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A community strategy should target a specific emotion to amplify.
I like this wall of member stories shared on the Discovery Education community.
It works to associate the community with a sense of joy and inspiration.
It also works as an ongoing hall of fame for great community members.
Take a second to read this abstract from Tseng et al.
“Specifically, members with knowledge-seeking motives to participate in online brand communities became committed via two routes: with or without symbolic motives. On the other hand, entertainment-seeking members became committed only via the route through symbolic motives.”
Essentially, people that came for knowledge became committed to the community if they were satisfied with the knowledge gained and, to a slightly lesser extent, if they became motivated to be socially integrated with the group.
A few exciting events coming up:
On Tuesday 17th October (next week!) I’ll be running an hour-long strategy workshop to help attendees test, tweak, and refine their community strategy at HigherLogic’s SuperForum in Washington DC.
On November 3rd to 6th, I’ll be joining an incredible group of speakers at the Israeli American Conference National Council (also in DC).
Maisie is starting a new community role and asks a few common questions:
“How do I get people from different countries, different departments, and different backgrounds to start communicating and sharing with each other?
What platform do I use?
How do I make my message relevant and interesting among the bombardment of emails we get every day?”
Two ways to grow:
1) Broaden your audience focus. Facebook is the best example. Facebook jumped from Harvard to ivy-league schools, to all almost all educational institutions to just over everyone in just over two years.
2) Double down on your existing audience. StackOverflow and Kaggle are good examples. Begin with one functional purpose you can help your audience with and gradually find more and more ways to be useful.
For most of us, I’d go with the latter.
We’ve been fortunate to consult with organizations whose communities we would define as runaway successes (Facebook, SAP, Oracle etc…). One major difference between these companies
Now you have your community goals, objectives, developed your strategy, and selected your tactics, what comes next?
Resource allocation.
I can’t overemphasize just how important this is.
Last year, I asked a course participant to keep a diary of every task she worked on. She lasted 2.5 days until she gave up. She was too busy to even write things down, but the results were illuminating.
We’re all swayed by the allure of activity metrics.
It’s comforting to see discussions with hundreds of responses and thousands of people visiting our communities every day.
But this biases us to select tactics which will generate the most activity instead of the tactics which drive the best results. This is classic engagement-trap thinking.
