There are so many opportunities to engage members of your online community.

Think:

• Pets
• Children
• Relevant current affairs
• Member birthdays (but do it right)
• The welcome email (but do it right)
• Interesting hobbies (do you enjoy clam digging?!)
• Member achievements (in the community and in their personal lives)
• Community milestones (forget numbers – this is more about community campaigns)
• Relevant ‘National Days’ – eg National Sleep Awareness week for an insomnia support forum

Don’t spend too much time trying to come up with exciting, glamorous and unique opportunities to encourage member engagement.

One of the most popular threads on Female Forum is one entitled ‘Good Morning’. Members report in and wish others a good morning and talk about their plans for the day.

It’s hardly glamorous, but it’s community building gold.

Do it from the very beginning.

Membership fees are but one way to monetize an online community.

Two main strategies here:

1. Allow members to join for free and encourage them to ‘upgrade’ to paid membership.
2. Charge a one-off application fee just to get in.

I recommend strategy 2.

If you charge someone to join your community you weed out everyone but the most willing and the most enthusiastic.

No more tire-kickers.

You get an immediate cash contribution and you get a member who is far more motivated.

An added bonus:

You get to spend time managing and developing the community, not ‘encouraging’ members to upgrade.

I’m not talking about making your online community confusing or difficult to use.

Instead, there should be at least one part of your online community that only ‘insiders’ understand.

One of the biggest threats to online communities is growth.

From a member’s perspective, it’s impossible to be friends with everyone. The larger the community, the more noise it generates and the more distracting it can become.

Make sure older members don’t get crowded out or marginalized.

As a community grows, it needs to have elements that make sense only to certain members. As a result, they’ll always be able to recognize a small part of the community as truly their own – regardless of how it evolves and changes over time.

A very small number of Insomnia Land members are part of the ‘Goat Worshipping Sleep-Challenged World Dominators Club’.

That title appears under their username whenever they make a post.

This makes absolutely no sense to anyone but those on the ‘inside’.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

Disclosure: My name was mentioned in this book and I received a free copy. However, this is an unsolicited and unsponsored book review that is completely of my own opinion.

This review, for Richard Millington’s Buzzing Communities is only the third book review I have shared on Community Spark after Patrick O’Keefe’s Managing Online Forums and Angela Connor’s 18 Rules of Community Engagement.

I prefer to review books that are aimed specifically at community building and are from authors I know and trust.

Rich writes the community management blog Feverbee and is the founder of The Pillar Summit, a community management training course.

His book, Buzzing Communities, focusses on how to collect data and how to use it to make your community better. Rich’s book will also help you prove that your services as a community manager are valuable.

This book will teach you how to measure your community’s return on investment and how to calculate your personal return on investment as community manager. Rich shares a list of ROI goals and how to measure them. In effect, this book will help boost your job security.

Buzzing Communities really shines with the data collection techniques it shares. Rich outlines specific tasks for you to follow for each phase of your community’s lifecycle. He tells you what data you should be collecting and the best way to use that data.

By reading the book you will learn how to improve member conversion rates, the key metrics you need to be measuring, how to begin benchmarking and much more.

This book isn’t all about data, though. It contains lots of specific field-tested advice. Rich’s style of community management is ‘quick decisions and quick actions’ – this may not be to everyone’s liking, but he does make some convincing arguments.

One of Rich’s core arguments is that community managers should be less reactive and more proactive. He argues that when all you do is react, you’re simply maintaining the community and not developing it.

According to Rich, community management consists of eight elements:

• Strategy
• Growth
• Content
• Moderation
• Events & Activities
• Relationship & Influence
• Business Integration
• User Experience

The book describes each of these elements in detail and explains how long you should be spending on each, according to the lifecycle stage of your online community. At the end of each section, Rich describes the key metrics you need to be collecting.

You will learn what should and should not be consuming your time when managing an online community. For example, Rich argues that most of your time and efforts should be spent on the ‘unseen’ – for example, instead of worrying about fights and arguments, Rich says that you should be spending more time worrying about the fact only one registered member out of 1,000 is still active six months after joining.

Rich shares examples of bonding/status discussions to help make your community stronger. He shares tips and ideas on how to reduce abuse in online communities and he explains how and why your community should have its very own constitution.

You will learn how to bring in other staff members and why it’s important that your community doesn’t really solely on one person (you) for its survival. Rich also shares the key elements of a successful community homepage.

