A Best Practice of World Class Communities is to Encourage Ownership of the Community by Members

One of the strategies Telligent encourages for building World Class Communities is to encourage a level of ownership of the community by its members.  There are several benefits associated with this:

  • People tend to support the things they feel they have ownership of
  • The cost of managing the community can be lowered with community volunteers
  • Community members can often be more ardent supporters of the community rules and also more effective evangelists of your products than employees

This usually works well because the interest of the community members is in alignment with those of the company sponsoring the community.  The following chart is an example of the typical types of things both a set of customers and a company would be focused on:

The key is ensuring that the community's interest stays aligned with the interest of the company that is funding the community, otherwise there is a problem.

Sometimes, Community Ownership can Turn into a Community Hijacking

Just after Christmas, Steve Pavlina closed down the forums on his site after five years.  You can read his blog post about it here.  These forums appear to have grown into a very successful community, with community user numbers that would be envied by most.  He had over 48,000 registered users who posted about a million messages across 67,000 threads. About 400 of his users were very active on the site and several were part of his volunteer moderation team, and yet he still shut them down.

Pavlina shared that his original objective for the forums was to create a space where growth-oriented people could come together to help each other in a positive support environment, and for a while that is exactly what he had.  However, over time, many of the community members started to develop what Pavlina labeled as ‘a sense of entitlement’ and they began breaking the rules.  They routinely annoyed other members and promoted their own businesses and affiliate programs.  The final straw was when some of the volunteer moderators – his trusted power users – joined in the dysfunction.  In other words, the vision for the community was lost. As a result, he shut down the forums.

5 Steps You Can Take to Avoid This

There are a number of things that can be learned from Steve Pavlina’s experience that can help you avoid having the same thing happen to your community:

  1. Work with a set of founding community members, or power users, if your community is already well established.  Also create what Fever Bee’s Richard Millington calls a “Community Constitution”.  This constitution should include a statement of the community’s purpose, beliefs, and governance approach (the consequences of violating the constitution).  Having a set of members that assists with crafting the constitution helps to create ready defenders of it as well.

  2. In addition to the constitution, the community manager should create a community guide that informs new members how to get started, describes the intended culture and explains a bit about the history of the community.  This can set the stage for new member engagement and serve as a tool that moderators can point constitution violators to as a reminder of acceptable behavior.

  3. There must be strict enforcement of the guidelines – no exceptions allowed.  If a community member hasn’t already done it, moderators should publically provide feedback on inappropriate behavior so the entire community learns what will and will not be tolerated.  Additionally, public thanks should be given to community members when they call other members out on violations of the community guidelines and culture.

  4. The community manager has an opportunity to gently steer the direction of the community by initiating discussions and posting content that is of interest to the broader community and in alignment with the community's vision.  Having an editorial calendar and executing on it will ensure a steady stream of relevant content that is aligned with your company’s objectives.

  5. Establishing and maintaining good relationships with the influencers in the community is critical.  As mentioned above, community members can be both better enforcers of your rules and champions of your cause than you can.  Do what it takes to ensure you stay connected to those with the most influence in your community, and be sure to solicit both their input and help when needed.