15 May 09 # When a customer is a bad community member…
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Managing our online community is one of my many responsibilities. The online community is an extension of our content site, which is, partly, a subscription-based service. One of the challenges I face is how to deal with “inappropriate” members of the online community without losing them as a customer to our content site. Ultimately, the goal of the of the online community is to build a network of people who are loyal to our brand and become long-term subscription customers.

I am always disappointed any time that I have to remove a user’s membership in community, because it usually means that we’re losing a customer. As such, I often go to great lengths to try to rehabilitate abusers rather than banish them from the site. I know that the volunteer moderators who run the day-to-day community are often exasperated by my insistence, but I believe that if someone wants to be a part of our community, it’s in our best interest to try to find a way for them to be productive contributors.

Seth Godin had two posts this week that really hit home for me in this battle.

First, he asked What to do with people who aren’t going to go away quietly? He advises that when you have a customer that’s not going to leave you alone, it’s in your best interest to deal with that customer head-on. I agree completely. These unruly community members are people who aren’t going away. The violate of code of conduct repeatedly, they are slow to take responsibility for their actions, but they are quick to voice their outrage anytime a moderator takes action against their inappropriate behavior. They can be warned, reprimanded, or suspended and they’ll still keep coming back. When I encounter these people, I know they shouldn’t be ignored. For all the frustration that they bring me and the moderators, it’s clear that being a member of the community is important. When someone says to me “I want to be a customer”, well, in most cases I think I’d be foolish to say “I don’t want you as a customer.” I surely hope that the lifetime value of the customer is greater than the opportunity cost for me to spend the time to manage their behavior.

Seth followed up with Do you have customers or members? We have many more customers than we have members, and not all of our members are customers. What I want is for all of our members to be customers and all of our customers to be members.

Members can be difficult to manage, but they are clearly worth the effort.

11 May 09 #
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Just learned that I share my birthday with the company that employs me. We’re celebrating with cupcakes in the commissary, I’m honored.

8 May 09 # The speed of news
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Amazing how quickly Twitter replaced blogs as the source for breaking news. Seems much quicker than the move from newspapers to blogs.

This started as a message I posted on Twitter, but I thought it was interesting enough to expand a bit here.

I work in digital media and among the things we do really well is quickly aggregate news from across the Internet. It struck me as odd this morning when I got up and checked our news feed and noticed that two of our most recent items were sourced from Twitter. One of the Twitter users was a sports agent, the other a television reporter. We aggregate hundreds of stories a day and I’d be willing to be that a month ago, we’d never used Twitter as a source. Now, we do it routinely. Of course we post our feeds to Twitter too, and I’m amazed at how often we’re re-tweeted.

When our business first began more than a decade ago we were scouring newspaper sites, watching television, and listening to the radio to uncover all of the stories that we wanted to cover. Of course, the problem with newspapers is that the news is already a day old once you read it. Still, we provided one-stop-shopping where people could quickly come and read summaries (and our analysis) of relevant sports stories from across the country.

A few years ago, blogs started to become a pretty common source for us. They were updated more frequently and often included the little details of transactions that were important to our niche, but might not be important enough to make it into the newspaper. The blogs gave us more sources, and more news, but required us to improve our own filtering so we could sort the important details from the noise.

Fast-forward to 2009 and now we’re moving to using Twitter to get the news as quickly as possible. However, it’s not just about speed. It’s about the content. Now blog writers are using Twitter to toss out quick thoughts that might not warrant a blog post. Again, we find ourselves digging valuable nuggets of information out of what is seemingly throw-away noise on Twitter.

Each of these new generations of content production has given us more news, more details about the news, and it’s done it more quickly. The trade-off is that with more news comes more noise, so we have to keep working harder to quickly discover what’s important without getting bogged down in the useless chatter.

It’s a good problem to have.

7 May 09 #
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RT @darrenrovell1: Big Papi to wear black and pink Reebok cleats this wkd. For mother’s day, not tribute to ManRam. (Best line of the day!)

6 May 09 #
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Glad that Dylan Ratigan is staying w/ NBC, but pondering the impact on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street - Ratigan vs. Burnett - http://is.gd/xh9e

3 May 09 # Boxed Out
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Last night I had the pleasure of hanging out with a couple of good friends and enjoying some of the early Spring weather here in the Nutmeg State. As we were finishing up our meal, we decided that we should head back home and catch the Manny Pacquiao fight on Pay-Per-View. We arrived home just after 11pm, and still had about 20 minutes before the fight was scheduled to start. However, when we pulled up the fight on Cablevision the system told us the event was no longer available for purchase. A quick call to customer service confirmed — Cablevision wouldn’t let people purchase the fight after 11pm.

We were shocked. Here we were, sitting at home, ready to spend the $50 to watch the fight, and Cablevision wouldn’t let us order the fight. We did our best to negotiate with customer service, even making our way to a supervisor, but the answer was still the same: We will not let you order the fight. It didn’t matter if it was 1 minute, 1 hour, or 1 year after 11pm.

Now I’m sure Cablevision has some well reasoned argument for this decision, but how do you not let your customers pay for your product? Cablevision’s customers have myriad choices for how to spend their entertainment dollars, and Cablevision should be fighting for each and every transaction. Here was a situation where a customer desperately wanted to pay them $50, and Cablevision simply could not find a way to satisfy the customer. That, to me, is a business failure. This was a one-time event, so each customer that Cablevision declined to serve after 11pm represents $50 in revenue that Cablevision will never receive.

“Delight the Client” is an overused cliche, but the lesson behind it remains important.

-UM

P.S. In hindsight, maybe we’re glad that Cablevision didn’t let us pay $50 to watch 4 minutes of boxing, but I’d much rather have been given the chance to watch the fight live on TV.

Tags: Marketing Customer Service Sports