You shouldn’t buy an expensive camera if you’re not planning to learn how to compose great photos.
If you don’t know how to frame a photo, fill a frame, nor use diagonals and leading lines, an expensive camera won’t help you much. It’s like buying a better laptop to write a better novel. There could be some useful extra features, but you need to learn the principles first.
This is true for online communities too.
You shouldn’t invest thousands, even millions, of dollars in community technology if you don’t know how to properly create the results you need.
Your platform vendor can tell you how the features function (about as well as a camera manufacturer can tell you how the camera works), but that’s not going to help you compose the perfect result.
Are You Using Default Settings?
Your community website should be entirely unique to you and your members.
If you’re using your platform’s default settings, haven’t clearly prioritised specific features and topics, and you’re not nudging members towards the behaviors you need, I’ll bet you’re not even close to getting the results you should be getting.
For most of us, there is terrific potential to improve our communities. During my CMX Workshop (“Richard’s workshop“), I’m going to guide you to make rapid, incremental, changes to achieve the best possible results from your community technology.
This workshop is platform agnostic. Using a free Facebook group or an enterprise community platform matters as much as using a cheap or expensive camera when learning to compose photos. It helps, but the core principles matter far more.
By the end of the workshop, you will be able to build a roadmap of improvements to get far higher levels of participation and better results from your community platform.
Even better, you will have a group of peers to help guide your efforts and be a sounding board for your ideas.
p.s. You can watch this webinar on community design with CMX to give yourself a head-start.
p.p.s. My conversation with David Spinks about community skills is now live.
p.p.p.s. I’ll be speaking at Swarm in Sydney, Australia, this week. Feel free to join us.
