Chris Ennis

Social networking deviants

As many of you know, I am a co-founder of the social networking website SoberCircle.com. SoberCircle is a community that caters to recovering alcoholics and addicts, a population that general websites do a poor job in delivering a service that allows them to communicate comfortably about their recovery. This is where we come in.

Recently, an incident occurred on SoberCircle where another member masqueraded around the site as me, telling members that they had a problem and that they all were getting on my nerves. Here is a timeline of how the events unfolded in the chat room:

Monday, 2:24 PM CT
A bitter argument between two members takes place (this is not an infrequent occurance in chat). The person pretending to be me says :”oh, just simmer down, i am sure we will all get along as soon as you start thinking like me” These are fighting words for some in recovery…

Monday, 2:40 PM CT
I start receiving messages asking why I would bash monitors. Word travels fast apparently and not very accurately either. Its like that experiment we all have tried when we were younger, where you give a single person a secret, that secret gets passed from one person to another and at the end of the communication chain, the result is hardly like the original message. This is what happened here.

Monday, 3:45 PM CT
By this time there are a half dozen blog posts by various members that voice their frustration with me and they’re starting to comment on my profile. Here is an excerpt of one of the comments:

I would suggest you apologize to your monitors via blog asap.
Things got out of hand and none of it should have been in the chat room.
Please do this soon before things are broken and not repairable.

At this point, I am completely confused.

Monday, 6:30 PM CT

Find out that half of our chat monitors have resigned themselves from their positions. Damage control is in full effect at this point. A meeting is called where we pull our chat monitors into a conference call to discuss the situation and how to resolve it. After an hour and a half of discussion about the matter, we come to some pretty hard conclusions. Here is what we determined:

A moderation force for any website that sees millions of hits has to have a quick, fluid and continuous communication stream that exists outside of the walls of the website itself.

So many of the monitors walk around on egg shells, in fear that any move they make could be scrutinized. Scrutinization is good, but you have to empower these people for them to be effective monitors.

Every action that is taken to clean up chat must be documented so that the other monitors know everything that is taking place within the rooms.

These are essentials to a good social networking monitoring force. All of which are points I was aware of before but this incident just drilled it home even more about important these really are to a successful community.

Its a constant struggle for balance, where every little thing that is seen as negative could be that seed that starts a user revolt.