Scott and Randy discuss the (mis)use of the various forms of the "ban" tool, and provide alternative techniques.

• It's Almost Impossible to Rehabilitate an Online Troll, Steve Brock Director of Moderation Services at Mzinga
• Building Web Reputation Systems
• SMC Epsiode 14: LinkedIn's Scarlet Letter
• #CMAD presents: Modern Moderation: Moving Beyond Trolls and Ban Hammers (stream)Streamed live on Jan 26, 2016 - Join us to talk tech with Justin Isaf, to ramble about reputations with F. Randall Farmer, to ponder proactive tasks with Sarah Hawk, to advocate for automation with Darren Gough, and to learn the legal aspects with Aurelia Butler-Ball.

Randy: Ban the ban hammer.

Scott: What?

Randy: Ban the ban hammer.

Scott: Wait a minute. We gotta talk about this.

Randy: Welcome to the Social Media Clarity Podcast. 15 minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media and platform and product design.

Scott: So in this episode we're going to focus on what seems to be the moderator's tool of choice, the ban.

Randy: And how it is, most often in our experience, the wrong tool.

Scott: Yeah, it could be the right tool in the right circumstance, but it's mostly misapplied.

Randy: Yeah, if you're reaching for it first, it's probably the wrong tool, but we'll talk about that in detail. We could set this up by talking a little bit about our experiences encountering other people talking about the ban hammer. Scott, you find a wonderful reference post. Do you want to tell us a little bit about it?

Scott: Sure. So, this is just an example. Steve Brock who's the director of moderation services at Mzinga that talked about the difficulties of rehabilitating online trolls. But in it he's talking a lot about bans. How to identify trolls, how to ban, what different bans are, and how to apply them, and whether or not they are effective. So this is a good example of how a lot people tend to think about dealing with misbehavior in online communities.

Randy: Although, we're going to be picking a little bit on Mr. Brock, by no means is he unique in most of these positions. In fact, were going to talk a little bit about how each point has its own challenges and each point carries forward the error of the previous one, and it leads you to a place this is both undesirable and expensive.

Scott: So what are the steps, Randy

Randy: The steps are first you identify the troll, figure out who it is you're wanting to take action on. Someone who is doing harm to your site. You perma-ban them. We'll explain the different bans in a few minutes. The idea is to kick them off the site and make their identity no longer accessible. He also suggests removing all content, doesn't mean they're all bad. And if they return with a new account, immediately ban that as soon as you detect that. You could try hell-banning. This is number five, he says, "But they'll find out." He's actually right about that, and then he says, "Well, the abuse will get worse once they figure out you're pulling tricks on them." It turns out, number six, you have to assume that they can't be reformed, so you've got to stay vigilant. You have to stay on it all the time. And for his final step he says, "Therefore, you need 24 7 coverage and so you need to hire enough moderators to cover your site." It's our contention that this entire list that leads to outsourced 24 7 coverage of your site and a constant battle with removing people follows from errors starting at the very beginning of the list.

Scott: But before we get into that, let's actually define a few of the terms that have come up already. Perma-ban, it's a ban that is based on the identity, banning the account. There's no fixed time out. That's it. You ban them, they're gone. You can ban based on their account. You can hit their IP address. You could try to ban them based on credit card so they can't start a new account if you're a paid account. Also, there's kind of this nuclear option of removing all of the content. Regardless of whether some of the content was actually good, you ban the person, therefore, their content must also go too. So, that's the perma-ban.

Randy: I'll talk a little bit about hell-banning, which I mentioned earlier. This is also known as shadow-banning, stealth-banning, or ghost-banning. It's strange. It's hiding content from the community except for the creator of the content, the person you're hell-banning. The idea is, you'll see that you posted, but no one else will see the post. Meant to be discouraging, or meant to just let you burn out your energy. It goes all the way back to The Well. The Well had a method for doing this where people would actually selectively stop reading content from other people, and this led to destroyed threads that no one what was going on in the thread because you could never tell who was actually reading what. I want to quickly, even though I know were just making a list, I want to go ahead and shoot hell-banning in the head-

Scott: Yup.

Randy: So we don't have to talk about it much more. Because this involves a bunch of complicated technology, which is trivially defeated by anyone who is malicious and confusing to those who aren't.

Scott: Yup.

Randy: The community doesn't know what they're missing, and when someone knows someone and talks about it and they find out they're hell-banned, you end up with the community talking about hell-banning, not whatever your content is.

Scott: Right.

Randy: Scott and I are both unified. There's a lot of moderators like us. Do not waste any time on technology to hide from your user that their behavior is unacceptable.

Scott: It wastes a lot of time because it leads inevitably to two results. Steve Brock calls it out perfectly. They'll find out, and then they just abuse even more and even harder because they feel like they've been cheated in some way. And then the other one is anyone else who isn't hell-banned or ghost-banned gets paranoid about whether or not they've been ghost-banned. If any technical glitch occurs, then they suddenly think that some action has been taken against them. This is not healthy for your community. You'll spend time assuaging people of their paranoia then you will building the actual community and trust. It destroys trust. So those are two types of bans. There's another type of ban, if you will, and it's the time out. It's a temporary suspension from being able to contribute in some particular way. This breaks up into a couple of ways. You can limit somebody's permission where they can't post, or they can't reply. You can even limit their ability to log into the system, but the idea is that it's a time out, so that you can communicate with the person. Or you can degrade their service. Randy, you have some good stories about degrading service.

Randy: There are often reputations systems for detecting egregious behaviors, and I'm talking about is specifically, the spamming behavior. I worked for Yahoo for five years. When they would detect either a mail spamming bot, or a bot hitting the search engine to get results to use to make SCO, what they didn't do is ban IP addresses. What they did instead was build a reputation database and degraded service. What that meant was, when a request would come in from a highly suspected spamming robot, they would serve it, they would just serve it very slowly. This is kind of a low level taxing. What happens if you ban them all, we've seen one of the few days yahoo was actually down, they made a change to their interface for search, and all the spamming robots in the world that were hitting yahoo started failing instantly. They were getting instant errors back from the web servers. This was creating a denial of service attack, as a result of all the robots who were never used to failing now retrying instantaneously. So hundreds of thousands of robots were now sending hundreds of requests per minute.

Scott: Yeah, that's bad.

Randy: They put back the interface because there was this kind of detante in degraded service design.

Scott: So that's not the same thing as ghost-banning, that's just degrading somebody's service because it's targeted. Spammers want to be able to spread their spam as quickly as possible and move on to the next target, and if you slow them down, you're actually costing them money.

Randy: Spamming behavior is different from whatever trolling behavior is. The reason we say ban the banhammer is because cases like we've outlined here are missing the key point. The category error is the difference between troll and trolling. The difference between being a spammer, a person, and spamming. We really have a problem with online social contributions. It isn't people, it's behaviors. The only thing you can really evaluate is the content. It's trolling that's the problem, not trolls.

Scott: Right. It's really important, and we've talked about his in the past, and I talk about this when I give workshops, you focus on the behavior, not on the person. In Sociology, there's a thing called the fundamental attribution error, and that's basically when you take a behavior and you ascribe that as a personality trait to a person. So if somebody does something that is a violation of your terms of service, they post something that is borderline racist, they are not necessarily a racist. They are not necessarily a troll. They've done something and then that's a specific behavior that can be addressed as opposed to simply assuming this is who they are and they'll never ever be different. You do wind up in the exactly that idea of trolls can never be reformed if you make certain assumptions that their behavior is tied intrinsically to their personality. We just know that's not true.

Randy: We even know that ID's aren't people. Back to the post, the person comes back over and over with multiple ID's. So an ID banning solution is no solution at all. But sometimes, it's the reverse. Sometimes there's no person. When we start talking about spamming, the spammer, the mythical person who is doing the spamming is not reachable. He's got a hundred thousand robots doing stuff. You don't even know where he is. You don't know how to reach him. You can't back through those robots. It's the robots that are exhibiting the behavior. So you have to deal with the robots in that case. In the case of trolling, you have to deal with the trolling posts. What are the things that are causing a problem. What are against your terms of service or your community guidelines.

Scott: We're saying ban the banhammer. When you're reaching that as your first tool, it's probably the wrong thing to reach for, but there are times when we do need to use this kind of a tool in specific instances, and spamming is one of those instances.

Scott: Let's define it a little bit better, because a lot of people will call all kinds of things spamming, including just an off color comment.

Scott: They have zero or even negative quality to your community. They have absolutely no contribution at all. They're not even part of the discussion. There's a lot of them, or they're coming really fast. There's not a human behind those particular posts. At that particular point, what we're doing is we're throttling the input. Instead of treating it as a community problem. We're treating it as a bandwidth problem.

Randy: And bans are not my first tool for dealing with that. My first tool for dealing with that is content hiding, described at the end of my book, "Building Web Reputation Systems." In the final chapter we talk about how we enabled users on Yahoo Answers to mark items, such as spam, and we started to trust them. We came up with a method by which we could trust them and we could literally, within 30 seconds of when a piece of spam would come up, it would be hidden from the network. What hidden means is kind of the opposite of hell-banning. That item disappears for everybody, and a notice is sent back to the author, and this deals with that problem, which is if the author is just a robot, the author can't mitigate it. You won't be sending back a note saying, "No, no, no, this is my real content. I got ganged up on," or something. This is why, when we turned on this mechanism on Yahoo Answers, spamming vanished, literally within two weeks. The spammers picked up and they left and they went somewhere else.

Scott: And that's because you were using the crowd to surgically remove the bad content.

Randy: Yes. So the point there is there was no banning of the user account. It wasn't necessary. The user account became inactive because it no longer could successfully post.

Scott: You didn't have to ban anybody. They abandoned their effort.

Randy: That same process is used on accounts that are more tightly tied to people, the people who care about their postings. If they have them reported using the same mechanism, not for spamming, but for tastelessness, or some breaking of the rules. The same mechanism will trigger. The content could be hidden and they would receive a note explaining to them what the community gave them as feedback about what needs to change, and they could change it. They weren't banned. The problem with the ban is when it does tie to a person, it's an ending. It's an invitation either to an escalation or an ending. It's the last thing you should ever do if you do it. If the first thing you do is ban someone, they can't correct the behavior, and you come off very poorly.

Scott: It's a slap in the face.

Randy: The customer lost forever.

