FreshNetworks Blog

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People trust peers, even if they don’t know them. This is the observation behind the success of online communities from TripAdvisor to reviews on Amazon or indeed any one of the many examples of online communities that are growing and flourishing. We trust these strangers-cum-peers with important decisions in our live – from which hotel to book for our annual holiday, to support on medical or financial decisions. And some trust these strangers-cum-peers so much that they even lend money to them.

We know that people trust the advice and recommendations of peers. They connect through their content, their stories and their experiences. If somebody tells us about their life then we know more about them, we can empathise with them and understand better the decisions they tell us that they make. The more we get to know people the more we can assess the level at which we trust their thoughts and their stories. We learn more information about them and this lets us evaluate their thoughts and the relevance of these to us.

And it works – we can get to know people online only through their conversations and ideas. In fact it makes it easier for us to find people like us. They no longer have to be near us or ever met us in person. The ideas alone are enough to connect us.

One example of the level at which we are able to build relationships of trust online is shown by the peer-to-peer micro-lending sites, such as Kiva or Zopa. These sites rely on individuals needing a loan finding others with money to lend. As a lender you obviously need to feel that the organisation behind the scheme has a strong background and a low default rate. But when it comes to actually lending your own money to an individual it is the relationship you can build with that person themselves that counts.

You can’t talk to them or meet them. Rather you have to rely on their stories, ideas and contributions online. You get to know them by what they tell you and what they reveal to you. You find people with whom you can empathise or understand. And through these ides and stories alone you can make a decision to lend them money.

This is, of course, a great thing. People wanting small amounts of money that can make a real difference to their lives. And because we can now connect them online this is possible on a much more peer-to-peer basis. Of course, it also shows the power of online communities and our ability to connect with people through shared ideas and discussions. Whilst I might be willing to lend money to somebody like this, I probably wouldn’t be willing to lend money to the person that I see on my way into work everyday but have never spoken to, and know nothing about.

Online communities allow us to find and connect with people through ideas. Through sharing ideas in this way we really get to know them, and really start to trust them. And that’s why online communities can be really powerful.

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As an online community manager, you will have a ‘gut’ understanding of who makes up your community. Their rough interests, probably the gender split and a fairly good grasp of age. But this will largely be based on who is posting, what they’re posting and how often. The real shape of the community will be far more nuanced.

The 90-9-1 rule

The 90-9-1 rule, or 90-9-1 principle, is a really handy way of remembering who does what on your community.

It’s also a helpful way of gauging how traffic visiting your site will translate to people posting on your site and engaging with the community.

In brief:

• 90% of community users are passive members. They ‘lurk’ and read, without contributing.
• 9% of community users are ‘editors’ that will modify content or add to an existing thread (by posting a comment or replying) but rarely create any content from scratch.
• 1% of users are ‘creators’ that will participate a lot, including adding photos, starting new discussions and taking part in activity across the community.

With more low-effort forms of activity becoming commonplace, such as clicking to rate a piece of content, the ratio of editors to lurkers is likely to rise. However, the likelihood is the number of creators adding lots of fresh stuff to your community will always be a tiny percentage.

Community champions

As your online community grows, you will see a handful of members that not only create a lot of the content, they also seem to take a real pride in the community and take extra tasks upon themselves.

They are likely to:

• Welcome new members, replying to introductory posts and helping to signpost useful content to them
• Report any activity that breaks the rules or disrupts the community
• Try and calm down disputes and appear to have the community’s interests at heart
• Be very active in creating new content
• Have ideas on the future of the community and promote the community externally
• Encourage ‘good behaviour’ and show others how to behave through their own actions

These are your community champions. They will save you a lot of groundwork and help you to keep the community growing and safe.

Nurture them and appreciate them, but make sure you keep clear the boundaries between you and them. You don’t want them to get too big for their boots and become problems, splitting the community into them and us, nor do you want to feel beholden to them and uncomfortable making decisions that will affect them – such as removing iffy content they have posted.

The methods by which you reward and involve them is largely dependant on your specific needs, resources and the limits and possibilities of your community platform. But whether it’s a fruit basket or a cheerful personalised email every once in a while, you must show you appreciate them.

Active users

There will always be a large number of lurkers. Even if yours is a closed, private community where everybody knows everybody in real life, there will still be some who choose to eyeball without ever tapping the keys.

Everybody in between lurker and champion is an active user, in other words, users that do something on a fairly regular basis are active.

A good community manager will strive to entice lurkers out of their passivity – perhaps through polls and minimum effort functions – and convert active users into champions. What is vital to the health of the community, however, is keeping active users active, and keeping their activity levels high.

The Toxic Team

You will, of course, find that there is a small core of moaners and gripers. They’re not trolls or troublemakers for the sake of it, but they’re sceptical, easily affronted and standoffish. They’re also your best friend.

While it may not seem like it, and sometimes you’ll wish you could just ban them and be done with it, the members that are moaning but keep coming back time and again can help make a community.

Think about it:

• they keep coming back so they feel that they are stakeholders
• they care about the community and the experience
• they want to engage
• they’re telling you what is wrong and what can be improved
• they’re probably saying what politer and more forgiving members are thinking
• if you can turn them around and prove you respect them, all that sounding off will now be in your favour – they will be community champions.

Take them seriously. Don’t indulge their ideas if they’re ridiculous, but consider why they are saying what they are saying – do they have a point? Is there mileage in trying something new? Have you done something you should apologise for or explain? Perhaps they have misunderstood your actions, and if they have, then others will have to. Be transparent, honest.

