The Online Community Guide

Join Us And Change How People Build Communities

Let’s try this again, we’re hiring. 

We’re looking for someone that wants to change how people build communities.

The current approach is completely wrong. It is too reactive, too focused on platforms, and too similar to marketing. As a result, most communities fail.

Even those that succeed struggle to reach their potential. By applying the principles of social science, we can change this.

This is a message we want your help in spreading 

 

Community Advocate 

We’re hiring a community advocate.

We’re hiring someone that can build positive relationships with a range of groups/organizations, help promote and advocate the use of social sciences in communities, and take on and deliver projects to completion without fail.

We’re looking for someone that has a passion for communities and a great track record for making things happen.

We’re looking for someone with a genuine desire to help people build better communities.

We’re looking for someone that truly loves connecting with their fellow community professionals and building positive relationships. 

 

You should be…

 1) 100% reliable. This is a job for a doer. You making things happen. You crush deadlines with time to spare. If you struggle, panic, or withdraw when confronted by deadlines, this isn’t a good fit. If get a charge from getting things done and making things happen, drop us a line. Reliability is essential here. 

2) A great communicator. You should be happy introducing yourselves to individuals and groups, building strong connections, selling your ideas. Strong self-confidence helps a lot here.

3) A community expert. It’s going to be tough to do the job if you don’t know the material. It helps if you’ve read our book, understand our principles, and developed communities of your own.

4) A terrific writer. You need to be able to create material that helps people build better communities. If you can’t write articulate ideas in a concise manner, this isn’t for you.

5) Eager to change the world. I know, this sounds lame. This isn’t a spreadsheet role. This is about changing the world. The world would be better if there were more successful online and offline communities. People active in communities are happier, healthier, and wealthier. This is work worth doing. This should drive you.

This is an intense role. It will involve connecting with key people and organizations, producing regular material, attending events, and achieving real, visible, results.

 

Benefits of FeverBee

At FeverBee, we hire terrific people and provide a platform for them to do their life’s work. To help you do that we provide the following: 

• Full training in communities and community development (with certification). We’ll train you to be a leading expert in this field.

• Work from home and with flexible hours. You decide what hours you work (with agreed results to achieve). You can go to the gym in the afternoon, work the hours you’re most productive, and have a social life during the week.

• Access to our virtual assistants. You can keep the mundane, repetitive, tasks off your desk and free up your time to focus on your key goals.

• Freedom to develop your own projects. We believe in freedom and responsibility. You can determine how you will advocate our ideals.

• Travel to clients and events across four continents. Some see this as a burden, others a perk. Take your pick. Our work has taken us to UK, USA, Canada, China, Australia, Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, France, Lithuania, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and a few more.

Please no cover letters, CVs/resumes. We want to see your drive and persuasive skills. Call us and persuade us you're right for the job. 

 +44 (0)20 7792 2469

Our accountant would prefer we hired someone in the UK, but you’re welcome to persuade us otherwise. 

Investing Social Capital

Social capital is the value of the connections between members. This encompasses both the quantity and quality of those connections.

Over time, communities build up social capital.

What do you do with this social capital?

You invest it in community projects. You invest (not spend) the social capital in projects which will benefit the community in the future.

This means establishing a goal. This means asking members to work on a task that is too complex for a single person but benefits the community in the long-term. This might be creating a resource for newcomers, organizing a series of live events, developing a jobs board, creating community-branded products, or campaigning on an issue.

If you invest the social capital wisely, it pays dividends over time. Just don’t let it build up meaninglessly over years. Make something happen. 

What Has a Really Big Impact Upon Levels of Participation?

Big wins are rarely in community development.

Gamification has a minimal, short-term, impact (about 5%).

Moving and changing platforms has a tiny impact (unless you’re using a terrible platform, then it has a big impact).

Adding a new feature has almost 0 impact.

If you want to significantly increase levels of participation, there are several big wins. 

1)   Attract the most interested members/narrow the focus of the topic. The biggest determinant upon levels of participation is interest in the topic. Our interest are usually narrow. We might have an interest in cars, but we’re more likely to have an interest in fast cars, pretty cars, driverless cars, green/electric cars, classic cars, Italian cars etc…

Narrow the interest, cut out a big chunk of members, and focus on what a small group of people really care about. Make sure you find ways to attract specifically those that have the highest level of interest in the topic.

