Don’t develop a strategy without interacting with your audience. You can should go beyond surveys here. Surveys can yield very useful insights about which audience to target or what tactics might work, but it fails to answer a key question.

How do members feel about the behavior you want them to perform?

Speak to your audience and find out how they feel about the behavior today. This stretches beyond asking them what they do and what they think. It means speaking to members who are performing the behavior and understanding how this behavior makes them feel.

We so rarely consider what we want members to feel about the community and their contributions to it. When we do, we default to positive-sounding emotions (e.g. we want members to feel excited and happy). But what do these emotions mean and are they the best emotions to use?

What Does It Mean To Be Happy?

Imagine a member tells you creating great content makes them ‘happy’. You need to probe beyond this. What does happy mean?

Does it mean they feel respected and valued? Does it mean they feel creative and inspired? You need to identify the very specific emotions you want to amplify. This will take work to interview people about their current attitudes towards the behavior.

The first step is to set up as many interviews as you can with people performing this behavior today (aside, simply setting up interviews helps you build useful relationships that will help later on). You need to push very deep at this level to identify the exact emotions they feel. You need to get really specific answers, otherwise your entire strategy might be based upon the wrong emotion.

For example, if you want people to join the community, ask others how it felt to join the community. If you want people to perform a specific behavior, ask those that perform the behavior how it feels. This works better in a direct call/interview setting than it does via surveys.

Data Should Surprise You

The data here should surprise you. We often find the emotion we thought was driving the behavior is not the one most cited. If your data does not surprise you, you might be biasing the data towards what you expected (or hoped) to find.

Identifying The Emotion To Amplify

The answers will always be more nuanced than joy, happiness, and excitement. You need to push hard for people to explain how they feel when they make a contribution. You often need to translate this into an emotion into something deeper. The emotional wheel below will help you push deeper to find the very specific emotion that people feel.

These emotions will lead into one or more really clear strategies that you can choose between.

Let’s look at three really simple strategies based upon the example above. To illustrate how the strategy changes based upon the emotion, we will keep the goal and objective consistent.

Example 2: Respect Strategy

If your research revealed that people who create quality content most desire to feel respected, your strategy should work to amplify this level of respect.

You can see here, too, that tactics would not be about gamification or notification systems. Your tactics might focus on levels such as a personal thank you from the CEO, reviews of their contributions by senior staff members, inclusion in staff meetings, etc.

Should You Use Negative Emotions?

This is also perhaps the most controversial area of strategic community management. Should we amplify negative emotions to gain behaviors?

You must use your own ethical barometer here. If fear of something bad happening encourages people to create quality content that builds their reputation and improves their condition, that is a mutual win. If it draws people further into despair, that is clearly unethical.

Our advice is to consider whether this behavior would improve your member’s condition. If the answer is yes, then fear and worry can be a powerful motivator to drive positive action. If members are already afraid or worried, it makes no sense to us to ignore this. You can instead signpost your community as a place to resolve and alleviate those worries. If you disagree, you can stick solely to positive emotions.

There are three separate strategies to achieve the same strategic objective. Each of these will lead you down an entirely different set of tactics to achieve your goal. This is why the strategy you decide is so critical. It must be based upon clear research to avoid making a costly mistake in the wrong direction.

You should only have one strategy per strategic objective.