Community Moderation and Governance

Overview

This skill covers how to moderate and govern a B2B marketing community — including membership curation, guideline documentation, and community manager presence. All practices are sourced exclusively from Exit Five podcast guests; no outside frameworks or general best practices have been added.

Membership Curation

Define who you will not accept — and enforce it. Establish a clear profile of who the community is designed for, and actively reject or remove members who don't fit. The two bad-actor types named explicitly in the source are aggressive salespeople and spammers — use these as your starting anchors. For each type you identify, write a short rejection message template so you're not drafting from scratch under pressure. Then define the trigger point: will you screen at the application stage, or act after a member joins and exhibits the behavior? Both decisions need to be made in advance. Accept that some people will be unhappy with rejections; this is a necessary cost of maintaining the trust and quality that makes the community worth joining. (Source: Matt Carnevale, Episode #320)

Community Guidelines

Write down the gray areas — don't leave them to interpretation. Don't rely on vague norms or assume members will intuit what's acceptable. Create written guidelines that explicitly address gray-area behaviors: self-promotion, thought leadership posts, and solicitation. Anchor the guidelines in a single core principle that captures the community's purpose — for example, "we want people talking to each other, not at each other." Then model what that principle looks like in practice. For a self-promotion gray area, a guideline entry might read: Acceptable — sharing a post-mortem of a campaign you ran with lessons learned. Not acceptable — posting a link to your product with a call to action. This kind of concrete example, applied to each gray-area behavior, is what reduces confusion and makes enforcement consistent. (Source: Dave Gerhardt, Episode #320)

Community Manager Presence

Treat community management as a dedicated role, not a shared responsibility. If community management is currently a part-time or shared responsibility, the source position is that this is a structural problem — not a bandwidth problem. The fix is to designate a single owner whose primary job is community, not to ask someone to do it alongside other work. The community manager must read every post and respond to comments. The rationale: members visit infrequently, so when they do log in, the experience they find will determine whether they return. Inconsistent or low-presence management will result in member churn. (Source: Matt Carnevale, Episode #320)

Where Experts Disagree

No disagreements were identified among the contributing episodes for this category.

What NOT To Do

• Don't leave gray-area behaviors undefined. Ambiguity about self-promotion, solicitation, and thought leadership creates confusion for members and friction for enforcement. Write it down. (Source: Dave Gerhardt, Episode #320)
• Don't accept members who don't fit the community's defined profile. Misaligned members — particularly aggressive salespeople and spammers — degrade the experience for everyone else and erode the trust that makes the community valuable. (Source: Matt Carnevale, Episode #320)
• Don't staff community management as a side responsibility. Assigning it part-time or alongside other work is a structural error. When members log in and find an unresponsive or poorly maintained space, they leave and don't return. (Source: Matt Carnevale, Episode #320)

Sources