 

2)   Build a sense of community amongst members. This has the longest-term impact upon levels of participation. It’s the most sustainable. It’s not a single tweak. It’s a combination of elements designed to take a group of people that interact and foster a genuine sense of community amongst them.

 

3)   Develop a complete calendar of activities and implement it. Implement an action plan that includes discussions, events/activities, and content. Make sure there is something fresh in the community every day.

 

4)   Place the latest activity above the fold on the landing page of the community. This is a quick win. We did this for one client and the level of activity rose overnight by 42% before holding steady over 6 months at around 30%.

 

5)   Tweak the notification system. The notification system has a huge impact upon levels of participation. Tweak who the notifications are sent from, what they sent, their length, and what people are asked to do. Ensure it’s opt out, not opt in.

To increase activity, most organizations will demand expensive platform changes or promotional drives. This doesn’t work. All of the above are far cheaper and far more effective. 

Unsettling Top Members

You probably have several highly active members.

They participate most frequently. They contribute the best content.

How do you reward them?

You don’t.

These aren’t the members you need to worry about. They’re already doing what you want them to do.

Members don’t leave a community because they didn’t receive appreciation/rewards/gratitude. They leave because they don’t feel part of the group, become bored of the group, or lose interest in the topic altogether.

When you reward the people that are already doing what you want, you risk unsettling them. It creates jealousy. Some members will be below the reward cut-off point. It also risks changing their motivation to something less sustainable.

The members you need to worry about are those which have joined within the previous 48 hours, those average level of activity is declining, and those who could be brought up to top member level. Finding ways to encourage these members to participate is far more productive. 

Top members have their uses. They give you influence. They’re also those who most likely want to be more involved as volunteers. Just don’t assume that because someone is a top member, they need to be rewarded. Simply being a top member is their reward. 

Building Powerful Peer Groups

You don’t compare your life against George Clooney.

He’s not in your peer group.

A-List celebrities might, but not you.

You measure yourself against those you consider your peers. You measure yourself against a relatively small group of people whom, at some point, have had the same level, interest, or held the same position, as yourself (at the same time – people don’t compare themselves to the deceased).

Early on, this was your school friends. Later, it was your work colleagues. Now it’s probably an online group. Once we find our peer group, we use them as references for our own achievements. We constantly check in to see what they’re doing and how we compare. 

Our self-concept is based largely upon how we’re comparing against our peers. Much of Twitter’s success lies in its ability to connect these peer groups and show, in real-time, how we compare (Mark just published a book? Now I must publish a better book!). 

However, peer groups aren’t always pleasant. Jealousy is rife. You might have as many rivals as friends. You might help as many people as you criticize. This still drives high levels of activity and, often, progress.

Many of the greatest eras of innovation for different sectors came through periods of highly active, very volatile, peer groups. Think psychoanalysis in pre-war Vienna, cubism in early 20th century Paris, or the astonishing progress in Silicon Valley over the previous 40 years.  

Community managers, especially those working with communities of practice, need to build powerful peer groups. Peer groups hook members for decades. They sustain high levels of activity. They sustainably force members to push themselves – this means members contribute value material or do ever-greater things to gain the recognition and respect of their peers 

If you can build a powerful peer group, you can create an asset which sustains high levels of activity and pushes the field forward. You have incredible opportunities every day to build these powerful, life-changing, world-changing, peer groups.

Your target audience, right now, is looking to find their peer group. We desperately want to find people at the same level, facing the same challenges, or share our unique interests.  

This has several implications. First, you must ensure your community is highly focused. Focus on a very narrow niche of an interest, position, or experience. Communities with too broad a focus fail to build peer groups. Focus is your friend. Ask your target audience who they consider their peers, then look to see what connects them. Is it job position, previous achievements, a common experience, or something else? This is your focus.

Second, make it easy for the peer group to showcase their latest achievements. Allow people to post links to what they have achieved or they are working on. You can even make this a requirement in the profile. 

Third, facilitate the peer group. Interview the most successful people each month. Mention what people are working in your news posts. Let the peer group vote for their member of the month/year. Highlight the accomplishments of the group. Publish open-challenges for members to solve.

