Seven tips for building online communities
I fell into community management by accident. It started with an online innovation challenge where people were rewarded for commenting on ideas which snowballed from there. Before I knew it I was doing this full-time and picked up a few tricks and tips along the way, which I am going to share here.
One thing though, by “online community” I don’t mean creating a Twitter or Facebook account and publishing information. I mean a place where people interact, share ideas and feel more equal, and in brand communities, this is usually customers, consumers or people who have the potential to be either. There is not just a one-way flow of information, from the poster to the reader, but multiple conversations going on at once.
Now that this has been made clear, let’s dive in.
Make your “why?” clear and communicate it to your members
First, you need to be clear on why you are building your community. Is it to enter new markets? Is it to get closer to your customers and get more insights? Or, is it to get ideas and feedback on new products?
It doesn’t matter if your “why” changes but you do need to communicate this to your members to create a sense of trust.
Decide what “success” means for you
Once you have the “why”, what would make this community successful. Write about what this successful community looks like and what the members are doing. What do the members say when they tell people about your community?
Work out how to measure “success”
And, how will you know if your community is successful? You will only know if you set some targets you can track and measure. For example, the community generates 100 new product/service ideas a quarter and approximately ten of these ideas go into the development stage. Of the two ideas that reach the marketplace, a quarter of the community members share the news on social media resulting in 100 trackable sales.
Measure it
Okay, that is a bit ambitious. But, you get the idea. You really need to be as specific as you can and measure as much as you can to indicate that success has been achieved. If you manage a community for a brand, I can guarantee that at some point down the line you be asked for measures and matrixes that have not been tracked. You can pre-empty this by considering the answer to this question - “if this community did not exist, what would the budget for this community be spent on?” Then work out how you would measure the success of this competing project and what an analogous measure would be for this community.
Develop your community personas
A lot of these measures might depend upon who is in the community. Before you even start a community, you need to decide who your ideal community members are. I would recommend creating some personas for these community members i.e. a visual and a description of one type of person in the community.
Find out where your personas “hang out” and meet them there
Included in this persona description is information on the type of social media platforms this person uses, the apps they use, and The type of online groups they are a member of. Then you need to go find these people where they are and direct them towards the community using an incentive that resonates with them.
Slowly reduce your control
When they are in the community and trust has been established, you need to start easing off. Give the community members more control. Ask them what they want to get from the community. Start to delegate roles to community members. And, start to champion them, their work, and their interests.
Before you know the community is less about you - the community manager - and more about them - the community member. After a while the “why” of the community might change and diverge. The definition for success will probably change. This doesn’t matter so much, because you have established the most important things about community - trust and understanding - which gives you the scope to get deeper insights that you imagined and a stronger connection with your customers.
