However, in the past couple of years, eMusic clearly started to shift its emphasis toward competing with iTunes. They started to bring in more major labels and subtly raised the subscription fees. At first it sounded like a good idea…who wouldn’t want to have access to some White Stripes and Foo Fighters along with their New Pornographers and Metric? But as eMusic transitioned, the member forums started to show signs of discontent. Then last month eMusic completed a deal with Universal Music Group to add several thousand new tracks from mainstream artists. That’s when things took a turn toward the ugly side.

Nowhere has the ugly become more obvious than on eMusic’s member forums. Here are five things eMusic is doing that you can’t afford to do if you want a thriving member community:

1. Not address issues raised by members
You don’t have to dig very far to see just how pissed members are with eMusic. Here’s a sample of post titles from the forums:

• Have credit, can’t download; lousy customer service
• Well, it ain’t an improved service we’re paying for…
• Goodbye emusic
• Money taken but no credit.
• How to destroy customer loyalty

Want to know how many times a rep from eMusic responded to these particular posts? Zip. Zero. Zilch. Review the forum and you’ll see that most of the interaction is members consoling other members and lamenting how things have changed for the worse. When it comes to actually addressing the issues raised by members, eMusic most often chooses the silent but deadly route.

Here’s a better way: Hopefully, it’s crystal clear. Deal with your members’ issues as openly and quickly as possible. Yes, sometimes an instant response isn’t the appropriate thing to do (particularly where investigation or research is necessary), but people will tolerate bad news a lot better when they’re treated like intelligent adults.

2. Speak mainly in PR-ese
When someone from eMusic does bother to communicate with members, its usually their VP of Corporate Communications, Cathy Nevins. I don’t know Ms. Nevins but what I can tell by her background and her interactions on the forums is that she clearly doesn’t understand the differences of PR, customer service, and community management. Find any post or response she writes and it oozes with PR-ese, rarely addressing the actual issue and sometimes providing misinformation. Case in point is this question regarding a change in service: http://www.emusic.com/messageboard/viewTopic.html?topicId=263393#1487316. After Cathy does offer a response, notice how many subscribers call her out on offering a less-than-truthful explanation. There’s also an interesting related conversation going on at non-affiliated emusers.org.

Here’s a better way: Talk to your members like they’re people you give a damn about. Be specific as often as possible. Apologize for screwing up. If you feel the overwhelming urge to spin and micromanage a situation, you need to nip that in the bud. Communities of passionate members are built around relationships of respect and honesty. PR-ese isn’t part of that equation.

3. Allow VPs to run the community
I hope my criticism of Ms. Nevins isn’t seen as personal. It’s not. (In some ways, I do feel bad for her. It’s horribly apparent that she’s in way over her head, perhaps even close to burnout.) But what I find curious is that eMusic puts the responsibility of interacting with paying members in the hands of a VP whose background is public relations. Know what this tells me? That eMusic executive management doesn’t really know what the hell it’s doing, and definitely doesn’t know how to maintain an online community.

Want further proof that this company has a deaf ear toward online interaction? All posts at eMusic’s blog, 17 dots, written by their CEO, Adam Klein, have the comment function disabled (though notice all other posts have no problems with comments). And yet more proof is on their Twitter account where they mostly RT and respond to positive tweets, but ignore respectfully critical questions, issues, and comments.

If eMusic really understood the importance of a positive, thriving community, they’d realize that talking with their members – even if they are pissed off members – would help. It would also be a good idea to hire a community manager immediately who knew how to communicate openly with people, listen with empathy, and calm tensions by providing needed information (on the other hand, the lack of a true community manager and the impact on eMusic’s member satisfaction isn’t a new issue).

Here’s a better way: Nothing against VPs or execs managing communities, but often they’re not in the right place to do it well. It’s vital to maintain their buy-in and keep them involved when necessary. However, managing a community is work that takes focus and a wide variety of skillsets. If your online community is foundering, hire an experienced community management professional.

4. Allow critical issues to escalate
By not immediately and adequately dealing with those tensions expressed by members who felt cheated and ignored, eMusic lost their shot at quelling the criticism. These issues didn’t just arise overnight…they were slowly percolating over the last several months. One could almost argue it started last summer during a particularly significant subscription rate hike when eMusic added Sony to their catalog.

Here’s a better way: It’s a no-brainer but it’s so easy to let problems snowball until they turn into full out avalanches. Then, it takes a herculean effort to dig your company out of the pileup. Don’t let the avalanche occur. Build an issue escalation plan that includes a clearly defined process for what to do when a significant issue arises within the community. Know who will handle the situation, the timeframe for handling it, and the various communication points for response.