Highlight the impact the group has already made to its sector. The peer group needs an amazing sense of possibility and rapid progress. They need to feel at the epicenter of what they’re doing.

If you’re toiling away at a community of practice, focus on building a powerful peer group. Focus on a narrower group, showcase the achievements, and then highlight individual members. 

“But we haven’t changed anything!”

One community manager is receiving criticism for privacy issues in his community (no, not Facebook).

Nothing in his community has changed – it’s simply a bigger community now. He’s treating his data the same way as he always has. 

However, once your community becomes big enough to matter, you become a target. 

All the minor issues become very important. One day your platform might be fully reliable and you might have no security, privacy, legal (or even personal safety) concerns.

The next day your platform is crumbling under the weight of popularity. Dozens of hackers are trying to steal members' passwords. Members are complaining about the same privacy policies you’ve had for years. A company is suing you for members posting their copyright material in your community, and one member just looked up the address of you and your family on Facebook.

Telling the community that you “haven’t changed anything” isn’t the solution - it’s the problem.

As the community grows you need to change things. If you’re running a rapidly growing community, start preparing for big changes now. You have to become more professional in your approach.

This almost certainly means spending money. You need someone that has experience in community platforms for large communities. You need to consult a lawyer to identify potential threads and negate these risks. You need to spent a lot of time researching privacy policies that work. You need to find a someone with a lot of experience in security.

The best advice we offer is to get the best advice you can. Find those that run huge communities in your country and ask for their help. 

Learning Revolution

I had the pleasure of doing a 30 minute interview with the terrific Jeff Cobet of Learning Revolution. 

We discuss communities in a learning context, how to get a community started, and potential revenue models for communities.

You can find the interview here. 

Also check out Jeff's terrific interview with Alan Weiss (among others). 

What Happens After You Leave?

If the community died after you left, you failed. 

It's misguided to brag the community was fine until you left. Proving this point with data becomes surreal. Worse still, it shows a lack of respect for the community.

If the community died once you left, it means you didn't hire a good replacement, properly train the new community manager, undertake a proper handover to the new community manager, nor put systems in place so the community could sustain and increase its high level of activity. 

If you're leaving, you owe it to the community (and your future career efforts) to ensure the community thrives without you. 

You need to be actively engaged in finding your replacement (tip: hiring someone from the community usually works well). You need to properly train them in community management and in the unique aspects of your community. Ideally, you want to work side-by-side with the new community manager for a few weks. 

You want to give them the best possible handover. This handover announces the new community manager in the best possible terms. It includes introducing the community manager to all the key members. It means interviewing the new community manager and ensuring they post threads asking for ideas about what they want in the community. 

Would you rather point to a community that's thriving since you left or one that's dying since you left? 

Useful Field Reports

In The Game, Neil Strauss talks about the community of pickup artists. 

They would discuss different methods of attracting women.

They contributed regular field reports to the community. They would test something they discussed and report back to the community how it went.

This causes a rapid acceleration of skills (among predictably comical failures).

If your community’s members submitted regular field reports, would it improve the community?

Would it help if members were regularly testing what they tried and reporting back to the rest of the community how it went?

We might be surprised how well this can work for communities of practice, communities of interest, communities of action, and communities of circumstance.

Gaining Influence As A Regular Participant

The community manager should be a frequent participant in community discussions. 

You don’t need to be the leader, but you do need to be an influential regular.

If you want to build influence. Consider one of these three, well-trodden, paths:

• Be an expert: Participate less, but add expertise in every discussion. Find a unique viewpoint, unique information, or summarize the debate. Go far beyond the contributions of every other participant.

• Be likable. Participate very frequently and in a very friendly way. Always be an optimist, never pessimist. Reach out to members individually and get to know them. Refer to a member’s previous contributions in your own response. Do interesting things and be someone others want to reply to. Look up the classic How To Make Friends and Influence People.

• Reciprocate. Do a lot of things for many other members. Reach out to dozens of members individually and find out what they’re doing and ways to help them. If a member mentions a problem they’re having in the community, look for a way to solve it. 

