TechWag

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Louis Gray posted an article looking back at the last three major user lead revolutions when it comes to users balking against what look like seemingly arbitrary changes on the part of a social community. All three, Digg, Facebook and now Twitter center around thee major ideas, functionality, censorship, and privacy. He also picks up on the Google RSS issue as well.

The problem with this, and as a social community manager, or company that has a significant exposure to user generated content or social networking is how to handle the controversy of the things that are going on at the time. Most companies blink, but not before there is a major Public Relations (PR) disaster that is happening right now. If you look at the times when users have lead the revolution it always boils down to a vocal minority that is able to generate a lot of noise about an issue or a subject. Much like the “streisand effect” many times what you want to hide/not deal with becomes a huge issue on the internet.

Companies looking to develop policies, plans, procedures, recovery, marketing and public relations all need to understand those three events, what caused them, why they were significant, and why you can not stop them from happening. The best you can hope to do is be upfront with what you are planning on doing and why you are doing it. The one big commonality between all of those is that the companies in question did not truly communicate early enough what they were planning on doing.

Digg was somewhat of an exception, because they were trying to comply with a legal mandate, however that was seen as censorship. If Digg had been blogging or otherwise sharing with the community that this is the issue, this is why the Blu-Ray decryption code was being pulled down, people still would have posted it all over the network, but the firestorm might not have been as bad as it was.

If you are thinking of doing social networking, working through how to handle the controversy that you are going to create or have created for you at some point is one of the critical issues to address early on. Much like any disaster recovery plan, knowing how to manage the disaster, no matter what it is, is a very good thing to know how to do.

When you are dealing with user generated content, knowing how much it means to you, your success with social networking, and how you will manage that content (take down, explanation why, sharing the issue, or hiding the issue behind a policy) puts a value on that user generated content before everything goes snafu when something happens. If user generated content means little, then that is good to know. If user generated content is a part of the business model you are using online, then it has a significant value, and much like an activist stock holder, you might find yourself at the wrong end of a group of users, who want you to do something other than what you originally intended on doing.