Getting to know your community: breaking down the divide

by Jesse Coombe, eModeration Community Manager.  You can follow Jesse on Twitter @emodjesse

Yesterday, something Tamara said got me thinking about the word “user.”  Within this industry and others it has become the catch-all term for people who visit a site, post on a forum, or play around in a virtual world.

For a long time I’ve held the belief that we’re really using the wrong term.  “User” implies exclusion and a one-way relationship.  It suggests that they consume the services provided and give nothing back.  Shouldn’t we all strive for a sharing culture in our communities, where visitors see our content and are inspired to create something for the next visitor to read or look at?  Perhaps if we were to adopt a more inclusive term we’d be halfway there?

The other problem with the word “user” is that it’s very impersonal.  “User” is a word made for marketing and corporate back-patting.  “Our site has 1,000,000 registered users producing 100,000 ad impressions per day!”  That may be all well and good for the board room but people don’t want to feel like they’re a commodity.  Furthermore, when office buzzwords leak out into official forum posts or newsletters it serves only to fuel the reader’s belief that we’re entirely detached from them, even to the extent of speaking a different language.

So what would be a better word to use?  You could try “member” – indicating inclusion and belonging.  Perhaps “contributor” – reminding them that they provide for the wider community, just as you do.  I feel that either is an improvement on “user” but why not refer to John, or Sue, or even xXsephirothgoku1337Xx?

The larger your community gets, the harder it is to genuinely know your members.  Even so, the investment of time to establish a relationship with at least your most active members can produce invaluable results.  Read their posts, respond to them, start a dialogue.  They’ll appreciate the effort and so will anyone else who comes across the thread!  It shows that you, the community manager, are friendly and accessible but by extension these positive attributes will also be attached to the brand you represent.

Once upon a time I was the community manager for a massively multiplayer online game.  I was fortunate enough to be involved with the project from the very beginning so it was relatively easy to introduce myself to new members as they registered and give them the shock of their lives that a community manager on a gaming project was actually willing to chat with the fans of the game!

By demonstrating that I was in fact human they were much more willing to treat me as such.  I wasn’t just the shadowy supervillain, existing purely to tell them what they could or couldn’t post and periodically deliver bad news about release date slips through a maniacal grin.  They acknowledged that these were unfortunately necessary aspects of my job but they knew me and understood that I had their interests at heart.  The game missed more deadlines than I’ve had hot dinners but we never incurred even 10% of the nerd rage I’ve seen in other gaming communities and I attribute that entirely to the time my colleague and I spent hanging out with the members.  I ought to point out that I hired that colleague from within our own community and he hit the ground running as only community alumni can.  Having already fostered relationships with his peers as a member, he was instantly accepted as an authority figure.

As a community manager, as a moderator, and as a plain old “user”, I’ve seen so many communities with a profound “us and them” divide and a membership that actively rallies against the management, like teenagers against their parents.  What I hope you’ll take from this article is the knowledge that this doesn’t have to be the norm.  Treat the members of your community not as users but as people and it won’t take long at all to see the difference in how they respond.