One of the challenges we face as an organization that wants to foster a sense of community among our members is that there are very legitimate reasons that absolutely open conversations can’t occur in our space.

It runs counter to the whole spirit of web 2.0 and social engagement, I realize, but hear me out.

As I’ve described before, my current employer is a professional association / bargaining agent hybrid. The latter part of that equation is what makes message control important. We represent our members in collective bargaining. This has a couple of different effects:

Effect the First: The ugly game that is negotiation

Hands up if you’ve ever bought a car. Okay, well, since I can’t see you I will assume that many of you have. Those who haven’t have probably bartered or negotiated over something, though. So you are all familiar with the art of negotiation. When you offer the friendly car salesman $20,000 for a car, you don’t really expect to take it home for $20,000. You just want to get him away from the $28,000 sticker price. He hems and haws and tells you that he can’t possibly go lower than $25,500; you pretend to walk away in disgust before coming back and telling him quietly that your wife will kill you but maybe you can go up to $23,000…

On and on it goes, until you both agree that $24,000 is probably fair and he’ll throw in the sport package floormats and the first oil change free.

Now, imagine you weren’t buying this car just for you. Say you were buying it for a whole group of people. (Hmm, this analogy is being stretched a bit). The reality is you did pretty well, you knocked $4,000 off and you’re getting those sexy rubberized floormats. But you had to hold those cards close to your chest; you had to pretend to walk away and imply your wife was going to kill you.

What if the salesman could log on to your group’s website, call up the forum thread on the car purchase initiative (like I said, we’re reaching for this analogy) and read your post from last week when you said you were willing to go up to $25,000 for the car if you had to.

The negotiation would have gone a lot differently, don’t you think?

Effect the Second: Et tu, lonelygirl15?

I’m digging this whole car-buying analogy so let’s stick with it. So now you’re negotiating with the car salesman but instead of him logging on to see your comments, he’s logging on and reading that a bunch of the members of your organization think you’re going after the wrong kind of car and that they have serious doubts that you’re the best person to lead the car purchase initiative in the first place.

Think that might undermine your bargaining position a bit?

Nevermind that 95 per cent of your members support your position, we’ve all seen that the moderates don’t bother commenting on websites. As far as the car salesman is concerned, you’re working without a net. You don’t have a bargaining leg to stand on.

So what is a poor boy to do?

And there, my friends, is the proverbial rub. How does an organization engage its membership in a meaningful way while still being mindful of the potential dangers of open and public engagement?

I’ve got a few ideas but I’m really hoping to get some comments from anyone who may have ideas of their own.

1. Be upfront
   This is a given. If it comes down to heavy moderation, explain upfront what the moderation criteria are. Don’t wait to be asked or criticized because by then it’s too late. When someone says “Why was my comment blocked?” they are really saying “My comment was blocked, what a bunch of fascists!”
2. Be reasonable
   Only posting positive comments, even within a clearly-defined moderation environment, smacks of insincerity. Even if 95 per cent of the membership supports a position, the other 5 per cent has a right to be heard. Find a way to include the dissenting viewpoint. It it works for the Supreme Court…
3. Be proactive
   Respond to the negative comments, even if they don’t make it past the moderation filter. The benefit of brining the conversation inside your borders is that you can refute misconceptions and ensure legitimate concerns are framed in the proper context. Don’t ignore the malcontents, engage them and do it on your terms.

Any others?

If you missed my last post, I am going to be blogging about my experiences overseeing a major website redevelopment and logo redesign for my new employer.

We are at the stage now of trying to find the best partners to bring in. We are looking for someone to develop a new logo and visual identity and someone to do the actual web redevelopment work. This is really my first time on this side of the fence; I’ve worked for consultancies before and have prepared proposals but this is my first time soliciting them.

And wow, is there a range of quality just in terms of that first interaction.

To the credit of the industries in question, I’ve largely been impressed. People get back to me quickly and they genuinely seem interested in learning about our association so they can do the best possible job for us. This is, of course, in their best interest too. Which is why I am also surprised by two firms I’ve approached.

Firm the First (Logo Redesign)

In the case of firm one, I am wary of saying we’ve approached them at all, actually. For the most part I’ve approached companies I’ve either worked with before or heard about from people I trust. We are doing our due diligence in terms of soliciting proposals and evaluating their past work but there’s something to be said for working with partners you know and trust. One firm, however, I found by searching randomly. They had a slick website, real-sounding testimonials and a comprehensive online portfolio that demonstrated good work.

I fired off an email explaining a bit about the association, our project and how I found their site. Within five minutes I received an auto-reply thanking me for my interest and promising to reply in 24 hours with a quote.

Neat.

Except that 24 hours later, I had nothing. Ditto for 48 hours later. And 72 hours later. Then I found out that we’d been having some email issues at work thanks to an overzealous spam filter. I know for sure I didn’t get a few messages that were sent to me.

Being the gracious fellow that I am, I gave them another shot, though common sense would indicate that if their auto-reply made it through, any response should have. And common sense seems to be correct. I got another auto-reply promising a quote within 24 hours and that’s the last I heard from them.

Now, they made it easy to write them off because even now, several weeks later, no word from them. But I have to think that even if a reply had come after the 24 hour window had closed I would have been inclined to ignore it. When your first client interaction is a broken promise, it doesn’t inspire much in the way of confidence.

Firm the Second (Web Development)

Firm the Second lacks the blatant disregard of the client that is in evidence with Firm the First but I was still somewhat taken aback by its approach. This one was recommended by someone in the field I trust but, in that person’s defence, this person had never worked with Firm the Second on a project quite like this.

What Firm the Second seemed unable to grasp is that we are not a for-profit company. Search Engine Optimization is important, of course, but their expertise in the field isn’t the most important thing for us. Don’t try to sell me by telling me how you’ve helped companies improve their market penetration.

It smacked of a company so proud of its sales pitch that it no longer bothers customizing it. Unfortunately, even if strike one hadn’t counted against them, this approach extended to their approach to web design too. The company has what is, admittedly, a very sophisticated and user-friendly CMS that they have developed in house. Nothing too surprising there. But their unwillingness to talk about integrating other tools with their CMS is troubling. When I asked about integrating certain open source tools (WordPress, del.icio.us etc.) I was told either a) their proprietary CMS module can do just the same thing or b) they could develop a module for the CMS to do the trick.

On my dime, of course.

Their approach isn’t bad or wrong, necessarily, it just seemed to me that they were more interested in telling me what they can do rather than listening to what I need. The client looks to the supplier for a certain amount of expertise, of course, but ignoring other applications in favour of your own proprietary tools doesn’t say expertise to me, it says arrogance.