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Are you working on a new community with big time bells and whistles that caters to a niche that you just know has been waiting for a place to call home? If so, I encourage you to push ahead full steam. But, let me caution you first.
Your new community, no matter how great will not change habits. What I mean by this is you will not be able to stop potential members from posting on Facebook or twitter or their favorite Ning community. If you are assuming that your new community will become the new gathering place for those belonging to the niche, I think you will be disappointed.
Can you make it a great destination with robust content and interesting discussions? Absolutely. I know from experience what that kind of commitment can do and if you want some ideas on how to grow your community, read through some of the archives, or check out my book, “18 Rules of Community Engagement.”
The main point here is, if you are assuming that you can stop people from spending their time in the mainstream communities, you are way off base.
If you have a presence on those other networks, let the community know that and use them as part of an outpost strategy that highlights all that’s going on in your community. Accentuate the positive, or communicate with your audience in other places whenever you can.
Building a community is a labor of love. (Well, it can also be one of hate if you don’t have support from the top, but I digress…)
You will always think it’s better and deserves to be the center of your members attention, but it won’t be. Certainly not in the beginning.
Accept that you are not an island and work hard to grow your membership.
It’s the only way to grow.
I’ve noticed a spike in traffic that has likely stemmed from this Mashable article on Community Engagement, where I am quoted heavily throughout. Many thanks to Leah Betancourt for interviewing me for her most insightful article.
My regular readers know how passionate I am about growing online communities and engaging users online but you may not.
So, welcome to my blog, where I often vent, try to enlighten, and share the good, the bad and the ugly sides of community management.
Please take a few minutes to read through some of my popular posts, interviews and community management tips.
I hope you’ll find something you like.
If you want to reach me, I’m @communitygirl on Twitter, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. Oh, and if you’d like to read the entire first chapter of my book, “18 Rules of Community Engagement” you can find it in the September edition of EContent Magazine.
Angela Connor
Angela-at-AngelaConnor-dot-com.
I’ve shared stories with you about some of the ups and downs I experience as a community manager and that is one way for me to cope with it without going stir crazy. Sharing these stories is just as hepful for me as it is for you. Thank you for being a sounding board and letting me get things off my chest. It contributes to my sanity.
I am sitting on an Amtrak train at the moment heading to the University of Maryland to speak to a group of reporters, bloggers and editors at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism on engaging the audience. I prepared a presentation with tips on engagement and a series of ideas on how they can connect in ways that will build community for themselves and their news organizations.
I am excited about it, and quite honestly I’m ready for this train ride to end because it seems as though the oxygen level is decreasing and I am a bit light-headed. Thank goodness for an air card and Pandora for streaming music from my favorite artists. But this is not the reason I’m posting. This is…..
So here I am on the train in good spirits and I decide to check my Blackberry for email messages. I see one from a member who has been upset with me for quite a while and whose communications with me have deteriorated to a serious state of rudeness and hate. I almost left it unopened because it has gotten so bad that I now forward his comments straight to our attorney.
Here is his latest:
All this goes to show that you are indeed not competent to manage the community. You have singular inability to police your own venue, one of the very tasks you were hired to perform. Many people have left after having been baited by these assholes you so lovingly call friends. So ship this to your legal department….perhaps something will finally get done about the problem you allow to fester.
I know you have a million questions to ask me about this. Is he right? Is this true? Are you playing favorites? What the heck are you doing Angela?
Let me tell you that this was once one of the top members. He contributed amazing content and was a real advocate for the community. He had been around since our launch.
But he was also a real bully at times, condescending to the point of no return and often mean to people. I received countless emails from members asking me why he was allowed to get away with murder and asking what he “had on me” that made me allow him to stay. You see, I don’t make decisions under duress, and I am fair to people even when others are against them. I take criticism for that, publicly and I accept it. It comes with the territory.
I could argue with him about what my job entails and all that he is misinformed about in terms of what my duties are but it’s pointless. I am now his target and that’s just the way it is. He needs to hate me because he was banned from the community. He isn’t the first and won’t be the last.
