Community Management : Serious Work

Happy New Year to all, and welcome to my first post of 2010.

I’m just emerging from a small seething session provoked by a post in Ad Age (subscription only now I’m afraid but here if you’re a subscriber), where a hapless journo inadvisedly suggested that community management would be a great second career for ad agency creatives and hacks cast upon hard times by the current recession. That may well be true, and the article did contain some good information, but Ms Armstrong’s unfortunate assertion that prospective employers would be satisfied if their community manager candidate's job qualifications were that they subscribed to a few RSS feeds, were a regular blogger and used a suitable email address was – well, shall we say, far off the mark?

I wasn’t the only one to be riled either - see Angela Connor’s post and comments below on the subject in her Community Strategist blog. ‘Demeaning’ was the word most frequently used to describe the article on Twitter.

By the criteria set out in that Ad Age article, I could be a community manager myself – heck, I even understand a little about traffic analysis, and site navigation and I know a LOT about internet safety (not even mentioned by Ms Armstrong). But luckily for our clients, I also know my limitations. Community Management requires a diversity of talent, tenacity, dedication, experience, technical knowledge, communicative ability, aspersion and tact which I can only admire from afar. Lots of them have been at it for ten years or more.

Which brings me on to big halloos of glee for our Community Management team at eModeration, and a totally shameless plug for our services follows. We put together a review of the year for our internal purposes – then decided it looked so good we’d let our clients know about it too. You may just possibly not know yet that we offer multi-lingual community management as well as moderation, so here are the non-confidential bits which I can publish here.

Although we have always offered some community management services to our clients, we made it official by creating a new community management services offering that we launched on February 17, 2009.

With the help of a large team of trained (multi-lingual) Community Managers, last year saw us work with key clients such as the LEGO Group, MTV US and UK, Lifetime Networks, Supersecret, and Semana Digital.

Our client base has stretched across France, Denmark, England, United States and – the furthest afield and most exciting client visit - Colombia.

We have provided consultancy and direction about children’s safety, moderation guidelines, escalation procedures, moderation procedures, community set-up, change management, and Community Rules. We’ve guided clients in how to engage communities in children’s virtual worlds, on message boards, in chat rooms, teen virtual worlds, and specialty communities. We’ve written member communications such as newsletters, editorial promotions, community rules, FAQs, direct emails and templates. We’ve given seminars about Community Management and Strategy.

We act as Community Hosts by loving and nurturing our clients’ communities to engage their members and drive loyalty. And it seems we have been making our clients very happy:

“I think the work was very useful thank you for everything. We are very happy with the work done. Hopefully we will ask you again to help us with the set up and the administration of 2 or 3 communities." - Sergio Quijano, Managing Director, Semana Digital

“Working with eModeration was a pleasure. They were extremely professional, knowledgeable and most importantly thorough. The documentation they helped us develop will go a long way as we grow and expand our moderation team." - Ken Brunt, VP, Customer Operations, SuperSecret

“eModeration has been an integral part of our success . They not only provide hands-on customer service, but have also helped us to retain users by creating an engaging on-site presence and coordinated member communications. eModeration is also very proactive; they both anticipate our needs and present us with concrete action plans to troubleshoot potential problems. Their flexibility and rapid responsiveness have also enabled us to provide rock solid user support during complex and sometimes difficult deployments. Most important, eModeration treats our community as if it were their own. They are as dedicated to our project as any member of our team and are a delight to work with.” - Dalia Hierro, Vice President of Games, Lifetime Digital

"The eModeration team went to great lengths to understand the unique needs of our product. They delivered thoroughly researched guidelines that will inform all of our moderation strategies moving forward." - Scott DeVaney, Sr. Marketing Manager, Globworld

Introducing some key team members:

Wendy Christie, Resources Manager and Child Safety Liaison, has worked in the field of online community for more than 10 years. As the Head of AOL UK's Social Media and Community Team, she managed moderation, community editorial and community product integration between 1998 and 2007. She has been trained as a CEOP Ambassador, and also has a degree in Education from Aberdeen University.


Ashley Cooksley, Community Management Consultant, has extensive experience in community management, editorial supervision and direction, and Web-based project implementation by working in management roles at Ticketmaster-CitySearch, Petsmart.com, AOL UK, and on her own websites.



Dale Price works for eModeration as both a Community Manager and an Operations Support expert. With over thirteen years of online experience, his roles and projects have involved copywriting and content proposition, encoding and publishing multimedia content, defining and developing user interfaces, designing and developing database-powered web platforms, and moderating and managing online communities.


Sherry Wilcox works for eModeration as a Community Manager and a Project Team Leader. She has over fifteen years of experience in building and managing online communities. As Community Education Manager for AOL US, she managed an online education program that included developing and writing courses in child safety, Internet safety, and building successful online communities.

If you’d like to know more about the community management packages we offer, please email Ashley at ashley@emoderation.com, and she’ll gladly talk you through it.