Overused Buzzword: Community

In the Web 2.0 sphere, most people talk about the need to create, maintain and sustain their communities before even thinking about revenue models for their own sites, for example, online social network sites. SG Entrepreneurs is pleased to welcome a new resident contributor, Ian Timothy (with his blog On the Red Dot), to kick off his first article on the buzzword “community” and tells us why it is being overused.

Contributed by Ian Timothy

We hear a lot about how in this phase of the Internet we call Web 2.0 that Community is very important. I believe that the overusing of this buzzword ‘Community’ is very dangerous because it prevents entrepreneurs and companies from thinking further about the actual people who comprise the entity we call a Community. The buzzword prevents us from seeing that communities are not all the same and that there are different groups of people within a particular community. Growing a community isn’t just about attracting lots of people, setting up a forum, allowing them to comment and add friends.

Beyond knowing that Community is important, we need to understand who is the Community and learn how a company can engage this people in the Community.

There are four main groups in any community that come together on a website. In decreasing order of size, they are:

• 1. Users of the site.
• 2. Members of the site.
• 3. Participants on the site.
• 4. Contributors to the site.

The last group, the contributors could also be called the 1 Percenters because as studies of online communities have shown, usually only 1 percent of the members of a site actively contribute any form of content – this could be by starting a new discussion thread, a new group or answering the questions of other members.

Slightly more people (around 10%) participate in the site. They do this by adding comments, votes and ratings to the content created by the 1 Percenters. It should be noted that these people (i.e. participants and contributors) provide 100% of the utility for any Community.

One of the long term aims of any community organizer when engaging the community should be to move people from being users to members, members to participants and participants to contributors. Each stage down the list increases the involvement and the investment in time, energy and emotions of the individual.

Participating and contributing content can be seen as a hobby for these individuals as they often do it without being paid. Any community organizer should understand the motivations of the people participating and contributing. They could be doing it for altruistic reasons, wanting to contribute to the common good in terms of knowledge. They could be doing it for status as the community has a mechanism for ranking users based on their participation and contributions. They could be doing it because they find the information relevant to themselves and use the site to organize the information they have found.

There are two key groups in any community – Filters and Facilitators (these two terms are part of a group of four coined by Ben Mcconnell and Jackie Huba of ‘Church Of The Customer‘). The Filters are those that collect, select and package information for other people to consume. The Facilitators are those that create communities by encouraging conversation between users, answering questions, helping new users get assimilated into the community and ensuring that users connect in a way that conforms to the community’s standard and practices – they are the support group for a site, company, product or brand.

To engage the community that is on your site or those that have risen online with your company, brand or product as the focal point, it is important to help the Filters and Facilitators engage in their hobby. For Filters, information and the tools to organize the information are the two most important aspects you can help them with. The company, brand manager and product manager should identify these Filters and provide them additional information that are usually inaccessible to them. Allow them access so that they can repackage this information for other users who will most likely be interested in the information chosen by similar users.

Another way to engage such Filters is to discover the tools they find useful when processing information relevant to the site, company, brand or product and provide or enhance those tools. For example, Filters may use a disparate set of tools like del.icio.us or Google Bookmarks to keep track of the information they have found on other websites. Allowing these Filters to easily bring all these external information into your site is one form of engagement.

Facilitators are like volunteer managers. They help watch out for new users and deal with trolls. For your own site, the best tool that can be given to them is to establish at the beginning of the site a set of standards and practices that guide how users can connect and communicate with each other. Working with the Facilitators to nurture a culture for the community is an important step in engaging the community. Trusting the culture that is established is the next step – getting too involved by trying to censor or lay down the law could be detrimental to the efforts to engage the community and subsequently negatively affect how people feel about the site, company, brand or product.

Facilitators tend to be the people that help answer questions of other users. While you can be directly involved in constantly answering the questions from the community that has been built on your site and around your company, brand or product (and you should!), also engage the community by providing these Facilitators the information that can better help them answer questions. You already have a group of people who want to help so why not empower them! These Facilitators also tend to start discussions about topics they are passionate about. Engaging them means listening to them and learning about how they feel and think about your site, company, brand or product – the gems that could be found just by listening might just save your site, company, brand or product. If you think women want someone who listens, customers want that even more. Remember though, it is listen. Not hear. It is to converse. Not talk.

Everything in this post is not meant to be an exhaustive list of what you need to think about when thinking of the buzzword ‘Community’. Hopefully, it has served its purpose to spark further thinking about what ‘Community’ and ‘engaging Community’ actually means. There are lots of resources online and books you can read to further enhance your understanding of this area – the book ‘Citizen Marketers‘ and the blog by Ben Mcconnell and Jackie Huba are good places to start.

Remember, Community is important. More important though is the people in the community and the things the community says and does.

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