intothefuzz

For the latest chapter of my occasional Q&A series with notable online community builders, I spoke with Jen Burton, the community manager at Digg. In her job wrangling thousands of Digg community members and their daily interactions on the site, Jen has accumulated quite a bit of wisdom that she was kind enough to share here. Thanks much to Jen for her time! (Note: this interview was conducted in mid-August…my fault on slacking on getting it posted.)

Tell us about what your role is at Digg. What do you do there, and what’s a typical day like?

Sure – the community manager role at Digg encompasses (at least) three different areas: product management & strategy, product marketing & outreach, and finally representing the community. My typical day involves a quick scan through Google reader, checking in with my team to see what’s been up on the site or in emails and several meetings. I work closely with product management, QA and dev as most pushes are forward facing so it’s important that my team and I are aware of any changes coming down. The Digg community will definitely let us know how they feel about feature releases so I want to be prepared.

Obviously the entire Digg site is one big community interaction point, but what are the primary ways you engage with your community? Both in terms of hearing incoming feedback as well as communicating outwardly to them, that is.

We use several different vehicles to communicate: Twitter.com/digg for product, feature or event announcements, Twitter.com/digg_community to respond to people who have mentioned troubles or bugs on Twitter, Facebook.com/digg – mostly as an awareness vehicle by highlighting popular stories on Digg & through our blog – blog.digg.com. I tend to communicate with the community in comments on Digg stories to help educate or soothe swells.

We (my team) and I keep up with Digg mentions on Twitter as well as blog posts (larger media outlets are handled via our PR team) and we certainly keep an eye out for submissions on Digg about Digg. I’m starting to mess around with Facebook’s new status update search, but haven’t quite found value in it yet – I know it’s there, though.

How much of a role does your community play in setting your agenda when you work on product updates, new features and things like that?

We have the benefit of playing a decent-sized role – my team collects user feedback and presents to product once a week – because we represent the community inside Digg different groups here look to us for guidance – everyone from Ad Sales to R&D. Because I have a background in product management, I can’t seem to keep my hands out of that function so I often end up butting in to their realm on a regular basis.

When you spoke at the Good Ideas Salon, you talked a bit about Digg’s mission…could you share that here? And how does the community help shape and promote your mission?

Our mission is to be the place where people share and discover content online – the community is the backbone of that mission – I see the community as Digg’s chief product. So, the mission is designed to give the masses voice where with traditional media, they (we) had none. Digg has changed the way information is shared online in a broad sense & in a narrower sense, has allowed individuals to impact what is “news” or simply just worth sharing with millions. it’s an incredible feeling to have a story hit the homepage of Digg.

Yeah, we definitely get excited when we make your homepage…it’s amazing to watch that momentum kick in.

Totally.

Going back a bit, when Digg first started you were doing something really new…this was before the whole community model was as prevalent as it is now. How did you guys start to build up the community and get that momentum going?

The community at Digg truly grew organically (back in the day, Kevin wore the community manager hat). Digg was a niche site focused mostly on tech industry news so the community members already had something in common, but were fewer in number. As awareness grew (word of mouth – we’ve never had a traditional marketing campaign) the tech nature was diluted a bit and we added categories like World & Business and Entertainment. By branching out we’re able to better serve a broader community which has resulted in larger numbers for sure.

We’ve since added the Digg Dialogg program which has driven a lot of awareness for us. For example, we’re currently accepting questions for a Dialogg with US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in conjunction with the WSJ – my dad received notice of the Dialogg via a WSJ marketing email and ended up signing up for Digg (I don’t think he’d ever been to the site before then).

Regarding your growth, what are the challenges you face having a bigger community? I know that people can be unruly…is it hard to keep them focused or active in the ways that you’d like?

Yea – managing communities at scale is hard – we have a human touch on things like comments and comment moderation so scaling that is difficult and sometimes means that we’re going to miss some bad comments. We don’t, though, want to move into a fully automated world where a machine is decided when a commenter has crossed the line. So that’s the first challenge.

Another challenge is that the discussions on Digg can seem truly overwhelming to newcomers. There are always going to be people who want a more intimate environment than one with 2,000+ comments. Keeping those folks (the intimate types) engaged is more difficult at scale. We’re working on some changes to the site that will help micro-communities grow & I think we’ll see increased engagement – both on the story and comments level.

How do you maintain that human touch? That’s always what I struggle with in our community activities – it’s so important, yet can be so time-consuming.

No doubt – super time consuming. One of the guys on my team is a programmer by training so he’s built some pretty cool tools for us (which is nice in a startup so we didn’t have struggle against public facing feature dev priorities) that allow us to search for keywords, we use another report that shows us all the users that have been reported by other users and evaluate situations from there.

We simply can’t get to them all, though, so we also use a tool that allows us to put commenters in “timeout” for varying lengths of time. This is super helpful when it’s obvious someone is just fired up and needs some time to cool off – we don’t want to ban them, but we want them to walk away for a bit. Works wonders.

But – everything is done by hand – comment deletions, account bans, etc. We also work 24-7 so there’s not a time when trolls or spammers have free reign on the site.

Wow! How many people are on your team? Do you literally do shifts to cover the 24-7 aspect?

Yep – and, I only have 5 people on my team.

Impressive!

Yeah, they are awesome. Super committed and hard working – Digg would be a much different place without them.

Do you have any sort of guidelines posted to help set parameters for community activity? We launched the our creative community’s beta site yesterday and one thing I’m realizing is that we need to be a lot more clear about what the expectations are.

Yep – we have a simple set at Digg.com/guidelines that I wrote with a member of my team. Of course the TOS is the ultimate set but it’s super lawyerly and hard for folks to digest.

Do you refer troublesome people there often?

We do – of course my team and I know who most of the rabble-rousers are by name and email address. I do work with both R&D and product on abuse-prevention initiatives and features so we’re pretty well-versed in common ways people cause trouble on the site. But at the end of the day, it’s important to remember that the trouble makers are a tiny percentage and that we don’t want to tailor the experience on Digg to simply prevent them from getting up to no good. Have to remember the greater good and all that.

Good point! I could probably ask you questions all afternoon, but in the interest of not taking up TOO much of your time I’ll wrap things up. What are the ways the Digg community surprises you? Or makes you happy? Or amazes you? I remember you gave some good examples at the Good Ideas Salon.

Totally – let me grab the links for you…

One good example starts with one where the community sang Bohemian Rhapsody line by line in the comments, then another user mashed that thread up with the song to create a video.

On a personal note, I was really touched by the comments on this story: http://digg.com/pets_animals/Koala_survives_Australian_fire_shares_firefighter_s_water

Ok, last question: what advice would you have to people (me, for example) building a community online?

It’s important to be a part of the community – literally participating with the members – commenting, contributing etc. People need a champion – and as a CM for a new community, you’ll be that person. Once the community ramps up it’s important to step back enough to let the community start doing the driving and talking. Remaining open to surprise will go a long way in making your job enjoyable.

What not to do: talk down to them, stop listening, leave them hanging or blame them for any failures.

One last thing – be their advocate.

Thank you so much for your time! it’s been really interesting, and I’m sure others at Mozilla will enjoy it too.