Get a comprehensive community strategy
Have a best-in-class community experience
Measure and prove your value
Develop a world-class community team
Get regular insights by email
Browse our latest insights
Access free lessons
Get inspiration from top communities
Develop a world-class community team
Published by us and recommendations
Get regular insights by email
Learn how to create a successful community strategy from scratch
Discover how to prove ROI
Nurture top members
Get quickly up to speed on the basics.
Learn how to approach your community strategically.
Old discussions become neglected discussions.
Neglected discussions are filled with outdated advice.
If most of your new visitors arrive via the long-tail of search, your community could inadvertently send most of your audience to outdated information.
Let’s imagine you agree with your boss your community can support multiple goals.
Each goal has 2 to 3 objectives. Each objective requires a strategy. Each strategy takes 1 to 3 tactics to properly execute.
One community manager working alone can probably achieve a decent goal and execute 5 to 6 tactics. But when that becomes multiple goals, 9 objectives, 9 strategies, and 27+ tactics etc…you’re condemned to failure before you begin.
Yes, you can change the behavior once.
If the reward is high enough, the nudge is big enough, and it’s a novel idea, you can get people to do almost anything once.
But one-off actions don’t lead to a sustained change in behavior. If someone joins your community to get a free eBook they’re not going to be a regular participant.
Take a stance on this one political issue. It matters to you and it matters to most of the community.
But what about the next issue? Or future issues that offend your values? How often can you take a stance on issues before your community becomes only about political issues?
What happens when members highlight political issues that offend their values? Do you ignore them or incorporate them too??
Two weeks ago, we hosted an exclusive community event with Lithium to bring 20 of the highest ranking community people together to discuss and share issues in a safe, private, environment. We all learned a lot from it.
The remarkable thing here is just how cost-efficient this is. People leave with a sense of not being alone, a collective validation of their efforts, and an assortment of new ideas and thought processes. Most of all, they get a group of people they can contact for help in the future.
I like this from StackOverflow.
“Q&A tends to be somewhat competitive and adversarial. This means that users often get answers to their questions within minutes. But not everyone enjoys that sort of activity. So we are experimenting with another way to contribute to the art and science of programming. We call it Documentation. In its first year, users have created 21,954 examples organized in 6761 topics and representing 890 tags. Our vision of Documentation will only succeed when many developers pitch in with improving edits.”
The Google community was recently flooded with accusations of racism in search results.
Checking in on a Monday morning a few weeks ago, no-one seems to have been around over the weekend.
Once a perception forms, it’s hard to shift. Past a few hundred thousand members you need 24/7 moderator coverage to respond to issues like this.
If you interview any segment of community members you’ll discover the very real emotive reasons why people don’t participate more.
Lurkers, for example, give three common reasons for not participating:
They don’t have enough time.
They don’t feel they have anything to contribute.
They don’t feel they are smart enough to share their knowledge.
The big risk in leading is looking behind you and seeing no-one following.
You would look pretty silly if you were the only person at the airport holding a protest sign.
Very few people lead (or show initiative) in any community for precisely this reason, they might look a bit silly.
