I recently read an interesting blog post titled, Community building means making members feel special over at CommunitySpark.com. The author, Martin Reed, made some great points about how to grow member engagement. As he states in his closing paragraph, “Looking through the points above, I think they all come down to treating your members like human beings.”
This seems apparent but the virtual nature of the Internet is often at odds with human interaction. At iNET, we are working with fairly large communities with hundreds of thousands of members and sizable moderation teams. I know at times it is a challenge to properly address the human side of the interaction especially with business-to-business communities where knowledge exchange is the primary intent. After being asked the same question hundreds of times, members and moderators can get frustrated repeating the same response. Often the interaction is a harsh, “did you search for it?”
Our community coordinator, Dennis Johnson and his team, continue to work hard to emphasize the human interaction among community exchanges. For example, with one community we introduced community guides to help new members and visitors find their way through forum categories and sub-categories. On another iNET community serving up discussions on all things Apple (e.g. Mac-Forums), the community leadership awards a “member of the month” to members who demonstrate a high level of assistance in helping visitors and other members fulfill their needs.
In any case, Martin is right that a community represents more than the technology platform it sits on. It repesents a group of people sharing common interests with each individual serving a vital role in the overall community dynamic. It is certainly an area at iNET that we continue to focus on and work to improve.
2 Responses to Online Community Building: Members absolutely matter!