Community v/s Chemistry: Understanding Community Management through Academic Knowledge

As we continue to understand community management better, I noticed a correlation with a phenomenon we all learnt in our school’s chemistry textbooks. In this article, I will take you through how a Community Manager has a similar role to that of a Catalyst in chemical reactions.

But first a refresher on what a Catalyst is.

Catalysis is the process of increasing the rate of a chemical reaction by adding a substance known as a catalyst. Catalysts are not consumed in the reaction and remain unchanged after it.

To explain it simply, it is something that helps your chemical reaction take place faster and easily.

Some key traits about Catalysts to keep in mind:

• It’s participation in the reaction itself is pretty much nil.
• It brings down the activation energy, i.e. the energy needed to kickstart a chemical reaction.
• Some reactions only take place due to the presence of a Catalyst.

Now that we are caught up, how does this relate to Community Management?

Let’s observe any community existing naturally.?

Example:

Two colleagues that work in the same office don’t know each other yet.

They use the same lift, drink from the same coffee machine and water cooler, and use the same cafe space.

Now in the odds of bumping into each other a bunch of times, and finally one of them taking the initiative, they would become acquaintances.

However, this could take a while.

Now, imagine the same situation where a mutual acquaintance of theirs introduced them to each other. Didn’t the same result occur much faster with lesser efforts?

Here the reaction was them getting to know each other, and the catalyst turned out to be the mutual acquaintance!?

The participation of the mutual acquaintance would have been nil in the discussion between the other two. But it was the presence of that person that made this happen.

And that’s what community management is about! Creating reactions. Making connections happen. Faster and easily, with fewer efforts.

Let’s look at the traits of a catalyst again and how they co-relate with community management:

• It’s participation in the reaction itself is pretty much nil.

The community manager only needs to introduce and get a discussion started. The bond naturally forms on it’s own.

• It brings down the activation energy, i.e. the energy needed to kickstart a chemical reaction.

It possibly would have taken weeks for this interaction to happen, infact it needed an initiative from one of them. The presence of a Community Manager gets things rolling easily without needing much energy to be exhausted by any party.

• Some reactions only take place due to the presence of a Catalyst.

Perhaps the two would have not even bothered getting to know each other, if not because of the little nudge.

Now here’s the kicker.

This can be co-related to more than just making connections. Infact, it can be implemented in all stages of a community member's journey.

You can expect another article someday on my take on the stages of a community member’s journey.

There already are sufficient articles on the topic to get an understanding.

But to get a brief idea to explain the kicker, here are some stages you would see:

• Person with common interest tether, existing outside the Community space.
• Discovery/Introduction to Community
• New member/ Entry into the Community
• Observer/Lurker
• Passive participant
• Pro-active contributor
• Community Advocate/Hyper-active engagement
• Disengagement

Now it’s the task of the Community Manager to act as a catalyst to transition the member from one stage to the next.

Some things they would do to make transitions happen faster than just letting it happen naturally:

• Invite the person to Community proactively.
• Welcoming to the community and giving a thorough introduction.
• Understand their interests and share content/discussion taking place in the community according to those interests
• Ask them questions or invite them to drop a comment
• Encourage them to share their thoughts
• Give them tools and support to carry out initiatives they might want to lead

It would be a good thought to take the mindset of a catalyst when you are in the role of Community Management.

I’d like to close this off by sharing an example of how this mindset helped me build my community stronger:

To create more connections, we needed to make more interactions happen, more bump ins’ with each other. We hosted a new members chat where we played a game. Everyone was asked to introduce themselves and also encouraged to listen to others carefully.?

Why??

Because after that, all the participants were given chits to write certain points about themselves without writing their names on it. We shuffled these out and read them one at a time. The goal was to guess who the chit belonged to.?

What did this encourage and lead to?

It encouraged listening attentively, leading to knowing people better than you normally would have. That further led to them having conversations with each other on a 1-on-1 basis and forming deeper connections.?