Question about managing communities
5 by ddumik | 3 comments on Hacker News.
At our company, we manage a vibrant and active community forum through Facebook Groups. We have many free customers (we have a freemium solution with our product) and paying customers. We use the group to share live Q&As, News, different videos, and important notices. Our users also actively post on our group asking for help from various community members, but also to give feedback about our product. We value the feedback we receive, but often the feedback is polluted with a lot of negative comments from other users. Sadly in some cases, the conversation devolves to unprofessional/inappropriate behavior. We do have a staff of volunteers that help us moderate these conversations, but ultimately we are looking to change the tone and habit of the community. Our goal is to share more positive stories, drive our customers to our support team when they need help, encouraging our paying (and more professional customers) to participate and influence our community to have more productive conversations. We are debating internally on several ways to do this. One idea is to start a new Facebook community group, and slowly sunset the old one. The other is to maintain the current community, but be more aggressive about moderating conversations, and proactively post more content. We see many pros and cons with both approaches. We don't want to give customers the strong impression that we're attempting to cover up or censor our community, but we also feel there are many members of our community that is introducing an unproductive and often mean energy to many conversations. For those of you that maintain your online community, have you ever encountered this problem? If so, how did you deal with these type of issues?
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