Most people go for likability, this is the most difficult to sustain over the long term. Expertise is easier. Reciprocity is most rewarding.

All three of these are designed to give you a high level of influence within the community. The key is to pick a path and consistently push it to the edge.

A few more tips here and here. 

Help A Member Out (the short newcomer window)

If you want to convert more newcomers, identify how you can

1)   Solicit an initial contribution within 24 hours

2)   Prompt members to respond to that contribution within 24 hours

3)   Solicit a further contribution within the week

Last month, I spent 3 weeks kayaking the Amazon River and hiking through Patagonia.

Before the trip, I spent days looking through the BackPackingLight community to find the lightest, most effective, equipment available.

I didn’t participate. I searched, lurked, and left. 

You have a tiny window to convert a newcomer into a regular. If you don’t engage them the day they join, they won’t become active members. You need to guide your newcomer to make an active contribution to the community within the first 24 hours.

Solicit their biggest problem. When a newcomer joins, prompt them to tell the community the biggest problem they face. Then list these problems in your help a member out area.

Now regulars can directly help people solve the problems they face. This prompts the newcomer to ask further clarifying questions and gradually feel more connected to the community. It also helps the regulars feel valued and useful.

Imagine this community also had people list their upcoming trips and when they were going. Members can see who else has been on their trip and get specific advice (or see who else would be there at the same time).

Imagine you received follow up messages asking how your trip went and a prompt to enter a field report for other members to see.

Imagine there is a further prompt about the next trip you intend to take.

All of these tactics (along with many others) can guide a member towards becoming a regular in the community. 

Which can be applied to your community? 

p.s. Final day to register for our Professional Community Management course. Begins this week. 

Attract New Customers With A Community

About half the community plans we review have the same goal; more customers. 

It's tricky to get new customers via a community. Communities are great for reaching current audiences but often poor for reaching new audiences. 

Why would someone that doesn't know you want to participate in a community about you? 

If your goal is to reach a new audience, there are three things to consider:

1) The community can't be about you. If the community is about you, you will only attract your existing customers/clients. The community has to be about the audience (a community for finance professionals) or how the product helps the audience (a community for finance professionals who want productivity hacks). The community needs a unique name. You get to be active participants, not the dominant voice. 

2) You need an existing link to a new audience. How will you reach the people you don't have access to? How will word spread? If there is limited existing contact between the groups, you're going to struggle. If that's the case, you need to build partnerships and gain support from existing popular mediums.

3) How will you convert members into customers? You can't directly sell to this audience. How will you convert members into customers? You can use a tremendous value exchange. You can look for opportunities to highlight leads. You can participate and become a trusted voice that people want to search for. You can simply brand the community and increase familiarity amongst your target audience. 

Be specific about how you will tackle each of these. Force your company through the tough decisions early. 

Venting And Exploding

In real life, we can quickly tell when people are venting.

So we let them vent. It's therapeutic. 

Online, it's more difficult. Are they really angry with us or projecting their anger at a situation on to us? The different is important. 

If we push back when anger is projected, we turn a fixable situation into an explosive situation. We make the angry person angrier. Community professionals with a zero tolerance policy do this often. A placatable member can quickly be turned into a lifelong enemy. 

When people vent, the recipient's job is to hear them out. It's not to cut them off. It's not to be defensive. It's simply to exhaust every last drop of that anger possible. It's to provide further opportunities to express their anger at the situation. 

Don't make false promises ("I'm going to do everything in my power to fix this"). Don't try to win the argument - that's not the objective. Let your ego slide. Very often, it's not about you.

Simply by hearing a member out, asking a few further questions, and perhaps asking how the situation should have been handled differently, you can prevent future trolls. 

CIPR and Communicating With Members

This e-mail from CIPR Conversations is similar to many terrible e-mails sent out to community members.

 

"Hi Richard

 

As a valued contributor to the CIPR Conversation we wanted to keep you updated with some changes that we’re making to the site which will improve the browsing, contributing and social experience for all of our users.

 

What will be different?

The big news - The Conversation is moving over to a new site! It will be powered by a completely new content management system which will optimise the experience for you on your mobile, on your tablet and at your desk. We’ll also be making it easier for you to share your favourite posts through new social-sharing features and we’ll facilitate greater discussion through new comment threads.

