What a Daily Soap's Community Chat Taught Me About Brands

My first real job on the internet was not a strategy role. It was a chat window. As an intern in community management at GZSZ.de, the online home of Germany's biggest daily soap, I looked after thousands of messages: love letters to fictional characters, outrage over plot decisions, and, in between, some very personal stories. That internship turned into almost seven years at RTL and, eventually, a title: Germany's first official social media manager.

Today I work as an AI consultant at BE BRAVE AG on sovereign Swiss AI infrastructure, and as co-founder of ORION AI I build systems that support conversations between brands and people. The more I automate, the clearer it becomes: my most important lessons did not come from an AI whitepaper. They came from that soap chat. There are exactly three of them: listening, moderation, closeness.

Listening: your community knows before you do

In the community chat I learned that the audience notices almost everything first. Whether a storyline worked was visible in the comments long before any report showed it. Fans often knew the characters, their contradictions, and tiny details better than some people on set. If you listen seriously, you get market research for free: unfiltered, honest, and in real time.

I saw the same thing later at Phantasialand, where I ran digital communications from 2017 to 2019. With around two million visitors a year, the most honest feedback about queues, food, and new attractions was not in surveys. It was in the comment sections. Brands that treat comments as a chore to be managed are throwing away their best data source.

Listening is not a question of tools, by the way. It is a question of attitude. A simple dashboard plus honest attention beats any expensive monitoring suite nobody reads. The decisive question is not which software you use, but who on your team actually feels responsible for what your community is saying right now.

Moderation: showing up, not just deleting

Moderation is often confused with deleting. But moderation mostly means making the rules visible, setting the tone yourself, stepping in at the right moment, and holding back at the right moment. A community rarely tips over because of a single troll. It tips over when nobody responds and the loudest voices take over the room while the friendly ones quietly leave.

For brands, that means this: if you open a comment section, you take responsibility for the space that forms there. That was true for a daily soap, it was true later during my time as CEO of Heroes Germany GmbH working on client projects, and it is true today for every AI chat. An unmoderated channel is not openness. It is neglect.

Moderation also needs speed. In the chat of a daily show, a reply after three days was worthless because the episode was already history. Today that is even more true: if you respond to a justified complaint only after the weekend, you have already lost the discussion, no matter how good your answer turns out to be.

Closeness: behind every number sits a person

Later, at Mediengruppe RTL, I was responsible for more than 100 profiles with over 20 million fans. At that scale, people quickly turn into reach. That is exactly the mistake. Closeness does not come from volume. It comes from moments when someone realizes: there is actually a person over there, reading what I write.

My favorite example: with Vidpresso, we produced the first professional Facebook livestream of a Klitschko boxing match. The most impressive part was not the technology. It was the moment viewers saw their own comments appear live in the stream and understood they were part of the broadcast. It is no coincidence that I later became CDO of a Swiss livestreaming scale-up: live is the most honest form of closeness.

What AI does well in community management today

Today, between BE BRAVE and ORION AI, we run more than 30 AI and digital products in production, from voice agents on the phone to live translation of streams into English, French, and Italian. From that practice I can tell you: AI is an excellent assistant in community management, if you give it the right jobs.

• Answer recurring questions around the clock: opening hours, prices, shipping. Always friendly, never annoyed, even the thousandth time.
• Pre-sort messages by sentiment and urgency, so your team looks first where things are actually on fire.
• Spot patterns: which topics are piling up, where is a problem building before it escalates in public.
• Remove language barriers, for example through live translation of streams and chats into multiple languages.
• Draft replies that a human reviews, adjusts, and only then approves.

What you should never automate

Between fan mail and criticism, GZSZ.de also received messages from people who were clearly not doing well. Soap storylines about illness or loss touch real lives. No model answers messages like that. A human answers, or nobody does, and nobody is not an option.

I draw the same line in every project today: grief, real despair, crises, apologies in the brand's name, and anything with legal weight stays in human hands. So do irony and humor near the edge, because one failed automated joke costs more than every minute you saved. AI may prepare, sort, and accelerate. The relationship itself belongs to people.

Conclusion: listen first, automate second

If you bring AI into your community management, start with the questions I learned as an intern in that soap chat: who is actually writing here? What moves these people? Where do they need a fast answer, and where do they need someone who truly listens? Only then comes the technology. Automate the repetitive work and invest the time you gain where closeness is created.

After almost seven years at RTL, then Phantasialand, an agency, a scale-up, and by now more than 30 AI products in production, I am convinced: the brands that win in 2026 are not the ones with the most bots. They are the ones where you can still feel the human behind the machine. So here is my question for you: which message in your community is waiting for a human right now, while a bot processes it? If you would like to sort that out together, get in touch. I still read every message myself.