How to build and cultivate online communities
In July, I worked with Harvard in Tech on a webinar around building and cultivating online communities. Here are the key takeaways:
Pick your focus. Communities that start off too broad will not successfully broker meaningful conversations and relationships given the relatively small likelihood any 2 people on the platform have sufficient commonalities.
Define your target population that is broad enough to build a large community but all around a meaningful shared pain point.
Be closed but inclusive. Focus on intention rather than background when deciding who can join the community. Instead of optimizing for a particular level of seniority (which can lead to competitive, exclusive, elitist, and less meaningful communities), concentrate on building a group of people with shared goals and dreams and ensure everyone joining has a collaborative, positive intention.
Start with an initial group of engaged users. Be intentional in finding the first couple hundred community members. These community members will set the tone and culture of the community in explicit and implicit ways and also be brand ambassadors who attract future members.
Enable open and honest conversation. Allow people to post anonymously as long as they are a member (thereby, going back to point #2 above, all anonymous posts are made by people with good intentions).
Empower community leaders. Find engaged, energetic, and resonant members to be community leaders to stimulate conversation on posts and set examples through value add posts of their own. Ensure full (ideally 24/7) coverage with your set of community leaders so conversation is driven throughout the day, regardless of time zones (if you are an international community).
Balance grassroots content with top down content. While many of the posts can be spontaneous, organic, and user generated, subtly guide and add value to the community and diversify the content through more long form, article style posts.
However, long form content alone can seem rather one sided. To complement these, find platforms, such as Q & A livestreams (perhaps with pre-submitted questions to make them accessible to all people with different schedules and in different time zones), for members to interact with interesting leaders in the community. This is also another way to highlight the caliber of the community to attract more members and drive more engagement in existing members.
Follow a regular, rather than sporadic schedule for these top down initiatives so community members can know what to expect and rest assured this value will remain.
Make opt in meet up pairings. Instead of pairing all members with each other for conversations or assuming default opt in for each round of matchings, have members intentionally opt in each time for each round. In this way, all matches made will at least be between people able to and interested in connecting with others in the community.
Lower the bar to engage. Some members may be shy or otherwise do not know how to engage with the community. Provide easy ways for them to do so, such as polls or thought provoking questions that anyone can answer.
