• Helps  members understand community expectations and culture
• Makes it easier for your team — and other community members– to  manage the community
• Helps get legal buy-in as together you’re addressing many known risk areas

In his book Managing Online Forums, Patrick O’Keefe provides thoughtful, detailed recommendations on developing and enforcing guidelines based on running several thriving communities.  Here are just 10 of his many guidelines; check out his book for more, as well as real world examples and nitty gritty advice on  running a communities.

10 community guideline ideas

1. Advertising and spamming: beware the many, many sneaky advertising  methods people try to use. Patrick provides several examples, which are also helpful to bloggers  trying to understand  whether some comments are legit or a backdoor spam strategy.
2. Copyright: guidelines should help members understand what they can and can’t do within copyright and intellectual property laws.
3. Personal, real-life information and privacy: don’t allow home addresses and phone numbers.
4. Vulgar language and offensive material: Not allowed.
5. Freedom of speech: Communities are intended to be places where people with like interests can share ideas, debate views and give and get help. But they;re not places where anyone can say anything. “You have no obligation to allow people to say whatever they want, whenever they want. It is your site and it is your responsibility to set the guidelines that all users must adhere to.”
6. Respect: Inflammatory or disrespectful comments not allowed, including slanderous information. Related, “Do not allow your site to become a soapbox for someone you believe has some sort of agenda.”
7. Deleting accounts and/or posts in the future: put guidelines in place that will respect someone’s request to have his/her posts removed, without removing valuable content from the community. (Patrick’s advice: change user name to something non-descriptive like username85673.
8. Hotlinking: No posting and linking to images, videos, fies on servers that you don’t have permsission to link to as the person paying for the server  is paying for this. “The result is badnwidth theft.”
9. Caution on advice: “Your policies should make it clear that any advice given on your site is for informational and educational purposes only, that it is not verified by you or anyone else for accuracy and as such, it can be inaccurate.” He notes this is especially important if the community conversations get into highly sensitive — and often regulated — issues like healthcare and financial advice.
10. Who’s the boss? Make it clear who has the final say on enforcing guidelines, and be clear about who people should contact with a complaint and how the complaint should be lodged, e.g., via private email vs. on the community site.

Note: Chapter 6 of Patrick’s book,  “Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos,” addresses issues that every corporate legal eagle worries about when it comes to social media and that not enough marketers think through  before launching. Showing legal that you have anticipated these types of possibilities and have detailed plans in place for dealing with them will help you more quickly overcome legal’s concerns and get them working with you vs. finding reasons why NOT to have a community.

Let’s take three common scenarios and analyze whether those relationships are indeed shallow or not.

If my 13 year old son has friends on Facebook or some other social network, and he uses those networks to continue interacting with his friends after school, or when then move on to high school - are those shallow relationships? Of course not, it enables him to extend his interactions with class mates beyond school hours, stay in touch with people who change school, or extend his relationship with weekend-only friends or summer camp friends to everyday relationships. It makes his relationships stronger - not weaker or more shallow than the friendships I grew up with.

Now let’s look at people who I know professionally and befriend of Facebook. I get to know people from a totally different angle than I would have ever gotten to know them from our professional interactions. Through social networks I will get a better sense of their hobbies, their music taste, their reading preferences, or even their family struggles - strengthening that relationship beyond the weak ties that professional relationships typically lead to.

Ok, so how about those people you accept as friends on Facebook or Myspace that you do not really know. In my case I am a blogger and I have an audience. Whenever someone befriends me on Facebook and we have more than 10 friends in common I will friend them back. I look at it as an audience - and through social networking I actually strengthen the relationship I have with my audience. The same can be said for bands on Myspace - they can create relationships with their fans that is much stronger than we ever had with the bands we liked.

Now I will not befriend someone who I do not know on LinkedIn. Why? Because on LinkedIn the reciprocity that makes that network work is based on social capital I have with others instead of just myself. For LinkedIn to work I need to try to get you some time with someone else I know, not just give you my time as is the case with Facebook and some other networks.

So all in all I think that a majority of online social networkers benefit from stronger relationships with people they interact with online, not weaker or shallower relationships. Social networking adds a dimension to most relationships that was previously not there.

Sure, there are outliers out there who do not benefit from stronger relationships by being online - and a ton of them who are wasting their time and your time - but those are outliers. They actually exist in the physicall world as well.

The workshop was four hours, yet the time flew as there’s so much to talk about and learn in this area. What made the session especially valuable to me was the tremendous participation and insights from HR and communications executives at some of the biggest companies in the world. What a great group to teach and lead! Thanks all.

During the workshop we did an exercise about “anchors” slowing companies down from realizing the possibilities of social media, which we addressed as part of the session. Here were the biggest anchors from the group, in order of “anchor weight.” The overwhelming resistance to change was a bit frightening to me. How can companies survive, never mind grow, without some risk and and openness to new ideas?

Top anchors slowing down social media adoption

• Time and resources: Finding resources amid competing priorities, where to find budget, who to manage
• Fear: Inappropriate employee comment, fear of bad news, maintaining company secrets, afraid to fail, fear of exposure, fear of unknown - this has never been done; fear of change; loss of control
• Management buy in: Conservative culture; old guard holding on to what has always been done, senior management not in favor of “sharing”; resistance to change; senior executives are anti-communications
• Generational issues: baby boomers not always willing to embrace new technology, generational resistance
• Value: lack of clear purpose for getting involved
• Initiating: Lack of a champion who gets it; knowing how to get started, where do you begin?; no resident expertise

Additional, but less significant, obstacles

• IT: security issues; IT desire to maintain control of tools; Complexity: too many competing technologies, too complex
• HR
• Legal/risk management
• Having to try to make SAP and Sharepoint work as social tools
• Maintaining company voice
• Employees feel they are already asked to do too much

So the counter-intuitive thing to do in this economic downturn - engage more aggressively with your customers, prospects and detractors in social media and social networks.