 

On top of this, we’ll improve how it displays and aggregates all of this great content. The Conversation will now have ‘Public relations’, ‘Public affairs’, ‘Internal Comms’, ‘Digital’, ‘Tech’, ‘Marketing’ and ‘Advertising’ hubs that will pull together the best blogs and original content from these areas into their own specialist hubs. As editors, we’ll also continue to pick the very best of this content, promote it to The Conversation homepage and share with the world through the social web.

 

How will it affect you?

On Wednesday 1 May 2013 the current site will be closed down and a brand new CIPR Conversation site will be launched at the same address (http://conversation.cipr.co.uk) the following week.

 

Once the new site is launched you’ll be able to register for a new account through Twitter or Facebook (as well as via your email if you like the old way!) and you’ll be ready to contribute!

 

Unfortunately, if you were using The Conversation as a place to write and keep your own blog, all of this content will be deleted in the change to a new CMS. Before the site closes, we’d advise you to save your old posts in hard copy and port them over to one of the great free blogging tools like WordPress – and once the new site is up and running, it will be simple for you to syndicate the RSS feed from that blog so that you can easily sync all your past posts on your user page.

 

We will still make it possible for any individual or company to sign up and syndicate their existing blog to The Conversation via RSS. Plus, if you don’t already have your own external blog we will continue to make it possible for you to contribute through The Conversation’s very own native blogging platform.

 

Keep an eye on your inbox and we’ll let you know when the new site is launched.

 

We hope you’ll continue to contribute to the success of The Conversation, we’ll be up and running very soon.

 

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch."

 

Formatting issues aside, there is plenty wrong here

A few thoughts:

1) Members don't care about platform changes or most of what's highlighted above (at least not until they've been made). Sending e-mails to tell members about a new platform, especially without adding anything substantive, you gaurantee your future e-mails will be ignored. Members only care about awesome things that are happening in the community. Talking about the community platform is the equivalent to talking about the changes to the local community hall ("We now serve tea AND biscuits!"). 

2) If you're going to make a big platform change, then ensure there is something remarkable happening within the community at the same time. People will associate that great, remarkable, thing with the platform change. Organize a terrific live event, or highlight the top 5 discussions of all time, or the mose useful piece of advice ever posted. 

3) Avoid deleting content members have contributed to the community at all costs. If you are going to delete members' content, don't bury the story in the 6th paragraph. Instead highlight the change and offer to port across the blogs of the top 20 contributors. For the rest, you've created a simple, step-by-step, guide to doing this.  

4) Words are incredibly valuable. The more of them you use, the less members will read. Don't send updates to members which are longer than a 2 - 3 paragraphs. Cut out every piece of fluff. People can always click for more information. 

5) Send personal e-mails to your top contributors. Especially when all their content might be removed within the next 5 days. p.s. Also give members more than 5 days (over a weekend) to save their material. 

6) Split the announcements. The announcement with the platform change should not be included with the announcement about members losing all their content. 

How can you approach this?

We would suggest splitting this into two e-mails. 

E-mail 1) The big exciting event e-mail

Hi Richard,

We have something big coming up.

We have Mr. VIP joining us on May 1st for an exclusive live Q&A session about how to be terrific at {topic}. 

For the first time, Mr. VIP will be sharing how he did....

Mr. VIP's visit will mark the launch of your new platform. You'll see the changes for yourself in a few days. Broadly, it's going to make the user experience, especially on mobile, much better.

If you want to learn how to do x, y, and z, then sign up for the event here.

www.thelinkgoeshere.com 

 

E-mail 2) The losing content e-mail

Hi Richard,

Don't skip this e-mail.

Despite our best efforts, it's not going to be possible to move all your old content to the new platform. 

However, we don't want to lose your content. We have a cunning plan.

We're going to move your content to blogs that you control and then important the content back in via RSS. If you don't have the time to do this yourself then  let me know and we'll set it up for you.

If you want to do it yourself, here is a step by step guide we have created:

www.thelinkgoeshere.com

These 2 e-mails means that 1) you need to have something exciting happening in the community platform and 2) you need to set aside the time to help people move the content over and create that guide.

