What’s next?

By the time you read this book, many things might have changed.

New tools might have emerged which present exciting (and, at times, confusing) opportunities for engaging your members. Many of the communities featured in this book will have risen and fallen in popularity. New events will have probably rocked the economic and political climate you work within.

Even as I write these words (April 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic is causing turmoil across the planet. Some communities are struggling to cope with a surge of activity. Others are experiencing a rapid decline in participation. No one knows what the future looks like in a few months, let alone a few years, from now.

As the cliché goes, change is the only constant. Every year or two, a new ‘game changing’ wave of technology and social trends threatens to crash down upon us. And sure, each wave will undoubtedly leave its mark upon our communities in ways that are impossible to predict. But this doesn’t mean you should spend your time trying to surf at the crest of each new wave. While some aspects of communities will be affected, the core principles will remain the same.

This book is about those principles. It’s about the things that unite members into communities. It’s about creating a community that’s indispensable for you and your members. If you stay focused on these, you can survive any change.

Creating a community is one of the most challenging and rewarding things you can do. When you connect strangers together under your roof, you unlock energy which can supercharge your organisation. You create the kind of value that for your audience is impossible to replicate anywhere else.

A huge part of this value is expertise. The only true expert is the one who realises how little they know. No one has all the answers. But the collective wisdom of a community is unparalleled. Whether you’re trying to fix your iPhone or you’re worried about an upcoming health treatment, the experiences and wisdom of a community surpass any single book or white paper. After all, what is Wikipedia if not simply the documented knowledge of a community on a global scale?

But the other part of this value is emotional. If your iPhone is broken, you’re frustrated and angry. You don’t just want the answer, you want to know someone sees your anger and they care. You want to know that you were listened to and not dismissed. If you have an upcoming cancer treatment, you want to feel like you’re not alone. You can’t put a value on having a network of people, who have been through your exact situation, guide you through every step of the journey.

Even this doesn’t cover the true impact of a community. Communities help us collaborate better together and coordinate our activities. Communities help us feel respected, appreciated, and wanted. The connections you make when you launch a community can help you support more of your audience better than ever before. You can harness your members’ best ideas to deliver a better experience for them. You can spread the best expertise from your top members to newcomers. Almost every area of your work, whether it’s recruitment, marketing, sales, engineering or more, can benefit from your community.

But a word of warning here. Be realistic. Not every topic is one which lends itself to creating a strong sense of belonging. Look around you right now. You probably don’t want to spend your time hanging out in the community hosted by companies that manufactured the chair you’re sitting on right now, the refrigerator you bought, or for the producers for most of the items in your fridge. But that doesn’t mean these and millions of other companies shouldn’t have communities. It just means the value of those communities is different.

If your internet connection breaks, you probably don’t want someone to try and be your friend, you simply want someone who can give you a good, empathetic, answer. Better yet, you want to find the answer without having to ask the question yourself.

Don’t underestimate just how important it is to nurture a handful of top leaders, superusers even, in your community. They are the ones who will ultimately determine if the community thrives or dies. In fact, it might only be a handful of top members who are ‘true’ community members. They might be the ones who feel a true sense of belonging with you and with each other – and that’s perfectly fine!

When you do build a community, you need to deeply understand and emphasise with your members. Commit the time to get to know them well. Learn their needs and desires. If they just want to ask questions and get answers in a community, that’s great. You can build a community to satisfy that desire. If they want more – perhaps to get expertise and tips, discover how people like them are tackling similar issues, and attend upcoming events, then you can build a community for that too. Every extra minute you invest in getting to deeply understand your members pays off many times over later down the road.

When you get started, try to start small, test your ideas, use a platform that’s relatively inexpensive. Once you’re sure your concept works, then you can begin expanding and investing in areas that deliver more value to members. You might build a powerful reputation system to reward and support the members who want to lead your community. You might start creating content and hosting events for your members to better share information and connect with one another.

Be deliberate in the culture you want. Every decision has trade-offs. Focusing strictly upon high-quality contributions will make the community difficult for newcomers and limit participation. But if you head too far in the other direction your community might become filled with spam and be of no value to anyone. All major decisions about rules of a community are made somewhere along this kind of continuum. You need to find a balance while ensuring that your community isn’t ‘just another community’, but has a unique position in the minds of your members.

Don’t be naive about the risks involved in connecting people. Just because people are interacting in your community doesn’t mean those interactions are good. If members share harmful information with one another, attack one another, or look to cause mischief, you need to anticipate and have a plan to deal with that. You can’t prevent every possible problem, but you can identify the majority of them and mitigate the impact of many of them.

Finally, if you want to be a professional, you need to have a strategy. You shouldn’t be waking up each morning and simply reacting to what happens in your community. You should be proactively driving the community to where it needs to go. You should know what you’re trying to achieve and what the plan is to achieve it. This strategy should be fully resourced and costed. A strategy is what takes your community to the next level and ensures both you and your community achieve your full potential.

Find your community

Community leadership can feel like a lonely job. Many of us doing this work are the only people in the organisation responsible for it. So don’t do it alone. You can go deep into the meta of our work and join communities of people that lead communities. There are plenty of them out there.

I recommend you join the CMX Hub group on Facebook and consider a membership to the Community Roundtable. I recommend you join our community at www.feverbee.com and attend the events hosted by CMX, Khoros, Higher Logic, and many others. You can also follow the #CMGR (community manager) on Twitter and keep abreast of the latest conversations taking place in this field.

Of course, once you have found your community of like-minded community leaders, be sure to share your experience and expertise too. Even if you’re a newcomer to the field, you know what it’s like to be a newcomer to the field and the kinds of questions you have. The people who come after you will find that truly valuable. Even the smallest contributions to our community compound over time to help the masses.

Take your skills and knowledge to the highest level

I also strongly recommend you take your community skills to the highest possible level. Remember that ultimately the success of your community depends not on the technology you use but in your own abilities. Far too many people leading communities have received no training and are forced to learn on the job.

In 2011, we created the first professional community management course and over the years have trained 1300 community leaders today. If you want to advance your skills, then you can head over to www.feverbee.com and take our training courses.

You can also read some of the top books in this field. I recommend those below:

• Jono Bacon – People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams and The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging
• Charles Vogl and Carrie Melissa Jones – Building Brand Communities: How Organizations Succeed by Creating Belonging
• Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
• Bruce Patton, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen – Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
• IDEO.org – The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design
• Peter Block – Community: The Structure of Belonging
• Douglas Atkin – The Culting Of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers
• Rob Kraut and Paul Resnick – Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design1

You can also read my two previous books:

• Buzzing Communities
• The Indispensable Community

Need more help? Drop me a line

If you want an organisation who can design, create, and/or manage your community for you, you can drop me an email at [email protected].

FeverBee has helped 300+ organisations develop their communities including organisations like Apple, Facebook, SAP, Novartis, and many more. We’re eager to develop your community strategy, create a fantastic community website experience, and train your team. Whether you just want a check up on what you’re doing or someone to guide you through the process, we’ve got the experience to help you.

And even if you just have a question about something you’ve read in this book, drop me a line. I’m only too happy to help.

Good luck!

I wish you tremendous luck on your community journey. You’re doing work that matters and I can’t wait to follow your success.