image courtesy of chooyutsing

Rachel Happe, of The Community Roundtable, just published the best blog post I’ve read in a long time about how to nurture a successful online community. A key point is that members who have a lot of social influence within a community may be preventing full community participation. Her main points are stated thus:

1. Behavior within a community of peers can be influenced by a “flow of influence” within the community

2. Focusing on the most active community members and most popular content can kill community

3. A good community manager should encourage broad participation, actively reaching out to those less likely to participate

One participatory inhibitor is the presence of online influencers. It’s a funny tension, because an online community is naturally proud of its influencers and “social media rock stars.” Social media rockstar (or nptech rockstar) members will certainly bring more attention to a cause, project, or nonprofit. This attention will help the organization more easily reach its advocacy, fundraising, or other goals. Their presence also assures that others will be interested in joining the group.

However, an online community can be hobbled by influencers as well.  Happe states in her post: “Highlighting the most popular only reinforces for the majority of members that their voices don’t matter because they don’t have popular attention.” In my own work within social media communities, I’ve seen that a few loud voices can dominate group conversation. I’ve also seen group members pander to, or consistently agree with, members who have a lot of social media influence. The same thing tends to happen on Twitter (we all want that rock star influencer to retweet us) and in real life (we all want to meet a rock star influencer at a conference and have that person really, really like us…)

Some essential elements of a strong, participatory community are that:

Members begin to feel social obligation to other

Everyone feels comfortable participating fully, and

Group relationships become interconnected

Interconnected relationships between group members strengthens the group as a whole. Weak ties become stronger as those members within the community move communal relationships to individual relationships outside of the group. (I’ve written about the strength progression of social media ties here.) However, nptech rock stars within a group creates a “gawker effect” (my phrasing) which can inhibit full participation, lead to in-cliques and out-cliques, and inhibit external relationship-building. I’m not saying that a community doesn’t want a few rock stars inside the community, but I am saying that both the influential members and the community manager have an obligation to ensure the long-term growth of the community.

Encouraging new leaders and community involvement requires vigilance and outreach, especially in groups with “influential” members

Rachel offers six solid suggestions for encouraging broad community participation, which are worthwhile to read. To those, I’ll add five more:

1. Welcome groups of new members as they join. A simple “welcome (names of up to 10 new members) to our group! Please take a minute to introduce yourself and your interests” is a great way of making newcomers feel welcome. One Linkedin group administrator sends out a monthly update to all members welcoming and listing the names of each new member and his/her city and country. Mentioning my name made me feel personally welcome.

2. Ask established influencers or leaders to send personal or public messages to new members who join, welcoming them. In one Facebook Group that I administer, I asked a group of established and talkative members to consider sending a personal message through Facebook to new members welcoming them to the group. Group members have mentioned this gesture as something that made them feel very welcome.

3. Ask members that post infrequently, but offer great ideas, to expand those into a longer blog post or lead a discussion about an idea. I’ve seen the quietest member participate more frequently after asking her if I could interview her for a blog post.

4. Make the community calendar transparent and inclusive. Do you hold a monthly mastermind call or community discussion? Do you offer specific types of content to the community monthly? Create a system where all members have the opportunity to offer ideas and suggest themselves as content creators or discussion leaders within the community.

5. Encourage social media rockstars (group influencers) to consider themselves community cultivators. Ask them how they think that they could reach out to help others feel welcome.

Full community participation is ideal and the role of a good organizer is to encourage new leadership and participatory opportunities for everyone. As an example, Rachel offers the idea of highlighting content that doesn’t have a lot of comments. Why? “Because highlighting the least reviewed content encourages content creation and participation from every member.” Absolutely.

Additional reading/resources:

Creating community on a Facebook Page

Klout as a tool for community managers: Why I don’t buy it

I read a fascinating blog post at The Community Roundtable entitled The Value of Community Management. The blog post considers the value, specifically the financial benefit, that community managers provide to managed social communities. Several readers who manage online communities wrote in to offer their data about the difference community managers make. Reading the discussion, I realize there are a number of points that are fully applicable to social networks such as Facebook Pages and Groups, Linkedin Groups, Google Groups, and others. They apply equally to for-profit and nonprofit-sponsored communities.

1. Active management of an online community creates real value for the organization

Tom Humbarger was the paid, active community manager until his position was eliminated. From that time forward, his company chose to manage the online community passively. Tom wrote a blog post about what the effects of active vs. passive community management. His data shows that growth, number of visits, number of page views, and time on site decreased dramatically during the absence of a community manager. The full article is well worth reading here.

As an example, this graph illustrates the dramatic drop-off in the number of site visits once active community management ceased.

2. Similarly, active management of a Facebook Page creates real value for the organization

I was the active manager of a corporate Facebook Page for a period of three months in 2009, until the company decided to eliminate all managed social media. From that time forward, the company decided to auto-fed blog posts to the Facebook Page, with no added interactions. During the time of active Facebook Page management, the Page grew at a rate of about 8 fans a week, had a post quality of 21, drove about 8 visits a day to the site,  but had a conversion rate from Facebook Page to website registration of almost 25%. Since the Page became inactive, the number of new fans/week has dropped to less than one, there are almost no website visits, zero conversions, and the post quality is zero.

Community Roundtable blog reader Maggie McGary also saw similar stats in her nonprofit’s Facebook Page: she writes in the comments that the number of visits from Facebook to her nonprofit organization’s website plunged during a one-month absence from active Facebook community management.

Community management, whether you define it as managing a private community, or a community on a social media platform, is critical to community growth and moving people from the managed community  towards organizational goals.

3. Active management also encourages relationship-building, which leads to loyalty and community growth

When I was a community organizer, we used to call this “relationship organizing.” Simply put, friends bring friends to organizations, and remain involved because of them. I used to try and map friendships, recruit influencers, and ask them to bring friends into the cause. In online communities, we develop cyber friends that influence us to participate and keep us active. I have started participating more actively in certain online groups because I have developed friendships with other members over time. I also recommend these groups to my friends, and feel increased loyalty to the sponsoring organization. I would never have created these online ties if the group wasn’t active and well-managed.

I asked Hildy Gottlieb, who managed the monthly twitter chat for consultants to community benefits organizations, if there are online ties between the participants of the monthly #npcons chat, and if these ties arose from the chats. She responded emphatically: “Oh goodness yes. There are many people who have met through these chats, who are now having some pretty engaged and higher level conversations throughout the month because they feel they know each other from that involvement.  It’s just like any other involvement or community- the more you put into it, the more you get out of it.”

Simply put, a well-manged online community leads to real value for both the members and the community sponsors. That’s a win-win situation.

Have you managed a social network? Can you add your data to this conversation?

Have you seen the effects of passive management on a social  community?