So, here I am–preparing to speak tomorrow on the joys of community building and engaging the audience and BAM…a “YOU SUCK AT YOUR JOB” note.
I’ll be sure to stay away from my inbox until the presentation is over.
Wish me luck!
Have you thought much about how you will take your community to the next level in 2010. I’ve been giving that a lot of thought and I’m not sure that it’s new features for me. We’ve done that and I think our users like what we’ve offered. I’m thinking more in terms of content and by content I mean multimedia content that adds value to their lives and what they indicate is interesting to them through their behavior in the community.
So when I received the latest briefing from Trendwatching.com, my wheels started turning. Instead of viewing it as merely a list, I am thinking more broadly. If these are trends for 2010, how can I be ahead of that and what can I do to bring that to the community?
I will share the list with you here and come back over the next few weeks as 2010 approaches and share what I think I can do to integrate this new list into my overall community strategy. You do the same.
Here it is:
Ten Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010 (Trendwatching.com)
- Business as Unusual
- Urbany
- Real-time Reviews
- (F)luxury
- Mass Mingling
- Eco-easy
- Tracking & Alerting
- Profile Myning
- Maturialism
See the full report here and further definitions here.
There is easily three on the list that should give you ideas right away. What do you think? Does this approach make sense to you? i say we try everything because with communities, you never know just what will stick.
Have you heard of GetGlue? It’s another sharing community that allows you to keep your friends in the loop on what you’re reading, listening to and other things you find interesting across the web. Glue shows you items that you’ll like based on your tastes, what your friends like and what’s popular with everyone else.
I caught up with Fraser Kelton, VP of Business Development to learn a little bit more about Glue:
Who is AdaptiveBlue and what is Glue?
AdaptiveBlue is a young NYC-based company that was founded by Alex Iskold. Our mission is to create a better browsing experience for individuals on the web. We’ve created a product that connects you to friends around the things you like on popular sites around the web.
What was your motivation for creating GetGlue, and what needs were you originally trying to meet?
The motivation for Glue was that the current web required too much work from people to get valuable information when looking at books, movies and music online. Currently, if you’re interested in books and you’d like to know what your friends are reading and what they think of a specific book you have to do a lot of work – you have to either send them an email, contact them via IM, or dig into their profile on a social network. None of this is easy work. Glue works hard to make it easy to find out what your friends think of the books that you visit on the web. When you visit a book on Powell’s (for example) Glue appears automatically to show you friends who visited the same book on any popular book site around the web. You can see who visited it, read their review, and then access smart shortcuts to interact with the book in deeper ways.
What made you decide to move forward after realizing it was a good idea?
Alex drives the vision for the company and the team is filled with stellar people who can help realize the idea. What has been awesome is that the community on Glue has really started to gel so we can get a lot of feedback and insight on changes to make to the product, features to add, and functionality that people would like to see.
When I joined GetGlue during the Tweetchat with you and Phylis Zimbler Miller several months ago, I noticed the ability to connect with my Facebook and twitter friends. Do you plan to add any other social networking sites?
Not right now. We think that between Facebook and Twitter we have most of your friend relationships covered and adding more sites would introduce additional complexity with minimal benefit. We do, however, allow you to claim a number of different social networking sites on the web – you can claim your Blog, LinkedIn, Last.fm, MySpace, and other online profiles.
How do you convince those who are on the fence or don’t really see how GetGlue will fit into their lives to give it a try?
We rely on the strength and passion of our user community to help spread their love to Glue. You can read some of the incredible testimonials on our website, on our blog or by doing a Twitter Search.
One of my favorite features is the 140 character reviews which you call “2 Cents” and the ability to interact with others via private messaging. What other features are you working on?
