7 Contrary Truths About Online Communities

There are many contrary things to what is frequently assumed about online communities. These include:

1. Online communities should be small. The bigger a community gets, the less people participate. This creates wastage and makes it impossible for the community manager to identify and work with the top members. Better to extract 1 hours a day from 100 committed members than have 50,000 mostly inactive lurkers. Stay small and extract maximum value from the few, not a little from the many.
2. Famous online communities are terrible examples. Most successful communities were usually lucky. They’re bigger than yours will be. You will have unrealistic expectations, strive for growth and ignore proper community management. Look for mid-sized communities instead.
3. Fights are good for online communities. Fights are healthy forms of expression and self-disclosure. Shut them down if they get personal, but let heated debates happens. No-one quits a community because it’s too active with fierce debates, they quit when it gets boring.
4. Online community websites should be cheap and ugly. People hate learning new things. Fancy community websites need to be learnt. It’s usually easy and better to use a simple forum platform or mailing list for people to participate.
5. Publicity is bad for online communities. Traffic is useless unless you have the foundations of a successful community (regular members) to catch it. Forge a regular group of members first, then try to grow. Early publicity creates dumb expectations and destroyed the first impressions.
6. You should kill your registration page. Registration pages restrict the number of people who participate in your community. We’re in the age of OpenId, Facebook Connect and dozens of data-portability options. Use them.
7. Don’t ask influencers to join your community. Influencers are too busy with their own communities to help. By far, the overwhelming number of active community members are those given the platform for the first time.

Some of these are difficult to accept. They’re contrary to what works elsewhere. Those that consider community work to be similar to marketing are going to be especially disappointed.

Comments

[Bifftheunderstudy.wordpress.com]

1. Agreed. How would you manage a situation where you are managing the community of a massively popular IP to help prevent this?

4. Point taken, but 'cheap and ugly' is perhaps the wrong title for it. Given the choice between two communities of similar activity people will always gravitate toward the one that looks more 'official'.

5. Traffic pays the bills, through ad revenue. It shouldn't be your top goal, but it certainly doesn't hurt if you know how to manage it.

6. For communities catering to professionals, perhaps. I think people enjoy their anonymity and disconnect from real life too much in more casual communities.

[Dennis Baker]

Rich,

You bring much Common sense and simplicity to community management/building. Excellent and truly valuable insights here.

Thanks for the time you spend putting this BLOG out.

[Richard Millington]

Buff, do people gravitate to the ones that look professional? By far in sports team communities, people go towards the unofficial ones. The ones that use simple forum bulletin boards.

And if your relying on traffic to pay the bills, you need to diversify and find things that your members are willing to buy.

[Nan Patience]

these are good

[Paul Novak]

When you think about it, these are common sense that for some reason is usually ignored. Registration is a good one. While it's nice to have a fat registration list to brag about, how many people have exited because they didn't feel like signing up yet again just to make a comment? Think they'll be back?

Goodm advice.

[Bryan Coe - Blackbird e-Solutions]

Good post. I disagree a bit with the first point though. I think just saying communities should be small is a bit restrictive. I seems to me that you are trying to say. "Quality over Quantity." Which is something different. There are larger communities with lots of quality people involved too.

[Martin Reed]

Don't points 1 and 6 argue against each other? In point 1, you're saying it's best to keep the community small, then in point 6 you're encouraging the use of open registration to increase the number of members.

If your goal is to keep the community small, shouldn't membership be difficult, rather than easy?

[Richard Millington]

Point 1 says it's best to keep communities small. Point 6 says that registration pages restrict people who want to join your community.

Being accepted as a member should be difficult, not participating in the site itself.

Staying small should be a conscious decision and set of actions, not the result of a registration page turning away potential members. Membership isn't about the registration page, it's about who participates. Participating should be easy.

[Bryan Coe - Blackbird e-Solutions]

@Richard - so how do you make being "accepted as a member" difficult? What do you do with those that are not accepted and what are the actions taken to ensure that you stay small? I'm a little unclear how you want to do two contradictory things. Allow everyone in but only accept the good ones without using any barriers.