Social Media Dos and Don’ts
Friday, October 02 2009 - social-media, social-networking, user-experience
Social networking (and by extension, social media) is the current big thing on the internet. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are some of the biggest destinations on the internet for just about any class of internet user. Every business wants their site to have social aspects now and wants their site to be both the journey and the destination for their users and/or customers. The question is, what is the right way to integrate the various concepts into a business site? There are a lot of dos and don’ts that you need to be worried about and today I’m hoping to go over some of these while providing a little history lesson about a site (and company) that I know quite well – TasteOfHome.com, the website for Taste of Home magazine.
(NOTE: Social networking and social media are indeed different things, and I am going to try to use the correct term for the correct situation. For a better understanding of which term means what, please read “Social Media vs. Social Networking: What's the difference?” by Mark Stelzner on Examiner.com. It provides a brief explanation of what each term means in fairly simple terms.
The Early Days
From the start of the magazine, Taste of Home was already a form of social media. The recipes in Taste of Home have always been submitted by readers of the magazine, which means that it is one of the precursors to UGC (User-Generated Content). As the internet grew, Taste of Home also grew to make use of it. Taste of Home is home to every single recipe every published in the magazine, and is also home to one of the most active non-technical forums I have ever dealt with. In fact, those forums have been around for what is almost an eternity in terms of the internet: they have existed in one form or another since 2001. Up until late 2007, the forums were maintained on a separate site, with a separate interface, and with a few exceptions, the users of the forums were left to run wild. Here’s where a big "don’t” comes into play. Don’t let users run amok on your website. If you look at the posts from the first 6 years of the Taste of Home forums, you will find lots of things that you don’t want to find: severely off-topic discussions, insults, even threats towards other users. This is an important idea to remember from the start. I will get into it in more detail later, but for now let me say that trying to add some semblance of order after a period of social networking chaos is very difficult to do.
In December of 2007, we launched a brand new redesign of Taste of Home, with a big enhancement – the direct integration of the forums, along with support for blogs, via Community Server. This caused quite the uproar. First, the system was slower than what the users had been used to. There were a few technical reasons for this, but primarily it was because the previous site was incredibly sparse and incredibly limited. Community Server provides a lot more functionality than a home-grown solution could ever hope to, both for the users and for the administrative staff. Unfortunately, one side effect of this added functionality is longer download times. We really didn’t do enough research in advance of the redesign, so we didn’t know how the users were getting to and using the old forums. Do get to know your potential user-base BEFORE you start building a solution. It turns out that there were a large number of users on the old forums still using dial-up internet access, and an even larger number using very old and very outdated browsers. We knew the makeup of users on the main Taste of Home site, but we didn’t spend enough time focusing on the users of those forums. It turned out that there was a significant portion of users that rarely, if ever, went to the magazine website, but were on the forums for multiple hours every day.
As for those technical issues, we did have some things to work out. It turned out that the database server that we were using for production at the time had some problems, and couldn’t handle the extra load that Community Server gave it. We did get significantly more traffic in the forum area of the site during that first few weeks because in addition to the regular forum users posting a lot more (to test things out), many of the users of the main site were now coming to check out the new forums. So, the important tasks here are: Do plan for scale and Do do significant performance testing. Even if you are starting out new, with no existing forums to move over, you really don’t know how things are going to take off. I’m not saying that you need a whole farm of top of the line servers to start with, but you do need to have a plan in place to get those servers if you need them. We had no such plan and we had to immediately repurpose another server just to get the database up and running efficiently, which looked really bad to the users, because our brand new community was down for approximately 10 hours less than a day after we launched it.
Of course, some of the complaints about the new site had nothing to do with speed or downtime, they were solely related to the fact that it was new. In general, people are creatures of habit, and don’t really like change. The users of the Taste of Home forums were no exception. We shut down the old forums when we launched the new ones, but another of our magazine properties, Birds and Blooms, also had its forums hosted at the old site. There were some users of the Taste of Home forums that tried to stage protests on the old site, trying to commandeer specific forums to be used for the “refugees” of Taste of Home that didn’t want to try something new, for whatever reason. Thankfully, and to an extent predictably, these protests did not last too long, and within a few months, pretty much everyone in that situation had moved over and learned to love the new features that the new system could provide. There are two things to note with this, particularly if you are trying to replatform or otherwise affect your existing users: Do communicate with your users about what is going to be changing and Don’t get too worried when you get complaints about a redesign. If we had communicated with the forum users more efficiently regarding the changes that were coming, they may not have been so adamantly against the changes. You need to be specific – give them examples and screenshots. If possible, making a beta publicly available can do wonders to make your users feel good about the change. It not only lets them get used to the change, it also lets them feel like they are part of the process. In fact, we communicated with the users a lot more when we finally moved the Birds and Blooms forums to Community Server and the process went a lot more smoothly, with very few complaints. Of course, it helped that there was a significant overlap in the user base between the two sets of forums, but providing the users with screenshots and proactively answering their questions before the launch were some of the key factors in a much smoother launch.
