Using Listservers to Drive E-Mail Discussions

In addition to newsletters and standalone e-mails, listservers enable you to set up a far-flung e-mail discussion group that can provide learning to members and support your business in several ways. Let me explain the concept, and some of the features that listservers offer to facilitate discussion lists.

One of my activities is directing a major Internet Bible study that reaches 4,500 people in 116 countries. About 20% of the JesusWalk (www.JesusWalk.com) members are involved in e-mail discussion groups so they can discuss the week's lesson. (We're currently using Yahoo! Groups' free service. www.yahoogroups.com) When one of the discussion group members sends an e-mail to the listserver, the listserver immediately echoes that e-mail to all the members of the e-mail discussion group. The result is an ongoing conversation about a topic, back and forth between list members who may be many miles and time zones removed from each other. A real sense of community can develop through this kind of conversation.

This works well unless lots of members are sending a flurry of e-mails -- then it can become overwhelming, repetitive, or of lower quality. Listservers allow us to deal with this problem in two ways -- digests and moderation.

Digests

Members can request that instead of receiving e-mails one-by-one, they be sent either each day or when a certain number accumulate and then are sent together. If you're a member of an active e-mail discussion group, a digest can help you keep your sanity -- and keep from clogging your e-mail inbox. The disadvantage is that you don't read comments when they are brand new, but when they are hours or perhaps days old. Too much delay can inhibit the conversational aspects of an e-mail discussion.

Moderation

When a list grows in size, it becomes important for the listowner (or a moderator designated by the listowner) to approve ("moderate") messages before they are sent out to the whole list. I explain this so that when you set up your own listserver, you understand the various kinds of moderation. Groups are usually moderated or unmoderated. Moderation has two effects:

1. The quality of the posts distributed to members goes up, since the moderator doesn't pass on the "static" -- the mundane, the inane, and the "good comment" e-mails. The moderator picks the most cogent comments and approves them for distribution.
2. Errant list members need control. In any setting you find people who are thoughtless, nasty, or grumpy, and can destroy a group if given free reign. In my groups, I set clear guidelines that members must agree to. For example, it's okay to disagree with another member, but it must be done with love and gentleness, not with a know-it-all, I'll-set-you-all-straight attitude. Fortunately, Yahoo! Groups enables me to selectively moderate posts from a particular member who is getting out of line. When he or she posts a message it is e-mailed to me for approval before going out to the entire group. If a member gets too out-of-line, I can unsubscribe him and prevent him from resubscribing under the same e-mail address (called "banning" by listservers).

Headers and Footers

Listservers also let you customize the e-mails that go out. Many listservers allow you to add a word or two to the front of the subject line of each message, so recipients can easily identify and filter messages from a particular list. You can often specify a particular header or footer, a sentence or two that goes at the top and bottom of each message. I include information on how to unsubscribe or change one's e-mail address so they don't feel they have to contact me to do that for them.

Archives

Finally, listservers often provide a way to preserve previous e-mail contributions in a searchable, online archive. This gives list members a tremendous resource to gather knowledge quickly from past discussions, but reminds us to be careful about what we send to an e-mail discussion list. It could live on in an archive forever.

Business Uses for Discussion Lists

I don't want to give the impression that e-mail discussion groups are useful only for non-profit organizations. They are often used in business settings to help share knowledge with each other and build on what the group is learning. Two outstanding examples are the I-Sales Discussion List (www.adventive.com/lists/isales/summary.html) moderated by veteran Internet marketer John Audette. Here marketers from all over the world discuss all the aspects of selling online. Another popular list is I-Advertising moderated by Adam Boettiger (www.i-advertising.com). Both these lists have tens of thousands of members and are moderated digests. That is, they come out daily with the best of the comments received during that day. Many companies use discussion lists to provide product support for their customers or for training employees in branch offices.