Moderator's Reading List For Online Community

The demand to build online communities has been accelerated by the fashion of social media. Consequently the roots and best practices of moderation are often overlooked due to the pressures to perform. However, online community building requires skill -a cultivated skill - in order to create a productive and safe environment for information exchange. Online communities can be of great value to organizations seeking to foster relationship building, increase customer intimacy, and to better understand the needs of their members (and therefore have the ability to translate those needs into service offerings or products).

We believe that the act of building communities for business is a strategic initiative that can fuel the lifeblood of an organization. The information gathered through the give-and-take of dialogue can be leveraged to benefit both the customer and the company by serving to inform and change the ways the company does business; Perhaps there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with a product ... through the community, the organization can learn about it before it becomes persistent, and perhaps issue an product upgrade. Maybe there is a new hot issue brewing within an industry... the community is likely to identify it quickly - which leaves the company in a position to respond.  There are some of the ways that well moderated conversations can make a competitive difference.

Online communities are of greatest value to a company when they are managed internally as the customer relationships are much too important, especially in the B2B realm, to leave to an outside agency. But, in order to be successful, the act of supporting interactive areas needs to be conducted wisely. In our training workshops where we teach community management skills within companies who manage social sites, we often leave behind a summary of readings so that the community facilitators can continue to have resources at hand when questions arise.

Here are some articles that we believe can be most helpful to both novice and expert community managers alike...


The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online
by Howard Rheingold
This web page contains an extensive list of moderating tips and of ways to model good conversational behavior.


Building Professional Peer Communities: An Interview with Vanessa DiMauro
by Matthew D. Lees
This interview provides a good historical overview of online Communities of Practice. It also discusses some concrete areas of online community building, such as establishing trust, member relations, and active moderation.

Calming Threads of Conflict in Online Forums
by Nancy White
This summary of a list conversation discusses useful strategies for a moderator who is dealing with challenging postings in their online community.

Communities of practice: a brief introduction
by Etienne Wenger
An introductory article to Communities of Practice, it includes a list of nine activities through which communities can develop their practice, including problem solving, seeking experiences and mapping knowledge.


Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge: Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice
by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder
This excerpt from Harvard Business School Press discusses the successful elements of a Community of Practice and how to more fully engage members.

Guidelines for Managing Virtual Discussion Groups
by CARE Academy
This two page handout identifies four categories of online communities, key moderator roles and commitments, and sample evaluative measures.


How Online Social Networks Benefit Organizations
by Lisa Kimball and Howard Rheingold
This article discusses ten ways that an online social network brings value to a corporation, with a description of moderator strategies to achieve each goal.

Preliminary Heuristics for the Design and Evaluation of Online Communities of Practice Systems
by Mark Notess and Josh Plaskoff
Written by a professor at Indiana University, this article identifies nine heuristics from a review of academic online community research. For each, the authors identify key questions to be considered.

A Roundtable Discussion About Online Professional Development: Three EDC experts in online professional development discuss the evolution of the field
by Dan Tobin (interviewing Judith Zorfass, Glenn Kleiman, and Robert Spielvogel)
Three early creators and researchers of online professional communities discuss successful facilitation techniques, activities to engage the community and methods of evaluation.

Top Tips for Moderators of Online Discussion Groups
by William Spitzer, Kelly Wedding, and Vanessa DiMauro
Adapted from a moderating book published by TERC – a pioneer in online professional development ­– this article shares moderating strategies, including asking questions to encourage participation, composing thoughtful responses, and promoting reflective dialogues.

Why communities of practice succeed and why they fail
by Gilbert Probst and Stefano Borzillo
Published in European Management Journal, this academic article identifies ten reasons that Communities of Practice succeed and five reasons why they fail. Moderator techniques are described along with a corporate example for each.

There is also some good stuff to be found on the download section of the Leader Networks site

Please add to this list to help grow a useful body of work for all of us community builders!