5. Treat your longtime members with lack of respect
For what it’s worth, I’m probably leaving eMusic after five years of membership. I can’t say how much I appreciate what eMusic did to expand my musical horizons. But like many members who’ve been with the service for years, I’ve hit my breaking point. It finally came when indie labels like Matador exposed eMusic’s new terms that seem to benefit the big media conglomerates over the companies that made eMusic great once upon a time.

One of the most reasoned responses came from fellow longtime member EVDebs:

Much of the anger expressed at 17dots and elsewhere flows from the rampant dishonesty that has marked emusic’s communication strategy regarding this price increase and the seeming contempt with which you have treated your longtime subscribers. You have made it much, much harder for yourselves to make a convincing argument that this price increase was anything but a result of your questionable decision to focus on bringing major labels on board. The problem with any strategy built on lies is that even the truth ends up sounding like a lie once everyone has caught on to the fact that you’ve been lying.

Here’s a better way: Your longtime members are the ones who likely saw your community through the tough times and probably evangelized your brand to spread the good word-of-mouth. Why in the world would you kick them to the curb, even if the focus of your community changes? Don’t be arrogant enough to think you can just go and get more members like they grow on some kind of magical tree. Instead of pushing them further away, draw them closer to your community and business. They contributed to your success. Thank them accordingly.

image credit: Crawdaddy! Magazine

Coca-Cola and Unilever are shifting their digital focus away from traditional campaign sites and towards community platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, as social media begins to dictate their marketing activity in 2010.

Yes, these are the big kahunas of the corporate branding universe…but can their strategies work for small and medium-sized businesses? Not only do I think the answer is a resounding “100% yes!”, I believe that building community over campaigns is an absolute must for nearly any enterprise today. Why?

Read the full blogpost at BaileyHill Insights…

photo credit: scoobay (via Flickr)

• Kill spam
• Control trolls

Worthy reasons for sure. Nobody wants or needs spam and trolls camping out on your site. But do the risks outweigh the benefits gained from comment moderation?

There are three levels of comment moderation:

1. No Comments/No Moderation. A blog is intended for broadcast purposes only. Few can get away with this. One exception is Seth Godin and I’m not exactly sure I’d consider his site a blog (see below).
2. Comments/Moderation. A blog has comments, but these comments are moderated by the publisher. It can be hard to tell if your comment is going to get sequestered until after you click Post. If you’ve commented on blogs before, you know what I mean.
3. Comments/No Moderation. A blog has comments and these comments are posted in real time once you click Post. I’ve made the choice to go this path with comments here and my other blogs (which might reveal a bit of bias).

Let’s put aside the No Comments/No Moderation level since it shouldn’t be part of your game plan if you’re publishing a blog. I would even suggest that any site that doesn’t offer the ability for readers to respond and interact isn’t really a blog. It’s just a broadcast engine.

This leaves the other two levels and the issue of which method to use. If you choose to set up moderation, here are a couple of questions to answer:

• Is an objective of your blog to inspire interaction among your readers?
• Can you quickly approve comments so they enter the dialogue stream shortly after posting?
• …And if not, are you okay with your readers either not bothering to comment in the future or not returning altogether?

I apologize if it seems that I’m setting up this argument a little too much. My experience is that moderation rarely corrects the problems it’s intended to solve. There are several spam-filtering tools available for blog platforms (e.g., WordPress comes with Akismet; Typepad has its own built-in solution). These tools nail the spam comments before they even hit your site. And if you’re concerned about trolls posting inappropriate comments, let’s approach from another angle: what is the probability of true troll behavior (not to be confused with opposing viewpoints) appearing on your blog to the degree that the comment needs to be deleted?

I argue that moderation imposes significant risks to the health of your blog’s community – particularly if your blog is new. When someone leaves a comment on your blog, they want it to post in real time. They want to be part of the dialogue. When you sequester their comment until you get around to approving it, you’ve effectively kicked them out of participating in the community. Worse, most folks don’t know when their comment is going to get approved so they move on…and you’ve potentially lost them as both commenter and reader. If you’re truly worried about trolls, put a solid commenter policy in place letting your readers know what happens to inappropriate messages.

So ask yourself if moderating comments adds or detracts from your blog’s interactive experience. And unless you have good cause to moderate (and yes, there are a few out there), promote an open dialogue in your community.