As for those complaints, you are definitely going to get them whenever you make a significant change. You definitely need to listen to the complaints, but there is no need to act on every single one. Many complaints are literally just going to be because it is something new, and those complaints need to be taken in, absorbed, and addressed accordingly. Do make sure to address complaints, even if you aren’t going to make a change. This is key – users want to know that they are being listened to, and even if it is something of a canned response, letting the user know that you read their complaint and understand their frustration can go a long way to keeping that user around.
A Period of “Stability”
Shortly after the launch of the new site, one of the online editorial team took over and became the first community manager for Taste of Home. This was a huge step in the right direction. He was out on the forums, making sure that things were at least a little bit civil, even if things were not on topic. Cooking and recipes were discussed on occasion, but even the forums dedicated to those topics seemed to be overrun with politics, religion, random local news and even things like sex. When this was brought up by both the community manager and me, it was unfortunately brushed aside. The overriding opinion was that even though these discussions were off topic, they were still providing traffic to the site, and any traffic is good traffic, right? Well, no, in reality that is not the case. There are several problems with this theory. First, Taste of Home uses context-based ads. With discussions about sex and religion, especially discussions on paganism (yeah, who knew?), the ads that were displayed on the site were not the sort of things that some people wanted to see, and there was another backlash. We had to spend a large amount of time explaining to users and responding to complaints that the ads in the forums are based on what they are writing about, so if they don’t want to see any unsavory ads, then they can’t talk about those things on the forums. Also, because of these discussions, several spammers found the site and started posting random things and creating profiles with links to inappropriate sites. They didn’t find out about this until one of our reporting people found out that Taste of Home was coming up on the first page in google for some unexpected (and highly undesired) search terms. Finally, what happens when someone new to the site, a site about recipes and cooking, goes out to the forums for the first time and finds it overrun with topics similar to those mentioned above, and very little to do with cooking? Most likely, those users are going to leave the site and never come back; they are almost definitely not going to join the discussions on the forums, so that means fewer potential users creating new content for you. Do keep discussions on topic and relevant to the business of your site. If you do this, the likelihood of the above things happening to you is greatly reduced.
Another point about these off-topic discussions is the topics themselves. A former boss of mine had only one real rule for the team – no discussions on politics or religion. The reason? Those are two of the most polarizing topics out there and lead to more fights and arguments than just about anything. So even if you really want to allow off-topic discussions, Don’t allow topics that you know will be trouble to be propagated and prolonged. Keep them in a private forum or group (if you have them) or explicitly disallow those topics, even if you are allowing off-topic discussions. And make sure that the any volatile discussion gets ended by your moderators before it gets out of hand.
That brings up another point: Do have moderators in place from the start. Whether it is a couple of people from the business watching things while they do their “normal” job, or dedicated moderation staff (internal or outsourced), you need this. I will get into detail as to why this is important shortly. However you fill this need, it needs to be known that it is a part of the plan, and the people responsible need to make sure that they are doing this job regularly and efficiently.
This doesn’t really seem like a period of stability, does it? No, it really isn’t. However, in terms of what was going on with the community, it kind of was; nothing was changing. The trolls remained, the discussions still got out of hand, any removal of spammers was handled reactively instead of proactively, and the various factions on the forums continued their little feuds with each other at will. For whatever reason, the community manager wasn’t really allowed or didn’t want to do anything to make a change. Then an organizational change happened.
Finally, a Change for the Better
Early in 2009, our community manager decided to retire. No, that’s NOT the change for the better, but in a way, it did help push the change along. A new community manager was brought in from another publishing company, and when he started talking about all of the same things that we had previously said, something did change. He was given more leeway than the previous community manager, and was allowed to finally do things like ban the naughty users and lock posts that got out of hand. No idea what the driving factor was, it may have even happened with the old community manager still there. The important thing was that the change happened. Of course, this caused a lot of problems as well (as any change does, I can’t say that enough). Things went along well enough, with not a lot of moderation taking place until a particularly bad thread was started and went on for several pages of posts. The instigator of the thread was banned for a two week period and the thread was locked (note, I did not say that it was deleted). The problem was, this person had made quite a few friends on the forums, and was part of one of the aforementioned warring factions. Now there were dozens of complaints that this person was banned and that person wasn’t, or that the post didn’t warrant banning the user at all.
