Many people think that if you buy the right software and throw an online community out into the wild, it will be immediately successful and basically just go viral like everything else in the world of social on the internet. It’s got to be true, right? It’s been seen time and time again.
Yeah. Right.
So there are some basic truths to developing online communities. This is a very short list and is certainly not meant to be complete – just painting a bit of a picture here for the sake of discourse.
- Online communities are not ‘fire and forget’.
- The fallacy of “If you build it, they will come.”
- Online communities are not usually successful overnight.
- Even if they are, they will take work to continue to succeed.
- It takes more than one central person/personality to keep communities alive.
- Content curation is a constant.
- Measurement, monitoring and governance are all incredibly important and need to be thought of in advance, during, and after projects…
A lot of these concepts aren't readily apparent to the casual passerby in a given community – and honestly, nor is there a lot of reason for people to care about these concepts on a day to day basis. That’s our job to act as the stewards of the communities and make sure things work when they are needed. Seems simple enough – until you consider what actually goes into building online community and have to look at tweaking something here or there to keep things moving along smoothly and in the right direction. It’s a balance of technology, social science, hard work, analytics, business, hard work, communications, and well... More hard work.
However – (who likes to read that word in the middle of something going along so positively, right?)… The hard work may not mean as much or be as fruitful without the principal work in the middle. Imagine a three-legged stool with two longer legs – it isn’t going to work very well, now is it. What goes into making it a functional working stool again? Which one do you focus on first? Can you tackle two of the challenges at the same time?
I think a lot of people saw that when we introduced the new platform this past summer in June of 2014. We made a major change to the tools we leverage to enable customer-company engagement and a lot of people said, “HEY! Whoa!” We saw the need to make a major correction in the underlying technology based on analysis of the previous several years work. It caught some people off guard – some pleasantly and some had to make adjustments in how they collaborated with us.
In the coming weeks, months, & years we will very likely have to make more changes in order to deliver upon our promise of an excellent customer experience and to keep providing value to both our customers and company alike. In order to set a baseline of understanding for what we look at on a regular basis to determine what needs to be done at the micro level with feature/function, content, contests, and so on we’ll use ‘maturity’ as a baseline for progression in building community.
For the purposes of a discussion around maturity with respect to online community, we will use The Community Maturity Model which has been crafted by the good folks over at The Community Roundtable. It’s a great framework that breaks down 4 stages or categories of maturity across 8 different competency areas in online community building (see image below). The chart itself is rather macro in nature but the discussions it leads to can get very micro-focused and granular in what is necessary to progress from one stage to another within a particular competency. We like it because we are able to adapt the discussions across our extremely diverse portfolio and the communities which serve the customer populations within each product or solution area.
In the coming weeks, I will take each competency and break it down to examine where we are from an overall perspective, what is important for all of us to look at and watch for, and what changes may be coming in each area. I think the first area that needs to be explored – as the base of the model and community building in general – is strategy.