We’re really trying to keep Glue focused on a small set of valuable features. Glue-rs love the ability to add a short 2cent comment to a book and have it appear on all of the popular book sites. Another great feature is the ability to look at all of the books that your friends like. Probably the newest, most popular feature is the ability to see what’s most popular with your friends. You can go to a screen called Glue For You and see the most popular books with your friends.
You’re clearly building community here, or helping others do it. What are your thoughts on online communities overall, and how to make them effective and successful?
The best way to grow a community is to be authentic and genuine and take a sincere interest in each individual who contributes to the community. We pride ourselves on openness and excellent customer service. We actively engage with our passionate users and solicit them for product feedback. Part of being sincere and genuine is to only ask them for input when it matters – that is, be willing to execute on the feedback that’s provided. In the most recent release there are a dozen features that were suggested directly from people within the Glue community. Another way to encourage a healthy community is to appropriately thank those who provide so much. We’ve recently created shirts for a select few as a way to say thanks. We call them Super Glue-rs 
What are your plans for the next 6 months? How about the next 2-5 years?
We’re going to continue to deliver an excellent product that people love and provide improvements to Glue.
Since I have you, in what communities are you active, mainstream and not-so-mainstream?
I used to be very active in a music community on IRC but I’m now predominantly active on Glue (it’s important to eat your own dog food) and Twitter.
And one final opportunity to toot your own horn:
Toot toot!
Who is AdaptiveBlue and what is Glue?
AdaptiveBlue is a young NYC-based company that was founded by Alex Iskold. Our mission is to create a better browsing experience for individuals on the web. We’ve created a product, Glue [link: www.getglue.com], that connects you to friends around the things you like on popular sites around the web.
What was your motivation for creating GetGlue, and what needs were you originally trying to meet?
The motivation for Glue was that the current web required too much work from people to get valuable information when looking at books, movies and music online. Currently, if you’re interested in books and you’d like to know what your friends are reading and what they think of a specific book you have to do a lot of work – you have to either send them an email, contact them via IM, or dig into their profile on a social network. None of this is easy work. Glue works hard to make it easy to find out what your friends think of the books that you visit on the web. When you visit a book on Powells (for example) Glue appears automatically to show you friends who visited the same book on any popular book site around the web. You can see who visited it, read their review, and then access smart shortcuts to interact with the book in deeper ways.
What made you decide to move forward after realizing it was a good idea?
Alex drives the vision for the company and the team is filled with stellar people who can help realize the idea. What has been awesome is that the community on Glue has really started to gel so we can get a lot of feedback and insight on changes to make to the product, features to add, and functionality that people would like to see.
When I joined GetGlue during the tweetchat with you and Phylis Zimbler Miller, I noticed the ability to connect with my Facebook and twitter friends. Do you plan to add any other social networking sites?
Not right now. We think that between Facebook and Twitter we have most of your friend relationships covered and adding more sites would introduce additional complexity with minimal benefit. We do, however, allow you to claim a number of different social networking sites on the web – you can claim your Blog, LinkedIn, Last.fm, MySpace, and other online profiles.
How do you convince those who are on the fence or don’t really see how GetGlue will fit into their lives to give it a try?
We rely on the strength and passion of our user community to help spread their love to Glue. You can read some of the incredible testimonials on our website [www.getglue.com], on our blog [http://blog.adaptiveblue.com/?p=1552] or by doing a Twitter Search [http://search.twitter.com/search?q=getglue]
One of my favorite features is the 140 character reviews which you call “2 Cents” and the ability to interact with others via private messaging. What other features are you working on?
We’re really trying to keep Glue focused on a small set of valuable features. Glue-rs love the ability to add a short 2cent comment to a book and have it appear on all of the popular book sites. Another great feature is the ability to look at all of the books that your friends like. Probably the newest, most popular feature is the ability to see what’s most popular with your friends. You can go to a screen called Glue For You and see the most popular books with your friends.
You’re clearly building community here, or helping others do it. What are your thoughts on online communities overall, and how to make them effective and successful?
The best way to grow a community is to be authentic and genuine and take a sincere interest in each individual who contributes to the community. We pride ourselves on openness and excellent customer service. We actively engage with our passionate users and solicit them for product feedback. Part of being sincere and genuine is to only ask them for input when it matters – that is, be willing to execute on the feedback that’s provided. In the most recent release there are a dozen features that were suggested directly from people within the Glue community. Another way to encourage a healthy community is to appropriately thank those who provide so much. We’ve recently created shirts for a select few as a way to say thanks. We call them Super Glue-rs http://bit.ly/SuperGluer
What are your plans for the next 6 months? How about the next 2-5 years?
We’re going to continue to deliver an excellent product that people love and provide improvements to Glue.
Since I have you, in what communities are you active, mainstream and not-so-mainstream?
I used to be very active in a music community on IRC but I’m now predominantly active on Glue (it’s important to eat your own dog food) and Twitter.
And one final opportunity to toot your own horn: Toot toot!
I recently interviewed Ning’s Chief Operating Officer Jason Rosenthal for an article that will appear in the January issue of EContent Magazine. (It will also be on their website and I will be sure to share the link.) Only portions of the interview will be used in the article, so I’ve decided to share the complete interview with you.
1. How many Ning sites are there currently?
More than 1.6 million Ning Networks have been created on the Ning Platform and we currently have more than 36 million registered users.
2. How would you characterize your growth since launch?
The Ning Platform has increased in size by more than 300 percent in the number of Ning Networks created, registered users and active Ning Networks in the past year. We see approximately 5,000 new Ning Networks being created every day and we are adding about one million registered users every 12 days.
3. Does Ning have any plans to offer more analytics as companies look more towards specific measurements to gauge the effectiveness of their communities?
We are committed to arming our Network Creators with the tools to make their Ning Network as successful as possible. We currently offer Ning Network Creators a variety of management features to optimize the effectiveness of their Ning Network. This includes the ability to edit the layout of their Ning Network, bring in features unique to their needs, and manage the invitation flow. We also give our Network Creators the ability to easily integrate Google Analytics into their Ning Network.
In addition, for those running Virtual Gifts on their Ning Network, we offer a rich set of analytics tools to measure and quantify gift transactions and frequency.
4. What are some of the most successful communities using the NING platform?
Success on Ning comes in all forms depending on the goals of the Network Creator and the interests of their members. Some examples include:
The Twilight Saga – A Ning Network for fans of the Twilight book series with over 200,000 members
- Brooklyn Art Project – A Ning Network for fans of Brooklyn artists with over 6,500 members
- GovLoop – a Ning Network for over 20,000 government employees and contractors at the federal, state, and local level
- IPL Nation – a Ning Network for over 700,000 fans of the Indian Premier Cricket League
-The Pickens Plan – a 200,000+ person strong Ning Network for grassroots organizing of T. Boone Pickens’ “wind energy army.”
5. What are your short and long-term plans for the future of NING?
Ning’s vision is to enable everyone to live the most interesting and vibrant life possible by giving people a platform where they can join and create Ning Networks around interests and passions. We also want Ning to be a service that provides people with a way to become more and more unique through membership in a wide array of Ning Networks and express that uniqueness to the world. With this in mind, we want the Ning Platform to grow with people as their interests, passions and friendships evolve in ways that we can’t even imagine today.
We focus every day on adding more value for our Ning Network Creators and their members. We recently launched two new products, Ning Apps and Ning Virtual Gifts, which we will continue to expand upon. We will also have more to announce in the coming months – stay tuned!
6. Do you find that many communities become dormant shortly after launch? If so, why?
We see a lot of experimenting on Ning, as well as Ning Networks created for timely topics, which leads to some Ning Networks becoming inactive, or having activity spikes at certain times of the year. This experimentation is natural in the area of social creation and technologies. However, many of our Ning Networks only increase in growth due to the way that we’ve built the invitation flow and other features inherent in the Ning Platform.
7. What are your thoughts on what it takes to run a successful Ning community and how are you working to spread that knowledge to your users?
