Counterinsurgency-Style Community Management
Grant McCracken linked to Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency by Dr. David Kilcullen, Lieutenant Colonel, Australian Army, discussing it in the context of applied ethnography. If you are able to abstract away the most obvious differences between insurgencies and online communities, there is a lot of wisdom in this document directly applicable to the role of community managers.
In a modern online community, while no sane P.R. person would acknowledge that their employees view some segments of a user base as enemies, that attitude does exist, despite the measured tone of external communication. There are direct competitors kept at arm’s length, griefers, trolls, spammers, and many other types of people who (whether consciously or not) act to undermine the stability or quality of an online population. It is a significant portion of the job of a community manager to deal with their everyday activities without causing harm to the community through their own actions. And in many cases, the goal of certain harmful subgroups is to provoke the community’s operators into harsh action which they can then convert into media coverage for their own viewpoints.
If you’re involved creating online communities, i’d highly recommend you go read this article, ignoring temporarily the real differences between our work and the operation of a counterinsurgency. If you can work with the analogy, much of this hard-earned knowledge can be applied in similar ways. For example:
12. Prepare for handover from Day One.
Believe it or not, you will not resolve the insurgency on your watch. Your tour will end, and your successors will need your corporate knowledge. Start handover folders, in every platoon and specialist squad, from day one— ideally, you would have inherited these from your predecessors, but if not you must start them. The folders should include lessons learned, details about the population, village and patrol reports, updated maps, photographs—anything that will help newcomers master the environment. [...] This is boring, tedious and essential.
Staff at online communities come and go, but rarely do I see the operational knowledge of community managers codified into forms that can be quickly picked up by new hires. Often, new community managers are thrust into a situation beyond their comprehension by an engineering staff who has become too busy to deal with user base issues. It’s a great concept to develop handover folders for future community managers, or even engineers switching over to deal with a problem while the main community folks might be away. In some websites set up for community success, there exist mountains of contextual information connected to users, data, and media, visible only to the employees, which perform this function of informing people about the context behind a situation while they consider solutions. An emphasis on problematic user groups, topics, and geographical regions would be a useful component of such documentation.
18. Remember the global audience.
One of the biggest differences between the counterinsurgencies our fathers fought and those we face today is the omnipresence of globalized media. [...] When the insurgents ambush your patrols or set off a car bomb, they do so not to destroy one more track, but because they want graphic images of a burning vehicle and dead bodies for the evening news. Beware the “scripted enemy”, who plays to a global audience and seeks to defeat you in the court of global public opinion.
This is a fantastic insight into the operations of hostile parties on large, established communities. In some cases, direct competitors provoke a company into hostile action, which they use to get attention for their own startups by claiming injustice. In other cases, it’s an attention- or pageview-seeking bloggers causing problems then writing digg-bait about being banned from your service. With the speed of global blogging, it’s essential to remember that all correspondence and actions taken during a ban may be posted online, resulting in your trial in the “court of global public opinion.” Bans in this case, are commonly not finished when the moderator clicks a button.
I could go on, but i’ll let the article speak for itself. Some of my favorite pieces are the discussions of understanding a population locally and deeply, and gaining its respect, if not its love. I love finding cross-disciplinary overlaps, and this is one of the best examples i’ve seen in a while.
