5 Important Lessons For Building A Community

If you’ve read this already, you might have missed some really important lessons.

1. Don’t Set Restrictive Objectives. We’re not using Twitter as they expected. We send links, filter information for friends, share news/ideas and explain what’s caught our attention at any moment. If the Twitter team had tried to guide their community to set objectives, they would have killed the business.
2. Spam-Free Philosophy. Twitter didn’t spam anyone to join. Friends of the creators joined, then their friends, and more people. No-one spammed strangers to join. You want 90% of your members to hear about the community from friends, not you.
3. Ignore the Media. Twitter ignored the media. No-one pitched the press to write about it. Instead they grew until they became too important for the media to ignore. This works for niche communities too.
4. Low Costs.  Every community should cost as little as you can afford. The cheaper it is to launch the community, the less the need for instant results and profits. Now you can get on with doing your job.
5. Don’t Ask For Anything. Twitter didn’t ask users for money, nor many personal details to join. They didn’t make us jump through any hoops or try to make money directly from us. The less you ask your community for, the bigger it can be.

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.