One great section in particular explains how to organize and run events for your online community. This is something I’ve never seen discussed in such detail in a community management book before and is a fantastic addition.

If you purchase this book and follow the advice it contains, you will be a better community manager. Your job will be more secure. You’ll become more proactive and less reactive. You’ll be able to build and develop better online communities.

I highly recommend it.

Book information

• Amazon: Buzzing Communities: How to Build Bigger, Better, and More Active Online Communities
• Author: Richard Millington
• Publisher: FeverBee
• ISBN-13: 978-0988359901
• ISBN-10: 0988359901

Most new online communities fail because members don’t return to keep discussions alive or get involved in new ones.

Most of the time that’s because new members haven’t developed the habit of regularly visiting the community or members simply forget that your community exists.

Prevent this from happening by:

1. Making sure that all members receive an email when someone replies to a discussion they started (or they’re involved in)

2. Making sure that all members receive an email when someone posts a new discussion topic.

Most community software comes with this functionality but by default it typically requires members to opt-in.

Change this to being opt-out and you’ll see a big improvement in levels of activity and engagement.

A great community manager is proactive. Being proactive separates a great community manager from the rest.

Here’s a simple task for you. Write down all the ways you were proactive in the past week. Work them into your ‘standard operating procedure’. This will make you a better community manager.

Here are a few things a proactive community manager does:

• Finds and deletes spam before it is reported by other members.

• Follows up with members who sought help in the past few days to make sure they are back on track.

• Keeps an eye on the member registration list and corrects obviously incorrect email addresses (think hotmial instead of hotmail).

• Responds to members who mention any problem they’re having with the site even if the issue is only mentioned in passing and not in the relevant ‘support’ forum.

• Intervenes in discussions that are about to boil over before all hell breaks loose. Often, just contributing to heated discussions will remind the protagonists that you’ve noticed the discussion, making the need for direct intervention less likely.

What could you do right now, that you don’t necessarily need to do?

Inc. recently posted a great article entitled, ‘What Would Winston Do?‘ – although it’s aimed at business leaders, it should be a must-read for all community managers.

What you need to take away from the article is the following snippet:

Great leaders inspire greatness.

In his early days as Prime Minister, Churchill also had to exhort a war-weary military, Parliament, and public to stay the course. In a make-or-break speech to the House of Commons, Churchill acknowledged “the darker side of our danger and burdens” and went on to say, “It is in adversity that British qualities shine the brightest, and it is under these extraordinary tests that the character of our slowly wrought institutions reveals its latent, invisible strength.” The speech has been credited with helping to revive Britain’s sagging spirits and gradually changing the course of the war.

If you want to get more from members of your online community, you need to highlight their positive traits.

If you’re not convinced about how effective this strategy can be, consider this: a Harvard study split a group of Asian American women into two groups and gave them a math test. Before the test, one group was reminded that they were women (who are perceived to be weaker at math). The other group were reminded they were Asian Americans (who are perceived to be stronger at math). The first group under-performed, whilst the second group excelled.

A similar study placed math test participants in two groups – one group were role playing the position of boss, the other group were role playing the position of assistant. The assistants scored lower.

As a community manager, you want to be inspiring your members. You need to be leading by example. You need to highlight positive traits, delegate responsibility and leadership, and keep negativity behind closed doors.

Too many community managers see cliques as a bad thing (Tommy tried to stamp them out completely). Doing this can bring a community to its knees and strip it of its personality.

Cliques are a good thing for an online community. When members form smaller groups, it makes a community stronger. By trying to stamp them out and making all your members ‘equal’, you’re crushing your community’s spirit.

Cliques make online communities exciting and vibrant. Arguments, debates and rivalry are the fuel that keep communities alive and keep them interesting.

Yes, cliques can make a community seem intimidating to new members – but that’s a good thing. The harder it is to join your community and integrate within the existing membership base, the more committed and dedicated to your community that new member will be.

Instead of worrying about cliques, encourage them.

Questions are vital. Asking questions keeps community discussions alive. Asking questions keeps a community manager in touch with the community. You should never stop asking questions – especially when you don’t know the answer.

Recently, a member of Female Forum complained about some of the jokes that were being posted in the ‘Just for Fun’ section of the forums. The jokes in particular were ones that poked fun of specific nationalities and political systems. As jokes go, I didn’t find them offensive – but I could see how they may be to some.

