badgerworks

Jake over at Oracle AppsLab wrote about community building and feeding recently. One of his best recommendations is to not build a new community but to work within existing ones. He also discusses the critical position of community manager. I am currently engaged in building an online community based on a very active real life community. I also serve as de facto community manager. In a nut shell, this is really hard work.

This year I was appointed as the small institution representative within a large user group. This group already has roughly 70 active small institutions with five to ten members from each. My task is to tighten up that part of the larger user group to bring those members into a focused special interest group. Our user group has an existing online community that is extremely active, a large and successful annual conference, and many veteran members. Among the smaller institutions, there is an existing bond: we meet up at the conference, communicate throughout the year, and work very well together is smaller collaborative groups. On paper, this newer, more focused flavor of an existing brand should take off! (For a solid article on the power of the new, read Guy Kawasaki’s post on his blog.)

I won’t say that my efforts at community organization are failing (they aren’t), but they are not taking off as rapidly as I had hoped. (Perhaps I need a controversial video on You Tube to get this thing going.) Instead, I am finding members by ones and twos and guiding them into the community — lots of hand holding, lots of care and feeding, lots of communication and content generation, lots of work. This will pay off, I hope, in the long run as once I get the member I should have them for good because I have worked so hard to demonstrate value.

Back to Jake’s points, I completely agree that community building should start within an existing community and grow from there. In my case I have an almost ideal situation: I am working within an existing online community, with members who have known each other on- and offline for years, and with
a group of hard working, savvy users who understand the value of online communities. I have all of that and it is still very difficult. I also agree that, if possible, an online community needs a dedicated manager. Everything I read in a day, every event I attend, every topical white paper published now goes through the “would this be useful to my group” filter. I guarantee I miss far more than I catch. the result is that the community is not fully served and the overall value takes a hit.

One of the best parts of this experience, though, is that I am making progress. I am learning lessons. About 18 months ago, we tried to form a regional online community of small to mid-sized institutions grappling with the same problems we faced. We set up a catchy sub domain name, stood up an open source CMS, applied a slick design, occasionally added some content — and were then shocked that nobody used it. “But it has RSS feeds!” we cried. Well, we have come a long way since then, but we still have a way to go.

So what else do we need to grow and feed our communities? At what point do we hit a tipping point when we don’t need to micro-manage the community anymore (or do we ever)?