Building Communities Online October 26, 2006
Out of all the sessions at the Blog Business Summit, the session on building online communities held a special place of interest for me. In many ways, I simply happened upon the community that I’ve built at RCG, so it was refreshing to hear the speakers articulating thoughts I’ve had on how to build a community. In many ways, building a community feels somewhat intuitive (i.e. respect your users), but it turns out that the details often lead to tricky minefields. In many ways, this lesson highlighted just how far behind the real estate sphere is in creating effective online communities.
The three panelists, Elisa Camahort, Tara Hunt, Betsy Aoki, have all spent time on the front lines dealing with the good and bad of building up an online community.
Tara Hunt’s background includes running the grassroots marketing of Riya, which launched with a tremendous amount of buzz. On a high level, here are some high level tips for building a community:
- Let customers “win” (earn a living from your business)
- Let customers talk with each other.
- Get a personality
In particular, I really like the advice she gave with how to deal with gadflys (i.e. troublemakers). She said one very effective method is to put them in positions of power! (“kill them with kindness!”) Her experience was backed up by Elisa (of BlogHer) who said one of the most effective tools in moderating the group blogs has been to make the most vocal (often troublemakeing) members as group moderators. That process of putting them in the position of enforcing the code of conduct effectively changes their view! Interesting stuff.
Another interesting topic Tara hit upon was to describe how Flickr’s first grew their community. Turns out that Caterina (one of their founders) acted as a first-class host when Flickr launched and reached out to each and every new user to tell them (based on the photos they were submitting) the different groups that might interest them.
Betsy Aoki (aka the Microsoft Blog Queen) gave a nice overview of some of the community building efforts she has been part of at Microsoft (most notably building up MSDN and QnA. I found it particularly interesting that by blogging about a product in development (QnA), Microsoft was able to get 300 sign-ups a day for the public beta (even before there was anything for anyone to see!). In addition to the sign-ups, a strong community was built (before the product) to the point that at launch, community members were on the front line defending the code of conduct because they had taken part in its creation. However, her most memorable line (of which I’m only able to paraphrase) was when she compared creating a community to throwing a party: “There is an organic nature to it, but if you don’t provide a place, organize the food and drinks, prepare the music, etc. the party is not going to happen”
The third panelist was Elisa Camahort of BlogHer, a huge community with a special emphasis on issues important to women (but it was made very clear, men are still welcome there!). A lot of her comments focused on the need for the community organizers to “respond”. In addition to speaking and listening, community leaders need to respond to issues. Being responsive has been a common theme at the conference and is constantly touted as a key differentiators of blogs.
Sphere: Related Content- Posted in : General Real Estate
- Author : Dustin
I guess they day is not...
Comments»
Thanks for coming to our session…glad you found some points of interest and relevance toy our experience! (And thanks for reiterating that men are welcome at BlogHer.)
Just one thing: My name is Elisa, not Eliza…thanks!
Thanks Elisa,
I just fixed the typos!
Thanks for the write-up — helpful for those of us following along at home.
Also, it was Caterina Fake of Flickr that Tara was referring to.
“Get a personality”. Does that mean the blog has its own personality? Can you expound on how that one point was driven home?
Ardell,
I can promise that you have no need to get a personality in any of your blogging endeavors!
To put it in context, Tara (who I talked extensively with over dinner) runs a consulting firm that helps companies use the internet to market themselves. With that in mind, her comments were not really geared toward individuals who blog, but rather companies who try to take on blogging as a way to build up a community. In that sense, it becomes quite important to ensure that a company blog has a personality if it is to get any traction at all!
Blog Business Summit News…
/images/33632-31387/powwow.jpg”>Hey, there’s a Blog Business Summit going on in Seattle this week and Dustin from RCG is covering it. The conference blog itself is rich reading and highly recommended. Here are a few of my favorite posts from the conf…
Dustin - as one who will soon be attempting to forge a real estate-related community, I appreciate your coverage of the conference. It’s great to hear about the little (but important) problems/solutions others have encountered that one would not think of when starting a community.
Thanks!
Thanks Tyler,
Other people, like Paul, are doing a better job of covering “all” the events. I’ve been focusing on the sessions that are focused to enterprise-level blogging (and social media), and a lot of these sessions are necessary relevant to RCG readers. Nonetheless, I may try to do a summary post because I find these topics particularly interesting!