This post is part of series celebrating Community Management Appreciation Day (#CMAD). Learn more!
Online community managers share content, moderate discussions, edit or delete posts where appropriate, welcome new users, mediate conflicts, and help ensure that community policies and guidelines are followed. But there’s also a fundamental role that community managers play that is often overlooked. Community managers communicate the community’s vision to its members. In many ways, this is their most important function.
Put simply, an online community is much more than a website used by people to talk to one another. A community must have a reason to exist, and a shared purpose. In some cases it’s very easy to define. A message forum for the game Dinosaur Cowboy Raiders of Antarctica vs. The Gorilla Kingdom exists because some people are interested in Dinosaur Cowboy Raiders of Antarctica vs. The Gorilla Kingdom, and that community’s purpose is to share knowledge, insights, information and opinions about the game. If someone on the forum starts posting about the United States House of Representatives or farm equipment, the community manager will let them know that this is not what the community is for.
If you do not communicate a strong vision of why the community exists and what it’s for, its members will either leave out of boredom or frustration, or — and here’s where it gets really interesting — they will create the vision themselves.
I’ll provide a small example from my own experience with an old personal blog of mine. I used the blog to express my opinions about a variety of disconnected things, and share things I found funny or exciting. If you asked me what it was about, I wouldn’t have had an answer.
One day I posted a rant about a loyalty program run by a consumer goods company whose product I loved. As a customer I found the program’s website slow to load and frustrating to navigate, and I said so. Soon the post began to attract comments from other people who felt passionately about the program. Lots and lots of comments, to the point where my blog became the fourth result on Google for the loyalty program!
Comments poured in every day. I was excited by the attention, and took an active role in replying to threads, moderating discussions, and answering newcomers’ questions. After a while, though, I realized that all of my traffic was a result of that post, and it showed in the comments. Whenever I would write about other topics on my blog, people left comments on those posts talking about that loyalty program.
One day, one of my most active commenters brought a rude visitor in line by explaining to him that everyone was there to talk about this loyalty program. “That’s what this community is for,” she said.
Yes, these were no longer commenters on my blog. This was a full-fledged online community that I had started by creating content that people were interested in. And because I’d never communicated to them what my blog was really for, the community had found a purpose all its own — one that had nothing to do with my own goals. I had to shut it down, knowing that it would cost me a large portion of my audience, and would disappoint people who’d invested time and energy on my site.
I disabled any further comments on all posts about the loyalty program, and edited them to include a message that directed visitors to a popular message forum dedicated to that program. I also emailed the moderator of that forum as well as my most active commenters letting them know about the change. I was grateful that they’d given me their attention and support, and wanted to help ensure that the community found a true home. After a few years I deleted the posts entirely.
Whether or not people read my personal blog is no big deal. But community managers for brands cannot let things get to the point that I did — real reputations and dollars are at stake. We must be standard bearers for our clients’ vision, and guides that nurture communities in such a way that the leaders who naturally emerge from within it share in that vision, and support its purpose.
Photo courtesy of simonsterg.
If You Don’t Provide Your Community a Vision, It Will Define One
This post is part of series celebrating Community Management Appreciation Day (#CMAD). Learn more!
Online community managers share content, moderate discussions, edit or delete posts where appropriate, welcome new users, mediate conflicts, and help ensure that community policies and guidelines are followed. But there’s also a fundamental role that community managers play that is often overlooked. Community managers communicate the community’s vision to its members. In many ways, this is their most important function.
Put simply, an online community is much more than a website used by people to talk to one another. A community must have a reason to exist, and a shared purpose. In some cases it’s very easy to define. A message forum for the game Dinosaur Cowboy Raiders of Antarctica vs. The Gorilla Kingdom exists because some people are interested in Dinosaur Cowboy Raiders of Antarctica vs. The Gorilla Kingdom, and that community’s purpose is to share knowledge, insights, information and opinions about the game. If someone on the forum starts posting about the United States House of Representatives or farm equipment, the community manager will let them know that this is not what the community is for.
If you do not communicate a strong vision of why the community exists and what it’s for, its members will either leave out of boredom or frustration, or — and here’s where it gets really interesting — they will create the vision themselves.
I’ll provide a small example from my own experience with an old personal blog of mine. I used the blog to express my opinions about a variety of disconnected things, and share things I found funny or exciting. If you asked me what it was about, I wouldn’t have had an answer.
One day I posted a rant about a loyalty program run by a consumer goods company whose product I loved. As a customer I found the program’s website slow to load and frustrating to navigate, and I said so. Soon the post began to attract comments from other people who felt passionately about the program. Lots and lots of comments, to the point where my blog became the fourth result on Google for the loyalty program!
Comments poured in every day. I was excited by the attention, and took an active role in replying to threads, moderating discussions, and answering newcomers’ questions. After a while, though, I realized that all of my traffic was a result of that post, and it showed in the comments. Whenever I would write about other topics on my blog, people left comments on those posts talking about that loyalty program.
One day, one of my most active commenters brought a rude visitor in line by explaining to him that everyone was there to talk about this loyalty program. “That’s what this community is for,” she said.
Yes, these were no longer commenters on my blog. This was a full-fledged online community that I had started by creating content that people were interested in. And because I’d never communicated to them what my blog was really for, the community had found a purpose all its own — one that had nothing to do with my own goals. I had to shut it down, knowing that it would cost me a large portion of my audience, and would disappoint people who’d invested time and energy on my site.
I disabled any further comments on all posts about the loyalty program, and edited them to include a message that directed visitors to a popular message forum dedicated to that program. I also emailed the moderator of that forum as well as my most active commenters letting them know about the change. I was grateful that they’d given me their attention and support, and wanted to help ensure that the community found a true home. After a few years I deleted the posts entirely.
Whether or not people read my personal blog is no big deal. But community managers for brands cannot let things get to the point that I did — real reputations and dollars are at stake. We must be standard bearers for our clients’ vision, and guides that nurture communities in such a way that the leaders who naturally emerge from within it share in that vision, and support its purpose.
Photo courtesy of simonsterg.
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