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The community often gets pitched to internal and external audiences in noble terms; connect, collaborate, unite etc…
More and more, we find the simplest route is to stress the time you might save.
Next time you have a problem at work you don’t know the answer to, login to our community and ask. Then move on to the next task. Check back in in a few hours and find several great solutions to choose from.
I used to try to build a sense of community among members far too early.
The problem was people didn’t know each other yet. They didn’t know if they wanted to be associated with one another. They didn’t fundamentally trust that this was a useful place where people like them hang out.
In psychological terms, this is known as cognitive trust
Everyone wants the top experts, senior decision makers, CEOs and influencers to join and participate in their community.
It’s not going to happen. These people are too busy, too self-important, or simply unwilling to spend much time interacting with people below their level (outside of their own organization).
A thesis…
Your community probably isn’t generating the value it could because you’re spending too much time building engagement and too little time building internal alliances.
One community manager last week mentioned their frustration at constantly seeing product feedback from the community ignored by the engineering team.
Every few months a prospective client, working on a new community, will invite us to submit a proposal, see the cost, and reply along the lines of:
“Thanks, we’re going to see how it goes and we’ll let you know if we need your help”
Which makes perfect sense if you feel you can make it work without help.
To continue from the subject matter expert post.
We turn down a lot of work because we won’t manage a community for a client.
We do plenty of other things, but hosts need to own those relationships.
The reason is simple.
Sometimes you can get everything else right and stumble at the ask hurdle.
This is the point where you have to ask someone to do something they’re not already doing. Every community effort reaches this point.
This is difficult, especially without an existing relationship.
Writing an online community strategy from scratch is hard, especially if you haven’t created many strategies before.
Too many online community strategies don’t logically connect the ‘what you’re doing’ with ‘what you’re trying to achieve’.
Having written and reviewed over a hundred community strategies from brands big and small at this point, we see many of the same problems occurring.
For larger companies, your community isn’t only on your platform (and it’s never going to be).
Your customers have created their own Facebook groups, subreddits, StackExchange sites, and have built an audience around their own social media channels.
Previous clients have had a policy that varies between legal harassment at worse to lukewarm support at best. Simply ignoring these groups is most common.
