It helps if you have a large number of existing relationships, a huge passion, and a wealth of expertise on that topic. If you don’t have these, it’s far more difficult to manage a community.

This has two implications.

First, if you’re hiring a community manager look for evidence of expertise, relationships, and passion. Look for the community managers which have:

• Existing relationships in that topic
• General thoughts and ideas about the future of that sector
• Read books about the topic (and can speak confidently about them)
• Have participated heavily within the topic elsewhere.

Second, if you don’t have these things – then work to get them. Build those relationships, read and practice widely in that topic, keep a journal or online resources with your progress for newcomers. Begin publishing your own material. Expertise doesn’t take as long as you might imagine.

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If you wish to keep reading FeverBee, please do one of the following:

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There is behaviour that adds to the community and behaviour that subtracts from it.

You can judge whether behaviour adds or subtracts from the community by judging what would happen if everyone took the same action.

If everyone voted in a poll, submitted content, or participated in discussions, that would probably be a good thing (albeit, with the good-to-have problem of managing that level of activity).

If every member spammed the community, tried to siphon traffic for their own activities, posted provocative comments, or played silly games – this would clearly be a bad thing.

This is where innocuous and (sometimes) well-meaning posts that help an individual member run into trouble.

A well-established member asking others to do something off-site which benefits them isn’t bad if they do it privately (direct messages). Done publicly, however, it encourages others to do the same. It’s behaviour that subtracts from the community.

Soon you’re faced with a tough decision. Do you punish an established member or allow this behaviour to happen? Do you risk accusations of favouritism or allow the entire community to be overrun with subtracting behaviour?

Step in early and stop behaviour that subtracts from the community (especially your own).

 On July 1^st, Google is shutting Google Reader down.

 This means we need to persuade you to take one of two actions.

 1)   Click here to subscribe by e-mail (best option)

 2)   Move your Google Readers feed to Feedly (it takes about 2 minutes)

For this to happen, people need to know and trust you. This means increasing awareness and building relationships.  

It’s hard to launch a community for an audience that doesn’t already have strong relationships with your team. You can’t launch it and hope for the best. You need to begin building awareness and trust months before you open up the platform.  

We use a four-elements framework for this; participate, create, host, and interact.

Participate

• Identify and participate in existing discussions. Be genuine, ask questions, get advice, give advice when you feel ready.

• Attend as many in-person meetups if you can. The cost of sending someone to another city/another country for a meetup is always worthwhile.

Create

• Launch a blog/newsletter/e-mail series on the topic. 

• Publish white-papers based upon interviews and case studies you’ve picked up from the community. 

Host (organize)

• Organize a series of popular events on the topic. This will begin with a tiny number of people, but will grow gradually.  

• Host and attend meetups, even if just a tiny number of people attend – a tiny number if enough to get a community going. 

Interact

• Contact 5 to 10 people a day for 3 months. Reach out to them and sustain these discussions.  

• Schedule interviews with the top experts in your space. Discuss how they might be able to promote their material in the community. 

During this time, never ask members to join a community or do anything that benefits you. Your goal is simply to tackle the awareness and trust stages. Ensure that people know you and that they trust you. 

By the time you launch the community, you should have a huge number of people you can invite to participate. 

“We find no evidence for the influence of customers’ altruism, nor of customers’ desire for improving and enhancing existing firms’ products by submitting ideas”

In short, your customers don’t care about you or your mission.

Using appeals related to improving products or broader sense of purpose doesn’t work well.

What motivations do work well? There are three:

• Demonstrate personal capabilities and skills (show off/increase standing)
• Receive recognition of third parties for ideas (recognition)
• Have fun developing ideas

If you want great quality feedback, use messaging that is focused on the individual’s desire to impress others and receive recognition.

On July 1^st, Google is shutting Google Reader down.

This means we need to persuade you to take one of two actions.

1)   Click here to subscribe by e-mail (best option)

2)   Move your Google Readers feed to Feedly (it takes about 2 minutes)

We’re going to repeat this message over the next few weeks.

Apologies in advance for the annoyance. I wish there was an easier way. 

For a long time, no-one documented all the advice on how communities develop or categorized all community management activities until recently. 

There is a huge, open, market for community professionals that can gradually add the best expertise from their community into documents other people can use for help. Include direct quotes from named people in these documents. Now categorize this material into frameworks that people can more easily digest.  

You can use a wiki if it’s easier. If you’re pushed for time, begin doing this with just one topic. Now move on to the next topic, and the next. Soon, you will have documented an incredible amount of expertise that everyone can easily find.  