Scott: At Schwab Learning, I had the ability to ban people, but we never did. We dealt with spam by an escalation process. It would evaluate what came in, and I would either pull the content, or I would hold the content, but I would always contact the person. I had different levels of contact. I had the, "Oh, you made a mistake. What you wrote looks like spam. I'd love to hear more about you." And so that's not an ending. I was opening up a bigger beginning. "Tell me more. Please participate more, and prove to me that this isn't just spam, but it looks like spam, so I'm worried about it." Then, there was the self-promoters. There was this gray area about solicitation in that particular community. So we'd have some people who were very well meaning, and would make their own products, and would want to promote them to other parents, and I would say, "Hey, you know, I'm really sorry but self promotion is not okay, but if you want to talk about other things, and you want to promote this on your profile, when you talk about other things on our community, people will see your profile, and then they'll see what you're trying to advertise. We're giving you that space to be able to do that. Then there was, "That's it. You're a spammer. I've pulled your content. You violated my terms of service. Please don't come back. I've canceled things." That always gave a chance for somebody to give me a response back. We didn't have a huge amount of spam, but invariably if it was that bad, nobody responded. But I would usually get some kind of response from the other messages from anything from, "Oops, I'm sorry," to "How dare you." We took it from there. But that was a discussion.

Randy: Yeah. So what you want is beginnings, right? You want dialogues, as much as you can afford them. If you're going to pay people to moderate, they should be having conversations, not just destroying them.

Scott: Ideally. Unfortunately, a lot of moderation services aren't really set up that way. They're set up to remove content based on terms of service. It's difficult to find moderation services that you can spend the money, to take the time, to help actually foster communities. It's a shame.

Randy: It's mostly a scaling problem. If you've got user generated content in great quantity, as I mentioned earlier, if you're going to invest in tools, don't invest in hell-banning. Invest instead in customer feedback so that the users can tell each other how to behave and reinforce that behavior. That's one way to increase the leverage you get out of your paid moderation people so they can spend time with specific cases that need their attention. If the community is keeping the new kid who shows up and doesn't know how to behave from posting a crappy question or answer on Stack Overflow, then you don't need paid moderators. In fact, Stack Overflow is one of the largest, richest communities with the highest quality content of it's type in the world and it has very, very few top level moderators. All moderation tasks are actually done by any contributor who cares enough to generate enough content of enough quality on the site. If you ever want to see what a site looks like when it doesn't live with a banhammer as it's first line of defense, Stack Overflow or any of the Stack Exchange servers are really interesting to show how they incrementally give authority to you as you succeed in contributing to the community.

Scott: At Schwab Learning, there was a point where I started to teach the other community members exactly what I was doing. I decided there was a point where I said, "I'm just going to be transparent about this, and start doing this in the public." Especially when it was the nice stuff, and started showing people how I approached potential spammers by addressing their behavior and saying, "Hey, maybe this is a mistake. We'd like to hear more from you." The community picked up on it. I was no longer the first line of defense against spam. The community became the first line of defense. What they would do is they would engage with anyone who looked like it was spam, and they would try to talk to them and draw them out, and if they weren't able to draw them out, then they would bump it up to me and say, "I think this person's actually trying to spam us."

Randy: I do consulting on social media product design, and discussions about moderation are a critical part of what I consult on. So new clients often give me administrator access, or moderator access to their communities so that I can see what's going on behind the scenes. One of my clients, I was looking around for moderation information and I discovered a profile for a user, and they had a field on the profile that the administrator's could see that said how often they'd been banned. This person had been banned six times. This is the example of the banhammer going insane. These are perma-bans. You prevent them from participating and then apparently, they could appeal, and then you could put them back on, and then they ban them again for similar behaviors and so on. The banhammer is the wrong tool. In fact, every offense was the same, and it was a minor offense. Technology changes to the software to discourage that behavior that would have been more effective in changing the behavior.

Scott: So we're saying ban the banhammer and we've been giving hints at things to do instead, ways to think about behavior online that won't cause you to think, "I've got to use that banhammer right away." And so, let's get real detailed and talk about exactly what you can do instead of using the banhammer.

Randy: Number one, start by defining the behaviors you want to encourage and the ones you're trying to discourage from your contributors in your community. This should be baseline for choosing the actions you take going forward.

Scott: These behaviors are not people. Yes, you have your community guidelines, but understand that if somebody violates a community guideline you don't punish the person. You give them an opportunity to correct the behavior.

Randy: Amen. So based on your available resources, you can either develop tools to facilitate the community marking the content, to give feedback privately to the contributor, so that they know they should make some changes.

Scott: Giving them a chance means that you're focusing on the content that they're producing. If a piece of content is clearly violating your terms of service, or a piece of content is clearly being generated by a bot, or it's clearly a spam going off to somewhere else, or it's illegal, then yes, you're going to want to remove the content.

Randy: If you're at scale, you need the tools you need to find them. Sometimes your community is small, and a personal conversation is the right choice. Other times, your community is huge and you have to have the tools to scale or you will never solve the problem. People have tried to buy the solution with human moderation, and they've all given up. At scale, you need help. You need tools, and if you're lucky you can get tools to enable your community to do a lot of the basic work.

Scott: Even if you're not at scale, don't overlook the ability to enlist your community in helping you identify and correct behaviors of people who are coming into your community. We're talking about avoiding the banhammer, which is a tool, and we're talking about all the other ways you can reduce damaging behavior in your community, and these are skills that anybody can employ including your community. So you can teach your community the same things. Teach them to engage and try to sus out the difference between is this person actually trying to harm you, or is this person just making a misstep about their behavior? If they can't handle it, then you become the escalation process. You then support your community as a community and you can get a small amount of scale even with a small community out of this.

Randy: Very true. And you might be able to get incremental tool development to support the community. So for example, if you don't have a community platform, if you don't have report abuse as a button on content, assuming you have that much incremental tool development maybe significantly cheaper if all you want to do is count the number of people who mark this thing as violating the terms of service. Stack Overflow has a tool I'm not a big fan of but it's functional. You can spend one of your points to actually give someone a negative score. I don't like the math of this, but if enough negatives go in fast enough, they immediately read it as a hidden content line. So they get community feedback immediately, and then there's an escalation process that can occur to appeal. They recently changed this to improve the initial response, negative feedback pattern by changing the name from deleted to on hold, which invites a conversation and to have a community practice of, is it you leaving negative, one, or anything other than the most obvious spamming behavior, you should leave a comment about how to improve the post. It's kind of a social system that they've evolved to go along with their mechanical systems. A mechanical system doesn't have to be complicated, but it provides a mechanism for social evolution.

Scott: Reframing the idea of flagging away from this is bad, it shouldn't be here, to this is problematic, and we want to fix it.

Randy: I consulted on discourse.org's moderation mechanism and it does just that. When several people mark a thing as a problem, and the problem is not illegal or spam, but it's a content problem, the content still gets hidden, but the message that goes the user invites them to edit it, to fix based on the feedback from the community, and if they do edit it, it will be able to be re-posted immediately with no flags on it. So we say, "You can fix it. You can go back to square zero with this post, immediately. Give it a try." So, we presume that if it's not the most egregious kind of errors that the content hiding will be temporary until the problem is resolved. This is how people can learn the behavior that is expected of them in the community.

Scott: I would like to see a lot more systems offering something like that. All too often, it is a post and punish model. You post it and either it goes away, and you're punished somehow, or you succeeded and it stays. This is what missing from a lot of these is that we're just not giving enough people chances and giving them the agency and the respect to actually change their behavior.

Randy: This leads to the kind of thinking that was in the article when it said that, "Trolls are irredeemable." What do you think it's going to take if you never accepted their bad stuff from the beginning, and the community said if you want to post here, please don't be a dick, and there's a dick button, they will learn to conform, or they will leave. You don't have to kick them out because their content never appears. And by the way, it turns out to be the same pattern. So the pattern is, "Do I post things that are to my only benefit and to the harm of others, or do I contribute to this community?" The definitions of those vary from place to place, and it is the community who can help you enforce them as well as your moderators. So your moderators can focus on the real exceptions.

Randy: Ban the banhammer.

Scott: Ban the banhammer.

Randy: Alright, we should say goodbye though.

Scott: Oh yes. We should say goodbsye. Thank you very much for listening. We hope that this has been some help. So, don't reach for the banhammer.

Randy: Yes, people are not nails. Catch you later.

Randy: For links, transcripts, and more episodes, go to socialmediaclarity.net. Thanks for listening!

Marc, Scott, and Randy talk about recent changes at social platform companies as they wrestle with the ethics of their customers causing conflict, such as racism/sexism in AirBNB and Nextdoor.

• Airbnb, a Silicon Valley Titan, Breaks Ranks in Admitting Its Power, New Your Times, By Anad Giridharadas, 9/12/16
• Nextdoor Breaks a Sacred Design Rule to End Racial Profiling, Wired Magazine, Margaret Rhodes, 8/31/16
• What YouTube Stars Are Going to Do Now That They Can’t Swear and Get Paid, Motherboard, by Kaleigh Rogers, 9/2/16

Scott: This week, we’re going to talk about a trend that we’re seeing and is being reported in the media about large scale internet companies stepping up and taking some responsibility for the power that they are creating with their networks.

Randy: Specifically the social power.

Welcome to the Social Media Clarity podcast. 15 minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media in platform and product design.

Marc: A lot of platforms have tried to be a common carrier. They don’t want to interfere with what goes on, on their platforms but in some ways those days are over in part because what went on, on some of those platforms turned out to be so bad that it could no longer be tolerated.

Randy: On Airbnb, people were refusing guests because of their race.

Scott: For a long time, Airbnb was essentially turning a blind eye to it saying we’re just providing the platform, but at some point there was enough response from the community, from people who were reporting on discrimination that was occurring within the given platform that Airbnb made a decision that we don’t really want this discrimination to be a feature of our platform so now we have to design something to eliminate or reduce the kinds of discrimination that are going on.

Randy: When designing systems, I had to do this a few times at Yahoo that when a channel behavior and specifically say some behavior that some people participate in, is not acceptable when people interact with each other on our network, you will lose some customers. If you say, you cannot use race or gender in most cases, to limit who you rent your Airbnb room to, you’re going to lose some customers.

You’re making a conscious decision of the type you didn’t make up until now generally which is you wanted all customers. In the early days of the internet, all that mattered was the number of … First there was eyes and then when they start to have communities like a number of transactions that occurred. That’s all you cared about.

Now, we’re saying actually there’s a quality of transaction that is important to us and since it’s between individuals who do not work for the company, we’re now in this middle man position. We actually have some responsibility we walked away from before to actually say, “No, there are some kinds of transactions that are allowed here and not others.

Marc: Platforms have been a wild west, anything goes and the values were more about not interfering with the operation of the platform rather than the way in which users engage with one another and that is shifting. We’re seeing a maturation of the market. Very large players are recognizing that they have to or need to or want to step in and they are now going to say, “We’re going to ban racism from the platform. We’re going to ban sexism from the platform. We’re going to ban certain kinds of abusive practices from the platform.”

Many would say this is long overdue but it is interesting to see that companies are now stepping up and changing the design of their platforms as well as the terms of service that govern their platforms.

