Better #23

Kia ora lovely people,

Where should I take this newsletter? Serious question, and one I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.

We’re about to tick over 500 subscribers (which is wild) and I’ve settled into a rhythm of publishing, which I feel is DANGEROUS. Because soon I might get too comfortable and start going through the motions and you might get bored and stop reading or start unsubscribing en masse like birds migrating when the winds change (🥹).

I don’t want that to happen (I like you and I like birds), which is why I’d love to chat with you (online) and hear more about why you subscribed in the first place, and how I can make this fortnightly experience better and more helpful.

In return you can ask me whatever you like about what I’ve learned over the past 15 years of creating, sharing, and leading in the content and channels space (or we can just chat 😊).

Up for it? Hit ‘reply’ on this email and we’ll set something up.

Cheers,
Seamus Boyer 👋

I’m super excited about today’s interview. Venessa Paech is a legend in community management, and I first learned about what she does by attending the All Things In Moderation conference earlier this year.

It was an eye-opener for me, as was this interview, which got me thinking much more deeply about what the goal for the comments section could and should be.

Because even though today is all about community management (which we’ll define shortly, don’t worry), so much of it is directly applicable to government and council social media.

It really hope you enjoy it.

👇👇👇

Firstly, Venessa, tell us who you are and what you do.

Hi! I’ve been in online community management for around 30 years, leading community for organisations like Lonely Planet, REA Group, Envato and Australia Post, and consulting with organisations including ABC, the Australia Federal Government, Teach for Australia, Reach Out, Bunnings and Woolworths.

In 2009, I founded the Australian Community Manager Roundtable which in 2011 became Swarm, Australia’s national conference for community practitioners. I led Swarm for 11 years, then in 2023 I launched a new conference for humans who moderate - All Things In Moderation.

I co-founded and run the peak body for online community management in our region, Australian Community Managers, which produces research, offers training, accreditation, resources and other services for community managers working across all sectors and settings. We liaise extensively with government and academia to grow community management practice in the APAC region.

I also act as an expert witness for legal matters surrounding the use of social media and online communities, and I’m a community academic, teaching community management at the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne.

How would you describe community management?

Even though the practice has been around for several decades, it’s still a contested and misunderstood term. If you ask different people you’ll get different answers, but amongst online community practitioners there’s a general consensus that community management is a distinct discipline from social media management. Community management places the emphasis on the people; social media on the tools and the form.

Certainly social media management can involve the nurturing of and managing of a community, but typically it’s more akin to audience management, more like strategic communications or brand marketing, which are separate, complementary skills. And of course, if you're on social media, regardless of your goals, you'll likely be moderating as part of that work.

Community management is the explicit nurturing and maintaining of a community as a social structure (unlike audiences and networks). Community management usually involves managing some kind of community (interest, circumstance, locational, causal, etc.) for a strategic purpose -  organisational, commercial or otherwise. To some this would seem semantic, but the reason it matters is that the way we build a community, maintain and steward it, measure it or define success, are different from how we measure things like audiences or marketing. Community management is concerned with depth and relevance, while social media is more focused on breadth and amplification.

What attracted you to community management and led you to making a career out of it?

I stumbled into it accidentally, which many community managers do. I was originally studying musical theatre at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. This was in the early 1990s, right at the threshold of the early World Wide Web. I found myself drawn to participating in early online communities, visiting cybercafes, hitting the computer lab at Uni to check in. I was totally captivated by the idea that hundreds or 1000s of people were coming together from different countries around a shared idea or purpose, finding commonality and affinity at an extraordinary distance.

I remember watching the early community managers doing that work, promoting shared emotional connection, building shared culture, and thinking, this is incredibly cool. I found it as emotionally and intellectually as exciting as the other work that I was doing. So I became involved as a user and community member - and throughout my time in New York, I grew into volunteer community manager roles, supporting different types of online communities, bringing people together for the love of it.