Which community do you think people want to join and participate will participate in? The one with a wealth of documented, categorized, expertise or the one without?  

The problem with too many communities is the very best advice is visible only for a few days. It gets pushed down to irrelevance. That’s a tragedy. 

Wouldn’t it be better if our audience members did {x}? They would benefit, we would benefit, the entire field would be much better.   

Let’s create a community where members can do {x}. It will be terrific.  

This logic doesn’t work well for building a community.  

Don’t use communities to change existing habits or create new ones. Use communities to build upon existing habits. 

The reason why members aren’t taking your desired actions now is probably not because they lack a community platform. It’s more likely a mixture of selfishness and laziness. There are difficult things to overcome. 

Analyze the habits of your audience before you launch the community. Identify specifically what they do in that topic. Go to a few meetups, take note of what they talk about. Do they share advice or shoot the breeze? Do they ask for specific tips or broad ideas? Do they give job/career advice and opportunities?  

Now create places within your community for these things to take place. For example, if members frequently talk about equipment in various forums and meetups, create the definitive member-reviewed equipment in your community. Invite members to share their very best equipment tips.  

Imagine you run a community for teachers. You notice they often talk about child discipline. You can create a place in your community for member-created guides, scenario discussions, quick tips, and interviews with experts.  

You can only do this if you already understand what your audience does. If you lack that knowledge, if you don’t really understand your audience, you miss a great opportunity to build the community.  

• They lack domain knowledge. They have a basic question which they want an answer to. Most members will know the answer to this question. The question often begins with “Hi, I’m new here…”. They are looking for the basic community response. 

• Complexity of information. This occurs when members have a specific problem that is too complex for a standard response. They are either seeking someone that has come across this exact situation or quality information that might apply to their situation.  

• Access to information. They can’t access the information they need. Therefore they need help from others to acquire the information they require. 

• Fragmentation of information. They don’t know where to find the information. Information is dispersed across many different channels. People initiate discussions to identify and find the information they need. 

Most discussions initiated in communities of practice are related to a lack of domain knowledge and complexity of information.  

If you’re building a community of practice, it makes sense to highlight (and balance) discussions that are complex and specific with those that clarify a broader domain of knowledge that the entire community can answer. 

They’re often about the organization, not about the audience. They’re not based around a strong common interest – just temporary problem members have.

Members typically join and post discussions without overcoming any social fear first of participating. Members don’t typically build strong relationships with each other and the sense of community has limited impact upon levels of participation.

Can you guess why? Support communities aren’t communities.

By definition, a community is a group of people whom have developed relationships around a strong common interest. In support communities, those relationships don’t happen. People come; ask questions, get help, and leave.

Certainly, some members stick around and answer a lot of questions to satisfy their need for efficacy, recognition, or achievement. Sometimes, those members also strongly identify with the organization itself. Yet, doesn’t constitute a community.

There are exceptions. GiffGaff, for example, goes far beyond customer support and creates a genuine community amongst it’s members. This is the exception, not the norm.

Support channels are powerful things that save organizations significant sums of money in via call-deflection. However, they’re not communities. They’re not the category that proves the rules of communities don’t exist. If you’re trying to build a customer support channel, you’re playing by a completely different set of rules.

Jeff Atwood nailed this some time ago. They’re difficult to follow and make participation harder. People just want to scroll to the bottom to see what’s new. Broadly, most strands of conversation still play out to their maximum potential.

If you’re debating whether to use threaded discussions or not, don’t.  

The idea that organizations should cultivate and harvest social capital from their stakeholders is revolutionary. It’s not necessarily new, but it’s certainly revolutionary.

Some are blown away by organizations talking directly to stakeholders, we’re blown away by our stakeholders talking to each other. 

In an era of fuzzy buzzwords, engagement everywhere, social business hype, and poor measurement, this risk being just another thing. But I hope not. It’s so much more important than any of them.

This is the answer to some of the biggest strategic questions of our time; what do we do with all these stakeholders we have? How do we develop a sustainable competitive advantage? How do we increase value from the assets we already have?

All of the above; engagement, social business, and other buzzwords are small pieces of the social capital puzzle. 

Social capital, your target audience interacting with each other, leads to many amazing things. It leads to higher retention rates, rebuy rates, upsells, and advocacy. It leads to improved, more cost-efficient, customer service. It leads to employees sharing knowledge and innovating within the organization. It reduces waste. It leads to ongoing innovation within your sector.

You can build social capital today and completely change your entire field. You can build a community today and still be harvesting the social capital it yields decades later. Turning the organization into a mechanism for building social capital can completely change how you approach what you do.