Learning #1
Okay…this isn’t so much a new learning as it is a poignant reinforcement of something that I know. Acquaintances made online become closer friends when meeting offline (like with my friend Bill Jacobson). If you have a community that only meets in the online space, seriously consider how you can encourage offline meetups.

Learning #2
We’re creating and recreating social norms with every new community and new technology. The way we interact acceptably in one online community may be entirely inappropriate in another. For an example think about your interactions on LinkedIn versus Facebook. While it’s not universal, I wager that your interactions in Facebook are different than LinkedIn (okay, at least mine are). And the types of people you friend on Facebook are likely different, as well (again, not universal…your experience may differ). And all of this impacts how we form behaviors, attitudes, and actions in our communities, in addition to how create expectations of other members. For companies and organizations wanting to build communities, having a grasp of these norms is incredibly important. Thanks to @gammydodger for kicking off this strand of thought.)

Learning #3
Grappling with our various online personas is filled with anxiety. With so much of our lives existing online, there really isn’t a magic formula for determining what persona to use in a given moment. Do you create and use separate personas? Or do you find a way to balance a unified persona? What we do know is that there are pitfalls with either case. And what makes it even more difficult is that as new semantic search technologies arise, we may not have a choice about what parts of our online lives are open to viewing. What is certain is that if each of us doesn’t have a strategy for how we interact online through comments, photos, bloggings, twitterings, etc. we put ourselves in a tough spot. (Thanks to @davepeck and @chip_roberson for spurring this session.)

Learning #4
It is vitally important to separate the person from the action. This is closely related to Learning #2. If someone violates a norm, the desire to label them as a “troll” or similar does nothing but create a conflict. Why? Because there’s a part of us that equates trolls with evildoing (or at least someone doing bad) and then we take the next step of binding action to person. Instead, we need to make an effort to separate the individual from their action. Reach out to the offending individual, listen to their perspective, and seek to understand. It could be they didn’t know the community rules or tacit social norms. But if they continue to offend take steps to maintain the health of the community. (This learning came from Scott Moore’s info packed session on Social Psychology and Communities.)

This really doesn’t begin to cover everything, but I’ll put it up as a good start. I know that as I continue to reflect on yesterday’s unconference, more will percolate to the surface here.

Oh, and if you or your organization is serious about online community, you need to pencil in next year’s unconference. For me, it was worth every single penny I invested.

Patrick O’Keefe’s Be Honest with Your Members about Unreasonable Expectations

Spike Jones’s Participation is Different from Engagement

The content of both posts were rather different, but interestingly enough, each inspired a similar question from me: what, if anything, comes after engagement? It’s generally agreed that participation is a good starting point, but not enough. It’s still a bit too passive when it comes to building a vibrant community. This is why engagement is a much pursued and highly cherished goal. Spike makes an important observation in his post as to the difference between mere participation and engagement:

When you go to your meetings today, you’ll see the difference. It’s between those that are sitting in the meeting – and participating by just showing up – and those that are adding to the conversation because they are engaged. In other words, you can participate without being engaged. Engagement is the step beyond participation.

I’m in complete agreement, but there’s something gnawing at me. Is there another level beyond engagement? Is engagement enough to inspire community members to monitor the site for trolls and inappropriate comments? Is engagement enough to inspire the high level of interaction needed to sustain a community over time?

I’d like to suggest that there is another level beyond engagement. Enter stewardship. Stewardship takes the energy of engagement and adds the commitment of ownership to community. Let’s face it…we care more deeply about things we feel we own. I once wrote a post at Bailey WorkPlay called Nobody Washes a Rental Car. If you can help your community members feel a pride of ownership, they’ll not only be engaged but also provide the kind of stewardship necessary to building a strong, thriving community.

There’s so much more to contemplate and think about on this topic. I anticipate that this post will lead to some more concrete advice for how to cultivate stewardship in your community’s social structures. If you’ve discovered practices, policies, processes that inspire stewardship, what did you do and what did you learn?

The point I’m attempting to make is to be mindful of your own community. Do you have any cliques? Is there an “elite” class who may be excluding other members from their group? I’m not suggesting that allowing groups to form is a negative. Just be careful about the dynamics forming from this behavior. If members feel they are not included and welcome in different areas of the community, they’ll likely make way for the door.

