How to Get an Active Community

As I explored in my post on Encouraging a Community with the carrot and stick method, I was having difficulty getting members to be active users.

My analysis found that the community I’d fostered wanted to hear stories, but didn’t want to give them. My next step was to encourage people to talk. I created an area where aspiring journalists could just talk, announcing their presence on the site. The idea is that if they’re friends, they’ll be more inclined to help each other. That might not work, but it’s had a better success rate that my previous efforts! The next step is to approach communities that want to tell their stories and enable them to meet the community of Journalists who’ve now started interacting on the site.

Here’s what I’ve learnt so far:

Don’t assume users will grow organically –make a community

The individuals are out there, but it takes effort to bring them together. Sometimes it just takes a few people conversing to give others’ the confidence to join the conversation.

Use personal relationships to ask people to become members

I asked people I was already in conversation with to help me out by starting the conversation. The people I asked were already aspiring Journalists, so I targeted people I thought would have a genuine interest in posting on the site, but knowing me already and being asked by me personally meant they were more willing to do something for me.

Build personal relationships with members

Managing this community doesn’t mean you can’t learn from them. Accept that you know no more than each member of your community. Be human. Thank them for their advice and opinions. A good community manager won’t need to force this, because we’re passionate about the people in our community.

Foster a core group of ambassadors

When Nick Lockey told me this is how Flickr started, the penny dropped! The more I’ve put it into practice, the more I’ve realized how crucial it is. I wish I’d done it sooner! The first members will set the tone for everyone else. Start by asking people you already know in that community to do something specific. For me, this was asking them to post something about themselves and what area they were looking for stories in. You could ask them to

• do a poll
• give advice or
• give their opinion.

It must specific though! People are more inclined to do something they can do in a few minutes.

So the lesson I learnt:

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. A conversation can grow organically, but a good community manager starts the conversation – even if it’s manufactured.

Have you learnt from a community you’re managing? Have you got any ideas on how I can find a community of people who have stories to tell, and how to join them with my community of Journalists? I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments box below.

Boost your brand with social media and an online community

When it comes to advertising £1 out of four is spent online. This is a relatively new trend as big brands come to realise that online is where the action is!

It’s been revealed by The Grocer that Coca-Cola cut its ad spend by 6.6% in 2010. Instead the company is trying to build relationships with their audiences or customers through social media and their online community.

With the launch of Coke Zone – a website with a blog, news, sport and entertainment – Coca Cola is aiming to establish better relationships with its customers.

Sindy4cokezone interacts with the members of the online community telling them about what is going on at Coca Cola:

This interaction demonstrates Coca-Cola’s social media strategy which is clearly about long-term sustainable engagement, developing advocacy and encouraging brand loyalty. It also shows that social media is not just about campaigns or generating buzz around a new product launch, but that it can also be used to engage with consumers on an ongoing basis in order to deepen relationships with a brand.

Starbucks has also joined the social media revolution when it comes to brands and online community management. The coffee shop chain has developed a page called My Starbucks Idea:

Customers are able to give their opinions on certain Starbucks products and make suggestions for new ones or to bring back old ones.

We’ve all heard Vodafone’s slogan “Power to you” and it seems that brands are taking this idea and developing it through their online communities. Essentially the use of social media with brands and advertising gives more power to the customer and client and is now one of the most useful tools available to big brands..

BUT it’s important that the relationships brands build with their members are well managed – otherwise members will stop being active, think less of the organisation and at worst leave the community.

Misuse of social media and the community to promote your brand

Promoting

It’s true that you represent the brand, but you’re not a promotional vehicle.

Your forums, comment threads, Facebook wall, Twitter stream, email lists and other channels of communication you control must not be simple promos either .

If you can steer away from self-promotion you will protect the integrity, trust, openness and fun in your community.

Corporate speak

Don’t be too professional. Use words that you would normally – be yourself!

Things to remember…

• Your brand must be well-established.
• Use forums to build your online community: sharing information will encourage interaction within the site and promote the brand.
• Create quality content: interesting and varied topics and questions for the diverse range of people participating in the forum.
• As online community manager you should be relatively easy to contact, as the members will sometimes have concerns.

Let us know how you have used social media and your online community to boost your brand.

Community management in a land of paywalls

The Financial Times has been behind one for years, and makes good money out of it. The Times and Sunday Times slipped behind one last June, closely followed by News of the World. The Daily Telegraph have hinted they may be tempted to erect something, possibly less like a wall and more like a fence. And it’s only 7 days until The New York Times erect theirs, although holes are already being found.

I am of course talking about paywalls: A device used by media organisations to lever revenue from their online editorial content. But how are you supposed to manage a community – something inherently social and interconnected – when nothing can be shared beyond the barricades? You may have seen this rather irritating symbol ‘(£)’ which signifies when a link leads to paid-for content.

A flawed method?

Web consultant, teacher, and writer Clay Shirky is an expert on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He is not hopeful about the outlook for what I call ‘paywalled communities’:

The Times has stopped being a newspaper, in the sense of a generally available and omnibus account of the news of the day, broadly read in the community. Instead, it is becoming a newsletter, an outlet supported by, and speaking to, a specific and relatively coherent and compact audience.

He goes onto say it is becoming little more than the “online newsletter of the Tories”. SpinYourWeb has touched on the fact that online communities are strongest when there is a shared passion.

If you are going to produce news that can’t be shared outside a particular community, you will want to recruit and retain a community that doesn’t care whether any given piece of news spreads, which means tightly interconnected readerships become the ideal ones.

A realm of exciting possibilities?

Others are more positive about how the restrictions might actually provide the perfect breeding ground for eclectic interactions:

By fencing off the Times all of a sudden now becomes an interesting social experiment; as a further step they will be insisting on real names. It could be the start of a morecivil, closely-knit, vibrant community without the trolls and drive-by snarking … Conversely, now that commenters have paid up their subscriptions, their expectations about the website’s content will rise accordingly, and now the community management team there have a sizeable task on their hands.

3 principles

If you find your self in such a predicament, with your community being put behind a paywall, here are a few tips to keep your head above water:

1. Be prepared to completely change your focus through the transition period. Your community will change when the paywall is erected and you need to be ready to change with it.
2. Avoid assuming who your core (paying) users are going to be. But when you do have an inkling, follow this up with research and find out everything about your new community members. Constructing that 360 degree picture of who’s consuming your content is vital.
3. Don’t assume less users means less work. Remember: if a paywall is being erected, your customers are paying for premium content and want a service from you to match that. Boutique community management if you will!

But these are just my thoughts. I would love to hear your ideas!

Nick Robinson: a journalist fed up of community engagement

Photo: Joe Pike

BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson is one of the most well-known journalists in the country. However, he doesn’t like engaging with the online community of news enthusiasts. Because of the abuse.

I was listening to him reflect on his career last night at an event at West London’s Frontline Club.

He claims to be the first BBC political journalist to blog, way back in 2001. But although there are useful comments on his blog, the constant abuse (most of it swiftly censored by moderators) from some readers has made him weary of its benefits.

This is maybe connected to the fact that the BBC is funded by the licence fee, a compulsory tax, meaning Nick’s audience believe they have some ownership over his work and a right to make their opinions known.

Twitter

The micro-blogging service Twitter is popular among Nick’s colleagues and his opposite numbers at other broadcasters:

• Sky News Political Editor Adam Boulton – @adamboulton
• ITV News Political Editor Tom Bradby – @tombradby
• BBC News Channel Chief Political Correspondent – @BBCLauraK

But Nick Robinson isn’t interested in joining. He’s so high profile and reporting on such polarising and emotive issues that he can’t form constructive, mutually beneficial relationships with community members.

Are there any other examples of high profile figures avoiding community engagement because of the abuse? Maybe Stephen Fry who took a break from Twitter after being told he was ‘boring’ by other users.

Community members – Quantity vs. Quality

The automatic feeling when you start to bring a community together is to invite as many people as you can to the group. In the past the focus has been how many Facebook friends you have or how many people are following you on Twitter. BUT when it comes to communities, is it quality or quantity?

Quantity

Rich Millington from FeverBee explains that you must resist short-term growth spurts when it comes to your community. The best and most important way of approaching communities is with a long-term growth strategy. Having endless members joining in one month is not a good thing.

“10,000 members in the first month is bad. It might be good for a marketing effort or social media campaign, but it’s bad for a community.”

The problems

10,000 members will prevent you from developing a community culture.

Most will never make a contribution – you can’t convert that many into active members.

You can’t build relationships and a community culture with that many people joining at once.

To read more on quantity, click here

Quality

Without doubt the best community members are those that are active and contribute to forums and debates.

There will always be community members that contribute more than others.

These members are hugely important for your community but they can also be dangerous because of the power they hold within the community. If these powerful members post something inappropriate they influence other members.

Rogue members are aware of the power they have and need to be dealt with carefully. Keep them on your side, whilst being seen to treat them the same as everyone else.

What to do if an influential member posts inappropriate content?

Remember Community guidelines

Your online community needs rules/guidelines. This shows community newcomers what’s expected of them and demonstrates your community’s culture and personality. They also give you the moral authority to intervene when things get out of control.

Influence before action

The more you have to intervene in your online community, the less responsibility you are giving your members. This will encourage members to continue posting similar content or reporting posts they deem offensive.

Influential members know they have influence. If you want to keep hold of that member, try to use your influence carefully before you use your moderator privileges.

If one of your influential members posts something that you feel is unsuitable for your community – here are three strategies you can employ from CommunitySpark:

1. Try to steer the conversation

2. Privately contact the member

3. Get other members to intervene

Rich Millington’s Masterclasses on Community Management: No.5 – The Future of Online Community Management

(Continued from Rich Millington’s Masterclasses on Community Management: No. 4 – Money to be made? )

In No.5 of the Rich Millington Masterclasses series, Rich Millington, the founder of FeverBee – an online consultancy for online community management – gives us his thoughts on the future of Online Community Management.

He believes people are focusing too much on geolocation, portable location aware devices and technology for the future.

Rich says the future of online community management will be more about the community side of things than the online side.

Offline and online communities will merge with thriving offline communities developing a web presence.

Check out the video below to find out more:

Rich Millington’s Masterclasses on Community Management: No.4 – Money to be made?

(Continued from Rich Millington’s Masterclasses on Community Management: No.3 – Born, not made)

Rich Millington , founder of FeverBee – an online consultancy on online community management - tells us whether we can make our first million through our online community.

Rich says running an online community can bring money-making opportunities:

• You talk directly to your members cutting advertising costs.
• You can sell advertising on your site – although Rich says this isn’t the best way of making money.
• You can organise events to bring your members together – sell tickets, sponsor access etc.

Rich’s favourite way of making money through his online community is souvenirs. He says that as the community manager you know your community better than anybody else so you can make exactly what your members want and like.

Time to put your thinking caps on for some member memorabilia!

In the meantime check out the video below for more info:

Wikia

Wikia is the latest venture of Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales.

Separate from the successful not-for-profit user-generated encyclopaedia,  it hosts thousands of different niche communities, who update content on their detailed area of interest.

“All of us collectively have a lot more knowledge than one person does.”

As blogging Journalists we can learn a lot from Wikia about how to harness our audience’s knowledge by providing a platform for communities to express themselves.

Spin Your Web’s Fiona Marley Paterson asked Wikia’s Community Manager, Sarah Manly, how Wikia manages their huge community.

See Wikia’s website for more info.

Have you tried any of the things Sarah talks about? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments box below.

Meg Pickard: Getting your journalists engaging with your online community

“It’s quite difficult to persuade anybody to do things that they don’t want to do or that they don’t see value in”, says Meg Pickard, the Guardian‘s Head of Digital Engagement.

Persuading journalists to engage in online communities is easiest when you can explain where and why there is value in doing those activities. This could be:

• Finding new audiences
• Talking in new spaces
• Developing new skills
• Broadening  stories: growing insight, additional perspectives and adding ‘texture’

Meg believes that once this is explained, it becomes a compelling reason for engagement: ”Most of the challenge is helping people to understand the proposition rather than getting them to do something they don’t want to do.”

Sceptics

Forcing someone to get involved in online communities is never an option. Meg says: “In the social media world, the worst person to be on Twitter is someone who doesn’t want to be on Twitter”. If you’re having problems with some of your team keep two key points in mind:

• It takes time to work out the best way to use all this technology
• If there’s no way that it can be used where the journalists are comfortable, don’t do it

Of course some people “don’t want to learn skills and don’t want to move on in the ways we publish and the kinds of audiences that we speak to.”

Organisational change

This can be an organisational change, something that individuals shouldn’t feel responsible for. Meg believes that organisations must try to collectively recognise:

• The world is changing
• We need to work out how we can embrace that.
• Because the alternative is running away from it screaming saying we dont want to play and we don’t want to be involved. And that’s not really an option is it?

Meg Pickard: Social anthropology online

If we are going to properly understand an online community, it might be an idea to learn about the theory behind communities: online and offline. We learn a surprising amount from social anthropology: the study human culture and society

“Social anthropology is at its essence about understanding people and patterns of people, patterns of behaviour and cultures and communities”, says Meg Pickard, the Guardian‘s Head of Digital Engagement. She should know, having studied the subject for many years before moving into the media!

3 key questions to ask are:

• What are people doing?
• Why are they doing it (i.e. Why is it important to them?)
• What does it mean for them and the kind of relationships they have?

Meg says social anthropology is “incredibly relevant” to the digital area. She argues that the internet is an extension of our understanding of community, socialisation and forming relationships.