Scott: This is being reported in the media and there’s a couple of articles that we’re going to be riffing off. One of them is the New York Times article talking about where Airbnb as breaking ranks in admitting the power that we’ve just been talking about. It also talks about Nextdoor. It also pokes a little at Twitter who hasn’t quite come to the table of admitting power. We’re also talking about some detail design on Wired that reported on Nextdoor and talking about frictionless markets.

Marc: What’s common in many of the design changes is the imposition of additional steps. The addition of friction as a design philosophy seems to run counter to the prevalent one which is to remove as much friction, to create "one click solutions" to problems. Nextdoor’s design actually imposes a few additional steps to try to guide the claim about people’s observations about others maybe doing bad things in their neighborhoods.

Randy: Wired magazine doing an article called "Nextdoor Breaks a Sarcred Design Rule to End Racial Profiling" by Margaret Rhodes which details the walkthroughs. You don’t actually have to join Nextdoor to see the changes they made but they literally do detection and handholding as you write something. The example they give is when you’re reporting a crime. People often use racial language to describe suspected perpetrator of something and this walks you through the same process the police would go through if you called them to help you tease out the real details of what was going on and not ley you slip into potentially racial profiling.

Scott: The n New York Times talks about Airbnb and how they’re taking steps to diminish and hopefully eliminate racial profiling and gender profiling when people are renting. Previously they were getting reports of, and then did their own investigation of race bias in people trying to rent from other folks in Airbnb. They’re taking active steps both in guidelines and classes for their hosts and in what they’re going to be doing about reducing racial profiling in terms of hosts renting to guests.

Another aspect that goes beyond racial profiling or some kind of negative aspect that corporations/organizations with large networks are realizing they have an influence over is the fact that YouTube us starting to deny revenue, ad revenue to content producers to channel owners if they’re swearing during their videos. Motherboard has an article that talks about the details on what’s going on.

Marc: What’s new here is platforms are directly changing the acceptable used cases that they’re going to tolerate on their platforms and in some cases their values may not agree with all their users and their decisions may not always … It may drive people into an exodus into other platforms that will impose slightly different values and standards.

The YouTube example is one that I think is interesting because that one directly addresses the kind of content you’re allowed to create in YouTube and still have the right to monetize through advertising. That one might be one where we disagree most over what constitutes a legitimate imposition from the platform. My understanding is that there is a ban on the use of profanity if you want to have advertising.

This is an example where a corporation is shaping the nature of discourse and commerce on its platform on a way that the older vision of common carriers of open platforms that users decide how they’re going to use has ended and this is a big shift given the power of these platforms because could conceivably really, really change our behavior.

Randy: Specifically YouTube is interesting because it’s focused on their revenue model. They are getting better at targeting advertising and they’re finding that the people who click through the most on advertising like certain kinds of videos that they are now getting better and better at categorizing. The advertisers are less interested in reaching out to people who have smaller audiences who are less likely to be interested in their products.

Normally if you leave the social out of it, this is how Google has evolved a lot of different sites are based on advertising including Facebook have evolved. The difference here is that YouTube was different. It was kind of distributing all the advertising evenly across everything. Some people who’s content is less lucrative from an advertising point of view were generating more personal revenue through their rev shares, through their videos than other people.

This is not YouTube necessarily acting socially but they’re acting commercially at least in part. They have the power. Sometimes they’re trying to resolve a social issue. Sometimes they’re trying to resolve revenue and it’s not always clear that those two match up.

Marc: Where’s this all going? Is this the end of the nation state and the rise of the corporation as the organizing principal for all of our societies or is this something more specific in which platforms recognize they have enormous social power and understand that they are in fact communities -- which is to say that they have norms and that they therefore have boundaries ad that if you follow the norms, you’re inside the boundary and if you don’t follow the norm, you’re on the outside of the boundary. The interesting thing to me is who gets to define what the norms are.

Scott: Regardless of who thinks they have the power, organizations who control the platform do have certain powers and one of the key powers they have in terms of helping communities actually form is the power of context -- providing the context around how people are interacting -- and making the tradeoffs between trying to be something for everyone and clarifying who they are and what those groups of people are trying to accomplish.

Randy: Everyone on this podcast has helped people build online communities of one form or another. We’ve been facing these problems for decades. They just keep coming in news waves. Before this, back in the Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Quantum Link and those guys, those services all had to deal with it on an extra-legal basis.

When state attorneys came and would try to deal with the pedophiles on the internet age. If you remember back a decade or so -- that was the big social responsibility problem and it was basically the death of chat programs because they were unable to adapt. We’re now in a place where we’re more dependent on these systems not just for entertainment, for transportation, for housing or for our very livelihoods.

The systems have to adapt and that involves platform design and social design in the form of things like terms of service and community guidelines. Your podcasters actually provide services in this regard. If you need help sorting through this social responsibility which is now becoming part of system’s design on the internet, we can help you.

Scott: Send us email at [email protected] or find us on Twitter @smclarity and Facebook at Social Media Clarity. We’d love to hear from you.

Scott and Randy tear into the history and problems of comments on "news" sites, and identify the most overlooked problem. They then talk about current and future solutions (well, other than just giving up an shutting down.)

Popular Science -"Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments" -Sept 23, 2013 Shadow of the future: "The shadow of the future promotes cooperation in a repeated prisoner's dilemma for children" Original paper: Bargaining, Enforcement, and International Cooperation by James D. Fearon

Shutting down onsite comments: a comprehensive list of all news organisations How the Huffington Post handles 70+ million comments a year We discussed the history of HuffPo comments with Justin Isaf in Jan 2015 Tablet Magazine:

• A Jewish magazine is testing an unusual solution for toxic internet comments
• After deciding to charge for comments, Tablet's conversation moves to Facebook

Civil Comments: Reforming the Trollosphere: Creating Conversation in the Comments Section The Coral Project:

• "We need to change how people are submitting their content and we need to make sure that we're giving them good reasons to behave well."
• The Coral Project unveils its first product to make comments better

New York Times: Quora: How does the NYT determine which articles have comments?

New York Times: A Community Manager Walks Into A Bar:My AMA with Bassey Etim, Community Desk Editor at The New York Times The Engaging News Project:

• Journalist Involvement in Comment Sections
• Comments Are Terrible (But They Don't Have To Be) - SXSW PanelPicker submission for The Coral Project and the Engaging News Project.

Hey reporters: An alternative to #DontReadtheComments: Jump in Case Study: Yahoo! Answers Community Content Moderation from Building Web Repuation Systems The Washington Post is using Slack to create a reader community focused on the gender pay gap

Scott: Hi listeners, in this episode we ask why do comments on sites suck so much, and what can we do about it?

Randy: They're sucking because they lack context, and we'll tell you what that means.

Scott: Now, this isn't a new problem, and many are trying to address it. We'll share their approaches ...

Randy: ... And give our recommendations based on our personal experiences.

Welcome to the Social Media Clarity podcast, 15 minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media and platform and product design.

Scott: I'm Scott Moore.

Randy: I'm Randy Farmer.

Scott: We're discussing the problem with comment sections. You may have heard that a number of news sites have been shutting down comment sections in the last couple of years, or generally complaining about the poor quality of comments they receive on their articles, and we think that there's a real simple problem here, and it's the model in that people are presented with just a blank text box with no context about what to say or how to behave.

Randy: Part of that is because we don't know who the audience is. It's not clear from a plain text box who you have in mind when you're writing a comment, and what you're actually writing about. Are you writing to the publisher of the article? The reader? The commenter? The author? It's not at all clear, and I don't think the publishers were even sure. I think they assumed that the post, the content it self, would be a sufficient context for commenting, if they thought about context at all. One way I like to put it is, there's no "to:", expressed or implied, when a visitor creates their own context. Is it to the author? The publisher? The topic? Or a reply to another commenter? There is one context that I like to refer to all the time, which is when you post a public content, it's actually to God, Google and everyone.

Scott: This creates an attractive nuisance. The vicious circle goes like this. Publishers are not creating a clear context to their commenters, and without that clear context, people don't have enough context to care about each other, so they don't really focus on developing relationships. They tend to focus on being an audience to the rest of the world, and they have their own axes to grind or they ignore the content of the article, and post anyway, and these low-quality comments tend to wind up drawing more bad comments than good comments, and the circle starts all over again.

Randy: In contrast, there are communities with blank text boxes that have strong context and therefore have less difficulty with comment quality, because they're constructed around either topical content, or group goals, and they tend to be smaller and more intimate.

Scott: These tighter contexts provide what's known as "the shadow of the future," and that is, that's the probability of future interaction. If you expect to interact with other people in the future, you treat them differently. If you don't expect to interact with somebody in the future, then your cooperation is going to be lesser than. It's like comparing a small town diner where you expect to see the same people over and over, you're going to be nice to them, verses a bus station where everyone's passing through, and bus stations aren't really known for their friendliness.

Randy: Now it's time to discuss how others are trying to address poor quality comments on their sites.

Scott: For too long, folks have been treating the symptoms. There's a long list of sites that have closed their comments absolutely, completely, but there's a cost to that. You lose your SEO from comments. You lose potential ad revenue from people participating on the page where you're selling ads. Some sites exert editorial control over which content can have comments enabled, and for how long. For example, the Philadelphia Enquirer, the Guardian, Fox News, all pick and choose which pieces of content are going to allow comments at all. This can increase your editorial costs and you can also suffer from a dip in your SEO and ad revenue from people commenting.

Randy: Some, like Ars Technica and Boing Boing have put comments behind a click. This is an editorial speed bump. It's complex and it's all about context, and bad comments can cost you significant revenue. When I worked at Yahoo, Yahoo Health had comments related to articles about drugs and treatments, and when the drug companies were advertising, they were paying the highest ad rates on the internet, and they didn't like the detracting and often medically dangerous comments that were showing up on the same page as the article about their treatment or drug. They moved the comments off of that page in order to recover that revenue. The critical context turns out to be the advertisers for many of these applications, not the users.

Scott: Then we can't forget the ever popular increasing your moderation. Whether moderation happens before or after publication, these systems wind up being expensive, mostly because they don't scale well, and definitely don't respond quickly.

Randy: Some are pushing moderation tasks to Facebook comments, and for me, this is completely baffling, because now you have confused the context one more time, because now, instead of just the other people reading and the other people commenting, you now have brought in the entire user's social graph. Anyway, who gets notified when you post on a site using remote Facebook comments? Who are you talking to? Are you writing for your Facebook friends or are you writing for the author of an article?

Scott: We've come across a really novel approach. Make your commenters pay before they can view or comment. Tablet magazine is a magazine for a non-profit organization, and they actually charge for commenting. They have a daily rate of 2 dollars, or a monthly rate of 18 dollars, or a yearly rate of 180 dollars, and you might think, "Who would pay to comment?"

Randy: Nobody.

