From a session at the Netsquared Conference panel on “Bringing Your Community to Life”:

The panel leader, Alexandra Samuel, the young CEO of Social Signals Networks, a consulting firm for the development of online communities, rammed the following point home:

Paraphrasing:

Most organizations spend ten times more time and energy guarding against unwelcome user contributions than they do encouraging helpful contributions.

Instead of worrying about the potential effect of one potential nasty user comment, concentrate on the things you need to do to facilitate one hundred good comments:

• Focus by promoting conversation
• Make it happen, don’t wait for it
• Connect like-minded participants
• Connect complementary threads