Sounds a lot like serving the community doesn't it? 

Recruiting, motivating, and keeping volunteers in an online community

Wikipedia got lucky.

Wikipedia was in the right time at the right place.

You’re not Wikipedia. The stars won’t align for you. Thousands of volunteers won’t decide to help you with your community project. You’re going to struggle.  

You’re going to focus on getting your first volunteers and then a few more.

You’re going to master the motivations of volunteers, craft specific roles, and retain the volunteers you have for the long term.

 

What motivates volunteers?

Volunteers are motivated by one of four things:

1)   Power/influence/efficacy. Many volunteers are driven by the need to have an impact upon their surroundings. This is the efficacy factor. They need to feel power over their environment or other people. 

2)   Recognition/appreciation/self-validation. Some volunteers are driven by the need to be recognized and appreciated by others. This is often referred to as a form of self-validation. People contribute to seek positive opinions of themselves from those they consider their peers. If you contribute a great piece of advice, someone might declare you an expert on that topic.

3)   Commitment to a friend. Many people volunteer because they have a commitment to a friend/acquaintance already involved in the cause. How many people have you sponsored to do a run or activity for charity?

4)   Commitment to the cause. A few volunteers are motivated by the cause/goal itself. They help out because they want to support the cause of the community.

The top two are typically bigger and more reliable draws than the bottom two. Curiously, most volunteer recruitment focuses on the latter.

 

What volunteers can do in communities

Volunteers can typically undertake a variety of the following activities:

• Content creating/editing
• Initiating and sustaining discussions
• Moderating activities/removing spam etc…
• Platform maintenance
• Organizing/supporting community events and activities
• Welcoming newcomers and building relationships with key members
• Training and supporting other volunteers

This isn’t an extensive list. Communities relating a particular crowdsourcing effort (e.g. Wikipedia volunteers) will have more specific tasks, others will have a broader array of activities.

 

Recruiting volunteers

There are four effective ways to recruit volunteers.

1)   Headhunt specific people. Find people with unique skills, knowledge, experience, or passion and persuade them to become volunteers. These are people that can specifically add unique value to the community as opposed to those whom take on simpler, process-orientated, tasks.

2)   Target existing contributors. Find people that have made an above average contribution to the community, or a number of contributions, and persuade them to become volunteers.

3)   Soliciting applications. You call for people to apply for positions. This gives higher prestige to the positions being advertised. Don’t let anyone volunteer, pick from the best. The more exclusive, the more people are keen to do it.

4)   Invite people to pledge a contribution based upon their skills. This is known as the ABCD approach (asset-based community development). It asks people to highlight what skills they can contribute to the community and then encourages them to pledge those skills to specific tasks within the community.

 

Avoid calling for more volunteers. This rarely attracts a large number of volunteers. It can highlight a lack of momentum for the project and decrease motivation from existing volunteers.

 

Developing volunteer roles 

Develop volunteer roles which combine the unpopular, repetitive, tasks with those that are exciting and offer elements of power/fame.

Develop specific roles for volunteers based around what they’re doing already or what they would most like to do. Too many communities try to dump all their dull tasks onto passionate helpers. This achieves nothing.  

It’s far easier to recruit volunteers for a role that has:

a)   A specific name

b)   Power elements (organizing events, admin privileges, unique access)

c)    Recognition elements (creating content, opinion columns, listing on the site, public gratitude)

d)   Functional elements (checking forums, removing spam, contributing content)

e)    Clear area of responsibility (for a specific topic/category/area of the site)

 

Retaining volunteers 

To retain volunteers, you need to build a sense of community amongst volunteers. You need the commitment of volunteers to switch from commitment from the cause or to a single person to a commitment to the group and a continuance commitment.

We’ve covered this before, this essentially means the following:

1)   Ensure the volunteers frequently interact with each other.

2)   Highlight the history and progress made by volunteers. It's crucial to track progress on a week by week basis, not on a broad annual basis. 

3)   Provide volunteers with further influence within the volunteer group.

4)   Allow off-topic discussions between volunteers to facilitate group bonding.

None of this is easy to do. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to recruit  a core group of volunteers to help run the community. Yet, in the long-term, every community is going to need a core group of volunteers to sustain itself.