Scott: Well the answer is no one. They killed the comments on their site. All of their commenting happens on their Facebook page where they repost the articles anyway. According to them, this is exactly what they wanted. They are very happy with it exactly happening this way. If somebody wants to comment from the wild web, then pay for it, and they'll be happy to moderate your comment. That works out well for them, but it might not work out well for you if you're relying on things like advertising revenue and SEO.

Randy: This has been a problem for quite a while. It's well known. The grousing about it is everywhere, and we now join that group, but there have been several efforts to standardize and platformize. One of them is Civil Comments. Civil comments is a platform launched by Aja Bogdanoff who is involved with Ted Talks Communities, and Krista Morgan. Aja told Tech Crunch in October, "We need to change how people are submitting their content. We need to make sure that we're giving them good reasons to behave well," so when you write your comment, in order to post it, you actually have to review 2 other comments on the site for quality and civility. This gives you a chance to edit your comment before submitting. Then comments may go live or be held for review based on whoever is using the platform. This approach is a definite improvement, and it starts to set the context, but it's only after the user has invested in writing a potentially context-less comment. We think this approach might be able to be improved by changing the order, getting people to read comments from others before composing a new one.

Scott: Another tool for publishers to facilitate curation in moderation comes out of the Coral Project. They have one tool called Trust. It's actually part of 3 planned modules, Trust, Ask and Talk. The Trust module is largely so that journalists can find new sources, reveal potential troublemakers and identify useful contributions within all the contributions that are going on. It's not out yet. Some people are experimenting with it, and it still doesn't address what we're talking about, which is the whole idea of context. There's nothing to provide context. It's really looking at things after all of these context-less comments come out.

Randy: So far it looks like it's very early and there might be a little bit of reinventing the wheel, but we'll see how it turns out, and I'm certain they'll uncover some useful lessons I hope they share with us all.

Scott: The New York Times has really changed how they're operating with comments. They started by following the popular but misguided, generic goal of "building community", but that lacks context, and that's the whole problem we're talking about. Since then, they have transformed into a better "letters to the editor." As Bassey Etim, the New York Times community editor, says, "Our goal is to have every New York Times comment thread offer tangible, added value to each article for our readership."

Randy: That's a goal.

Scott: That's a goal, and it limits the scope. With that goal clearly stated internally and externally, that allows them to select which stories have comments and how long the comments are going to be open on a particular story, and when those comments come in, they're human reviewed. They prioritize what comments are reviewed based on whether it's on the home page, whether it's getting a lot of attention, and when they review their comments, they hold off on publishing every comment just because it passes reviews. They actually hold on to a couple of comments until there is a spectrum of positions that support or add to the article.

Randy: This does a great job of modeling.

Scott: Exactly. It's done by your paid staff and it teaches regulars what's going to wind up getting published, and then also they curate and they highlight. They do this either by having picks of particular comments that really add to the context of the rest of the article, or they do modeling by highlighting the New York Times Picks community by doing profiles of folks.

Randy: I really like that they preserve the context, as I was talking about earlier. They put the comments behind a click, which is the same kind of speed bump as I described before, but it's displayed as a pullout sidebar that allows the article and comments to scroll independently, so it keeps them connected, but it doesn't detract from either thing. It's great.

Scott: You're right, but ultimately with all of this, there's still just an empty text box at the top of the comments, which makes it way too easy to skip a lot of this really great context modeling that they're doing, so good effort, but we're still calling them out on the one piece that we're saying is, we're missing context.

Randy: My advice to them would be instead of just putting the FAQ link there, if you've never posted before, actually making you read the shorthand version of their FAQ, which is pretty short. After the break, our recommendations.

Randy: There are plenty of problems to go around and lots of people are trying different things, but we're going to tell you what we think. We think the most important thing is to decide the context. Ask yourself the questions that are important. Why do you want comments at all? What do you want from the commenters? This is a behavioral question. What benefits do the commenters get? How do we want them to behave? Gather those questions clearly in your minds, and then talk about how you might be gathering this information. Once you know these things, you want to communicate them clearly. You want to be transparent about your answers to those questions. If it's about ads, is that why you want comments? What are you going to do to trade off to get that revenue? You want to communicate everything about that. Don't just present a white box. It has no context. Make it really, really obvious by putting context everywhere. Make knowing the context a speed bump. Some examples include making context a click through, as we talked about a couple different ways already. Put the text box after or to the side of other comments, and we added that to the side of after we saw the New York Times. That model is pretty cool. Reward and require reading other comments. I worked on a project called Discourse.org, which is a message board system, and before you could contribute, you actually had to read through threads.

Scott: Part of communicating your context clearly is making sure that you've got the right technical bits for communicating the context. One of the challenges I found with working with traditional UX and UI approaches is that they tend to focus on what happens with one user behind the keyboard and not what's happening with hundreds of thousands of users in a social context, all taking that same action, and this plays out in terms of whether you want to have a community talking to each other or whether you want to have an audience talking to the publisher. If you want a community, set the context. Put the reply box on the bottom. Put the replies in chronological order. If you're looking at having the audience speak to the publisher, having the text box on top or having comments in reverse chronological order lends itself to talking to the article as opposed to other people. Labels can help. Consider changing the word "comment" to something else. Discuss, reply, contribute, and consider changing the label of your "like" buttons to "respect." There's something that backs this up. The Engaging News Project did a little research on simply changing "like" buttons to the word "respect," and they found that respondents who saw the respect button clicked on more comments in the comment section, and from an angle of participation, respondents seeing the "respect" button clicked on more comments from other political perspectives in comparison to either using "like" or even "recommend."

Randy: That sounds great.

Scott: Once you've set and communicated the context, it's important to shape it and reinforce it. Be willing to decide if comments are even needed on individual stories, much like the New York Times does, and this is a decision that can be based on your staffing capability, if the author is willing to or even able to respond in the comment section, if the topic is polarizing or if the top has recently had comments enabled. Also, set expectations for how you would like people to behave. Bassey Etim at the New York Times recommends you consistently tell your readers that they're part of a quality club, and this is the kind of quality that we're looking for, and this goes right back to our questions, "what benefit do the commenters get?" And, "how do we want them to behave?"

Randy: You also want to model commenting behavior. Calling back to the New York Times policy of holding comment publication until a balance is available is a way to teach people what gets published. Make sure your content authors and staff are participating to your best standards.

Scott: Don't forget, we're talking about people here, so directly engage with your commenters. Work with the folks who are writing the content, creating the content, to engage in the comments on their posts. This increases the quality of user contributions, and again, there's a little bit of experimentation from the Engaging News Project that found that when a reporter interacted in a comment section, the chances of an uncivil comment declined by 15 percent, and the commenters were 15 percent more likely to provide evidence over opinion when the reporters participated. Make sure your moderation staff is there supporting authors, so they can focus on meaningful engagement with the people commenting.

Randy: It's really popular to talk about recognition, reward and celebration, and in appropriate measure, these are good practices. Just don't substitute recognition and reward for diligent moderation. Here are some recommendations that don't require special technology, just people. Dedicate a portion of your moderation strategy to finding good content. Reward the kind of comment quality you want. Reply to the person directly, and thank them or congratulate them for a particular quality. Of course, highlight and promote the best contributions, and do a retrospective of model commenters. Sometimes the technology you have just won't cut it, and you need to consider an alternative approach. One approach I've used with several clients, and has been implemented in the Telegent platform is the ability for users to be the frontline in identifying the worst content, and allowing them to flag it and then automatically hiding it, perhaps for later review, but I must warn you, we're calling this out as an alternative approach because if you do it wrong you can actually make things worse. If you do it right, the response time between a bad post it disappearing can drop to seconds, fundamentally improving the apparent quality of your content, and discouraging bad contributions from vandals.

Scott: Sometimes you have to go back to your very first question, and ask yourself why you want comments, and realize that free text comments are not the right choice for your community or for feedback, and if you really want a community, consider a purpose-built community platform such as Discourse.org or even Slack. Now, the Washington Post is trying out an experiment where they have a small Slack community of Washington Post readers, mainly women, who are focusing initially on issues of pay gap, but it's turning into other discussions, which are becoming rich sources for the Washington Post to generate more stories or greater insight on this particular topic, or consider personal stories from your audience or your community that can give insight into a topic without a lot of back and forth that can be the source of conflict, and also consider that text is not your only tool. Submissions of images or videos, particularly if they are coming from members who are close to a particular topic or close to a particular location, where they can supplement or add flavor to the original topic are also ripe sources for content. That can give a sense of community without resorting to a blank text box.

Randy: It was a challenge putting together this episode because it's difficult that there are so many different variants of text boxes for user feedback out there. There are so many techniques that people are using in an attempt to fashion quality out of that content. For example, we didn't talk much about moderation techniques here today. That's what people talk about a lot and we hope to have an episode about that in the very near future. If you have ideas for specific things we should discuss in this area, please give us feedback. You can reach us on Facebook at Social Media Clarity and on Twitter as @SMClarity.

Scott: Thank you so much for listening.

Randy: Yeah, see you next time.

For links, transcripts and more episodes, go to SocialMediaClarity.net. Thanks for listening.

Part 4 of our Social Network Analysis Series. In this episiode, Marc details how seeking out specific influential people, or mayors, in your topic areas can lead to better engagement with new networks of people. We discuss how to find, connect, and engage with these mayors to have conversations that they amplify to their connections.

Previous shows in the Social Network Analysis Series Ep 1 - Social Networks 101 - Introduction to the imporance of thinking about social media in terms of networks. Ep 4 - Influence is a Graph - Marc defines influence and how our influence is different depending on the context we are in. Three kinds of centrality are described and what they mean in our networks. Ep 17 - What does your hashtag look like? Lee Rainie from Pew Internet Research - We discusse a report from Pew Internet Research describing 6 types of social network shapes and how each behaves. Learning these 6 will help you better understand how people are interacting and passing information when you see a social network map Additional Introduction to Social Network Analysis Next in Nonprofits 23 – NodeXL with Marc Smith - The first 15 minutes of this interview will also be helpful if you are new to social network analysis thinking and terminology. Tools for finding influencers based on centrality Gephi - The Open Graph Viz Platform NodeXL with Smart Tweets Request a graph for your hashtag or topic Start finding the mayors you should connect with by requesting a custom network map. You can search Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, various Wikis and more using a keyword, hashtag, URL, username, fan page, or group name. Be sure to let us know you are part of the Social Media Clarity audience! Request a sample network map Episode icon photo CC BY-SA 2.0 taylar @ Flickr

Randy: Welcome to the Social Media Clarity podcast, 15 minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media, in platform and product design.

Scott: Thanks for listening everyone. This episode is about finding new influencers, connecting with these influencers and getting your message amplified by them. It will be the fourth episode in our new Social Network Analysis Series. What are the other episodes, Marc?

Marc: Right, we have three episodes already out. Episode 1, the Social Networks 101 podcast. Episode 4, Influence is a Graph, and episode 17, What does your hashtag look like? with our guest Lee Rainie from Pew Internet Research. You might want to listen to any of those if this theme of using network analysis of social media is of interest to you.

