Is This Terrible Community Management?

Every few days, someone will highlight an example like this of terrible community management. 

DreamHost is down. People are angry. No-one from DreamHost is managing the comments. This, therefore, means it's terrible community management.

I would argue that this might be great community management, at least from a community perspective. A common enemy is good for the community. A community united against you is still a united community. That's not easy to achieve. 

If the community were to find a way to band together and resolve the problem, community theory suggests they will be much stronger for it. There is some evidence of this happening. They're suggesting different hosting providers, for example. 

None of this will help DreamHost. Upsetting your customers isn't smart. Many of these customers wont be coming back. But this isn't the point (of this post).

Customer service and community management aren't the same. They overlap...in places. But they're different. The art of developing a strong community isn't synonymous with the art of pleasing every customer. They diverge, frequently. This isn't terrible community management (or community management at all), it's terrible customer service. 

A community practitioner sees a major problem as a big opportunity for the community to work together to find a solution. As a result, the community is stronger. A customer service rep should will press the panic button and tell the audience to sit tight until the problem is resolved. That audience has no power. 

This might seem like a minor, terminological, difference, but it's far bigger than that. Time to start considering if you're doing community management or customer service. 

Comments

[KirbyG]

What kind of power could a user have in this situation though?

How can a community "work together to find a solution" when the problem is a blown air conditioner unit, or a major disk rack blown?

I think you're talking apples and oranges.

[Luke Winter]

Hi Richard,

If community management and customer support are as you say often working at cross purposes, but share the same goal of say 'delivering and maintaining a great customer experience', then any situations in which they are at odds would have to be arbitrated based on the goal.Certainly a community manager who wished to remain employed wouldn't say that the community is more important than the customer.

Since community management is somewhat young as a discipline it hasn't had a generation of experience navigating these conflicts in the manner that product management, sales, marketing and engineering have. It would seem that fundamental conflicts such as the ones you describe say less about the the difference between the customer support and community management, than the leadership in that company in communicating what is really important.