Bigger Is Bad

Deliberately break your community into as many groups as possible.

If Christopher Allen is right (I’m sure he is), your community will become less fun as you grow. Every member will need to spend more energy to be a member. It’s not sustainable.

Bigger groups are intimidating to newcomers and more exhausting for regulars. Participation becomes a chore. Members will leave and activity dies down.

As your community grows, it needs to develop into hundreds of smaller groups. Members can engage in as many groups as they handle.

Here are some ideas to do this:

• Issues. If a single issue gets a big response, ask the top provocateurs to form a group about it.
• Reviwers/Testers. Who wants to review or test your client’s products/services?
• Events. Who from your community is attending the same upcoming event? Form an event group for them.
• Geography. Do you have 5 members from Miami? Introduce them to each other.
• Wise Men. Which members miss the early days? Let them keep going.
• Newbies. Who has just joined? Introduce them to each other.
• Task Force. Who wants to fix a problem?
• Super participators. Invite those with the time to join a super-participators group.
• Elite Groups. I love these, anyone can be in one. Find what makes your members special and develop an elite group for them.

Imagine your community as a conference hall with a dozens of small groups (5 – 10 people) talking to each other.

Comments

[Paul C]

There is a lot of wisdom here. You're making it happen with tangents in many productive directions. I too like the idea of an elite group where everyone can feel special.

[Greg]

Interesting post, I would like to see this info applied to a community forum to understand what you are talking about better. You mention "groups" a lot but I cannot understand how that applies to practice (for example on a community forum).

[Matt Cheney]

Thanks again for a brilliant post. I'm going to try some of your group suggestions out in the next month.

I'm continually impressed with the actionable knowledge and your insights. Keep up the great work!

[Alison]

Another great post Rich. As a Community Manager of 140,000 people with 180 individual forums I couldn't agree more. When particular forums get large, unwieldy or simply move too fast, people get turned away. Fast moving forums make people feel left out rather than part of the community.

@Greg We are a parenting community so we have for example a meet other members category - broken into states, and broken down in to regions. We have categories for each stage of parenting from conception/preg/birth through to kids as well as work, lifestyle, hobbies etc. Hope this helps!

It is important to note IMO that categories should be created on demand, nothing is worse that a forum with 50 areas and only 2 posts per thread! Each of our 180 forums is assessed, sometimes merged, closed, split further etc on a continual basis.