Scott:Additionally, Marc was interviewed in episode 23 of the Next in Nonprofits podcast. The first 15 minutes of that interview may also be helpful if you're new to social network analysis thinking and terminology.

Today we're talking about influencers and what kind of influencers are we looking for, Marc?

Marc: Well, many people are interested in finding the people in a conversation stream who seem to have a lot more power to get their messages heard than others. Indeed, it's often the case that there are only a few of the mayors, if you will, of a topic or a hashtag. In many cases, we are interested in finding not the most prominent of these people, what you might think of as the A listers. In many cases we're finding that it's more useful to engage with the B-list. The B-list are the not quite as prominent but still quite influential people who might be a little less jaded, might be a little less busy, might be a little bit more interested in the fact that you notice them. They still play an out-sized role in most of the conversations in which they participate.

If you calculate a few network metrics about how all of the connections among a group of people in a discussion come together, some of these people really jump out. They're very visible as being very in the center of the conversation, so we rank those people and then we try to focus our users on engaging these very, very central people.

Scott: How do we find these B-list influencers?

Marc: Right, it is a multi-step process. We'd start with a few topics, we will build a snowball sample if you will. We start with a few words that we know are of interest to the people we want to communicate with and we might discover words or hashtags related to those key words. Then we're going to collect messages from each of those topic streams in order to build an analysis of the connections within them. We're going to go from each topic to it's near neighbors. You might start with a brand and then move towards a sporting event and then it might be an athlete, then it might be a big game or another team. We're looking for the very few people who are very much at the center of these conversations. We sometimes talk about these people as the mayors of the hashtag.

We know that there are people who are more influential than others. The question is what are the indicators, the numbers or the measurements that tell us that somebody is influential. Many systems focus on the follower count or the reply count. Those are interesting numbers but for any particular topic they may not be very predictive. We focus instead on a network metric, the measurement known as centrality. We argue that people who have this attribute known as betweenness centrality who are ranked highly on this metric are the people that other people react to the most. They sit in a position within the larger web of connections that put them in a strategic position.

We consider those people to be the mayors. If we could only identify the mayors for every topic we would have a list of influential voices, influential people who we might want to try to engage. These are the people who already have an audience, they're already demonstrating a certain amount of communications power and they're demonstrating that power on a particular topic. They are the mayor of the topic you care about, the hashtag that you are interested in.

Scott: What would be a good example of, say, I'm a brand and, say, I'm a clothing brand and I'm looking into a new network and I'm looking for a mayor of a particular network. Can you give me an example of, are they talking about my brand, are they talking about my topic or are they talking about related or a totally different topic?

Marc: All of those are very good seed terms for these network map efforts. You certainly would like to know who is actually using the name of your company or your brand or your product or your clothing line. If somebody is actually saying that, if they are the mayor of talking about you by name, that would be interesting but there may not be that person. Even if there is there may be other people talking about other topics that are relevant to your brand.

It may be the case that you sell something that protects you from sunburn but people don't really talk about sunburn but they might talk about camping or being marathon runners. Connecting with people who are having a conversation in which your product is relevant is a way of finding the mayor of a topic that might actually talk about you in a positive way because you have something meaningful and relevant to talk about with them.

Scott: Okay. Great. Now that we've found, say, a mayor or maybe two mayors in particular topic areas, what's the next step that we should take?

Marc: Right. Identifying a mayor is only the first step. We do want to identify them. We want to know who to follow. After all, it's unlikely that somebody will engage with you if you are not following them. Once you've followed them then the question is how would you start a conversation with them? We are interested in using some analysis of people's content to come up with words that are likely to be, or hashtags that are likely to be, salient, relevant, meaningful to that person. We do this by analyzing their content and finding out what words they use at a rate far higher than the rest of the community might use those words. Those words tend to be the salient or relevant terms for that person.

Scott: Can we have an example of determining saliency for a particular person?

Marc: Everybody in the data set is tweeting or writing some set of messages. You could argue that everybody is using a collection of words with a certain rate. In fact, if we took the words and messages from everybody we could put them all together in one pot and average them and we could come up with a number for every word which is the average rate that this word is used. Then we can compare each person to that average. Of course, no individual is likely to be average. Some people are above and below that average. Maybe you say the word carburetor a lot, maybe I don't say it much at all. In the context of automobiles maybe people talk more about performance rather than the price or in some cases people care about safety. Different words are going to be relevant to different people even though they're still talking about the same brand.

Scott: In this example if I'm, say, Ford, I wouldn't necessarily look for people talking about Ford. I'm looking for people talking about carburetors or mileage or handling and I'll find those particular people who are talking about that particular aspect of cars more than the other people around them.

Marc: Yes and we want to know that when they talk about it other people care. We want them not only to use a word but to use a word and be central.

Scott: Being central, how does that look in terms of behavior?

Marc: A person who's central not only gets retweeted but gets retweeted by a more diverse group of people than anyone else. It's not enough that a lot of people thought your stuff was great but people from groups that would otherwise never connect connected through you. You're essentially the bridge. If you can be the bridge then that's a sign, in network theory, of your power or your influence. We use that as a proxy for being the mayor or the leader of this discussion.

Scott: Great. So we find our mayors and how do we interact with the mayors?

Marc: Very carefully. After all, these are already very powerful people. They are the leaders of their communities. They dominate these discussions. There may be a few of them, there may be a dozen of them but here thousands of people who tweet or produce messages on a particular topic. This half dozen or a dozen people have far more power than anyone else. If you're going to try to engage them I recommend caution and respect.

One thing you might start with is to try to talk to them about what they already want to talk about. Changing the subject with these people is something that you should do very carefully. The first step is to identify what is it that they care about. We do that through this salience analysis of their content. We suggest using some of those key words as the basis for your entre, your opening to these people, in conversation. You should be talking about the hashtags. You should include the hashtags that they care about most.

Scott: If I'm Ford trying to reach out to the mayor of performance then I would want to include the hashtags that they're using or the key words that they're using when I reach out to them. Right?

Marc: You would want to use their hashtags, their words rather than, let's say, the ones that you want to use. You do want to convey your message but you must first include some evidence that you know what they care about and that you're willing to talk to them about what they have already defined as their interests.

I think in many cases there's a difference between marketing which is interrupting people and trying to talk to them about what you care about and social marketing which is talking to influential people and actually opening a conversation to try to connect what they care about with what you care about. It can be done in a more one-on-one way because there are relatively few of these people. With numbers that low you can actually have a conversation with everyone of those people.

Scott: By extension of the network effect, if we manage to engage that mayor well they're going to re-broadcast our conversation or their followers will see our conversation. We're actually reaching out beyond just the 300. Right?

Marc: Exactly. If you win any of those 300 you win a very big prize. They each might have thousands of followers who already have an established audience relationship with that person. Rather than trying to establish new audiences this strategy suggests that you engage people who already have these audiences. You do so by actually engaging them in conversation about topics that really do matter. It's really that shifting away from a marketing model where we make claims about a product and try to bombard people with those claims repeatedly in order to make them submit.

The shift instead is to actually having a conversation with the 30 or 300 people who actually really do care about your product and do want to talk about it and are open to hearing about the nuances of it and what's new about it because they really do care. This is about forming real relationships albeit commercial in nature but with people who really care and talking to them about what they care about.

Scott: In a nut shell that is amplifying your influencers. Right?

Marc: Yes.

Scott: Because we're working with them rather than trying to push them or guide them specifically.

Marc: You can't make them do anything. They already have enough power to really make trouble for anybody who tries to just advertise at them. If you spam these people you're really asking for it. They care deeply about their topic but if you can honestly engage these people you can actually have a conversation. The power of a few dozen conversations is greater than, I would argue, a mass broadcast to hundreds of thousands of followers.

Scott: What tools do we use to go about finding influencers and figuring out what their conversations are so that we can engage with them on their level?

Marc: There are a number of tools. It could be done manually. It's conceivable that with a pencil and paper you could read a tweet stream and draw, or at least write down, a series of observations about who replies to who and who mentions who. Clearly, that doesn't make a lot of sense in the internet age. There's a lot data out there and there are computers involved so they should help.

There are a large number of tools if you are a software developer. If you're a programmer there are database tools and network database tools and libraries for getting data and breaking it into pieces. If you are not a programmer, however, the number of choices drop. You really have relatively few choices at that point. There are tools out there like Gephi (gephi.org), which is a very beautiful and powerful tool which can be used to draw very large networks and do visualization and analysis of them. That's one possible tool.

I, of course, have been working on a project of my own called NodeXL which attempts to address this issue with a real focus on automation. Really focusing on making this just a few clicks to produce this analytic output, this report. You can find it on the web or you can get it emailed to you. The report tries to answer the questions that we think that people who care about a hashtag and want to get an overview of it or want to act strategically towards it would want to know. One of those questions might be, "Who is important around here?" So we have a feature called the Top Influencers section and it simply lists the people with the highest betweenness centrality.

Then it presents two features that help you implement this strategy. This vision of engage the people at the center and talk to them about what they want to talk about. That is one. That is a simple feature which is that there is now a follow button on each of these influencers. The second is this feature we call a Smart Tweet. A Smart Tweet essentially is a rough draft of a message to a person that contains first their name but then two of their most important hashtags and two important words, or salient words, and then room for your message, your hashtag and your URL. The goal is to encourage you to talk to an influential person about what they care about and find a way to link it to your URL and hashtag. After all, you're engaged in strategic communication. You have a goal. You want to convey your message. We're going to make it easier because we're going to help you actually craft it with relevance for the person who is most influential.

Scott: Now that we understand how to find those influencers that are not in our immediate networks we have an action for you, the listeners, to take. Marc has a request form where you can request any topic for a variety of networks and get your own NodeXL network map that will include the betweenness centrality, the most influential people, and if you're on Twitter give you options to set up your own Smart Tweets.

Marc: People who request a map will be notified when we complete the production of the map and we'll post it to the NodeXL gallery. Often when people see a map and report that's about a topic that's directly relevant to them it's easier to understand how they might use the tool.

Randy: For links, transcripts and more episodes go to socialmediaclarity.net. Thanks for listening.

I'm Randy Farmer, and this is another episode from the vault...

This time: Two Recipes for Stone Soup [A Fable of Pre-Funding Startups]

This is group reading of a post from Habitat Chronicles originally published in 2008, it was then lost in a drive crash and recovered in 2014.

There once was a young Zen master, who had earned a decent name for himself throughout the land. He was not famous, but many of his peers knew of his reputation for being wise and fair. During his career, he was renowned for his loyalty to whatever dojo he was attached to, usually for many years at a time. One year his patronage decided to merge with another, larger dojo, and the young master found himself unexpectedly looking for a new livelihood. But he was not desperate, as he’d heeded the words of his mentor and had kept close contact with many other Zen masters over the years and considered many options.

