Traci, To me, this really depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your social media, forums in particular. Hopefully, you have some control over who your bloggers are, so you can dictate to a point what they can and cannot write about.
Forums, however, have users that you have no real control over. For a forum, it needs to be made clear from the start what is and is not allowed. If you give them free reign over what they say at the beginning, you are just asking for disaster. It will likely get very bad, and someone at your organization will want to start enforcing some order, which then causes problems with those users that want to be able to do and say whatever they want. For example, I used to work on the website for Taste of Home magazine and worked quite closely with the manager of their customer interaction group. If you take a look at the forums on tasteofhome.com, particularly the forum called Kitchen Chat, there are all sorts of random discussions going on. If you look at some of the older topics (more than a year old) some of them get pretty nasty and vile. About six months ago, the person in charge of the forum moderation retired, and was replaced by someone that wanted to bring things back to a more civilized discussion. He started banning people who violated the terms of service, and started locking and deleting threads that did the same. Then, several of these people that were friends with the people that were banned started yelling and complaining about censorship and violation of freedom of speech. It was a very ugly situation, which really hasn't actually cleared up yet, but it's getting there. If they had understood that there needs to be some sort of moderation in this sort of environment from the beginning, this would never have been a problem. The thing that you need to remember about moderation and social media is this: how is your website and your company going to look to a new (or prospective) user when they check out your website for the first time and are taken to a page where someone is spewing out vulgarities left and right and disparaging other users just because they can? To me, it is definitely worth losing those users (or never getting them to begin with) that are going to make the entire experience unenjoyable for the majority of the group. Also, as for freedom of speech, the rights provided to us in the United States by the Bill of Rights have NEVER allowed for the right to say anything to anyone, anywhere, anytime. You aren't going to allow someone to start swearing at you or verbally abusing your children in your own home, correct? More than likely, you'd throw that person out of your house and never let them come back. The same should hold true on your company's website - some things should not be allowed, and you need to be able to enforce that. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=44836 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