The Ning Help Center and the Ning Blog are great resources for Network Creators looking for ideas on how to maximize all the options and features Ning has to offer.
(Author’s note: I’ve also interviewed a slew of community managers currently using Ning and will publish their thoughts on it’s beneifits and shortcomings in the next few weeks.)
I heard a bit of disturbing news today about a community manager at a local competitor.
She has been reassigned, and it was not voluntary.
It turns out that the media company feels as though she has created such a robust community that it is now self-sustainable and no longer requires her services.
That’s really a shame. I wonder what their plan of attack will be when people stop contributing or the quality of content begins to spiral, which it will.
You would think I’d revel in this this news, as this is a competitor, but I can’t do it. It’s a hit to the craft and the importance of our work. Nothing about that brings me joy.
What are your thoughts on this? We all know that building it isn’t enough. They built it and people did come. But they only stayed because someone made it worth their while. I wonder what will happen next. Whatever it is…chances are it won’t be pretty.
I’ll keep you posted.
If you follow me on Twitter you know that I spent most of the day at the Social Media Business Forum. Actually I am still here. I am sitting in the second to last row at the Blogger Relations panel with Lucretia Pruitt, Ilina Ewen and Kelby Carr. It has been a really good conference so far.
I attended a session earlier today on Building and Managing an Online Community with panelists Patrick OKeefe, author of Managing Online Forums Laurie Smithwick of Kirtsy and Ryan Boyles.
During that session I commented during a question I asked that you are not a community manager until you have dealt with trolls who threaten to bomb your car. That was re-tweeted quite a bit and even called the tweet of the day, by Gregory Ng.
But the thing is, I am dead serious. My issue is the casual use of the title “community manager” that now somehow encompasses customer service reps and anyone who monitors a brand on twitter or creates and manages a facebook fan page. Yes, you are reaching out and even communicating with the community but that is not enough.
Until you have been in the depths of this craft by nurturing and growing the community, reaching out to influencers, contributing massive amounts of content, dealing with relentless trolls and working hard to be an advocate of the community to bosses who may not necessarily understand what your work entails, I am not going to acknowledge you as a community manager.
There are many of us who take this work seriously and are put to task on a daily basis dealing with all that comes our way. And it is not pretty.
Laurie Smithwick answered my question saying that people like us need to hunker down and just do what we do and it will all be clear in the end.
We are still in the very early days of social media and this is going to happen so I really need to just get over it. But right now, I find it annoying. I will hunker down next month.
For complete coverage of the Social Media Business Forum, search the hashtag #smbf. I also have a few photos on Flickr.
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You may recall the first time I experienced the death of community member. It was a lot tougher than I’d ever imagined. Actually, I’d never given it much thought, and when it happened it was pretty tough. This member was young, vibrant and very well-liked in the community and believe me…the mourning was real.
Not too long after we had another member die as well. He was on vacation at the time and the news came as a shock. He’d recently blogged about his back surgery but there were no indications that he’d been sick.
When his partner announced in a blog post that he’d died, the community was mourning once again.
But what I want to share with you is his obituary. The online community was so important to him that his loved ones felt the need to mention it in his obituary. That last piece of information characterizing his life for all to remember including his involvement in an online community.
Here are the two excerpts that mention the community specifically:
John (GoPanthers) could frequently be found in the WRAL Community Forum GOLO until sidelined by his back surgery in March 2008. John loved animals both in nature and house pets. He was the proud father of Madison, a miniature Schnauzer and two Persian cats Sophie and Zoey.
…Brenda and Wayne Griffin, Vickie Abate, Peggy Holder and the many friends of John’s (GoPanthers) at WRAL’s GOLO Community Forum, including Juli, Lolly, and Mary.
I find it amazing that three of his best friends, who were important enough to mention in his obituary were found online, in the community I launched and continue to nurture. That speaks volumes to what communities mean to the people in them. The next time someone asks you why communities matter, tell them this story.
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