In addition, we started getting people saying that their first amendment rights were being infringed upon because they could no longer reply to one particular thread on a corporate-owned forum. I’m not going to get into the details of all the reasons why that is a flawed argument, but needless to say, the complaints went on and on. This is why I maintain what I said earlier – you need to have moderation in place from the get-go. People need to understand that they need to behave themselves if they want to continue to have the privilege of using your site. If we had had moderation from the start, or even from the start of the newly redesigned site, this would not have been a problem.
One final point on moderation: Do be consistent with how you moderate. If you do not allow personal attacks, then have rules in place that are always followed the same way: Maybe have first offenses banned for a week, second offenses for a month, and permanently after that. If you don’t allow off-topic discussions, then lock/delete any off-topic thread as soon as you find out about it. After a while, your users will even start to moderate for you – anything inappropriate or otherwise not allowed will get flagged by your users and reported to your moderators that way, making their jobs easier. It seems to happen out of some form of entitlement; the user sees something not allowed, and so they report it because they’re thinking “If I can’t do this, then no one else should be able to do it either.” It’s not really the best attitude to have, but it really does help your community.
After all of that seemed to die down, it has finally started to look like the forums are getting better. There are still off-topic discussions, but they seem to be more consistently kept in the dedicated off-topic forum (Kitchen Chat, for those of you interested). In addition, now that bannings are no longer just an idle threat, the users seem to be getting along a little better, and there don’t seem to be as many fights on the forums. But even though it’s much better now, a large amount of hassle could have been avoided and a lot of man-hours could have been saved, had we just followed these rules right away.
A Few Additional Thoughts
So, most of this has been explicitly about forums, but what about those other forms of social media? Taste of Home currently “uses” two other items: blogs and user-submitted recipes. Uses is in quotes because there really is no strategy in place for either of them. Blogs on Taste of Home currently have two problems: there is no requirement or consistency with regards to the magazine editors and writers posting anything and they allow any of their users to create blogs. I was never a fan of this from the start, when the former person in charge of the website said he wanted this. There are more than enough sites where people can create their own blogs for free – your business website shouldn’t be another one (unless, of course, your business IS providing free hosting for blogs). All this does is mix in garbage with what could be good and valuable content from your team. As for the user-submitted recipes, Taste of Home currently doesn’t really do anything with them online. Yes, they can be submitted in this manner to be potentially published in the magazine, but these user recipes are not searchable, nor are they available in the navigation of recipes by category. Here they have a fairly significant amount of actually relevant content that is just being ignored. In addition, this potentially great feature isn’t promoted in the forums, so there are potentially thousands of additional recipes that are getting lost in forum posts, rather than databased as recipes to be made searchable later. What this boils down to is the trumpeting call of one of my favorite Twitter follows, Kristina Halvorson: Do have a good content strategy. I’m pretty sure that she’s mostly talking about editorial content, but it definitely holds true for user-generated content as well. To me, what this also means is Do something correctly, or don’t do it at all. In both of these cases, having bloated, unusable blogs and a partially implemented solution for user recipes is actually worse than not having either feature at all. Having a poor social networking experience is not going to help you keep your users on your site, it will more likely drive them away quicker.
The List
To make things easy, I’ve split out all of my dos and don’ts into a list here. I am not saying that you need to do all of these things to have a successful community on your site, nor am I saying that this list is all-inclusive. But if you follow these rules, I believe you will have a much better site for your users and in the long run, it will help grow your business better.
- Don’t let users run amok on your website
- Do get to know your potential user-base BEFORE you start building a solution
- Do plan for scale
- Do do significant performance testing
- Do communicate with your users about what is going to be changing
- Don’t get too worried when you get complaints about a redesign
- Do make sure to address complaints, even if you aren’t going to make a change
- Do keep discussions on topic and relevant to the business of your site
- Don’t allow topics that you know will be trouble to be propagated and prolonged
- Do have moderators in place from the start
- Do have a good content strategy
- Do something correctly, or don’t do it at all
Those last two points are especially important, not just for social media, so I can’t recommend enough that you follow those for everything that you do on your website.