When I came back to Australia and took up a digital role, people were starting to have these conversations about the new social media networks at the time, asking, how do we approach this? Is there something here for us as an organisation? I was the one in the room who'd had experience gathering and mobilising people online, so became the go-to person for this space.

That’s interesting, because I know social media pros who find the interactive parts of the role quite nerve-wracking - especially when dealing with difficult people, or passionate people, or people who are lonely or confused.

I think it's natural and understandable to feel confronted by that. Digital life is real life, so we carry all our complicated emotions and reactions into it. For some who feel marginalised or unheard in their offline lives, social media feels like a space where they can be heard - and this can yield wonderful possibilities, but also new frictions and challenges. Particularly when we’re talking about local government, these are geographically bounded, established communities, coming together in a new environment full of potential in terms of creativity, expression and collaboration. But it’s up to us to seed and maintain that positive potential.

We have to step up to the responsibility of holding space for complex interaction. That's challenging, it takes time, peer support, and it takes training. I’d also add that those conversations are happening anyhow, even if you're not the one holding that space. So why not lean into the opportunity and be a part of something transformative?

That’s a real responsibility isn’t it, to ‘hold space for people’ online? Do you think government organisations take this seriously enough?

It's a positive and powerful thing to be the facilitator and hold space in a responsible way, but it takes a lot of intentionality. I don’t think government organisations fully realise this, but it's not a lack of care, it’s usually a question of being overwhelmed and under-resourced. Being the 58th thing they have to do that day means it’ll never thrive the way it could, or should.

People aren’t told: ‘Go away for three hours and think about governance in this space’. Or, ‘Think about the culture you want to build, and how you're going to achieve that through modelling different social norms’. Or ‘How might you approach this scenario if things go haywire?’. But that’s the job - that’s the practice of community management.

To me, the lesson for our organisations who want the benefits of the ‘broadcastability’ of these spaces and the benefits of the platform, is that it doesn’t come for free. You have to be ready to create and maintain a social and cultural space in a way that's realistic and achievable for you. That doesn't mean you have to be always on, dealing with crises 24 hours a day, but you must consider it. You have to design the space, the governance, the boundaries, systems and resourcing that's going to allow you to do this in a way that honours your side of that social contract.

And I think it's important for government, for any kind of social institution or representative organisation, to do that work.

Because the benefits can be huge for these organisations, right?

If you're doing social media well you get to tell more of your story, and the stories of those you represent. Social media can be a very intimate medium if you do it well and a powerful and effective communication space. It can deepen trust, belonging, shared emotional connection, shared identity, open minds and promote civil discourse.

If you’re keen to extract the benefits of that, then you need to pull your weight on the other side - you can't just expect to get the benefits and not do the work in terms of making sure the engagement is equitable, safe and time well spent for all (rather than just time spent). Especially when many mainstream platforms are designed to pull in the opposite direction.

It’s also important to acknowledge that not everything should be open for comment. For example, here in Australia I’ve had the pleasure of working with many government departments, and public media organisations like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, helping train and support their multiple community management and social media teams. Over time they’ve evolved their processes and are at the point where they’re making highly strategic choices about the types of content they open to comments, and ones where the risk outweighs any benefit in inviting engagement. It’s about knowing when to leave discussion live and moderate proactively, while ensuring they have the agency to create boundaries around discussion in line with their values, goals, and the common good they seek to achieve and represent.

For most people reading this, they are almost exclusively using the big social media platforms for online engagement, rather than anything more sophisticated or community-specific. Is it fair to say the amount of control we have on Facebook, Instagram etc is pretty limited?

Sadly, yes. Community managers have very limited agency on big social platforms. The power you have in those cases comes down to behavioural and cultural design, social norming, role modelling, using ambassadors and surrogates, and the human work of proactive community management. This can be quite effective, but on those platforms it always feels like pushing a rock up a hill. Remember the history of these spaces - ultimately they are about networked individualism and optimisation as an advertising engine. Enough of our publics are there that they can’t be ignored, but that doesn’t mean we can’t challenge them and build better.

