About Rich

  • Richard Millington is an online community builder currently working for the United Nations Refugee Agency.

    Richard is the founder of Commania, a community for community professionals and the author of the Online Community Manifesto.

    e-mail: richard@feverbee.com

    View Richard Millington's profile on LinkedIn

« What To Do With A Dull Product | Main | Don't Waste Your Time On Outsiders »

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8354de10f69e201116853eec6970c

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference 5 Important Lessons For Building A Community:

Comments

Martin Kloos

interesting points, but aren't you leaning too much on how Twitter became succesful?

In an ideal situation, you're community will develop itself, become succesfull and popular with little effort. But in many (perhaps corporate) situations this is not the case.

I'm currently involved in launching an online community for a Dutch governmental agency. We are activily inviting (in a positive way, and with focus on added value) potential members to join. We launch initiaves that are of benefit to the members. Is that spam? Perhaps, but we inform potential members during offline meetings about the initiatives. It's more like proactive marketing. Making people aware during a soft launch: a period where we do not spent too much time on external awareness. Proactively inviting members also gives us some 'control' (wrong word) on the first registered users and content, since this largely defines the focus and quality of the community in the future.

What we found out that members are extremely enthousiastic once they are aware of our initiative and see the potential benefit it brings them. But we need them to take this small step of getting to know our community and join. This is hard work and smells a bit like marketing :).

ps. I'm fully aware of the fact that 'true' communities are inherently bottom-up created, but I'm also a strong believer of consumers, entrepeneurs and large organizations participating coherently and side-by-side in active, co-creative communities that are of benefit of all participants: not only the community members, not only the facilitator, but everyone. My experience however is that launching an online community from organizational perspective can be a success but is a lot more work to become succesfull.

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Working...
Your comment could not be posted. Error type:
Your comment has been posted. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Working...

Post a comment