As word spread about the young master’s availability, he began to receive more interest than he could possibly ever fulfill. It took all of his Zen training and long nights just to keep up with the correspondence and meetings. He was getting queries from well-established cooperatives, various governments, charitable groups, many recently formed houses, and even more people who had a grand idea around which to form a whole-new kind of dojo. This latter category was intriguing, but the most fraught with peril. There were too many people with too many ideas for the young master to sort between. So he decided to consult with his mentor. At least one more time, he would be the apprentice and ventured forth to the dojo of his youth, a half-day’s journey away.

“Master, the road ahead is filled with many choices, some are well traveled roads and others are merely slight indentations in the grass that may some day become paths. How can I choose?” asked the apprentice.

The mentor replied, “Have you considered the wide roads and the state-maintained roads?”

“Yes, I know them well and have many reasons to continue on one of them, but these untrodden paths still call to me. It is as if there is a man with his hands at his mouth standing at each one shouting to follow his new path to riches and glory. How do I sort out the truth of their words?” The young master was genuinely perplexed.

“You are wise, my son, to seek council on this matter — as sweet smelling words are enticing indeed and could lead you down a path of ruin or great fortune. Recount to me now two of the recruiting stories that you have heard and I will advise you.” The mentor’s face relaxed and his eyes closed as he dropped into thought, which was exactly what the young master needed to calm himself sufficiently to relate the stories.

After the mentor had heard the stories, he continued meditating for several minutes before speaking again: “Former apprentice, do you recall the story and lesson of Stone Soup?”

“Yes, master. We learned it as young adepts. It is the story of a man who pretended that he had a magic stone for making the world’s best soup, which he then used to convince others to contribute ingredients to the broth until a delicious brew was made. This story was about how leadership and an idea can ease people into cooperating to create great things for the good of them all.” recounted the student. “I can see the similarity between the callers standing on the new paths and the man with the magic stone. Also it is clear that that the ingredients are symbolic of the skills of the potential recruits. But, I don’t see how that helps me.” The apprentice had many years of experience with the mentor, and knew that this challenge would get the answer he was looking for.

“The stories you told me are two different recipes for Stone Soup,” the master started.

“The first caller was a man with a certain and impressive voice that said to you ‘You should join my dojo! It is like none other and it is a good and easy path that will lead to great riches. Many people that you know, such as Haruko and Jin, have tested this path and others who have great reputations including Master Po and Teacher Win are going to walk upon it as well. Your reputation would be invaluable to our venture. Join us now!'”

“The second caller was a humble and uncertain man who spoke softly as he said ‘You should join my dojo. It is like none other and the path, though potentially fraught with peril, could lead to riches if the right combination of people were to take to it. Your reputation is well known, and if you were to join the party, the chance of success would increase greatly. Would you consider meeting here in two days time to talk to others to discuss our goals and to see if a suitable party could be formed? Even if you don’t join us, any advice you have would be invaluable.” The mentor paused to see if his former student understood.

The young master said “I don’t see much difference, other than the second man seems the weaker.”

The mentor suppressed a sigh. Clearly this visit would not have been necessary if the young master were able to see this himself. Besides, it was good to see his student again and to be discussing such a wealth of opportunities.

He resumed, “Remember the parable of Stone Soup. The first man did not. He recited many names as if those names carried the weight of the reputations of their owners. He has forgotten the objective of the parable: The Soup. It is not the names or reputations of the people who placed the ingredients into the soup that mattered. It was that the soup needed the ingredients and the people added them anonymously, in exchange for a bowl of the broth. The first man merely suggested that important people were committed to the journey. I am quite certain that, were you to ask Haruko and Jin what names they have heard as being associated with the proposed dojo, you would find that your name was provided as a reference without your knowledge or consent.”

The student clearly became agitated as the truth of his mentor’s words sunk in. There was work to do before the day was done in order to repair any damage to his reputation that speaking with the first man may have caused.

The mentor continued, “The first recipe for Stone Soup is The Braggarts Brew. It tastes just like hot water because when everyone finds out that the founder is a liar, they all recover whatever ingredients they can to take them home and try to dry them out.”

The mentor took a quick drink, but gave a quelling glance that told the apprentice to remain silent until the lesson was over.

“You called the second man weaker, but his weakness is like that of the man with the Stone from the parable. He keeps his eyes on the goal — creating the Soup or staffing his dojo. Without excellent ingredients, there will be no success; and the best way to get them is to appeal to the better nature of those who possess them. He, by listening to them, transforms the dojo into a community project — which many contribute to, even if only a little bit.”

“Your skills, young master, are impressive on their own. You need not compare yourself with others, nor should you be impressed with one who would so trivially invoke the reputation of others, as if they were magic words in some charm.”

“The second recipe for Stone Soup is Humble Chowder, seasoned with a healthy dash of realism. This is the tempting broth.” And the mentor was finished.

The apprentice jumped up — “Master! I am so thankful! I knew that coming to you would help me see the truth. And now, I see a greater truth — you are also the man with a Stone. Please tell me what I can contribute to your Soup.”

“Choose your next course wisely, and return to me with the story so that I may share it with the next class of students.”

“I will!”

And with that, the young master ran as quickly as he could to catch up with the group meeting about the second man’s dojo. He wasn’t certain if he’d join them, but the honor of being able to contribute to its foundation would enough payment for now. When he approached the seated group, he was delighted to see several people whose reputation he respected around the fire, discussing amazing possibilities. One of them was Jin, who was shocked to learn that the first man had given his name to the young master…

I'd like to thank our readers:

The Narrator was read by Amy Bruckman, Professor and Associate Chair, School of Interactive Computing @ Georgia Institute of Technology http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/ and part of the Young Master was read by Lane Lawley, software developer at Google. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lane-lawley-76026b16

The Tea Garden background sountrack was used by permission of Plate Mail Games http://platemailgames.com/

Thanks guys!

And, oh yes, I was inspired to write this story based on real-life events. You can ask me about it sometime.

Fir more episodes visit http://socialmediaclarity.net

TL;DR - You KNOW Marc, Randy, and Scott couldn't let Twitter messing with Favorites and Facebook Reactions go without some spirited discussion.

Intro: Welcome to the Social Media Clarity Podcast. Fifteen minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media in platform and product design.

Randy: I'm Randy Farmer

Scott: I'm Scott Moore.

Marc: I'm Marc Smith.

Randy: Really, Twitter, hearts?

Scott: Really, Facebook? Reactions.

Randy: Oh, my gosh, guys. We have a lot to talk about since the last time we've had a session. The big social guys have gone nuts for emoticons as a way to express yourself with a single click.

Scott: We already had ways of expressing ourselves, they were just very generic. Now we're trying to be specific about it.

Randy: Twitter changes from stars to hearts ...

Scott: ... and Favorites to Likes.

Randy: Yeah, and Favorites to Likes. [as if] they're exactly the same. If you think they're the same, people out there, just think what if they changed it back to a pile of crap. Is that the same as a heart, or a star? When I think of Twitter's problems, I don't think this is one of the ones that was very high on the list.

Scott: No, but it's one of the ones that helps them get attention. It helps generate notifications. They practically said, 'we're not getting enough people using the Favorite, so now we're going to change it to something that more people will use.' That generates notifications, and that brings people back to the app.

Randy: So, something that was meaningful, now means less.

Marc: Is it the case that you are more likely to love something than like it?

Randy: Well, that's not the test on the table in this case. It's Like versus Favorite.

Marc: Yeah, but the like generates this heart, which suggests love, and it used to be a star. So, we're moving from star to heart. Admittedly, we're going from Favorite to Like, but is there really that much more like than favorite in the world?

Scott: I think that the context was really different. From what I gauged from the reactions, other than people just hating change, was that Favorite de-noted a bookmark, and then expanded from there. A lot of people were using it as, "I'm saving this link for later", or, "I'm saving this Tweet for later". Some people were using it as, as you would for any signaling system, some people were using it as, "I like what you said". Now, they've actually tightened up the context while at the same time, loosen it, by saying, it's a like, which can mean anything. Anything that's positive. It's a positive mark on it.

Randy: Right, and they retroactively marked every Favorite a Like.

How many gillions of those they have, I don't know. At least one person I was talking to yesterday when I first saw this in practice, and was shocked by it, was Kaliya [Hamlin], otherwise known as Identity Woman, and she says, "Oh my God, now I've got to go fix all my Favorites on Twitter, because I don't love most of those things."

Scott: Yeah. Some people were tweeting out "Liking your tweet is not consent."

Randy: That's awesome. When we first thought of doing this episode, that hadn't even happened yet. That's just the freshest thing, that happened yesterday. Before that, Facebook was going to start testing the emoticon variants, or they call Reactions, as a response to the demand for dislikes.

Marc: Right. So, we don't get Dislike, but we get Reactions.

Randy: Well, and if you look at the reactions, the icons are ambiguous. I don't know if that's a feature or a bug. They do, in fact, include a dislike one, called Angry, it's angry face. It's like, what's this about? I think this is what we wanted to talk about, is we wanted to take some of these seemingly crazy, and capricious ideas, and talk about what it is maybe they're trying to do. We've been calling this, amongst the three of us - " Quantifying Empathy." So, we are going to have a conversation about that today.

Marc: Right. It seems that what we're seeing is a feature that allows people to have a very light weight way to author some higher level of attention. I mean, after all, the system knows who "saw" each piece of content, and it even reports that for some pieces of content on some platforms. It'll say some number of people have been exposed to, or have seen the piece of content, but that's sort of the lowest level of content measurement. How many people might have seen it. Now with the Like, or the Love, or the Favorite, or the reaction, we're trying to get people to click, and just click, but to click from a field of choices to give us a higher resolution sense of, what did that click mean? The Like was too ambiguous. So, now we have angry, and happy, and sad. What are the other ones?

Grumpy.

Randy: You can make up as many as you want.

Scott: Great.

Randy: No, there's just a few. There's a Yay one supposedly.

Scott: Yay. There's Wow, there's Sad, there's Angry ...

Scott: ... and there's one other.

Randy: So, when you use ambiguous faces, in the case of Facebook, it actually lacks all subtlety. Does it mean what the face expresses to you? Or, does it mean the words that are written underneath it?

Scott: Yeah. Am I angry at you because of something you said? Or, am I angry about the same thing you're angry? Am I expressing actual empathy, or am I reacting against you?

Marc: So, this is a great piece of ambiguity that the interface has yet to resolve. You pointed this out earlier, that people are splitting their reaction to what this story means _for the author_ of the story, and their reaction _to_ the story. So, there's this ambiguous reference that must be clarified, and these additional features do not clarify it. If anything they add more ambiguity.