The problem with humor is so much of it is based on issues that, if spoken about seriously, would be offensive to one or more parties. I recognize this fact, but I didn’t want Female Forum to become a place where jokes could no longer be posted, or members wouldn’t want to post jokes for fear of upsetting members or getting their content removed. Furthermore, I didn’t want to add stipulations for the kind of jokes we would or would not allow in the community within the community guidelines.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t like seeing long community guidelines – especially when they’re hidden within terms and conditions, disclaimers or other legal mumbo-jumbo. First, it’s impossible to cover every single potential ‘infraction’ or word you don’t want to see in the community. Second, nobody will read the guidelines if they’re too long or too hard to find.

So, I reached out to the member that was reporting the posts with the following message:

Hi

I’ve noticed that you have felt uncomfortable with a few of the jokes being posted to the forums of late (I know you’ve hit the ‘report’ button on a couple of them).

To be honest, I’m not sure how to proceed – normally I immediately delete all posts that are reported, but I am not sure how far to take this when it comes to jokes and other forms of humor.

Do you think we should be censoring or disallowing certain types of jokes? I’d appreciate hearing your opinion.

- Martin

Instead of making a decision as one person without consultation, I asked the member in question what her thoughts were. We had a discussion about the issue, and came up with the compromise of adding a ‘Sticky’ post in the ‘Just for Fun’ forum with the following copy:

The Just for Fun forum is a place for you to share jokes and other humorous stories or anecdotes. When it comes to humor, everyone is different – what one person may find funny, another may find offensive. Therefore, please think carefully before sharing them in this forum.

We won’t be banning or chastising people who post jokes that may be seen as offensive but we may remove these type of posts (at our own discretion).

As a general guideline, consider this before posting your joke or story:

If you were the individual/group being poked fun at would you still find the joke funny?

Generally speaking, it may be a good idea to avoid posting jokes that are political in nature. It’s also worth reminding yourself that we have members from all over the world here at Female Forum, so jokes that make fun of particular nationalities or ethnic groups may not go down too well.

We don’t want to stop people sharing jokes – humor and laughter help to bring people together, and that’s what Female Forum is all about. All we ask is that you think twice before posting some of the more potentially offensive or risque jokes.

Thank you!

In the end, I was satisfied, the member who complained was satisfied and we didn’t have to complicate the existing community guidelines. I was initially unsure how to proceed, but by asking questions, a solution was found.

A satisfactory conclusion, then – all because a community manager reached out and asked for input from a member, rather than acting in an arbitrary manner.

Remember – you don’t have all the answers (not all of the time, at least). Recognizing this will make you a better community manager.

A great community manager can build a great online community. That being said, a community shouldn’t be reliant on one person for its success. Yes, it needs a leader – but it shouldn’t depend on that leader for its daily survival.

Here’s a quick and easy way you can determine just how independent your community is – find your community’s total post count, and figure out how many of those posts were made by you.

When you’re building a new community from scratch, it will be largely reliant on its manager – you need to encourage the development of existing conversations and get new ones started. In the early days, it’s likely that you’ll contribute up to around 75% of the community’s content (perhaps even more).

As the community develops, you want to get this percentage down.

• Insomnia Land is two years old. 22% of forum posts were written by me
• Female Forum is three years old. 4% of forum posts were written by me
• Just Chat is twelve years old. 0.17% of forum posts were written by me

There’s an obvious pattern here – the older the community (and typically, the stronger it becomes), the less it relies on contributions from the community manager. As a community grows, more of your work as a community manager shifts ‘behind the scenes‘. That being said, it’s important to interpret these numbers correctly. Your aim isn’t to get your contribution percentage as low as possible.

Insomnia Land is two years old, but it’s clear that it still relies on my contributions to keep it going. This community is one of the most challenging I have ever built, yet I am seeing a clear trend as the community ages – I see more members posting as the days and week go by, so I know the community is on the right track.

Female Forum is three years old and it’s clear that this is a community that is now self-sustaining. That being said, it’s important that I remain involved and visible as the community manager.

Just Chat is a strong, well-developed community with its own culture and dedicated members. That being said, the fact that only 0.17% of forum posts were written by me suggests that I need to be more visible in the community.

It’s impossible (and perhaps, irresponsible) for me to tell you what percentage of contributions should be made by you based on the age of your community. Run the numbers yourself and see if you’re happy with what they say.