Giving Up Control

Sage advice from the Wall Street Journal:

“Part of giving up control is also giving visitors the freedom to complain and criticize the brand, or to wax lyrical about a competitor, to their heart's content.”

This isn't really giving up control. It's pretending to give up control while tightly holding the reigns to stop things going wrong.

Giving up control is giving people control over the community. Real, proper, control. Like giving some members the power to delete and moderate comments. Offering the power to open and close forums. The power to physically alter and adjust aspects of the community as they see fit.

The danger, of course, when giving members this level of control is they might use it to destroy the community. This rarely happens. Usually, it's only when you give members the power to really screw things up that they take responsibility for making it successful.

Comments

[Liam Barrington-Bush]

Well put Richard!
How often do you want/choose to invest yourself in something that someone else has done entirely themself? Probably not that often... it's usually only when we can start to take some kind of ownership over a project/community/campaign/piece of work, that we start to take leadership with it.
Campaigners are often worried about 'losing control' of their campaigns and their message, but really, it's what they should be aspiring to - a campaign truly run by and with the community...