Last week, David Spinks hosted the most important event in the history of online communities.
Nine terrific speakers shared insights from psychology, habit formation, their own personal experiences.
If you want a recap, click here.
What made this event special is the remarkable attendees didn’t ask what platform to use. They didn’t ask how to remove spam. They didn’t talk much about the tools. Tools are pretty simple.
Instead they asked the important questions. They asked questions that apply to every community. What motivates members? How do we form habits of visitation and participation? What rituals work best in which communities?
I sense we’re on the cusp of a change. We’re going to be less platform-focused and more social science focused. Knowing how to motivate members through using the right messages is going to be important. Knowing how to influence the community through proven processes will become common knowledge. Having the skill to get members to form habits will be critical.
We’re seeing this change in our own inbox. Every question used to be technology related. Now most questions are about the psychology of communities. This is a really big and important change.
These are the skills that every community professional will soon be expected to know. This is the new frontier in our work. This is what we should most be excited to explore.
We’re hoping to follow in David’s giant footsteps next week at the Virtual Community Summit in London (Feb 20 – 21st) .
We’re going to go deeper than anyone ever has into the psychology and science in our work. We’re going to equip every attendee with the fundamentals of sciences and then host a workshop so you can apply these skills directly to your own community efforts.
We hope you will help us continue what David started here and sign up to attend: