Harvard Business Review, Digital Property: New Community Rules

Below is an announcement on the LinkedIN Group for the Harvard Business Review site. This update shows the growing importance digital properties place on community management, especially managing conversation threads that are less about content and more about ad hominem attacks on the author and/or plugs for the commentator’s own benefit.

—–

• Group: Harvard Business Review – Reader’s Forum
• Subject: Update Announcement from Harvard Business Review – Reader’s Forum

Dear Friends,

Several of you have noticed some recent changes to our site. This brings about some change in policy and some clarification.

Discussion Board
Our main board is our Discussion Board. It is to be kept clear of promotions, job listings, webinars, invites, etc. Several of our members are now flagging inappropriate content, so let’s be clear what this is – and what it is not.

Your post on our Discussion Board should usually be framed as a question in order to invite discussion. The post should be of interest and/or benefit to our members. It is desirous for the post to allow other points of view to be introduced.

It should refrain from political or religious content.

‘What caused it to be flagged was that it linked to a piece that was authored by the person that posted it.‘ Authoring is normally a great thing; however, we have some very clever people on the LinkedIn system that set up similar scenarios which go to blogs that have advertising on them. They then use us for monetizing their blog, or a site that pays them to push traffic to them. This is a shame, as it really causes great harm to the integrity of our site and there is interesting and helpful information that goes by the wayside. These posts will be deleted with a two strike rule. If it happens twice, the member that submitted the post will be blocked from the group. There is an exception:

If you have been published, and this is ‘directed to a publication, such as Forbes, Business Week, etc., that has no registration required in order for us to read your work’, we will allow it to be posted to our Discussion Board. Remember, do not submit a link to a self-promoting site of any kind on this board. Do not submit a link that is riddled with advertisements. 

If you feel that your material warrants special attention and your post should be placed on the Discussion Board, please write to me with your defending statement. If it falls within our guidelines, there will be no issue. If it requires a change in guidelines, it will be taken under sincere consideration.

Promotion Board
Yes, this is where you can post all the webinars, invitations, announcements, etc. Please go to the Promotions tab today and find some very interesting, educational and helpful information. Remember, we do not endorse any of these promotions, we merely provide the board for our member’s use.

Job Board
Finally! Our HBR Readers Forum Job Board is here. This is the perfect place to post all the information about job fulfillment needed, partner searches, investment requests, business opportunities, etc. Remember, we do not endorse any of these postings, we merely provide the board for our member’s use.

We will maintain our subgroup, Bulletin Board, for anything that does not fall under these categories, but urge you to post to the main tabs when possible in order to be seen by all of our members. 

BTW, at the rate we are growing, it is possible that by the end of Q4 we will have over 20,000 of the most brilliant and successful leaders in the world all connected in one place – our Harvard Business Review – Readers Forum.

Thank you for your continued support.