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.
In the next few weeks leading up to the launch of our Strategic Community Management and Psychology of Community courses (enrollment now open), we’re going to breakdown some of the key principles behind our most successful community strategies.
Our goal is to distill the key lessons from our work with hundreds of communities (Facebook, Google, SAP, Novartis, Oracle, The World Bank, Wikipedia, Greenpeace etc..) into key principles that might help you rethink your strategy and approach.
StackExchange makes an important point:
“if everyone using your technology knows everything about it, that means your community isn’t growing. A healthy technology environment includes a stream of newcomers that are learning the basics, as well as experts testing the platform’s limits.”
A close friend has been wrestling with a community that’s been trundling on for two years.
There is some activity, but it’s barely growing. There isn’t much sense of community.
We recommended two years ago to focus on a tiny slither of the audience and cater to their unique needs. But he couldn’t force himself to do it. It would’ve meant:
Go to your community, list your discussions in the last month by the number of views, and look at the top questions listed there.
Take the top 5 to 10 and send them to an internal expert to write a detailed answer or opinion piece on one of them.
Then promote the piece internally and externally. If you have some paid social budget, you can use this to promote the answer too.
We first launched our community management academy in 2011.
It has since become the most popular community management training program with 1100 graduates from technology, non-profits, collaboration, healthcare, and their own business projects alongside many others.
Today we’re opening registration for two community management courses.
If you had a choice, would you launch a new community today on a forum-based platform?
You might, if you expected long-detailed discussions and high search traffic for older questions. Forums do a terrific job of this. They’re great at integrations and customizations too.
But these benefits apply to increasingly fewer companies. Most people just love to talk about the topic without any overarching structure.
Tangible incentives have a bad reputation for encouraging the worst behaviors.
This is partly well-deserved. Tangible incentives are great when people had little interest in performing that behavior in the first place, but beyond that, they can cause more problems than they solve.
Tangible incentives (like money) are best used as part of a properly designed system. Three good options here are prize bounties, raffle systems, and tipping.
Two groups, which would you most like to join?
“Join the largest group of design engineers on the web. We have 60,000 members from around the world”
“Join the most exclusive group of design engineers on the web. We only accept 365 members per year, 1 per day”
If you don’t have the internal support you want, it’s usually because you don’t have a good process for building that support.
Don’t wait until it’s too late, for concerns to rise, or until you need something.
Start building your list. Few things will have as big an impact on your career as maintaining good, clear, relationships with your list.
