Month: April 2017

When you begin work today, what are you working towards? What’s your process for systematically improving the value of the community?

Here’s a useful practice. Build up a few profiles of representative community segments and better cater to their needs.

To understand sustained participation in a community, you have to understand CAR.

This stands for Competence, Autonomy, and Relatedness.

It’s self-determination theory which has a lot of supporting studies (unlike Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which has none).

Take a moment and really think who has status in your field.

You just ignored that sentence, didn’t you? Genuinely take a second and come up with 3 names.

Now try to explain why you believe they have status.

The more you can get people to specialize, the more valuable your community will be.

The problem is many communities inadvertently encourage the opposite. People extort more favorable opinions of popular ideas to reinforce their perceived commitment to the group.

Don’t confuse a customer support community with any other type.

In support communities, people want quick resolutions.

If your washing machine breaks, you might visit the community to get an answer.

Many communities today are moving towards simple rating systems in responses.

Readers can select whether a response is helpful or not helpful. Some are measured by this metric (it’s as good a metric as any).

But what if a member asks a question you can answer but not resolve?

There’s a moment in many new client meetings where someone will say:
“The problem with [our audience], is they are too busy to participate!”

We’ve heard this from every type of community. Even a community for retirees.

The trick to improving the resolution rate is better questions, not more answers.

Most questions are far too broad to answer.

Compare two questions:

Bad Question: “My router isn’t working, does anyone have any ideas?”

Today we opened enrollment for our Psychology of Community course.

We believe understanding psychology is critical to building successful online communities.

Our goal is to help you use principles of psychology to sustainably drive a high level of engagement.