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The Seven Deadly Sins of Online Community Management

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Community managers are human and imperfect. Here are the Seven Deadly Sins that community managers are sometimes guilty of:

1. Pride: Preventing community members from criticizing you. The fear of negative feedback in communities tends to be overblown; fiercely negative comments are atypical. Communities thrive on member-to-member communication, and the authenticity of the community is at stake if members can't make critical comments or find that those comments are deleted. Negative feedback is valuable feedback; better to have it articulated in your own community where you can respond to it then have it only appear elsewhere on the Web.
2. Greed: Failing to share with community members the results of feedback and the changes inspired by the community. Where survey respondents typically don't expect to receive detailed summaries of the results, community members are participating in part to learn from their peers. They want to see how their views compare. And for feedback communities, they are participating because they value their relationship with you and they want to see you change to serve them better. It is critical to demonstrate to members how their feedback is translated into ideas.
3. Lust: Using the community to try to win sales. Survey researchers have confronted this and banned it: sugging (Selling Under the Guise of research), deemed unethical by standard market research codes of conduct. Don't treat the community as a lead generator for events and programs and sponsorships. Provide a community code of conduct that discourages members from commercializing the community to one another. A good community is primarily a social space rather than a commercial space.
4. Envy: Starting a community because "everyone is" rather than defining clear goals for your own organization. We encounter this among our prospects more than we would like: organizations that built an online community because it seemed like a good idea, but hadn't put in the effort to plan their objectives and how they were going to achieve them. The clearer you can be about what you expect to get out of your community, the easier it will be to measure the return on investment and to justify continued investment.
5. Sloth: Failing to devote the time and staff required. Forty-four percent of organizations surveyed by Beeline Labs reported a significant challenge was not finding enough time for their online community. In the initial launch, community management needs to devote time to starting and participating in discussions, and marketing needs to execute an extensive campaign to get people to log in and then to get them to come back. Over time a successful public community becomes self-sustaining, building a virtuous circle of online community engagement, but the community management must prime the pump.
6. Wrath: Punishing community members. Negative behavior in an Internet forum can take many forms, from flamers to troublemakers to pet-project promoters. Prepare some guidelines for how you will deal with detractors in your online community (see the linked post for advice on five types of detractors and what to do about them).
7. Gluttony: Over-surveying and over-researching members. Provide a Bill of Rights for community members discussing the restrictions you'll honor. For instance, limit surveys to twice a month and limit the length of surveys. One area where gluttony is acceptable: encourage as many members as possible to join!