Launching Your Online Community: How Not to Get Killed

It wasn't all that long ago when you could finish your 8-month web site redesign, throw the switch, raise a glass, and take a couple weeks off. You'd earned a break, and you could return home to address a queue of small bugs, changes, and additions without any great urgency.

Gone are those halcyon days! Gone, the feet on desks! Gone, the company-tab dinner-and-drinks bill! Gone, the laurels you could anticipate resting on! The real work is just getting started.

Whatever the challenges you face in the run-up to launch of a community site, you can anticipate a surge of activity immediately afterward, followed by an ongoing effort at moderation, engagement, and fine-tuning.

However strong your concept, your architecture, your design, and your implementation, human beings are going to show up. Inevitably, they will surprise you. They'll uncover issues the best iterative design process could never anticipate, they'll do and say things you don't expect, and in, hopefully, their enthusiasm, they'll break stuff.

 

Everything hinges on your ability to plan for ongoing work and set expectations with your stakeholders.

Plan ahead to engage the right resources to make updates to your site, especially in the first month after launch. Proactively prepare stakeholders for what's to come. Hang on to the slice of budget you need to keep the right people engaged ongoingly. If you fail to do this you will get killed.

 

When undesirable content starts showing up, respond, but don't overreact: Small corrections add up over long distances.

Inevitably, your community participants will behave in ways you don't expect. The content on your site will veer off-topic. Competitors' brands will show up prominently in conversations. People will post inappropriate, even objectionable content.

Don't panic. Don't redesign your site. Don't start moderating willy-nilly.

Instead, plan ahead to course-correct participant behavior. Build a phased approach, with increasing degrees of intervention and plenty of time between phases for the changes to take hold.

Start by identifying the issue. Analyze how it will impact your site objectives in the long run, and determine whether it's really an issue at all--sometimes the ways participants use your site will uncover for you new services you can offer--or even the real, hidden value of your community.

Before you do anything, understand why people are behaving the way they are. If you can't figure it out immediately, a survey is a great way to gather more information, and sometimes you can even ask participants directly. Start a thread in your forum asking what's going on and what people's perceptions are--you might accidentally solve the problem right then and there.

But it's common to need to influence the ways people participate. Influence behavior in ways that align with your site goals and participant needs, and everyone will appreciate it. Here's how:

Phase 1: Adjust Your Site Identity

Changing copy is one of the lowest-effort interventions you can do, and it's very effective. At slightly higher effort, you can support copy changes with visual cues, reinforcing the message you want to deliver. Wait a couple weeks and see what happens.

Phase 2: Adjust Your Algorithms

The most important influencer of participant behavior is the behavior of other participants. While you can't directly change the way people behave, you can change the degree to which different kinds of behavior are visible to other participants. While you can't control who shows up and participates, you can identify exemplary participants and showcase their contributions.

If the wrong content has too much visibility on your community site, identify the qualities you want to promote. Factor those qualities into your algorithms for surfacing content on the home page and important landing pages. Instead of showing the most recent content, show the content with the highest volume of recent contributions. Instead of showing the most viewed content, show the highest rated content. Instead of showing the highest rated content, show the content with the highest average time on page. Inhibit or promote content that uses certain words.

Keep your algorithms secret, so you can continue to tune them and so participants won't be tempted to game the system.

Wait a couple weeks, and see what happens.

Phase 3: Adjust Your Architecture

Changing what content shows up where, how the content is categorized and labeled, and which pieces of metadata appear with the content they describe can have a huge impact. Let's take those one at a time:

Change what shows up where. Problems with participant-contributed content tend not to be problems of organization, but rather problems of affordance. And organization can create affordance, most importantly on the home page. Think carefully about what stuff is visible on the home page. Make sure you include content that exemplifies the kind of contribution you want participants to make. Try the ten-second test: Show some people a printout of your home page, but only for ten seconds. Ask them to tell you everything they remember seeing, and then ask them to tell you what the site is all about.

Change how the content is categorized and labeled. One of the important functions of a navigation system is to describe the domains of the content included on the site. At a glance, site visitors can tell from your navigation what stuff is present on the site, and they can tell what kinds of things they might add. Is your navigation communicating the right affordance for your content? Try a simple test: Show some people a list of the navigation labels on your site and ask them to describe what's on the site. Then ask them to describe in one sentence what the site is about.

Finally, change which pieces of metadata appear with the content they describe. Site visitors will assume lists, for example, are ordered on the basis of whatever descriptors you display with list items, even when the descriptors would tend to suggest a different order. "Today's Best" can mean different things: Top rated, most viewed, most commented, editor's pick, etc--depending what information appears with the items on the list. If you want people to contribute content about dogs, display the breed of dog discussed in each content object next to the link to it.

Try tweaking these pieces. Then wait a couple weeks and see what happens.

Phase 4: Increase Your Editorial Presence

This is the nuclear option. But not all nukes are created the same. First and foremost, always enforce your community guidelines. Delete content that violates them, and leave in its place a reminder to others: "This post has been removed by the moderator for violation of the Community Guidelines." By the way, your community guidelines ARE visible on your site, right? If not, for starters, put them front and center everywhere participants can add content. Link to them when you moderate.

Don't overdo editorial presence. You want to create a sense of community, not a sense of editorial dictatorship--and community participants will be extremely sensitive to any kind of real or perceived manipulation of the community. If they feel manipulated they'll go away and never come back.

So be explicit about your editorializing. Create an editor's pick space that highlights the kind of content you want to encourage, and include highlights throughout the site, always with a label or icon that makes it clear what you're doing.

Use your editorial presence as an opportunity to humanize your brand. Show your editors' names and faces. Give community participants ways to interact with the editors.

 

Be polite to the flamers, haters, and grudge-holders--and leave space for the brand defenders.

When your community launches, it will attract people who have mean things to say to you. Initially, they'll come out in force. They've been waiting for this moment and they will not be denied.

Be polite to them. Be honest. Explain your policies. Apologize if you have something to apologize for--otherwise, don't. Walk the fine line between responding to your detractors and leaping to defend yourself against every criticism.

Remember that these people would be saying these things about you anyway. On your web site, they're likely to treat you a little more fairly, and you have a chance to respond to them publicly, in the full view of others who might otherwise be negatively influenced by them.

After a while, most of the intransigent haters will get bored and go away. Some might hang around, just to spice up your life a bit.

And then an interesting thing will happen. After all the shouting dies down, you'll start to notice level-headed community participants raising the dialog a bit, and perhaps even coming to your defense. You might even notice brand defenders emerging--loyal customers who value your offering and want a functional community to support it. That's when you'll know, without a doubt, things are working, and it's all going to be ok.

Comments

[beyond]

Thank you for the article. I'm starting my first website and what I hope to be community. Good advice... just what I was looking for.

beyond

[Ryan]

Glad you found it helpful! Good luck with the new site. I hope you'll check back in with me and let me know how it goes.