And when you do, remember that the most important behavioral attribute is not transparency, but empathy and reciprocity.

What do you think? Are you using LinkedIn or Facebookmore often? Would you network more heavily on Twitter or in other communities right now?

What we helped them understand is that the first thing they need to learn is how to articulate their own story, in other words, what is it that moved them to become involved and engaged, because it’s from their own story that they’re going to be able to most effectively engage others. So when people leave, they leave equipped to do that. That’s sort of the foundational piece.

And in the initial series in California, we launched 200 teams in two weekends that, with the support of four staff people, built that operation out there to the point where it could make 100,000 phone calls a day. This is like an investment in civic assets, in local communities that no political campaign has done for years.

The right benefited from being rooted in social movements, which do this because that’s what social movements do. They translate values into action; they bring people in to work together. But on the progressive side, everybody had become marketeers. Everybody’d been marketing their cause or marketing their candidates as if it was another bar of soap, transforming people from citizens into customers.

What we did was bring the citizenship back in and put the people back in charge, and then put the tools in their hands.

For me the biggest difference is not to bring the citizenship back, it’s about realizing that the power of personal stories - what motivated you to buy into this cause - is much stronger than that of talking points about the cause.

The same is true for brands, products and services. Let people tell their own narrative about why they like it instead of trying to get them to sing from the same song sheet with canned corporate speak.

The greatest challenge is treating people who are losing their jobs humanely and with dignity. The second challenge is keeping remaining employees engaged during such uncertain times. A Gallup poll shows that companies with engaged employees grow earnings 2.6 times faster than those that don’t. In this economy, that may mean that companies with engaged employees make it, and those without  will not.

Here are eight communications suggestions for these difficult times:

1. Create  online alumni communities ASAP – a place to help find new jobs,  provide encouragement and support, get financial advice on how to keep life together, etc. You can be up and running with  Ning community in less than 30 minutes for less than $30 a month.
2. Don’t paint a rosy picture on a bleak landscape: people know things are bad, don’t pretend they are not.  Be clear about your business situation and what you believe the company needs to do to survive and come out stronger.  For every action, help people understand the why behind it. You’ll earn more trust by being real vs. trying to put a “good spin” on a difficult situation, that will continue to be fraught with uncertainty for at least another four fiscal quarters, if you can trust the economists.
3. It’s not about transparency, it’s about fairness and caring: Employees must feel that you care about their personal well-being. A recent Harvard study found that “even well-meaning organizations can destroy trust if they are perceived as being fair but callous.”  Get out of the office and into the field with your employees so that you can both experience their worlds and show that you care and that all the HR  “employees first” mantras are more than just rah rah.
4. Tie every decision to your corporate values: take out those values and use them as the guide for making decisions and communicating.  If you really believe the values, they will guide executive decisions in a way that will resonate with all your stakeholders, particularly employees.  In making announcements, explain to people how the decision supports the organization’s values.  And if the values are not helping to guide decisions,  you know that the vision/value exercise was a failure.
5. Start with managerial incompetence: the largest driver of employee trust, according to the Harvard study, is managerial competence. In looking where to reduce staff, don’t simply cut by salary range or management level. Make sure you keep the A players, and excuse the mediocre. This will earn trust and motivate employees.
6. Put Enterprise 2.0 tools in place to make it easier to work: with fewer people needing to do more work, make it a priority to provide company-wide 2.0 tools (wikis, blogs, communities, forums) that make it easier for people to find help and resources within the company, collaborate, solve problems small and large, and connect as people with other people.  Most of these tools are inexpensive, easy to install and require little training.
7. Sit in the chair: last year a communications manager of a large retailer put two chairs in the company lobby and made herself available to employees who wanted to sit and talk. The response was overwhelming. (Read more here.) Sometimes small gestures go a long way, especially in such stressful times.
8. One point at a time: My tennis partner, a financial CEO,  and I were recently getting crushed in a match. He came over and gave me this advice: “Take it one point at a time.” We did, and we came back and won.  In such stressful, uncertain periods this same advice may be good for business as well.

You can also see the full interview in three parts here, here and here.

Let me know your thoughts - especially as we are in the midst of updating the study which is done in partnership with Deloitte and the Society of New Communications Research.

Sign up for the Symposium, and join us for drinks the night before at the Harvard Faculty Club of for the Gala Awards dinner that Friday night.

Can you overcome the perceptions?

And how do people make buying decisions when they need a product or service from an industry that is tainted like that? Sure, they can ask for recommendations…but in a lot of cases you do not need that product or service too often, and many of your friends may have never needed it either.

It’s a tough one…and one that many small businesses are facing.

Thoughts? Good case studies? Let me know…

I believe that the answer is in having communities that are tied to a transactional infrastructure. As I described in an earlier post, there are 4 forces of increasing returns in communities - members, content, member profiles and transactions. If your communities are purely member and content-driven, without a solid transactional component - like buying, or getting help - then it is much easier for members to pick up their profile and go hang out somewhere else. It is only if the transactions that I need to do become easier and more effective because of my interactions with the community - i.e., buying a book, renting a movie, getting recommendations for photographic equipment purchases - that I will have a hard time to pick up my stuff and go somewhere else.

If that is the case, then you wonder why so many communities are not directly integrated with the transactional infrastructure of the company that is hosting it. If I am a frequent buyer with a company that is now hosting a community - they should enable my buying experience to become better because of that community.

It also makes you wonder how magazines and newspapers, who typically have content-based communities, can increase their community switching costs. Maybe they could affiliate with their advertisers’ transactional infrastructure instead of selling banner ads which annoy all the members anyway.