Throwing a good party is tough enough. Imagine hosting a shindig at Martha Stewart's place.
You'd want to stay invisible enough so that no one forgot that it was Stewart's grand affair -- yet the glasses would have to remain filled, the trays whisked in and out of the kitchen as if by magic.
That's the kind of task Blue Barn Interactive faces every day. One of a small group of companies focused exclusively on jump-starting and maintaining discussion zones on the Web for major clients, Blue Barn moderates the chats and the message boards at the Martha Stewart Living site, keeping everything running smoothly behind the scenes, with no credit -- not even a link -- visible on the site.
The thriving community areas on the Children's Television Workshop site -- the online home of Sesame Street -- are also Blue Barn turf. So are the bustling celebrity chats at music site N2K. The company's résumé also includes high-profile clients such as Time Warner, Yahoo, Lycos, MetLife, IBM, and the HomeArts Network.
But you've probably never heard of Blue Barn. Perhaps its clients would prefer to let you think they're doing all the heavy lifting -- while looking fabulous -- themselves.
Founded in 1995, Blue Barn was the brainstorm of two New York writers, Marcy Kaye and Josh Sinel. The ability to see the world through the eyes of others is essential for writers -- and for hosts of online communities, Sinel said.
To excel in either calling, "you have to have a great deal of empathy."
Blue Barn trains online hosts in such skills as displaying empathy, sparking interaction, encouraging visitors to come back to a site, knowing when to step into a conversation to get it back on track, and how to stop flame wars before they start. They also teach hosts the subtle skill of easing mentions of a client's products into the flow of conversation without setting off alarm bells. These days, community and e-commerce aren't even one click away.
From an office in Manhattan's Flatiron District, Blue Barn coordinates the efforts of about 100 online hosts, who are paid US$10 to $15 an hour to keep the conversation humming along on sites like Superbowl.com and SportsUniverse. Many of the hosts are stay-at-home parents or working two jobs.
Though sites try to make a go of it with volunteer hosts, you can't demand the same level of commitment from someone hosting for the fun of it, Kaye observes.
"You can't just go in there for an hour a day," she said. It's not easy money. On one site, a mischievous hacker gained possession of the hosting software and impersonated visitors and hosts while booting people off the system. By posing as a clueless newbie, one quick-thinking host asked enough questions of the hacker -- "How do I send private messages? How do I change fonts on this screen?" -- to distract the hacker from inflicting more damage.
On another site, a regular participant threatened suicide when she lost custody of her child in a court battle. There, sensitive hosting helped an established community take care of one of its own.
Blue Barn has developed an extensive program to train hosts to cope with online environments. Sinel said, "You have to take crap from 100 simultaneous chatters, all wanting the host to break down somehow." Born community leaders, however, can turn up in unlikely places.
While searching for music-savvy hosts for N2K's Rocktropolis chat rooms, one name kept coming up: a fan named Vera, who was always on top of the latest releases and could spout discographies from Hendrix to Bush. "She was definitely the hippest rock 'n' roll chatter," Sinel recalled.
When Blue Barn's director of host management phoned Vera for an interview, he was surprised to learn that Vera is a 70-year-old part-time nurse. Vera still works for Blue Barn.
"Hosting talent is almost 100 percent intuitive," said Kaye.
Part of that talent is knowing when to let the conversation follow its own impulses and when to rein it in. Sometimes, said Sinel, an uptight client can make things worse. One sports client demanded that visitors be booted off the site for criticizing players' performances, with no warning and no explanation.
"We had people logging back in saying, 'Hey, why did I get bumped?' That caused so much harm," Sinel said. "[The client] wasn't even allowing the chatters to act as they would in the stands at the event."
Kaye added, "Protecting the community is not just a matter of delete, delete, delete."
Though the word "community" may seem as eligible for the buzzword graveyard as "portal" will be in about 15 minutes or so, Kaye and Sinel draw parallels between expert hosting on e-commerce sites and the old-fashioned business values of taking care of your customer.
"Community should be nothing new to corporations," Sinel said. "It's how you answer your email, how you handle customer service. Almost everything we do is about responsiveness."
