Managing Your Audience Through Volatile Cultural Moments

When something happens in the zeitgeist - your team that is closest to your audience or customers usually feels it first. 

Here are some tips for how to approach these potential pivot points in your community.

Determine Impact

• Articulate the issue and discuss with the teams that are closest to your audience to determine if you are already seeing an impact or what they believe the potential impact could be.
• Whether it’s your Trust & Safety team, Policy/Legal, Moderation or Customer Success, they will usually be the ones you turn to to hear how any event in the larger world is impacting your community.

‍Identify Policy Points affected

• Review your current externally facing user guidelines and your internal policies to determine precisely what policy violations are happening or could be violated.
• Be sure to review what is NOT currently in your guidelines and policies.
• Catalyst events usually result in policy revisions, so if you do not have a policy amendment process, including communication to users, now is a good time to document one.

‍Decide what words, phrases or models need to be addressed

• Make sure to document any changes you make to your automated toolsets, in case they need to be reverted or analyzed for impact.
• Oftentimes, words or phrases you have added to your list make sense to restrict from general conversation in your community, but then some event in the news happens and now it makes sense for you to allow your audience to be discussing it, whether it’s for a brief time or from now on.

‍Communicate updates to your audience

• Hopefully you have escalation protocols that include how to update your audience on policy updates. If not, now is a good time to document those protocols.
• While we rarely have to show ALL of the behind-the-scene machinations of maintaining the culture of our communities, the more transparent you can be with your audience on any guidelines your community follows or changes, the better.

‍Measure and amend process for future events

• Where possible, attach metrics to track efficacy of your changes so that you can report on updates to the rest of your teams. Data also helps determine if and when changes need to be reverted back to previous settings.
• Don’t discount qualitative data/feedback - Your super users will definitely let you know when you are missing the mark, or worse, you may see a drop in your overall engagement from users simply leaving.

These are just high-level, general tips to help guide you through tumultuous audience moments. 

Have more to add to the list, a story to tell or questions on how Cleanspeak can assist in these strategies? Let us know - We love sharing industry knowledge with our community of practitioners.

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