Month: May 2017

et’s talk briefly about training and courses.

I spent two days last week at a public speaking workshop.

It was incredible. I learned techniques (and a mental framework) used by some of the best speakers in the world.
This has improved every talk I ever do for the rest of my life.

We often meet with organizations who want to have 1000 active members within 3 months and 10,000 within a year.

Very, very, few communities have 1000+ active members. The majority we’ve studied tend to have a few hundred active members (and this is after several years).

It is possible to grow fast however, but only if you fall into one of three categories.

If you treat your top contributors better than others, they will act better than others.

I’ve seen perfectly functional communities turned into dystopian firestorms by well-intentioned efforts to reward and encourage top contributors.

Top contributors believe their own praise and act condescendingly towards other members

You can’t do too much about the number of lurkers in a community. You might be able to shift the metric (participants / registered visitors) by a percentage point or two, but this comes at a crippling opportunity cost.

And that opportunity cost is to capture your current visitors. You should worry far less about lurkers and far more about visitors who never come back to your community at all.

During a brief spell in PR, I would collect the forward features lists. These highlight what topics media publications would be working on in the coming year (here’s an example). If a featured covered a client’s turf, I’d write in with relevant suggestions.

Here’s a simple method to become more effective in your community engagement work (and a snippet from the Psychology of Community course).
Segment your audience into unique activity clusters as we see below: