Until 2006, I did community management like everyone else.
I would launch the site, try to get lots of people to join, and then work hard to keep them active. By this point, I had many years of experience.
I thought I knew everything.
Then I stumbled across this article. It completely changed the way I approached communities. Any smidgen of success we’ve had since then I attribute directly to reading this article.
The article outlined the most important part of communities (building a psychological sense of community). It highlighted how much I didn’t know. It proved that we can bring proven social science into online community building.
Based upon this (and reading over a thousand other social science articles) we developed a new approach. We developed a social-science driven approach to building communities.
Our success rate (partly thanks to our checklists along the way) is now close to 100%.
For the past three years, we’ve trained the world’s top community professionals this process. We’ve trained people from Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, LEGO, Oracle, EMC, Autodesk, Mozilla, Greenpeace and many more how to use proven social science to build incredibly successful communities.
On April 28, we’re relaunching our Community Management course. It’s fully online, it won’t interfere with your work, and will teach you a huge amount about building thriving online communities.
Registration opens today and closes when all places are taken.
We invite you to apply here: