I had a good time presenting a webinar this morning about managing online communities.
As always, I recorded the whole thing for your infotainment:
Communities
Building addictive communities
Rich Millington from Feverbee gave a great talk at the MozCon event on building communities that people actually want to join.
Lots in here that I have been discovering myself lately around creating a shared mission, and a sense of being an exclusive bunch.
Building my own community
Apologies for the light blogging of late. I’ve just been super busy and – if I am honest – a bit lacking in inspiration.
Anyway.
I’m starting a new online community based around people like you: folk who read this blog, get my newsletter and take part in my webinars.
I’m guessing that we all have quite a lot in common – problems, solutions, stories, knowledge – and that it makes sense to share what we have as a group.
Also I will be creating special content to go into this community that won’t be on my blog or other online spaces – all of which will be created based on what you, the community, ask for.
Right now for example, there’s a video tutorial explaining how digital capability is being approached at the Department of Health, where I am working at the moment.
I’m not building something huge here. My aim is to have a nice, small, manageable group of people who all contribute and help each other out. I’ll leave the empire building to others 🙂
If this sounds like something you would like to be a part of, just head over to the community where you can sign up for an account.
I look forward to chatting with you!
Minimum viable community
I was invited by James Cattell the other day to accompany him to a meeting to talk about what the best community software platforms are.
I think we rather disappointed the people we talked to, in that neither of us could recommend a particular system.
Instead we both advocated, in effect, a minimum viable community. Start with the simplest, lowest common denominator technology available. Something you know that everyone has access to, and they are used to using.
When people start bumping against the limitations of the technology, they might start suggesting new ways of doing things. This is the time to start thinking about what else could be done – when there is a user demand within your community.
The point is that picking a technology winner too early will put off some of your users – whether because they don’t like what you’ve chosen, or they aren’t comfortable with it, or because it doesn’t work for them.
Concentrate on getting members for your community and get them engaged, and when they start to want to do new things, let them guide you.
If you’re interested in building and managing online communities, you might like to sign up for my free upcoming webinar on the subject!
Loving lurkers
I couldn’t agree more with Mozilla’s Laura Hilliger:
We can’t force people to participate, and if we really care about educating people, we shouldn’t try. We should build and design for the people who are participating, and we should be careful to ensure that the lurkers feel welcome. We should create safe spaces of learning and mentorship where even those who don’t complete the call to action still start to develop trust in us, in our products. The fact is you are always a lurker before you participate, so we should be careful not to push people away by implying that they don’t count if they aren’t like us. If we work to love our lurkers, maybe some of them will find their reason to participate.