Do you have a moderation strategy? Or do you just remove provocative posts (often the best kind)?
When members visit a community, they copy what they see other members doing. The important word in that sentence isn't 'doing', it's 'see'. You get to decide what members are likely to see. Your moderation strategies shapes what members see and, thus, what members do.
Moderation isn't removing the bad stuff, it's making clear decisions about what you want members to be doing, and emphasizing those elements.
If you want members to discuss fiscal policy, then highlight those discussions, interview members discussing that, create a poll about fiscal policy, make fiscal policy discussions sticky threads.
Your moderation strategy shapes your community. It nudges members to take the actions you want. Pro-actively establish your strategy. Don't reactively remove the bad stuff.
I perfectly agree with your analysis, which emphasizes the fact that moderation and community management are deeply linked. Actually moderation is one of the community management tasks (and for sure an important one).
As you said, moderation should not be considered as an activity just consisting in “removing inappropriate content”.
For me and my team, moderation is much more: moderation consists in showing users the way of being within a service: what could be done, discussed, showed and what shouldn’t.
In others terms, moderation activity has also to be used for informing, educate, prevent deviant behaviors, stimulate the discussion, and underline good contributions… finally manage a users’ community, hasn’t?
Posted by: Maxime Dumont | Wednesday, 20 October 2010 at 14:22
This is really smart. It's a bit to long to turn into a tattoo (and that's really not my thing), but I'm going to display it prominently at my desk and make sure our moderators read it too.
The best thing is that this strategy sounds a lot more rewarding than being a hockey goalie.
Any thoughts on how to turn things around in a community where people have developed some bad habits?
Posted by: Da12vid | Friday, 22 October 2010 at 00:59