Randy: Interesting in Facebook, is you've always been able to use these exact same icons, you've always been able to add them to a message. You did it by posting a reply to post. You would then explain - so, you could put in a sad face, and say, "I feel sorry for you. If I can help you in any way, let me know." Right? So, you have this rich interaction that would be going on between humans. So, what do the humans actually want? What are good for humans? Probably saying more, not saying less. What really kind of drives it home for me, is when you *count* them. I say, when you click on an angry icon, there's object missing.

There's a famous expression; "This sentence no verb". Right?

Well, now with the reactions we have; "I'm angry with..." or "I'm mad at..."

Marc: That's great. That's great.

Randy: I'm sad at ... Right? In the same kind of construction, with that missing by pulling them out. Then you count them, and you say, "Lots of us are mad at..." We don't even know if those people are mixed and matched on what they're mad at.

Scott: Right. A lot of people are mad, but we don't know if they're mad at, or mad with.

Randy: Yeah, and I've got to tell you, that's going to drive people off. Just the mad icon alone is going to drive people away from posting, because they can't figure out, you know, if you have any social anxiety, any feedback, other than "we love you, it's okay" is going to be harmful. So, it surprised me that they said Dislike is too negative, we get that, and then put an angry face. In counting them they're already finding out in Spain and Ireland, where they're testing it, messages are coming back with a mixture of counted face types. Want to talk about no way to interpret data - What the heck does that mean? Facebook's excited, because they got a lot of clicks they probably wouldn't have got before. That they can use to route messages to your email box.

Scott: Yeah, so the cynical side of me says - so one thing in developing, and choosing what they were going to choose as far as what icons to go for - they looked at all the one word, and sticker-only posts, and they just kind of aggregated all that together, and said, okay, these are the things that people most likely say in those replies, when they're posting an emoticon or sticker or something like that. So, they're just making it easier for them now to count and quantify that for other purposes. Either to send notifications, or more likely a lot of the brand pages, the blogs, and other folks out there who are into Facebook marketing, are saying this could be useful, because now you can get more detailed information about what your brand reaction is. So, it's just another thing that someone's going to measure in order to sub-divide targeted marketing.

Randy: Yeah, but that ends up, it's true, and diluting. We all recall the experiments people have been doing just with Like and Share, if you think X: Like this thing. If you think Y: Share this thing. Right, because they're trying to manipulate these various counters. So, it occurred to me, they could have just put in a polling mechanism. So ...

Scott: Twitter did put in a polling mechanism recently.

Randy: Good.

Scott: Yeah, Facebook used to have polls. A long, long time ago, Facebook used to have polls, and they took them out.

Marc: So, this is an interesting point. If we're going to be critical of the reaction system, we ought to suggest an alternative:

One alternative is to allow the poster to list the reactions that they are interested in having people choose from. So, a little bit of a hybrid between a poll, and these emotion icons. Maybe you could react to me with sympathy, empathy, or cash, or other.

Scott: Well, you could even take the system that they have now, and say, which one of these would you like to focus on, or how many of these would you like people to, you know, is this a 'Wow - Yay' type of post? Do you want Wows and Yays, and you don't want Sads on your post, because that's not what you're talking about? They actually have something built in, this is really funny, in Facebook, they have the option for being able to say, "I'm feeling blessed." Or happy, or sad, or angry, and they have this list of about 25 of these things, and why can't I +1 somebody who is feeling a certain way already? Because now the context is, "I'm with you on this. "

Marc: So, what's the ultimate goal here? We want users to click more, and ...

Randy: ...let's be clear: Advertisers want users to click more.

Marc: Right, right. I meant to say, what is the system designers ultimate goal here. They want users to click more. As system users though, as people who use these features, what is our goal?

Randy: I got to say, I'm with Sherry Turkle on this, that anything that reduces human conversation, is probably truly reducing empathy. If people out there are interested, I'll put a link in the show notes to show Turkle's latest book and work. It talks specifically about the fact that we've been reducing ourselves to machine interactions with lighter and lighter interfaces to the point where we don't even know what empathy is anymore. We don't have to respond with any empathetic statement when all we have to do is click a sad icon.

Scott: Yeah, and I really want to read Sherry's book, but I'm starting to think that there's a slight difference in that, and a little bit more optimistic in that, yes, using our smart phones, and what not, are pulling us away from face to face conversations, and I think we're having to figure out now that we're breaking that, what can we do, now that we're turning our faces towards devices, what can we do to actually build back in? What are the things that we're missing, and how do we rebuild that in our systems? How do we get folks to build up more empathy with people, and can we do that with systems? I think it's something that is important. These systems are light weight, and they're somewhat useful, but they lack deeper meaning, which is exactly what you're saying.

Randy: Well, don't take the simple path. Don't just count clicks on dots, right? Design interfaces that help people solve problems.

Scott: Right.

Randy: People do this.

Marc: What problem do people feel like they have? I mean, at the moment Facebook trained us to want to generate certain kind of responses. We want Likes, we want Comments, we want some kind of currency that proves we consumed other people's attention, and that they've granted us some kind of approval. Is that they only purpose that we could use this platform for, and is that the only purpose these reaction features are designed to support?

Scott: Well, obviously not. I mean, that's not the only purpose. Facebook's purposes might be at cross purposes with those of us who want to actually build communities online, and help people develop deeper, meaningful relationships. That's why I think that these are light weight, but not very meaningful. They might suffice in those ambiguous situations, especially in a network like Facebook, where very often you are not close friends with the people who are on your Facebook network. So, sometimes commenting deeper on something could become awkward, because you just aren't that well connected, but you want to acknowledge. So, I think there's room for the social grooming that a Like, or any of these kind of reactions would provide, but I think that we should be thinking about, as designers, and as people who are fostering online communities, how to help people get to that deeper conversational engagement, that Sherry Turkle is point out, even though we are still on our devices.

Randy: Right. So, I think I can summarize my thought on this, clearly, which is, any interface that allows a single click for me to add angry, without and object on it, decreases my chances of influencing the person, or the event, I was angry with, because there is no context provided. So, the one way we can improve using these tools is if I choose angry, I do actually have to say at what.

Scott: Well, and as a designer, we could even prompt people that if you choose ...

Randy: Exactly.

Scott: ... that if you choose something it would give them the ability to provide the context, rather than the context-less emoticon.

Randy: Yeah, so, agree and disagree are missing. We know from helpful/unhelpful movie reviews that two of those icons are going to be re purposed for that, because they already are. If they had helpful and unhelpful we know those would be mapped to agree and disagree, for controversial objects. So, is angry going to be the new disagree?

Scott: Yeah, I think so.

Marc: So, is this all because typing a few characters, a comment, a short message, is too burdensome, and is it too burdensome because of the time, or because we're doing it with one thumb, standing in a checkout line, and that's why we really need, at most, the two to three to four tap method for replying to complex situations. Rather than the forty- or fifty-tap necessary to actually type out a five- or eight-word sentence.

Scott: I think that's a good point. I don't think that these systems are being designed with user convenience in mind to necessarily help us to communicate with each other better. I think that they are there to help us generate notifications, so that we come back to the application faster and more often.

Randy: A single click on a face has striped almost all semantic meaning from the event.

Scott: I think you have a point that this particular system is being set up, and this particular way, because mobile devices are being used for the quick in and out, you know, quick check. Users are using it that way, and Facebook and Twitter are adapting to that particular use in order to capture that behavior. That's what it is, it's a behavior capture system. They're getting somebody's attention, they want to get somebody to "engage," even though I don't think that's engagement. Then they're going to pull all that data together, and they're going to use it as either targeted advertising, or use it to generate more notifications to bring the original posters back to the application, where you deliver more ads.

Marc: So, I would say it as this: Why not to like the new Like - I'm angry, you might be happy, but we might not be able to tell.

Randy: That sounds like a great summary to me.

Scott: Yeah. Yeah.

Randy: Thanks everyone. I hope you're enjoying the new format.

Go ahead and say thanks, guys.

Marc: Right. Scott?

Randy: Say thanks.

Scott: Oh, that. I'm not. I'm like, now I'm lost.

Marc: You're not thankful? I'm thankful. Thank you everyone.

Scott: I'm Angry. Thanks.

Randy: Okay, that's great. That's an ending. I'll take it.

Scott: I don't know why. I'm just Angry.

Marc: Well, I'm going to be Grumpy in a minute, so ...

Randy: I might even keep a little of this.

Marc: Bye-bye.

Randy: All right.

Outro: For links, transcripts, and more episodes, go to Social Media Clarity dot net. Thanks for listening.

With this episode we embark on a series of "Best Practices" looking at the entire online community lifecycle - from ideation to creation though early growth to maturation|transition|transformation and even on to end-of-life.

It's a big, hairy, ambitious goal - so let us know what you think by leaving feedback at SocialMediaClarity.net

- This episode is for people starting an online community based on an existing group, family, friends, team, club, fans, church, guild, or hobby enthusiast - We are going to help you establish your online community’ purpose, goals and initial members. - When we are done, you’ll be in a better position to launch and keep the momentum of your new online community.

TT;DR - The Questions you need to answer before starting your community are:

Hi I’m Lucy Bartlet the co-organizer of San Francisco Community Manager Group and the girl behind ForumCon another VIGLink marketing things and I love the Social Media Clarity podcast.

Randy: The vast majority of new online communities die in their first days, weeks or months. It's not because of a lack of initial enthusiasm but because the creators didn't stop and consider the nature of the work they were about to undertake. It is a lot of work that falls in the shoulders of the group founder, who usually creates a group page on a social media site by just filling in some fields and then thinks, "What's next?"

Randy: Welcome to the Social Media Clarity Podcast. 15 minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media in platform and product design.

Randy: Welcome to the Social Media Clarity Podcast. I'm Randy Farmer.

Scott: I'm Scott Moore.

Scott: Today we're starting a series of best practices for establishing and curating a new virtual home for an online community.

Scott: For our first chapter of this series, we'll focus on smaller online communities. We're talking about an online place for your family, friends, team, club, church, guild, clan or your neighborhood. The main idea is that the community provides value primarily to its members not to a company, brand or an institution.

Randy: The vast majority of new online communities die in their first days, weeks, or months. It's not because of a lack of initial enthusiasm but because the creators didn't stop and consider the nature of the work they were about to undertake. It is a lot of work that falls in the shoulders of the group founder, who usually creates a group page on a social media site by just filling in some fields and then thinks, "What's next?"

Scott: We're going to talk about identifying and establishing your communities purpose: why people gather will gather in your community, your communities goals, what you're trying to achieve as a group and how do you know your community is successful and your initial members, who's going to help you seed your community and make it a vibrant place to gather and how do you grow a membership from there. These are the critical success factors to get your community started and keep the momentum going so you can increase its chance of success online.