The good news is there are many platforms designed community-first, that come with more relationally attuned features. They're designed for true community, and you can go even further with the kind of curatorial choices about the culture you want to build and the kinds of behaviours or activities you want to facilitate. And that's what it comes down to, right? What do we actually want to happen in this space?

What are some examples of those types of platforms?

There are forum platforms like Discourse, Khoros and Higher Logic. Chat platforms like Slack and Discord. Federated platforms like Mastodon. Some are more forum-based, some more messaging-focused, others video-focused, or events and town hall-style. There are hundreds of them, and community managers can help direct you to the right technology stack for your needs.

Realistically, for councils and governments, their core constituents are probably using the big social media platforms in some fashion (especially older community members), so it makes sense to feature them as part of your ecosystem. It then becomes about optimising in those less than optimal environments.

What are some things which people can be doing to try and encourage better conversations, or at least less gross ones?

Community governance and cultural moderation is key. Ensure you have a community constitution or a set of meaningful (non-legalistic) guidelines. We know people that tend not to follow guidelines aren’t the ones reading them anyway. But it’s critical you have a concrete document to reinforce social norms with, and support your regulatory protection.

Being a more active part of the conversation is a good place to start, and it can take months of work before you can start to retreat, as social norms become more embedded and your role-modelling is taking effect. Proactively steward a specific culture, rewarding and thanking desirable behaviour, calling out and compassionately correcting less desirable behaviour, offering context and examples.

We can afford to assume the best to start with. Many people are clumsy with their digital body language, and community managers need to become adept at reading that. For example, if a user or community member has shared something problematic, but there’s truth and validity somewhere in there, you might prompt them: “Really great contribution, we really appreciate your thoughts on that, but some of the language you use was a little bit insensitive, and I want you to understand why that is etc.” Moderating in public is important for this modelling, as are private moderation moments and correctives.

This can be labour-intensive work, but it pays off, especially after you do it for a little while. The staff member who has custody of that social space, however, has to be granted and afforded that time to do that work, and we know that's very challenging. Communities don’t self-moderate initially, without responsible and proactive community management to steer their direction.

Without this knowledge and training and time, it isn't really surprising then that organisations get jumpy when things get uncomfortable?

Not at all. They’ll either shut down discussions or get reactive, or both, which is not the healthiest of combos.

It comes back to being deliberate in our choices and actions. Are we being really intentional about every post we make, every invitation to discussion that we throw out there? First of all, are we wanting a discussion? If so, how are we pulling people into it? And then how are we proactively steering that discussion as we go, before things get out of hand. Then if they do happen to get out of hand, how are we intercepting that accordingly?

It’s not about creating group-think or whitewashing everything positively. You want to bring in diverse counterpoints, you want to have that debate. But you need to model civil debate. Most of the problems we have in social media are rooted in micro-aggressions and incivility. So we need to think about where things are going to fray and try to get ahead of that.

It is real work, but it tends to ease off over time as you build a community that understands those norms and has internalised them; they do the boundary maintenance for you, they’ll jump in and say, ‘We've had these discussions a lot over the years, here's how they go, here's why we don't do them anymore’.

If we’re unable to do the work, then I would question the rationale of being in these spaces to begin with. It’ll only lead to stress, division and greater risk of harms.

How else could councils and government interact with people online? Is there a better way?

Across community management practice there’s discussion around the concept of ‘community everywhere’. There is a real shift in terms of moving away from anchored-in-place communities, which still have importance as part of an overall ecosystem, but embracing the idea that it’s less about pulling everyone into a central repository, and more about meeting people where they are. This honours one of the core principles of community management - meeting and fulfilling needs.

For example, we might recognise that parent groups throughout our community are on WhatsApp, or some migrant groups may have their own Facebook groups, some people are here, some people are somewhere else. And then asking the question: ‘How can I meaningfully connect with them and add value to their existing communities, rather than co-opting them? How can I put them first and support them where they are?’

