Your Community as a Planet and Prism

Many of the questions that I receive relate to methods for either developing sustainable online communities or how to grow a niche community in a sustainable manner. Such methods vary depending on the demographic of the members and the cultural values expressed by those interested in participating. Over the past decade, I have been involved with the creation of nearly 100 online communities for various industries and interests. Of course, many of you know me as the creator of Land Surveyors United community which I built for my father back in 2007 and continue to manage today. This post is about online communities in general and a few pointers which I have hammered out over time. I must warn you that the following is philosophical in nature, but if you are a community builder who is able to read between the lines, I believe the following tips and perspective could be of great use to you going forward.

SIDE NOTE: The majority of my experience building communities has come from work using the Ning platform (my profile on Creators), Buddypress/Wordpress and SocialEngine. However, the observations below should be applicable to most any social network platform.

Some Observations About Planets and Such

Online communities - no matter the niche - are like little planets, each with their own ecosystem. As a community manager, you provide the venue for conversations to take place but be especially cautious when believing that if you build it they will come. It takes quite a while for would-be members to discover your community and even when they do, convincing them to join involves the use of an abstract formula for which is there is no universally applicable example. I will tell you, however that without conversations between members, a community you have not. If your site is simply a place to share what you (or your brand) has to say, it is website - not a community. The conversations which take place should contain minimal if any input from you. Just let them occur, but make sure they are properly categorized. In other words, once conversations happen, it is your job to make sure the content becomes categorized, tagged and grouped with relevant and related items. It is up to you to impose order upon what would otherwise become chaos. You might consider building pages dedicated to this type of grouping.

As community manager, you absolutely must commit some time and effort towards making sure members are aware that such place of your creation is the type of a place for people of a particular suchness -no matter the niche -to discuss what it is worth discussing. Of course, this is done in order to help others of such suchness find your place for discussing such so that they might discuss such too. As such, you must "do" certain things outside of your community and beyond your little planet, such as linking back to those discussions and photos which continue to bring in new members. This is where outside platforms built for anyone and everyone like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ come into play. Not only are they filters for your potential new members, they are social satellites of your community and you should have pages and/or profiles set up to represent your community, if you plan to gain the attention and socialize your community brand. As such, only the best of the best content originating on your site will attract visitors so don't share just anything. Visitors interested in your particular such may become members in order to join such discussions. Once you have gained their attention and trust it becomes your job to decide what you need to know about their relationship to such through profile questioning. As founder and community manager, it is your task to gauge whether or not they qualify for membership to your community, based on the answers they provide.

Takeaway: In most cases you have just one chance to decide whether or not that new person trying to join is real or a spammer looking to gain access to your members. Use your satellites as a qualifier. For example, there is a good chance that a follower of your Facebook page or Twitter account will already be interested in your topic, just as long as you stay on topic. If you stray too far from the topic, members will leave and never return.

The Questions We (Community Managers) Ask

When a new visitor shows interest in your community by signing up, you have one chance to see how real they are. The integrity of your community depends on whether you decide to accept them or decline their membership. Therefore, the profile questions you ask your members should require answers by which you test their humanity and sanity, unless you're building a social community for robots and refrigerators, think of it as a short quiz. This quiz is the best kind of quiz because they can always go back and change the answers to reflect who they actually want themselves to be seen as online. The answers they save become the about section on everyone's profile. With the right tuning, a member's profile could be as impactful as a living resume both from the perspective of other members as well as search engines. The answers they provide can tell you whether they are joining for the right reasons. In effect, their profile becomes the criteria upon which all other members will gauge them as well. I simply cannot stress enough the point that you shouldn't accept every person who joins to increase numbers. The person who joins your community must be deeply interested in the specific subject matter of your community. If not and they still try to join, they have ulterior motives, which may cause you stress eventually. In my experience I have noticed that if a person will not take the time to fill out their profile questions, they will rarely if ever contribute anything to your community.

Takeaway: Avoid the pain of spammers joining by asking well thought out questions in addition to using the other social platforms as your qualifiers for new members. That is where facebook, twitter, tumblr, pinterest, instagram and any number of other services become your community satellites, amplifying your message to other planets and to people in the future who haven't even been born yet.