Randy: As we go through these three big questions, we'll be using a specific example to show how they are applied. Let's consider our example: Drone photography of miniature terrain. This combines two hobbies, drone photography and miniature terrain building. This could mean everything, from drones taking impossible to get pictures of Legoland, to building remote booms to go inside small-scale model buildings. Our founder, Kasey, is an amateur, skilled at building miniature terrain of all types and is a gadget freak and is excited about the possibilities of remote cameras with her main hobby.

You should state your communities purpose clearly For example, mainstream drone photography doesn't pay enough attention to alternate uses such as: smaller scale, indoor flight, and even non-flying drones.

Scott: The first thing to establish is your community purpose–your central theme. What is it all about? The reason we do this is, a share tense of purpose helps people build relationships which makes stronger communities and that makes the work easier. The other reason is that, people are busy and so are your future members. Adding another source of social input had better provide more benefits than it cost. That is, your theme has to be compelling enough to overcome handling invitations, registering the overhead of demand on your members' time to read and to post.

Randy: So Kasey wants to describe her community as the home for model builders, photographers and drone aficionados, to share about terrain and drones, building hacking and photography. Oh and did I say photos? Lots of photos.

Scott: Once you've stated your community purpose, you will need goals to understand if you're accomplishing that purpose. Goals break up into several types. There are goals for the whole community; there's goals for the members of your community; there's goals for yourself; and there's goals for people who are visiting the community but haven't quite joined yet.

We'll start with group goals. And these are what the entire community contributes to, as a whole, to help the community achieve its purpose. The way to think about goals for the group is to imagine what the community success would look like; that you have enough members who are helping each other; that your members are improving on some skill set; and that your members are solving their problems whether they're small of huge. Once you identified these goals, you need to measure your progress and accomplishing them and some might be easy to measure. Many platforms have traffic or participation stats built right in. Some are harder to measure and so simply asking your member, by surveys, or encouraging them to give feedback about the kind of successes they're having from your community can be helpful; and some are really hard or they're too big to be able to measure, and so, you might use proxies or break them down to smaller pieces.

So how are we going to pick out success for Kasey? Let's pick out photos- lots of photos. So one goal can be, to appear on the first page on the google image search if somebody types in drone or miniature terrain. Another to goal to measure can be the number of uploads to photographs to Kasey's site as compared to uploads of some other site related to drone or miniature photography.

Randy: After the community goals, it's important to remember that every individual member comes with their own goals. How they interact with you really depends on how you want to specify the community. Do you want your community to be a friendly, welcoming, place? Helpful, collaborative, argumentative or spirited or even downright competitive. Communities can display a whole range of behaviors and you can influence the overall character of the community by determining which member goals are important. For example, if your community is about mutual support, consider that you have experts analysis and you might need technology to support questions and answers. Think early about what motivates your potential experts and you will support them.

Some members want recognition for their contributions from other members or from staff. Make sure the contributions that support the community purpose are the ones you recognize. Considering our example, the member goals are not perfectly aligned with the community goals but support them nonetheless. We're going to support social feedback, in the form of likes, so that community members can provide feedback to each other about the content that they think is best, for we're not likely to create a point system or leaderboard to compare them to each other. We like to support expert's analysis in the form of a moderator-granted helpful badge, as a way to recognize long term contributors.

Scott: Let's take a moment to talk about you as the community creator and why you're doing this and knowing what you want out of it is really important when considering how much effort is going to be required. Managing a community is a job in itself and it can take time away from the thing you're actually interested in and why you started the community, and if you're not happy, then nobody can be happy.

At first, it will feel as if you're doing everything- posting, welcoming, all of the moderation- and you are doing everything. And don't be disheartened; it can take months, even a year, for a community to gel. And we'll give you some tips on how to make it easier little bit later in the show.

The reason it's so important to think about what you need out of the community is because there are three broad outcomes that can happen if you don't think about this.

That is the bad, which means that you focus on the community so much that you become resentful about losing time you're spending on the topic.

Then there's worse, and that's focusing on the topic but then the community is suffering because you're not paying much attention to them.

The way to reconcile this and get the good outcome is to accept your role in the community and get help from other people who are in your community. I have a few tips on how to do that:

First of all, be honest with yourself and your community about the your role and your goals. At first it's all about you to get it started, but as time goes on it will be more and more about them.

Ultimately, you're starting a community for a reason and if the community isn't getting what they need, you're not getting what you need. So it's somewhat symbiotic. The more people who come into the community, the more your personal goals will wind up taking a backseat through sheer inertia.

Next, the objective. Realize that community platforms give you the community creator power that others' members in your community don't have, so be conscious and be careful about what you say and what you do. In the rough and tumble of community, it can sometimes feel personal, it can sometimes get personal, and that can get in the way of the community, as a whole, being successful.

Then it's important to be flexible. Anything can happen in the community- everyday could be different- and being flexible about working with your community rather than reacting to your community, can make things so much easier on you.

One way to make it really easy is to get help. You might already have volunteers who are helping you with managing the community or you can lean on the whole community for help. I've done this with the past with identifying spam rather than me solely trying to find every piece of spam that exist. I just let everyone know, "If you see it, let me know" and then it took care of itself.

And in asking help from your volunteers in your community, you're also setting up the future of the community if, for whatever reason, you might need to leave. If you are leaning on them more, they become less dependent upon you and overall this good for a community.

Back to our example, Kasey has identified what her needs are and she understands that she's in it for the networking with other drone makers and other miniature terrain builders and photographers.

She's also in it a bit for the revenue to support herself, to support the community, so she's upfront with herself about this and upfront with the community. Nobody's surprised if ads are going to be on the site.

And she has a separate goal. she understands that this could grow very big and she's going to share the load so she needs to find people who are going to be able to be capable of helping her with the community moving forward, but she want to do that within the next six months.

Randy: Finally, we want to consider visitors and their goals. Visitors are non-members often called read-only users and they often arrive at your site by external pointers such as invitations and shares- the most commonly, Google search. Visitors are the hidden factor in online communities. Their goals are typically short-term, either fulfillment of a Google search or checking out something specifically shared with them.

When setting the goals for your site relating to your visitors, you need to consider what benefits the community gains for having visitors in exchange for what benefits are granted to the visitors.

If you have a closed-door community for example, people could only arrive with the invitations. If you want a lot of random visitors, then the ability to read or maybe even download content would be key.

In some cases, you may even wish to allow visitors, non-members, to contribute in the form of likes or comments. You should keep your visitor goals in alignment with your community goals and if you want to increase membership, consider what would encourage them to join.

And for Kasey- in fact, she wants to encourage visitors- so she wants to make sure that visitors can find read and share the content on her site and actively encourages the recruitment of contributing members but won't allow posting without membership, in the hopes that it will encourage conversion.

Scott: Now that you have your purpose and goals together, you want to think about how you're going to attract your first members. Even the best plan community needs to attract his first 40th or 4000th member.

We're going to focus on the first 25. So, you're going to help you seed the community, who's going to get things started. What you should do is name 25 people that you think would be very active in your new online community; they might be from your local group; they might be from other online communities that you're already a part of: forums, social media; they might be blogging themselves where they might have their own podcast.

The next step, once you have your 25 people named, is to tell them about the community you're starting and personally ask them to help you by sharing their knowledge and experience. If you know them well, it's pretty easy. Contact them personally by email, by phone or in person and simply tell them about what you're starting and ask them to help, share. If you don't know someone well, participate where they are participating so you have a common foundation from which you can ask them eventually.

It's very important not to broadcast or poach from other online communities. You can quickly earn a bad reputation from the members and from the people who are hosting those communities. It's far better in a long run, to work in parallel with existing communities. That way people who come to your community and decide to stay with your community will actually be a stronger foundation for you.

Even after you asked people to join your community, it's important that you set the example. You need to create content in the form that you want emulated. If you want a site with lots of pictures of miniature terrain, you better start by taking and uploading lots of pictures miniature terrain to your community.

You will also want to establish the kind of behaviors that you want and here's a couple of recommendations for or things to start establishing early:

What about everybody else?

Let's start with additional creators and contributors to your community. These are folks who are like your initial 25, are knowledgeable and supportive. The way to find additional creators and contributors to your community is a many version of what I outline for the 25. Seek out people on online forums or on social media, follow them or participate in the forums, compliment them or be helpful to them in some way and introduce yourself in your new community. Any marketing strategy you make towards these particular group of creators are best around sharing supporting, being heard and being appreciated for what they know and what they've done.

You will also want to attract seekers, sharers and the curious to your community. These are the folks who're seeking answers, support and share your community purpose. Some ideas on finding these folks include, encouraging your community to spread the word, either by sharing links or posts or content or by referring specific people to your community. And obviously, search engines are your friend. Allow your community to be indexed by search engines. This is really good for niche communities especially as they grow, because they tend to attract people using the same terms as your community.

Like finds like. And the marketing messages to this group can be more broad. My advice is to talk about what the community is doing. Aspire to describe your community without using the word "community" or the phrase "join our community." It can be tough but if you use action verbs such as "share," "learn," "grow," "get," then you can avoid ambiguity around the broad-term community.

Randy: So let's try our example. Where will we find our potential members for our drone photography and miniature terrain group. Kasey is already a member of several email groups and participates in message boards, both for drone photography and for miniature terrain. She knows several people who are actually using drones to take pictures and she talks to them frequently about using drones on the smaller scale, and she asked them if they will interested in helping her by posting their pictures to her community.

Kasey decides even to post a flyer at her friendly local gaming store with a URL and some drone photos of her own miniature terrain. Besides the invitations, Kasey gets her initial members from the maker and D.I.Y. communities, that she's a member of, again, forums and groups.

After getting those initial members and priming our community with a dozen or so photos, highlighting the intersection of these two hobby communities. She shares those photos targeted to communities she participates in, on Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr and even Facebook.

Good luck Kasey.

There you have it. Three big questions to help you start on your journey to setup your online community:

The next step will be to choose a platform. Now, we don’t have time for that today, but we've linked some resources in the show notes that will help with that such as my recent paper: Five Questions for Selecting an Online Community Platform.

Scott: And if you would like personal help, I am available for consulting to get you started. You can email me at: [email protected]

Randy: For links, transcripts and more episodes from the socialmediaclarity.net thanks for listening.

This is the third in our series of episodes critiquing Huffing Posts changes in commenting policies and technology. This time, we interview an insider: Justin Isaf who was in charge of community at HuffPo in 2011 and 2012.

For links, transcripts, and more episodes, go to SocialMediaClarity.net.

Thanks for listening!

We're back after a long hiatus. We missed you!

Scott and Randy contunue sharing thoughts and observations inspired by ForumCon 2014, held in June. This time focusing on the transformation of the industry driven by mobile (keyboardless) devices.

For links, transcripts, and more episodes, go to socialmediaclarity.net. Thanks for listening.

Scott and Randy share thoughts and observations inspired by ForumCon 2014, held in June.

For a transcript or to comment, please visit SocialMediaClarity.net