What I learned about communities last week
Community Platforms, Internal Communities & Community Growth
On the 16th of December,Friday, I had a chat with Evan Hamilton- Director of Community at CMX. This was my second conversation with Evan and it was a great discussing and picking his brains on community strategy, on-boarding and internal communities. Evan has been involved in the community space for over 10 years and it’s amazing to learn about how the landscape has evolved.
This week’s ramblings are about my learning from our conversation(or at least whatever I could jot down about it).
Choosing the right platform
This plays an important part in building communities. Community managers don’t often realize how important this is until it’s too late. Then again, better late than never. Migrating community members from one platform to is a huge challenge.
Choose a platform that your community is comfortable with. This involves a lot of interaction with community members to figure out what works best for the majority of them. There are some great resources on choosing community platforms.
The kind of community you’re building plays a decisive role in choosing the right platform. For example, a community of digital marketers and social media experts would prefer a Facebook Group because most of the conversations would be spontaneous questions, links to blog post etc. whereas a developer community would probably be better off with Discourse for easier categorization, adding code snippets etc.
We got into deeper conversation about categories or sub communities. Evan gave some great analogies on creating these.
Imagine you’re attending a conference, you complete your registration and walk in to see a lot of rooms- you’re most likely to be confused and feel a little overwhelmed.
In the context of categories, if you’re building a community, it might not be a good idea to have so many sub-categories. Users tend to feel confused when they see a lot of options as soon as they sign up.
You navigate your way around and find a room. You find just one person in the room and it’s suddenly very awkward.
When you have too many categories at a very early stage, there might be very few/no people in some categories.
Have a center point where everyone comes in..maybe like the keynote, after which you are directed to go to different rooms for different tracks.
In the beginning, have one “catch-all” place for all the discussions in the community and once you see a lot of people actively participating, you can then create sub-categories.
Community Growth
Another topic that we discussed about was building community around an event/conference.
The secret-Start small and grow outward.
If you’re in the business of running events- say, a huge conference and you’re trying to build a community to engage with the attendees beyond the event, it’s a good idea to build relationships with the attendees/speakers who travel in for the event from other parts of the country(or world). Follow up with them post the event to see if you can work something out in their city. This could be a topic specific meetup or just an informal gathering for the person to share his/her takeaways after attending your event. Do a follow up on the event-
- How did the meetup go?
- What the general level of interest of the attendees?
- Would they be interested in another event?
- How can I/we(the organization) help you?
This is base is super useful! At some point of time, if you’re planning to host an event in another city, this base can help you gather some insights on the general audience, level of activity and other important metrics which you otherwise wouldn’t have got.
If your organization is ready to invest in these mini meetups, sending in some swags would be a great idea. Perhaps for the next event, you could also sponsor food+drinks for the attendees and maybe even send a representative to attend.
Building Internal communities
One of the main challenges that large organizations face these days are building internal communities.
Evan gave an interesting example about an organization with a fairly large team that incentivized individual performers. This is usually the case in large corporates, specifically in the sales and lead generation teams. The incentives went up to a six figure sum. This led to people competing among themselves and never really cared about the company’s goals. The company then hired someone to manage their internal staff community and the first thing he did was wave off the individual bonus. Instead, he gave them a team bonus. This encouraged them to work together as a team and built a morale among the employees.
For a company in it’s early stage, say 10–20 member team, it’s easy to set things up and build a framework which can then be scaled. If you can talk to them, ask them questions-
- What are 3 things that you’re most proud of about this team?
- What are 3 things that you think we could work on to improve employee experience?
This feedback could then be provided to the entire team and everyone could work together towards the goals.
Also, since we’re talking about communities, here’s something interesting that happened on Reddit.
Last week was super crazy with lots of offline+online meetings. If you’re managing developer/tech communities, I’d love to chat with you. Feel free to shout @dun3buggi3.
