Conquering The Newcomer Problem

You can conquer the problem of scaring newcomers away by dividing the community into groups of 150 people.

Instead of a 1500-member community, aim for 10 smaller, tighter, communities of 150 members.

The first 150 people to join become Community 1. The door is closed behind them. Only they can open invite new members now. They become a closed unit. The second 150 people to join become the second community, and the third 150 become the third community. etc…

This solves the problem of scaring newbies away, without annoying patronising your current members. Your community is open to benefit newcomers, but closed to benefit your members. Each smaller community might form closer relationships. You might even be surprised by the productivity of 10 online communities working in parallel.

Better still, you can try different strategies on different communities.

Why not give it a try?

Comments

[Richard Bailey]

Do you know where the number 150 comes from? Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point cites it as the maximum number of relationships the human brain has evolved to manage.

My Facebooks 'friends' for a long time lagged around the 150 mark. Of course, the database replaces my need to remember eg birthdays, names of girl/boyfriends and all that complex relationship stuff so most have pushed well beyond this limit.

[Richard Millington]

In my draft post, I had a * at the bottom highlighting why I'm using 150.

In the end I removed it because I didn't want the number to be as significant as cutting a big community into smaller groups.

The Facebook point is interesting. But didn't we have the ability to write birthdays down in calendars anyhow? I think, meaningfully, the number might not be so different.

[Phil Sheard]

If you take the Malcolm Gladwell 150 concept onwards, it would make sense for each community to gather around a certain area of interest.

Example - if a large community forms around music, have a Rock section and a Folk section rather than 2 mixed groups.

[Tom]

As someone working in market research, the idea of 150-size sub-communities which could act as cells is marvellously neat: thanks for that.

Re. interest-led specialisms: I'd be a little wary of this. To extend the music analogy, I think someone who dabbles in rock but is into folk would have interesting insights to offer the 'rock' community (and vice versa) - segmenting communities like that might become a recipe for groupthink.

[Stuart Glendinning Hall]

Thanks for the brilliant piece, it's inspired my own thoughts here http://www.stuart-hall.com/2008/12/12/do-you-overlap-or-divide/