…a big headache.
One retort to Friday’s post is you need a highly engaged community before you can get them to do the behaviors that matter.
This works better in theory than in practice.
It’s extremely hard to get members to start making contributions which require more vulnerability, time, effort, motivation, skill, and knowledge if they’ve gotten used to posting short, simple, comments on latest updates.
It’s hard to change the expectations from your boss/colleagues about what’s worth measuring once they’ve gotten used to seeing engagement metrics going up each month.
Worse yet, you might find there aren’t enough able (or willing) members to make the kinds of contributions you need. By now it’s too late to make a major course correction.
You need to bake the behaviors you want from members into the community from day one (and if it’s already too late, do it from today). Anyone can get people to be engaged almost any place, but it takes a lot more skill to build a community concept designed to help members make their best possible contributions.
