Here's an anonymized approach from some recent client work, in which we're developing a global branded community. Questions around policy and moderation have raised a bunch of interesting issues around how to manage brand in a large-scale user-generated content environment, where there's significant variation among "local" or micro- communities within the community at large.
The approach we're recommending hinges on top-down / bottom-up approaches to both policy and moderation. Let me explain.
When you define a community policy, there are three broad concerns you need to address: appropriateness of behavior, brand-relevance of content, and legality. Legality is something your lawyers need to work out, and in my experience there's a great deal of variety in terms of corporate comfort levels with legal risk. All I can say is, get Legal involved early. But appropriateness and brand-relevance are less clear-cut. A number of parties within the organization need to weigh in--and so does the community itself. Here's a picture from a recent presentation that illustrates the concept:
Here's some of what's going on in the diagram: The idea of social contract has to do with the appropriateness dimension of community policy. You can think of it this way: The policy makes explicit the unspoken agreement between you and your customers, and among your customers, about how it's ok to behave in the community. The social contract gets communicated implicitly by example and through social feedback and captured explicitly--defined--in the community policy. Legality and brand-appropriateness are likewise defined at a corporate level. And those three elements taken together are the policy. The policy is defined, in other words, centrally.
But policies need to be interpreted in actual practice and scrutinized as they are applied. Moderators need to apply it as a guide for their work, community managers apply it as they engage with the community, and individuals within the community apply the policy through self-moderation--moreover, the community itself responds and reacts to the applications of the policy.
So how does this work in practice? Here's one way.
The key here is that the site includes two separate content domains. Think of them as sets of pages that hold content related to local areas only, and pages that hold content of global relevance. Individual content objects might belong to one or both of those domains, but they're managed, in effect, separately.
The way this works, basically, is that there are two sets of moderators--global moderators, who manage content on pages relevant across all areas, and local moderators, who manage content on pages relevant only to a local community. These sets of moderators include both corporate staff and individuals within the community.
At the local level, local judgements trump global judgements. So content that's inappropriate for the broader audience on the global level might still be appropriate at the local level. And the opposite holds true as well. In each case, the policy defined at the corporate level is interpreted and applied at the local level, enabling the community to hold together within the structure of a common policy while accommodating a degree of difference within local contexts.
This is just one approach, but I think it's pretty interesting. The real challenge, I believe, arises inevitably as businesses engage users in interpretation and enforcement of brand-appropriateness as expressed through on-topicness. Is it ok to talk about snowmobile apparel on a site about cross-country skiing? In some communities, probably. But, but! What are the ramifications for the brand?
Yes, engaging users exposes the brand identity itself to scrutiny by its customers. What a challenge! But who better to have that conversation? I'm fascinated--but it's a topic for another post.
Have you had experience with defining, interpreting, or enforcing a community policy, online or off? I'd love to hear what you learned.
Comments