Listening Through Noise

In a world of noise, social channels can become clouded and must be filtered and categorized according to relevance, if for no other reason than clarity. Every community online becomes different over time as it evolves, changing while pushing older content down and replacing with it with new topics. In communities of practice, many older topics are evergreen and can become new discussions to anyone who is serious about what it is that they do. Each topic originates in your community or rather, it should. Every topic and/or piece of content becomes a link to share to your satellites, providing new opportunities to excite potential members. For example, if you have a community with 13k+ members and a Facebook page with over 50k followers, use the Facebook page to share helpful discussions that are happening inside your community.

Takeaway: Rather than bang out that next idea you have on Facebook, put it inside a post on your community and share the link on Facebook. You'll have much more control over the message that way. Your message will be read by those who want to or have time to read it. When the post is live, the link becomes what you share as updates on your satellites- your associated social profiles. All of those links should all be linking back to your post in the community now. That link become like a prism through which the focus is channeled and redistributed in a manner similar to a spectrum. Why? Because public knowledge changes every single time an object of knowledge is reinterpreted.

Evergreen Content and Noise Reduction

In communities of practice like Land Surveyors United, every time some new way of doing anything is invented, the old way may still be the best way, depending on who you ask - if for no other reason than because it is known to work. Whether or not it is will always remain a matter of opinion or debate. Questions of this suchness are timeless and as such should be grouped for reintroducing members to your site or in the very least make it simpler to find what they are looking for somewhere in that community. This is how we lessen the noise. We must learn to listen to one another through noise while reducing the noise, together.

Think of it like this: Your community is your planet that you are trying to protect and grow- the inhabitants of that planet (your members) love to have choices. One such choice is the ability to follow the community feed if all things happening inside your community from the outside- from the comfort of their fb profile by following your associated facebook page, for example, as a filter. This gives them an option. They don't have to be bombarded with everything that happens. This happens to be the primary function of Groups. You follow groups to reduce the noise. For example, a surveying student wouldn't be interested necessarily in the discussions happening in the Retired Surveyors group. Such is the case with your community.

Takeaway: Relevance becomes possible through organization. If your members follow your satellites, they are able to casually jump in at any time. This is their right as citizens of your community to not have to be notified when something irrelevant to their interests occurs on the main site. The best way to keep those following from the outside coming in is by feeding them links to community content every-single-day. On of the best way to do this, in my opinion, is through creation and updating of linktrees - one link with a collection of links related in type or subject matter. Your linktree could include discussions about a particular brand, organization, topic, category or type. You collect the links and keep adding them... but only share the one link. Now you can pack 20 reasons to come back to the site rather than one. Tools to create linktrees are Linkkle, eLink, Linktree and similar.

You can see an example of a linktree on the right where I have compiled my most relevant contact links into one single place.

Recycling archived content and bringing awareness to popular items is kinda your job if you manage a community. Unlike a website authored by a brand, the content which is added and updated should come from your members and should be organized, promoted and shared by the community manager. In social communities built for purposes of support, insuring the greatest number of relevant eyes find the content will increase the possibility of members finding the support they need.

The Paradox of Newcomers

One tip I can offer is to build a comprehensive getting started guide and have it show to your member on their first or second login to the community. If they aren't quite sure what to do first, this is a great way to direct them to different parts of the site. No one likes to enter a room for the first time and join a group of people standing around and staring at one another. An effective way to insure this doesn't happen is to continuously reignite the conversation by introducing new speakers to the circle. Regularly update the links and redistribute them to your peers and colleagues. On one community forum I built, we have conversations that were first started in 2009 that still receive comments and every new visitor offers a new perspective or insight from another geography. Of course you can always pay a person like me to try to do it for you. I would of course do my best, but chances are it would be better if I taught you the process so that you could put the time in. Chances are if I can't relate the subject matter of your community to my own life, job, hobby, interest and/or passion, how could i ever really be able to make it perfect?

