Dealing with online community troublemakers

As corporations and other organizations move to more interaction with their audiences (customers) and form online communities, there is (as we all know) a fear of losing control of the conversation. Well, yes, there is a loss in control, but the gain in getting real time customer ideas and response, the perceived openness of allowing even negative feedback and the increase in rapport with customers all far outweigh the drawbacks. Your customers are going to be talking about you anyway on all kinds of sites and forums - you are crazy as a company if you don’t want to be part of that conversation.

That said, there are some participants whose only goal in regularly commenting is to make trouble. I’m not talking about people who talk about a bad customer service experience or criticize a product feature. I’m talking about people who continually disrupt the conversation for no reason other than to disrupt the conversation. 

Obviously these people can be banned, but they can easily return under a new name and email. What is the answer? Jeremiah Owyang of Forester Research posted what I think to be the best direction in his blog post Social Punishment: The “Bozo” Feature.

This feature does not ban the person, but makes him invisible to all other users. The theory is that he does not realize he is invisible, but rather thinks he is being ignored. So when he does not get irate response from his voluminous outrageous posts, he finally gives up.

One commenter to this post felt that such an approach is “passive-aggressive” and led to a “vanilla-bland-boring community” in which no one would want to participate.  I disagree. There are, unfortunately, those in the world who do not want to add to a conversation but merely get a rise out of other users. These people drive thoughtful contributors away. There is a difference between making negative comments about a product flaw, customer service, or some other real issue and making trouble for the sake of it.