Community Management Lessons From Sarah Palin

By Sanya Weathers

This fascinating article appeared last week in Slate: It’s a quick read, but if you’re pressed for time, here’s the gist. Someone wrote a program that allowed them to see what the moderators of the Palin Facebook fan page were doing, in order to get a feel for what was being deleted.

The result is a crash course in community management as brand management. I am a proponent of community management as community building, and using the relationships (between customers as well as between the product and the customer) as the primary means of retention. But if you’re not interested in relationships, and you are interested in branding, there’s a lot of stuff here that’s being done right.

Here are the four strategic elements as seen from the deletion patterns:

1.  Spontaneity is not part of a brand management strategy. This is not as evil and manipulative as it sounds. Putting your best foot forward involves thinking about which foot is your best, and how/when you’re going to take a step. Letting people post whatever comes into their minds is not conducive to planning.

2.   Don’t associate the product with negativity. Negativity comes in many forms, and the least harmful is the kind that directly expresses anger from the consumer to the product. In order to prevent a deliberately public-facing community from resembling a cesspool, you also need to remove the negativity insiders express towards newcomers and those who don’t want to be insiders.

By removing all such negativity, you create two impressions: One, that your users are in full support of your product, and two, that there are no cliques or mean people in your community. These impressions won’t stand up to any serious examination, but remember, your lurkers and casual viewers vastly outnumber the people who are regular visitors.

3.   Position your product as mainstream by deleting extremism on both ends of the spectrum. PVP games often use this strategy. Catering to the hardcore, full PK with no limits crowd in person, but remove any such references from the official site. The videos and recordings still exist, but most consumers aren’t going to troll YouTube for the things the combat designer said at GenCon.

This kind of disingenuousness doesn’t play well on forums, but as part of a brand management strategy, you need to identify your niche, get consumers in that niche excited, and then position that niche as something that could potentially appeal to mainstream audiences.

4.  Don’t dilute the message by taking on associations. The author of the original article doesn’t understand why these types of posts are deleted, but it makes perfect sense from a brand management perspective. Your brand is not an Amazon product recommendation widget. (“If you like Idylls of the King, try Le Morte D’Arthur!”) No matter how benign the association, or how likeminded the target audiences seem to be, you need to understand that you can’t pick and choose which traits of the other product will be associated with yours. It is better to position your product as unique and authentic.

Professional community managers who specialize in strategic communication can work wonders for a client’s visibility and message.