Social capital is measurable. You can build social capital and directly measure the results. The benefits of social capital are powerful.

What we’re trying to achieve by this site, our consultancy, our training, our books and other material is to create a large army of people that can build social capital for their organizations.

The best thing about social capital, is it benefits everyone. It benefits those who are harvesting it and creating it. If you build social capital amongst a group of people, it benefits every single one of those people. They have higher levels of efficacy and even happiness. They can do more with their lives, or in their jobs, all because of you.

Building a community platform is just one approach to cultivate social capital. Hosting regular online or offline events is another. Having fixed time-specific discussions is another. Creating a peer-reviewed journal of progress for your target audience is another. Sometimes the platform isn’t the best option. It’s often the most common, but not the easiest.

Part of every community’s professional’s mission then is to ensure people understand these key four things:

1) What is social capital? 2) What is the value of social capital 3) How do we create social capital and 4) How do harvest social capital? 

Not an easy mission, but an important one. 

It’s for one of the following reasons:

• Anticipated reciprocity. They expect a response to their actions. If they post a comment, they would like a response.

• Increased recognition. They want to increase their own profile and satisfy their need for self-validation and self-esteem.

• Efficacy. They want to have an impact upon their surroundings. We could categorize this under power/influence.

• Attachment. They want to feel part of a special group and associate themselves with the group's identity. 

• Communion. They already feel part of the group offline and want to join in the online fun. 

• Need. They have an immediate need for information. This is primarily in support-based communities.

If you want members to make their first active contributions to the community, it’s better to focus on a message based upon the top three (anticipated reciprocity, increased recognition and efficacy). 

One solution is technical. You can tweak the sharing options. You can provide more nudges for people to share the material. This has a small boost amongst the members that were planning to share it anyway.

Another option is to beg. Please share/click/recommend/like this article. This is the route most FB fan pages take. It doesn’t work well and reflects badly on you.

Another option is to write a truly remarkable, groundbreaking, article. You can write the types of articles that get shared a lot because of their sheer quality/novelty/entertainment value. This is a rough market. You can’t pull this off every week. There are only so many How To’s, great contrarians, and Tim Ferriss’ in the world. For all the talk of content marketing, few people are doing this in any major way.

The final option is the school play tactic. Schools involve every child in the school play because they bring their relatives. This approach works with community content too.

The more people you involve in the creation of content, the more people will share it. If you ask ten members for their best advice on a topic, publish this as an article, those 10 people are likely to share it. In fact, many more in the community might feel a sense of ownership over the article’s creation.

The secret then is to develop a process for members regularly co-creating content in the community. You want members tackling several topics at any given time. You can even provide a list for members to topic. You want to publish regular eBooks written by the community with dozens of links back to relevant discussions in the community.

Ideally, you want this whole process to be ingrained in the community culture. Members propose a topic, different members share their ideas about it, this is publish and shared externally.

It’s a safe bet that members will share content that have helped create. It’s also far more fun than any other approach. 

 If that social order is rigid, if it’s hard to move from being a member to being a top member, if the boundaries are impermeable (or appear so), members will participate less.

 Or worse, social identity theory would predict they would attack members on the fringe of the group (perhaps newcomers) or out-groups to increase the feeling within the group.

 It’s dangerous to have an accepted group of top members which never changes. Others will also feel the outsiders. If you always focus content, discussions, and other activities on the same group of regulars – members perceive it impossible to reach the same status.

 It’s better then, to highlight the contributions of people rapidly rising within that community. Highlight the contributions of members whom have joined within the previous six months and have made a series of great contributions.

Offline, status is a subtle manner. We take both non-verbal and verbal cues. Online, you need to be more explicit. You may specifically state that this member is rapidly becoming a top member of the community.  You can also specifically point to the contributions that have increased their standing within the community.

If you want more activity. Make sure that 1) group boundaries are permeable. People can increase their status and 2) they have a proven path for increasing their status. This is a path that has been taken by other members. 

Let’s try to use more specific definitions. 

• Online Community. A community is a group of people whom have developed online relationships around a strong common interest. This means people whom have crossed an agreed boundary. By developing relationships we mean an extended reciprocity cycle and familiarity/trust in other members. By common interest, we mean something members spend a lot of time thinking about.

• Community building. The act of creating a community and reaching critical mass. This begins in the conceptualization stage of the lifecycle and ends when the community has achieved a critical mass. 

• Community management. The process of developing the community through the lifecycle to its maximum potential. This includes responsibility for all activities in the community. 

• Community organizing. The process of identifying community needs/desires and working with the community to realize those needs/desires.