Remember that time you narrowly avoided total community combustion when the brand page was hacked? Or a team of cruel trolls who de-railed the prosperous conversations claiming your brand had done something horrible? Or how about the time you yourself made that critical (and mortifying) typo in real-time and it was fueled virally?

Community Moderators can commiserate with these examples and many more. I’m willing to bet we’d all benefit from a little therapy session to unload our deepest community confessions. Thankfully, there seems to be a connected community of CMs out there who keep each other sane sharing stories and tips. We decided to make something of this by creating a SxSW session proposal entitled, “Confessions of a Community Moderator” where we’d like to bring CMs from around the globe to participate in an interactive Confessional Booth and workshop discussion of common challenges and solutions.

Together, we could create the next Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook… for Social Media Managers. The funny thing is, despite the responsibility over channels that many view as “fun,” or even “easy,” Community Managers need to bring in best practices from a multitude of different roles, such as Copywriting, Account Management, PR (Crisis Management), Content Strategy, Publishing and Promotions. What we all really need is a list of most common challenges and solutions (as crowdsourced from a smart group of CMs at SxSW) that pull in best practices from all of those disciplines and many years of combined experience with branded communities. To give you a taste of the potential here, we’ve started the list. Behold:

The 7 Monsters under Every Community Moderator’s Bed
(and a Survival Guide for Claiming Victory Over Them All) Read More