The One with All the Hate….

ok, so first of all I would like to apologize everyone for such a long silence on this blog.. the reason of it is pretty hmm silly I would say.. and it goes pretty much like this.. I wanted to make my blog a good source of knowledge and to sound smart while doing it and I was wondering how to do that. OK, you can stop laughing now, let me explain you what I mean. When I started this blog I wanted to write about how my work looks like, share my experience, show you the world of community management. Then I got this message that I should do my blog more pro, more “article” like than “blog” like and I fell for that… eh yeah, I know…

so anyway, that’s finished. No more trying to make this blog something it’s not. Blogging is blogging, nothing more, nothing less.

so today I want to share with you one of the most exciting part of every community managers job. Dealing with Hate. We all know that part of CM work is moderation and communication so basically trying to make sure that everyone in the community will follow the rules… and that means that sometimes we have to talk to people who are not really cool with our ToS, Rules etc. Let’s be honest, people don’t like to be told that they are doing something against some “rules”. And then the “hate” shows up.

What is hate? In case of this “post” I understand hate as a feeling that shows the community manager that something wasn’t explained in a good way so our user is confused and he’s not sure how should he respond. The easiest way – the one controlled by emotions – is to flame the CM. How can you flame the CM? By calling him names, by trying publicly to show how f**** up he is, by being rude, by deleting your acc and asking others to do so, by calling him on his priv cellphone, sending anonymous letters with “I’ll kill you” message in them… there is a lot of ways to flame, but hey! i don’t want to give you any stupid ideas… so let’s go on.

What is hate again? Let’s focus on understanding HATE as a sign. Sign of misunderstanding. In case of dealing with hate I like to generalize – which I hate to do in every other case. I generalize by stating that every single person on this planet is a good person inside. Really. I mean we are all here to live, we have different visions, different ways of expressing our feelings, different everything. But deep inside we are all good people. In some cases deep deep deep deep down but still…

Assuming that everyone is a good person when someone says “I hate you u !@*$!)@$*!@)# CM” I think “oh gosh, I made him feel like crap and now he’s confused and not sure how to act so he’s saying all these bad words“… then – depending on what he said of course, I’m not an idiot – I’m trying to find where did I go wrong? – communication always goes 2 ways – and I’m thinking how can I fix this, how can I tell him that I’m sorry that he feels this way and that if we talked more then we could probably find a way of understanding…

OK so I think I told you pretty much what I think, now let’s make sure you’ll understand it right so you won’t hate me.
Case Studies : The one with the Spam.

Scenario: A new user finds out that our community is a very cool place where more than 460 000 people  – yeah, GoldenLine is that BIG – with full name and surname interested in self development, business, career etc with average age of 30, sharing their experiences, gaining some new, meeting new people, networking. So he thinks – hey! this is the coolest place ever to tell people about my business, I shall go and spam so they’ll now about me.

And there he goes, he names himself as “Axel F.” and starts to send random people mails with link to his website. Let’s say he sent like 347 priv messages and about 200 forum topics on random groups – not connected with the kind of business he has (example: Topic about Cars on the forum about Healthy food).

And BAM! Someone reports him, I get his ID, home address, size of his shoe… OK, I went too far. Let’s just say I get the link to his profile and his topics. Let’s say I won’t delete him – as I should, I mean the guy is a bad-ass, he broke like dozens of rules we have – I will just delete the spam and send him a mail with the info that he shouldn’t do that as it’s against the rules. What will happen next? He will go mad! – of course we assume he will, maybe he won’t but let’s think about first option for sake of this case – he will say that he didn’t do anything wrong, he just tried to advertise, call you names etc. Now from my observations of flames I know that a lot of people will try to explain him that he broke the rules, and he shouldn’t have done it etc. and just try to explain their selves. That would probably work but “probably” is not good enough if you want to be good in what you’re doing….

In this case someone came to your community assuming that this community is great. You know that and you should use that knowledge as this small tiny thing is something you both believe in so you can use it to get his trust. So what you should do is firstly feel sorry that you made him feel this way. Then you should feel like he’s a baby and you’re hmmm some more mature person :) Then you should tell him – and mean it – that you understand what he tried to do but also you’re here long enough to know that this place is sooooo coool – your common ground – because people didn’t do what he wanted the way he did, if they did this place would be crap and no one would get any value from that. Simple as it is. And what’s more not even for a sec in this response of yours you didn’t judge the spammer directly. You just showed him that his actions were not good even if he had good intentions. So in the end he will probably feel like a crap but in the way that will let you sleep well. And that my friend is what I call professionality.

:)

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