manage engagement in meaningful ways...Community management is the discipline of building technical and social environments in such a way that individuals can easily organize and collaborate to achieve an obje…

The most successful audience team members have a complete understanding of how the organization works... interpret a treasure trove of data and analytics about what people are searching for, what stories they like, and what stories are missing that special something ...audience development was everyone’s job and no one’s job at the same time... Th…

I started the ‘coffee club’ as a professional community of practice focused on work and learning. We have a private community space for the members, who pay $10 per month... private discussion forum ... live web video chats monthly... recorded and available for 30 days... a trusted space. As the club grows, I will offer more services.... main focu…

Most criticisms lodged against the content creators that chose to work with the platforms are made with the benefit of hindsight... the decision many publishers made to close down their comment sections should be considered one of the industry’s worst blunders.... editors looked down into their article comments sections and did not like what they …

A place where users with radically different political opinions interact productively and politely, where a willingness to participate thoughtfully is the rule rather than the exception, and where people readily admit when their views on a subject have been altered... Reddit’s Change My View forum... promotes respectful conversation between people…

reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

Executive leaders are involved more than ever before in using online communities to solve important business issues ... But budgets are not keeping up with demand, and measuring value isn't getting much help from platform vendors... The majority of organizations have now deployed some form of community platform to help workers, typically in the f…

NYTimes' “verified commenters.”... few hundred people whose comments are posted without moderation can end up dominating the reader commenting system... causes quite understandable resentment among thousands of others...Because they go up first, their comments are almost guaranteed to get the most exposure, “and hence rise to the top and be seen …

Here’s what we’re doing so far on Makerbase to discourage abuse before it starts and address it right away when it does happen. - 8 Steps for Preventing Abuse in a Web Community — Making Makerbase — Medium

I spoke to seven news organizations - Recode, The Verge, Reuters, Mic, Popular Science, The Week, and USA Today's FTW - about their decision to suspend comments, the results of that change, and how they manage reader engagement now... Here's how they're all using social media to encourage reader discussion. - What happened after 7 news site…

nothing about Federman’s job responsibilities at Fortune are traditional for a Time Inc. employee. He works closely with colleagues in editorial, public relations and marketing. He mines analytics for data about the best times to post stories and what’s connecting with readers. He identifies trending stories and occasionally writes one ... helps d…

If you don’t want comments on your website, that’s fine, don’t have them. But don’t act like comments are some sort of intractable problem that can’t be realistically addressed by mortals. They’re not... you could fix this, but your priorities are elsewhere.... Having threads that close, having moderators that redirect entrenched disagreements,…

So the question at hand is how to keep your community alive and thriving. Or, on the flip side, here are the top 15 ways to (inadvertently) to kill an online community: - How To Kill An Online Community In 15 Easy Steps | Vanessa DiMauro | LinkedIn

sixth edition of the annual report series provides a snapshot of the progress and changes in community management approaches and highlights emerging standards. This year, TheCR analyzed data from more than 200 communities representing a broad range of community sizes and sectors to measure community maturity and its relationship to member engageme…

Some really advanced techniques in handling trolls here - The Internet’s Most Trolled Cartoonist — The Nib — Medium

Comment moderation and online community management strategies for news organisations, but relevant to government sites too: "Comments are a way for readers to connect with one another, and with the journalists and editors reporting the news. But ... can quickly turn uncivil, and news organizations often don’t have the resources or manpower to con…

""How to stop trolling online?” is the question of the moment. From [Quora's] inception, its efforts have been geared towards “making quality scale,” ... also meant keep making the application a safe place for users to write... It has introduced a new anti-harassment feature, where users are prompted to flag any comment or post ... Quora moderat…

"Your community, as it grows, is not really your choice. ... Your first 10 members will define your 100 will define your 1,000 will define your 1,000,000. The only choice you have as a business and as a host is who you invite to be your first 10-100 members. After that, you sort of have to get out of the way and then meet the needs of this new thi…

"Continuing its tradition of airing its internal discussions outside the office, the staff at Jezebel today called out the higher-ups at parent Gawker Media today over some pretty disgusting trolling at the site." I wonder how much more loyalty Jezebel's community feel for the site because they air their internal problems so publicly? I wonder ho…

New data supporting old news: "According to Gallup ... of 18,000 consumers surveyed, 62 percent said social media had no influence on their buying decisions. Among millennials, 48 percent said social media didn't make a difference... Many social media advertisers have ... neglected the essence, and potential, of social media: people talking to …

"The only kind of moderation that scales with the community is the community. ... Through the trust system, Discourse communities develop a natural immune system that repels the trolls, spam, and hate that eventually tear apart communities on other forum software. - Stack Overflow Founder's Next Big Thing: Reinventing Online Communities – ReadWri…

"The experience of talking about race, ethnicity and culture on the Internet is nearly always deeply disenchanting. People don't even talk past each other; they talk right through each other. Prejudices harden. We find ourselves confirming our worst stereotypes of one another. And that's before the slurs fly." Some great lessons for making it wor…

As Michael Silverman puts it, "a brilliant online community has more potential than your current social networking strategy", and he isn't even talking about EU communications. The only downside, not mentioned, is that convening a community requires: - web publishing technologies which do not date from the previous millennium - real online commu…

"We explain the European court of justice ruling saying that Google will have to delete some information from its index – and why it has divided opinion" Good example of explainer journalism, and of how answering the comments often looks like more work than writing the thing in the first place (if you don't believe me, scan the comments): - Expl…

There are more good recommendations in here than can be summarised, but if I had to choose one, it's: "Integrate the developers and editors, from where they sit to whom they report to. If you’re going to do social journalism well, you’re becoming a technology platform company... Almost all the important breakthroughs in social media have come fro…

Some key points from "The Benefits of Quality Content and Genuine Social Engagement ... to create great, sharable, engaging content and become an active participant on social platforms: - Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them.... - Content that gets highly shared is content with heart. Real stories, re…

"what is a Community Manager? Because the term takes on such a broad role, we are going to break down the best practices of Team Hüify Community Managers!"

Last year, in the runup to the first EuropCom conference, I gave it a bit of a hard time. My cynicism was confirmed by many I knew who went, describing it as a conference about Web2 and social media which allowed little or no participation. Oops.