In effect, it’s conducting online community outreach the same way you would offline community outreach, flipping the traditional social media marketing mindset. It’s a powerful mindset shift, and one that aligns perfectly with public service.

How do you feel about the state of the internet and social media in 2024? Do you still have that hope and that excitement you had when you started?

When you look at the state of the platforms and media landscape, with the Musks and the Metas of the world, it's hard not to feel dejected and cynical. Like many of us who experienced earlier online communities, I’ve spent time grieving what could have been. Of what I experienced first hand - that distributed web of communities, that has in many ways been stomped on and flattened out, and it's now a different world. That’s sad, and sobering, right?

However, there is growing fatigue with these monolithic platforms and the negative social and cultural consequences they’ve wrought. And I think there's a clear shift coming, already evident in some of the generational social media usage patterns. Younger people may still pop up in some of these bigger digital thoroughfares, but they are increasingly drawn towards smaller apps that cocoon you in an intimate setting, which echoes many of those earlier web experiences. We’re exhausted by profit engines optimised for outrage and division - and the craving for genuine community is more acute than ever.

Perhaps I'm being too optimistic, but I feel there's hope. Maybe we've learned a lot about how not to do this. Younger social media users are simply not tolerating many of these problems. They're interrogating the reality of it, and asking, ‘Why does it have to be this way? It's just a choice, let's make a better choice’. And that's great. It strikes me that the future may look more like the best of our digital past.

Quick 6 with Venessa Paech…

1. Strategy or tactics?
Far too many online communities lack a strategy and jump straight to unqualified ‘engagement’. Everything emanates from your Why: Purpose, then People, then Platform and Playbook.

2. Favourite platform?

Nostalgically, nothing has bested BBS and IRC. There’s a reason so many social networks ultimately end up introducing the same functionality as these older platforms. Currently I’d say Discourse is my favourite community forum platform (their CEO is a New Zealander!), while Discord is my favourite community chat space. Of the mega-platforms, Reddit is the winner, hands down. Their community and moderation teams are excellent, and they invest heavily in supporting grassroots community managers and moderators with the tools they can adapt for their needs.

3. Least favourite platform?
A toss up between X and Meta - for the collective damage they’ve done. Before Musk decimated Twitter, I’d have said Facebook (Twitter was once a fantastic space for government). Though not impossible, it’s a Sisyphean effort to steward meaningful communities on these mega-platforms. Remember their issues are a feature not a bug; they’re doing what they’re meant to, for the people they actually serve (their owners and profiteers).

4. One public sector account to follow?
The Queensland Police, here in Australia, have done a fantastic job building authentic engagement on their Facebook page.
 
5. One non-public sector account to follow?
Rather than following accounts, I’d recommend social media professionals connect with more ‘owned’ online communities off the big platforms. Locally, I can point to the work of Bunnings and Woolworths (who I’m proud to have helped on their community journeys). Bunnings DIY community Workshop is a superb, brand-integrated owned community that works alongside their social media outposts. While Woolworths’ bunch foodie community has generated deep loyalty and significant revenue for the organisation. There are strategic lessons here for everyone.

6. Something you wish you’d known earlier in your career?

Own and defend your story within your organisation as soon as possible. Perhaps most importantly, how you frame and define success. I’ve seen too many community managers fall into the trap of having uninformed leaders or peers set goals around meaningless vanity metrics, rather than a mature take on strategic community value generation for that organisation. They wind up chasing engagement for engagement’s sake, neglecting the measures that truly set them on the right path. There’s a body of knowledge around the practice, and many supportive peers in NZ and beyond to galvanise and elevate you (including Australian Community Managers, which can support through strategy, coaching and training).

That’s it for today. Bloody interesting stuff, right?

As always, please consider sharing this newsletter with someone you think might get value from it.

And hit ‘reply’ on this email and tell me what you thought of it. I love hearing from people 😊

See you in two weeks for more tips on how to get a little bit Better 👋