I just got back from ForumCon yesterday, and I’m now crazy inspired after a couple of days of general community management awesomeness. This conference was a perfect blend of of high-level strategy and real-time tactics. This was anchored by top-notch speakers, like Jeff Atwood, Richard Millington, David Spinks, Justin Isaf, and many more.
***Major kudos to Lucy Bartlett, of Viglink, for organizing such a kickass conference. (*Hint, hint, Viglink, please give Lucy a raise!)***
While it would be nearly impossible to sum up everything from this conference into one concise blog post, I’m going to summarize six key points.
1. Adopt Lean Startup principles when building your community from the ground-up.
Just because you can build a community doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. David Spinks emphasized the need to think of communities like products. When you do so, you can apply the Lean Startup principles to building your minimum viable community. This means that it’s absolutely essential that your community solve a problem. You must solve a real problem not a fictional one created by your boss saying we need a community talking about us.
Without a real problem, the community is destined to mediocrity at best- and more likely failure. Justin Isaf said a good minimum viable community test is to try and start a Twitter chat. If you don’t have enough interest to hold a chat, then you probably don’t have enough interest to build a community.
2. Base the concept of your community upon an existing motivation.
As Richard Millington discovered in his research, the best communities are based around a sole motivation. In fact, communities built around motivations such as social inclusion, pain (solving a problem), and pleasure tend to have the highest conversion rates.
3. Use purposeful design principles in your community.
As Courtney Couch said, purposeful design enables you to clearly answer this question, “You exist to do or solve what?” One of the best purposeful design site examples is Slack.
Sidenote, if you haven’t used Slack I strongly recommend checking it out. It’s an amazing group chat/collaboration tool.
You can apply these same principles to your community by clearly articulating and sharing your philosophy/vision. Then, reinforcing it daily when chatting with community members.
4. Content is king.
Your community is only as valuable as the content that is shared in there. Encourage your members to share high-quality content. One of the best examples from the conference was what Crista Bailey has built with TextureMedia for curly hair aficionados.
5. Focus your time on new contributors not lurkers.
Richard debunked one of the biggest myths many community builders have. This is that lurkers will eventually become active participants. This simply isn’t true. Instead of spending time trying to get lurkers to be engaged, it’s much more effective to focus your time on new contributors. He added if a new contributor gets a response to their first post within 5 hours, they are far more likely to stay engaged and continue posting within the community.
Some engagement tactics to appeal specifically to new members are:
1. Welcome new members publicly to the community after they make their contribution.
- Ex: Weekly email, newsletter, stickied post in the forum, etc.
2. Make them feel unique and valued.
- Ex: Reddit AMAs, Q/As
3. Force real relationships
- Ex: Provide opportunities for members to collaborate with each other through shared activities and/or subgroups.
6. Lead by example.
As Jeff Atwood pointed out, if you want members to behave and contribute in certain ways, you, as the community manager, need to lead by example. This not only includes creating and actively enforcing your community guidelines, but showing the behaviors that you want community members to emulate.
Bonus: The best presentation slides definitely go to Justin for successfully using cat photos to illustrate how to manage community comments at scale. It’s mind-boggling that the Huffington Post received 450,000 comments/per day.
Huff post 450,000 comments a day huge scale moderation @ForumCon @justinisaf #ForumConf pic.twitter.com/8ds6Ipb3wO
”” miakossi (@miakossi) June 19, 2014
