Are you ready for your campaign to “go social”?

This week one of our client campaigns had a major success. A campaign we built to engender meaningful conversations among members of a community picked up steam. In just a few days, some conversation topics grew from two to 45 participants. The conversations were interesting, on topic, and included input from a wide range of community members.

Then, someone from outside the community posted a comment. The comment wasn’t inappropriate or rude or even off-topic. The commenter just clearly identified himself or herself as an “outsider” to the community the campaign was designed for.

Thus began several days of fraught dialogue with our client. They wanted to take the comment down, or take the conversation down altogether. They fretted that the single comment would make the whole campaign illegitimate to the community of focus for the project. They reconsidered the whole campaign, given the evidence that it was interesting to people from outside the intended community.

In the end, cooler heads prevailed, victories were celebrated, and the client was better prepared for the next steps of the campaign.

The experience reminded us of three important things to consider before launching any sort of campaign intended to engage a community in public conversation:

1) What is your policy on acceptable additions to the conversation?

Hate speech and personal attacks are always off limits, and grounds for removing comments from a conversation. But what about comments attacking the premise of the campaign or organization? Or comments simply disagreeing with the premise? What about comments, like the one that caused such consternation for our client, that are just outside the experience and interests of your targeted community.

If you end up deciding that much more than hate speech or personal attacks are off-limits, you may need to rethink whether you’re interested in creating a conversation online at all. Smaller, in-person, or password protected online conversations may be more your style. The tradeoff is much less participation in favor of only “the right” kind of participation.

2) How will you judge success?

Have a very clear definition of success from the outset. Is success the number of participants, the tenor or depth of the conversation, the conclusion of the conversation, or whether conversation participants go on to do something more than talk with each other?

45 participants isn’t many for any Huffingtonpost.com comments conversation, but it’s a big number for our client given the scope, target, and topic. More importantly, it’s a number that builds towards key organizational and campaign goals.

3) What is your role in the conversation?

Is your organization or campaign merely a convener of the conversation? An expert participant? A leader conversation leader? How are you going to participate in the conversation in light of that role?