What to do? Here are four ideas to get you started:

• Build a language of inclusion into your community communications. Don’t miss an opportunity to express the values of the community. And if you don’t have a guiding set of values, create them.
• Monitor discussions and interactions. Look at how community “elders” communicate with “newbies.” Is it respectful or disdainful? You may need to pull out some conflict mediation skills here.
• Reach out to the individuals in the cliquish group. Chances are they don’t realize the potential harm of their actions. Calmly and clearly remind them of the community’s values and desire for inclusion.
• Find members who model an inclusive approach and send them an appreciative message. You’re rewarding action that you want to see.

Have you ever had to break up a clique or flag inappropriate behavior like this? What did you do? Love to hear your stories.

Oh and by the way, Heathers is one of the most grossly underrated films of all time.

I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it.
…I know the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would
die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as
certain if I let go of the crowd
–Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Even though this quote is unrelated to community and the online world, it just seemed to put a different spin on the persona of a lurker. Curious about others’ thoughts…

So Oprah and a continuing bevy of celebrities are hitching their brand wagons to Twitter and spurring their faithful followers to give the microblogging service a try. Just one problem: these new members are walking in and just as quickly walking out. From Nielsenwire Blog, Twitter Quitters Post Roadblock to Long-Term Growth:

When Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today. Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty. Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.

What does this say about Twitter? I’m not going to cast doom-and-gloom on the service but there are two lessons anyone who is building or managing communities ought to consider:

Welcoming. Twitter’s been overhyped lately and the fact that folks are coming and going really shouldn’t be a shock. All the media-fed mania did was increase the curiosity of folks who wanted to see what the hubbub was about. And when they got there, they were likely disappointed by what they found because there really is no community with Twitter. It’s a social network that inspires community. Because its a social network first, there is no formal welcome, no Twitter 101, no management plan for helping newbies feel comfortable with the lingo. (Come to think of it, maybe Twitter really does need a Chief Community Officer.)

When a newcomer visits your online community for the first time, do they feel welcome and safe to explore the community space? Or do they feel like they’ve just exited the plane into a strange land where their first inclination is to want to get right back on and go home? Think how nice it is to have a friendly gal or guy waiting on you when you deplane, hand you a lei, and say “Aloha.” If that happens, you might want to hang around and explore all your destination offers. Have a welcome strategy and prepare to execute it in a way that will scale just in case Oprah decides to make your community her next cause célèbre.

Integrating. But don’t stop at “Hello!” or “Aloha!” if you’re still dreamily hanging out at the Hawaii example. Most communities that fail do so because they don’t take the next step which is engagement. Why do some people try out Twitter then lose interest after a few weeks? There could be many reasons and would be a good use case for ethnographic work. I’ll propose one possibility: lack of ongoing value. We’re inundated by so many other distractions (like kids, spouse…okay only joking there). But the competition for eyes, minds and hearts is fierce. Is your community maintaining consistent value for your members? Do they feel engaged by their interactions in your community? Whether your community is tied to a cause-based nonprofit or a business, these are just a few of the questions you need to ask.

This topic of engagement is one of my favorites and one that fuels my own anthropological research. It was also a specialty in my association membership work so I can relate to how challenging it is not only attract new members but keeping them. Yet, retention is crucial so think strategically and make a plan. If you’ve found great ideas for keeping engagement levels high among your new members, share them with others in the community here.

While I list this as a commandment of community management, it really does apply in almost all professional and personal situations. Those among us who can master the ability to not shred someone who criticizes our work or ideas may not inherit the earth but they will be far more successful.

The question I ask when confronted with an individual or situation that challenges me is: What can I learn from this? It’s simple and it gets me thinking about other possibilities. If you’re managing a community, how do you deal with criticism, particularly if its negative criticism? Do you defend your position by erecting a barricade or do you welcome the commenter in and try to understand the world from their perspective?

Your company’s community and customer engagement may hang in the balance.

I offer two cases: Twitter and Facebook. When things blow up on either of these services, do we as users have any right to demand quick, speedy or personal support? We don’t give one dime for the ability to communicate and expand our networks. The cynical among us might even suggest that we users are really just leaching off of both Twitter and Facebook for our own gain. So if we don’t pay anything for these services, what right do we have to express outrage when we’re met with failwhales, questionable changes to terms of service or disabled features?

This is the conundrum facing most online community managers: delivering service in an age where its expected even on free sites. Perhaps the solution here is that we have to change our ideas of what defines a relationship. We can no longer strictly use the financial transaction as a point for determining service level. Since users bring value to the community through their interactions, it seems that we community management professionals need to adjust our own thinking. That failwhale impacts a user’s overall experience which, in turn, impacts the service’s brand. It’s a rippling effect that defines a daily reality for online communities.

Thoughts?