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Online Community Building: Members absolutely matter!
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.
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Hi Kevin
Thanks for the mention. I really don’t like seeing posts that say things like, ‘Use the search’ etc – they are unfriendly and leave the member with a hugely negative impression of the community. If the question is common, then perhaps the community can make the answer a little more prominent? (I like that you use community guides to help address this issue).
If not, is it really more difficult to copy and paste the actual answer rather than telling a member to use the search facility?
Keeping a community close-knit is a challenge when it grows. However, it is still important to ensure that all members feel valued. One way of doing this is through member awards, but the best way is to ensure that members feel welcomed and valued regardless of whether they ask a question that has been asked a thousand times before, or whether they are the member who spends six hours a day in the community and has made 100,000 posts.
When it comes to online community, it is easy to be distracted by technology. This is a mistake. The most important element of a successful community is the relationships that are formed there. In this respect, online communities are no different to offline communities.
- Martin
Thanks for commenting Martin! I agree – online communities are no different than offline. Although the communication dynamic changes the core human behaviors behind the communication are the same and therefore must be respected and managed in the same manner.
Kevin