Should We Do This? A Decision Framework For Community Tactics

Clients often ask us questions about new tactics. For example:

“Let’s create a video channel in our community for members to record and share videos”

It makes sense. Videos are rising in popularity, more platforms are pushing it, and it sounds fun. If you pull it off, your community can become the YouTube for its topic.

If you don’t have a framework for making decisions on tactics like these, you can easily go off-strategy and exhaust yourself chasing new ideas. Many communities become a graveyard for forgotten ideas.

Assuming The Best, Being Suspected Of The Worst

As a rule, give members the benefit of the doubt.

They’re not bad people, they’re just having bad days. They didn’t sleep well last night, they just came out of a major relationship, they’re stressed about work, and broken their ankle yesterday.

Anyone of these could explain why they lashed out at another member in that message.

The Simplest Possible Step

The idea was simple; get the engineers actively engaged in our community.

If we could connect engineers directly with members, the engineers could get useful feedback on their plans, learn what members needed, and build better products.

But the engineers (like most engineers, frankly) were far too busy to spend time in the community.

Don’t Get Sucked Into The Community Tactics Quagmire

A quick reminder this is the final week to sign up for our Strategic Community Management course. We won’t be running this course again this year.

If you’re not sure whether you should sign up, consider how many tactics you’re engaging in today.

If your community strategy is any good, you should be working on just 3 to 7 tactics each week.

The Superuser Fallacy

A simple rule of thumb is 1% of members will create 90% of your content. If you believe this, it makes sense to spend a

How To Know Exactly What Your Members Want (And Build Your Community Strategy)

Early on in most consultancy projects we run a survey.

You can find an example from one client here.

In a survey, we’re looking to validate/refute our ideas and identify clear member segments.

The member segments are the most valuable part.

A common mistake here is to look only at the aggregated data (i.e. the 1266 answers below).

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