Common Craft Blog
Online Community Lessons from SXSW and Community 2.0
By leelefever on March 15, 2007 - 3:25pm
I have been impressed and inspired lately by the degree to which community has become a focus for nearly every part of the web. Community 2.0 and SXSW Interactive offered a look at a number of different sides of managing and building communities. Here are some of the best points we heard from both conferences.
Know your pain threshold: Organizations are often not used to seeing negative comments from customers on their web site. In online communities this is inevitable. Your organization will have to learn your level of tolerance for negativity and criticism (each one will be different). In many cases, it is a bad idea to remove critical or negative comments (unless they violate the terms). Often, negative comments will be balanced by the community itself who can become stronger through building consensus and debate.
Critical members need to be heard: If people are critical, demanding change and rallying one another, you are doing something right: they care. As Elie Weisel said: The opposite of love is not hate - it is indifference. Working with these members is an important part of community success and listening is an important skill. Recognize their need to be heard and do not ignore them. Have "rules of the road" that you can use to enforce behavior that is unacceptable.
Community planning is a farce: You can plan the direction of an online community, but you'll find that the members will take it new directions that you never expected. You must be ready to work with members and the organization to balance the community's needs with the organization's expectations. This can be an enlightening exercise.
Don't start with technology: This is true with almost any web site. Keep the technology options open while you define what you're trying to accomplish with the community. Talk to future members, understand their goals, figure out what goals your site will accomplish and then how you can use technology and features to facilitate the accomplishment of those goals. Nate Ritter has a good post on this too.
Your community already exists: Know that your customers are already a community. You have an opportunity to offer something to customers that other web sites can't: access to the people and news that have the power to change the products and services they care about. Serve the community that exists and offer them access to things they cannot get elsewhere. This was partly a point from John Hagel's keynote, well documented by Patty Seybold.
Make your community shareable: You may want to create a "home" for your members. The fact is that future Internet users may have their own home in the form of a blog or personal web site. Instead of trying to keep them on your site, let them take a part of your site with them to their home. Give them a badge or "widget" that lets them display their membership and/or participation in your community in their home. You may find that the community markets itself in this way. The Flickr badge is a perfect example.
Be early, be personal: The first members to visit your community are the most important. Welcome them, make them feel at home and offer to help. Go out of your way to spend time being a community member yourself. Respond to questions and be yourself. Turn off the corporate speak and be human. The small, initial community will govern your success - recognize their participation invite them to help you tend the garden.
Online Community Lessons from SXSW and Community 2.0
I somewhat agree with the statement of not starting with the technology but lets face it, if you are building an 'online' community you've committed to technology and it needs to be an integral part of your business strategy from the get go.
Starting with clear goals and a business case is obvious (or should be). And 'how' comes very fast.
Had YouTube not made a clear technology decision to use Flash for video immediately they would not be where they are today. Had MySpace not decided to start w/ ColdFusion there is no knowing how much farther ahead of Facebook they could be today. The list goes on. Friendster / performance, etc.
Business leaders and entrepreneurs should take your advice and I'd like to add to it, "Don't make a technology decision at all.".
Instead, hire smart and leave technology choices to people who understand your goals, understand the space and have a proven track record of implementing social software solutions. Don't waste your time w/ vendor and if the idea is truly original monkey patching a CMS will only drain resources and handcuff the implementation. Geeks have a saying, "Jedi's build their own lightsaber." to which there is much merit.
Online Community Lessons from SXSW and Community 2.0
Thanks for the comment Brian.
In my experience, many people/companies who get started with online communities look at the project in the context of the technology they see. Until the last few years, communities only had a few proven technologies (message boards, listservs, etc.) In these cases, the vision for the community was sometimes limited by the tools/technologies.
Now that there are a number of new tools and a broad range of possibilities, starting with technology can a limiting factor. Only now can we dream and be unhindered by technology because the tools for build lightsabers have matured to such a level. Now it's all about raw materials and most importantly, the big ideas and vision for solving a problem.
Online Community Lessons from SXSW and Community 2.0
Ah yes, couldn't agree more. The bullet list for a community: forums, wikis, blogs, etc. I see those things as abstractions not technologies.
My amendment is about platforms more than anything. It is an interesting time and technology choices, platforms not abstractions, should be considered early and often in parallel with the vision ...and those choices shouldn't be made by a business team with a bulleted featuresheet from a microsoft vendor selling sharepoint. =)
Great blog, look forward to reading more. Cheers!
This is Just Not Right
Hello
I've had similar concerns about PageRank lately. I actually had a friend help me try to chase down information on PageRank in an attempt to better understand it.