I often get asked, “What makes a vibrant online community?” The facetious answer would be, “Passionate people and interesting content.” A more practical answer is, “A vibrant online community consists of a dynamic balance of different people with content and interactions that are most meaningful to them.” In this blog entry, I’ll address the content- and interaction-oriented factors (triggers, catalysts, lubricants, flows, and containers), and in my next entry, I’ll address the people-oriented factors.

The two most important types of content that drive vibrancy within a community are what I call “triggers” and “catalysts.”

• A trigger is something that does more than just attract attention (i.e. page views); it incites others to respond (via comments or replies or shares/retweets). A trigger can be in any format – a status message, a bookmark, a blog entry, a forum post, or even a wiki page. The most effective triggers tend to be timely and authoritative such as important announcements and detailed product information from the source (i.e. designers, developers, or testers rather than marketers). Real-time events such as webinars or online chats are also effective triggers, but their recordings or transcripts for on-demand playback are just as valuable for people. Lastly, contests or other calls-to-action, especially ones that are time-constrained, are the third kind of trigger that a vibrant community would have on a regular basis.
• A catalyst accelerates the distribution, awareness, and feedback for a piece of content. Distribution includes channels such as search/SEO, RSS feeds, email distribution lists, and activity streams on social networks – the more, the better. While distribution focuses on breadth, which may generate a lot of noise for the recipients, awareness is about depth primarily in terms of relevancy. Instead of widely broadcasting a piece of content to everyone within the community, consider narrowcasting it via special interest groups, user profile groupings, or tag-based feeds. Feedback for any piece of content should never be more than one click away, and ideally, subsequent feedback should be narrowcasted only to those who had previously submitted feedback for the same content.

The two most important factors that affect interactions within a community are “lubricants” and “flows.”

• Lubricants reduce the friction in how quickly and easily the members of a community can post and interact with content, especially on mobile devices. Both high fidelity (i.e. rich text formatting, picture zooming, video playback) for mobile Web browsers as well as two-way communication via email (i.e. not just outbound notification but also inbound replies) are effective lubricants. Similarly, high fidelity and two-way integration (e.g. login, activity stream, search, etc.) with social networks, other communities, and popular information management and collaboration tools can also significantly boost the level of interactions.
• Flows affect how timely and relevantly the interactions occur on a piece of content because it’s not always best to blast content through all available distribution channels. Flows are different from but usually occur within distribution channels in that if the latter is an activity stream, then a flow would be either a #hashtag or a @username reference. If the distribution channel is a forum, then a flow could be a specific survey topic, Q&A topic, or an open discussion topic that is then tagged or cross-posted elsewhere to improve its relevance to members, who may not be subscribed to said forum. Lastly, the flow you want for a specific piece of content may dictate the type(s) of distribution channel you use – common examples include status message or microblog vs. blog, blog vs. forum, and forum vs. wiki. So, don’t limit yourself or your community members to specific tools or channels!

Lastly, containers can improve the vibrancy of an online community by providing a specific boundary around the content, people, and/or interactions. The boundary can be transparent (i.e. a “joinless” group), porous (i.e. public open or public moderated group), opaque (i.e. private listed group), or completely hidden (i.e. private unlisted). Containers can also affect the flow of content based on the following analogy: rivers (e.g. team blog or forum), creeks (e.g. group level activity stream), lakes (e.g. large wiki), and ponds (e.g. small wiki). So, in order to achieve or maintain vibrancy within a community, you need to consider not only what kinds of fish (triggers and catalysts) to cultivate and how people will fish (lubricants and flows), but also where they would prefer to fish (containers).