The importance of being Victoria
It doesn’t matter if you are one of the busiest and biggest sites on the web, if your slogan is “the front page of the internet, that you’ve been around for a decade, or that you have recently raised $50 million in an investment round that has the company valued at around half a billion. If you forget that your functioning depends on the activity of thousands of volunteers and you sack the wrong person, you can find yourself with some serious problems.
The site managers of several of reddit’s most important communities change their pages to private, leaving thousands of users out in the cold and prompting a plunge in traffic on the site, along with the closure of several of its most popular pages. The revolt, already dubbed AMAggedon, has been sparked by the sacking of Victoria Taylor, reddit’s communication manager since June 2013, and the person who had managed to make AMAs (Ask Me Anything) into something really big and special, and who was the go-to-person for site managers. As I write this post, the majority of the communities have been restored, but moderators’ bad feeling is still palpable: for most, Victoria was the public face of the company, the person they would seek out to solve problems, and who was always there for them.
Not much is known about Victoria Taylor’s sacking. The company has refused to comment, supposedly to avoid referring to personal matters, an approach that has prompted all sorts of rumors, from disagreements with the management about making money from the AMAs, to a specific AMA with Jesse Jackson that turned sour. What is known is that she didn’t jump, but was pushed, and that Victoria has made clear she isn’t happy with the decision, and that the who affair is a communications disaster that has required CEO Ellen Pao to enter the fray.
Why would a decision to sack somebody suddenly turn into a PR nightmare, putting the company in the wrong kind of spotlight, affecting its revenue stream and potentially threatening its future viability? We tend to see the internet as a vast network of nodes, but of course behind those nodes are people: the keys do not press themselves, content is not self-generating, and problems certainly are not solved by divine intervention. The criticality of the situation generated by the sacking of just one person, located in a central position in the management of reddit’s community of volunteers, and somebody clearly respected and liked by that community, should have given the company pause for thought.
Ellen Pao now faces a paradox: if she says she is leaving the company, then that exit is going to have less impact than Victoria Taylor’s, somebody who is much lower down the food chain than she is. Should reddit have sacked Taylor, whatever the circumstances were? Or is this simply a case of having screwed up on the communication front and that could easily have been avoided, and that in reality is a storm in a teacup?
How many people in organizations are more important than their job title suggests? How important is the work of a community manager? What happens is the community involved in a company’s business decides to revolt, especially if the company is pretty much dependent on that community to make money? Every community manager dreams of a situation like this, where the community rises up to defend them or their job. Victoria Taylor is obviously one of those people who, although few may be aware of the fact, plays a vital role in managing the relationship between companies and the social habitat they rely on.
What has happened here is relatively isolated: few companies will see themselves in this situation, and most will see it as an isolated phenomenon, “one of those internet things”. When I discuss Reddit with my students, and along with Quora, an example of how to extract value from communities and threads, many of them admit to knowing nothing about how these sites work, or even of their existence.
But Reddit’s experience after sacking Victoria Taylor isn’t as isolated a case as many people might think: this is something we are beginning to see more and more, in companies of all kinds, as greater numbers of once hidden professionals acquire a public profile. The communities that support these brands are increasingly important. And behind each community are what we might call community leaders. The internet is made up of people, and we shouldn’t forget it.
(En español, aquí)