Time Isn't As Important As You Might Think

The amount of time it takes to run an online community is misunderstood. It doesn't matter how many hours you work. Many of the best online communities are ran by people working just an hour or two a day. 

What really matters with time is which hours you work and what you do in those hours. 

  1) Which hours should you work? 

If you work from midnight to 8am, you’re probably not going to be an effective online community manager. All your members will be asleep. It’s better to work when your community is most active. If your community is only active for 4 hours a day, you probably wont need to work 13 hours a day.

2) What do you do with your time?

You can run a really successful community in just 1 hour a time if you know exactly what to do in that hour. It varies from community to community, but if you delegate the day to day stuff to volunteers (beginning discussions, replying to comments, recruiting volunteers, organizing events) and focus on activities which develop your community.

The time you spend working on a community isn't irrelevant, but it's not the decisive factor. Plan your time and activities very wisely. Focus on the tasks only you can do; the tasks that require special access to your organization or relationships with key members.

Comments

[Mike Rowland]

Hi Richard,

I think this strategy needs the caveat of "It depends" in order to be correct. For example, this advice might work for a small slightly active community with limited features such as a discussion area, but I would not recommend it for a large brand's community or for a community which extends beyond the gate using social media as part of a larger initiative.

Less coverage in off hours depends upon your audience and it's location. I can tell you that the large global communities we've helped do in fact require off hour management.

I'd also be wary of the "delegate the day to day stuff to volunteers" tactic as well. There is a way to utilize volunteers and a way not to. In the U.S., you must be careful to not explicity set expectations and requirements on volunteers or you open yourself up to employee/contractor issues legally. There are other issues with this as well which we wrote about in our blog (http://impactinteractions.com/best-practices/community-myth-busting-ocue2009-presentation-notes/196).

But with that, you are spot on about being efficient in your working habits. A good community manager wears many hats and should focus on the valued adding tasks. But you also need to engage on the day-to-day as well.

Regards,
Mike Rowland
President
Impact Interactions

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Well i agree with your post..Time isn’t money so relax and no need to panic for less time.Time is incredibly valuable but its the only commodity that can be used only once and so it is essential to spend it wisely.Ne ways thanks for sharing your thoughts!