Takeaway: If you are building or manage a niche community based on your personal interests or industry of practice, hire someone like myself to both set it all up as well as teach you how to manage the flow of the network. However, do not bank the success of your community forming on the hope that the person you hire will develop enough interest in your topic to write jaw dropping posts or contribute relevant content. There is a good chance your members will be turned off by seeing mediocre, passionless content day after day. Instead, make a schedule for yourself for posting to the community, ask about best practices as well as tips and tricks. If you want your community to succeed do not depend on someone else to do it all for you. Just like any community in the real world, you will get out of it what you put into it.

Lead By Example

I constantly hear excuses from other community managers about why their community is "dead" or how it should be put out of its misery. I am here to tell you that the only excuse for a failing community is a management failure. Make no mistake, it takes time to build a community and by time I mean, every single day.

Any community built over night will erode in less time or will become overtaken with spam content. Believe me when I tell you this because I happen have built the most difficult community imaginable - i.e surveyors in many cases do not like or trust other surveyors in the real world. The challenge becomes the reward, but there is no book to explain how to make the communication thrive. Both time and effort will be needed to overcome the obstacles put into place by history, geography and cultural values. It is up to you to remain passionate regarding the importance of the community you hope to build. Communities are like fashion - they are never finished.

Takeaway: Put the time in and see what you attract. If you think your community is dead because no one new is applying to join, no one posts anymore, people are leaving, or any of the 100 other reasons why communities seemingly die, you may be wrong. Word of Mouth to Mouth resuscitation may save it's life. If you want for your network to expand, you must lead by example. You will never be able to effectively "pay someone to do it for you". At the end of the day, week, month, year, decade, only you know what will gain the interest of people like you...for whom the community was intended. Take it from me..a person who, like you, felt at one time like i didn't know what to do next. I noticed a sort of scientific process at work that I wanted to follow closer and cultivate a deep understanding of. My original Ning community for Professional Land Surveyors built March 10th 2007 will turn 11 years old soon. I have learned a lot from managing online communities over the past decade. Hopefully some of my observations can help save a few of you some time.

Creating Avenues of Involvement and Unity

It is ok to invent events and avenues of involvement for your members. Eventually, they will catch on. In 2012, I wanted to create an event that every member of my surveyor community could participate globally. Since then, every June on the Solstice, Land Surveyors United Members participate in Survey Earth in a Day and every year we set a new world record for the most terrestrial survey points collected in a single day. Members simply set up their Survey Grade GPS receivers (no cellphones) at noon in their location and submit the collected point data to the community. Essentially, we remeasure the entire surface of the planet in a single day. This year will be our 7th celebration.

The so-called Flat Earthers seem frustrated these days about this event, but it just goes to show that it is entirely possible to create an event for your community which can have far reaching effects outside of your community. I'll just leave it at that.

Final Point: Do Not Seek Quick Fixes, Commit Time Strategically

Far too many community managers today operate under the assumption that everything will happen quick and in large quantities because...well... it is the internet. An online community is similar to a community in real life in almost every way imaginable. Time, effort and and a hook are needed if you hope to create something for other people which will outlive you. I don't know what your motivations are, but for me it is just that. As long as the internet exists for communication, I want to provide a place for it to happen.

Building a community doesn't happen over night. In fact, it shouldn't. You do not need a lot of third party add-ons to make your site attractive, but you will have to do work outside of your community to bring new members in.. You simply must put in the time and effort if you hope for a community to form. Don't focus so much on background images or the color of a navigation bar. These aspects of your site are not what inspire new members to join. In fact, the way your site is designed and layout is tuned will be an ongoing experiment for the entire life of your community. For this reason I have always tried to help save time by sharing tips for other community creators.

Takeaway: In order to build a sustainable community, you must get to a place where your members feel comfortable and think of your place built for them when sharing that photo or tip or guide on how to utilize the community you built for them. Progressive enhancement is the human way to increase relevance of your community for search engines, social graphs, bots, algorithms and yes, humans. You can do this for your community by channeling the traffic back into the network and reintroducing relevant content to those new members and visitors which might find it and the dialogue which occurs useful even five years in the future.

If you are interested in some personal assistance with growing your online community or brand, please do not hesitate to reach out to me. I enjoy sharing my experiences and will never tire of helping others build avenues of connection and community development.