Your toxic team will force you to be a better community manager, and the whole community will benefit. They also show you just how involved you need to be, because they will keep you on your toes!

Trolls and troublemakers

And then there are those that really are trolls and troublemakers.

PC Mag‘s encyclopaedia has a good definition of trolling:

Surfing, or browsing, the Web.

Posting derogatory messages about sensitive subjects on newsgroups and chat rooms to bait users into responding.

Hanging around in a chat room without saying anything, like a “peeping tom.”

Trolls are pains, plain and simple. They try and wind up other members, create negative, dramatic situations and are deliberately provocative. They will do their level best to crank your tail too, but obviously you’ll never show them they’ve hit a nerve!

There are several possible types of troll (it may be a cry for help, they may be being picked on in their own lives, they may be desperately lonely), and while the effects are still the same and there are no excuses for rule-breaking, understanding the motivations can help you deal with them. But do not underestimate their determination, or potential power, just ask The Scotsman.

Read all our posts on Promoting Community Management

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There is often a misconception about online communities – that they are exclusively online. This just isn’t true, and indeed shouldn’t be true. Online communities are, put simply, communities of people who share a common interest, aim, goal or problem. They meet online but this does not need to be at the exclusion of them meeting offline. In fact there are significant benefits to doing so.

I was reminded this today having spent the day meeting and talking to the members of one of our online communities. Talking to them about how they have used the community to date and about the changes we are bringing to it as part of a fairly comprehensive relaunch. This kind of face-to-face feedback is incredibly useful. You can watch how people use the community, what they like and don’t like and prompt them for their thoughts on everything from the look and feel to the navigation and even accessibility issues. Impromptu and direct user testing and feedback at its most useful.

But perhaps even more informative today was to watch the community members talk to each other. Listen to what they discussed and what their common areas of interest and opinion were. This kind of insight is priceless when you are building, growing and managing an online community. The more you can understand about your community members, the better you can make the community for them.

And of course there is a real benefit to members meeting each other. They share a common interest and that’s why they get together online. Providing a way for them to get together offline too just enhances their experience. Which has to be a good thing.

So if you can find a way for your online community to meet offline, and go along to meet them too. You’ll be surprised what you learn and the benefit it brings to everybody.

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We posted last week about how customers sometimes do not know what they want. About how they cannot always articulate what they think, or how they are not always aware of what the opportunities and options might be. There is a third reason why it can be difficult to work with customers on co-creation – because they are not always aware of what decisions they make and why they make them. We are not, it turns out, as rational as we might think, or hope.

At FreshNetworks, we are fans of the work of Dan Ariely. There is a lot in his research in behavioural economics that has real resonance and application to online communities and co-creation. From incentivisation (and why paying people is a bad way to motivate them) to why we declare our preference for one product over another. There is much here for us to learn both about how people will behave in online communities, but also how we should design them to get the best and most useful set of insights for brands.

The video below is a great introduction to rationality and why our decisions are not always as much in our control as we might think. As Ariely says, we wake up in the morning and we feel that we make our decisions. But this is not true; in practice many of these decisions do not reside in us. So if you want to know why consumers behave as they do and how we can work with them in online communities then this is a good starting point.

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

The video comes from the great series of TED videos. There are some other really great talks and presentations there that are worth watching.

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An online community takes effort and often time to plan, build, seed and grow. You need to work hard to make sure you get the business objectives right, work out who you are going to engage and how to engage them, and then work with them to seed and grow the community with them.

That’s why it’s a shame when this effort goes to waste. When your online community fails to live up to its promise.

So how do you make sure this doesn’t happen to you? That you don’t waste your online community?

Here are four ways that we have often seen the opportunities that online communities offer being wasted, and some thoughts on how to avoid suffering the same fate.

1. You just aren’t present in the conversations

An online community is a dialogue, you work with and alongside the other members of the community on a shared interest, issue, topic or problem. It is no good just asking questions and expecting answers. Nor is it any good just sitting and watching what others say. You must be part of the conversations. Talking to people and exchanging ideas with them.

The biggest danger of not doing this is that the community members will become disillusioned. They will start questioning whether you are even listening and the conversations and debates will stop being about the original subjects and start being about you. This makes a very intimidating environment for new community members and so you will find that a small bunch of members take over.

The solution is simple. Talk to your members. Ask them questions, answer theirs and give your own opinion. Enjoy your community and enjoy talking to the other community members. They’ll respond to you taking part and you, they and the community as a whole will benefit.

2. There’s no link back to the organisation

A branded online community, or one that is clearly from a particular organisation must be connected into that same organisation. Community members will quickly lose interest if they think that nobody is listening to and feeding back on what they are saying. They will uncover a community manager who is unable to connect them into the organisation or represent the organisation in the community.

A real connection is needed to make the most of your online community and this can often mean enacting real change in your organisation. If you are using it to its full potential, an online community should be a way of getting the customer voice deep inside your organisation. You should be talking about the online community in meetings right up to, and including, the Board meeting. This is the way your customers are heard in the organisation, and the way your organisation can talk to its customers. Make sure you do.

3. You are not encouraging organic conversations

Too many online communities appear to have a fixed purpose or objective and only encourage people to take part on this. They may be communities based on media share, and not encourage discussions or forusm. They may be online research communities that do not nurture organic discussions on broader topics or between research activities.

Often the most useful benefit that you will gain from your online community will come from the areas and discussions you least expect. The topics you didn’t initially focus on or the debates and discussions that your community members start themselves. Organic conversations are where things get exciting. They are where new ideas can really come from and where the community can truly come to life. Make sure you don’t stifle them.

4. You moderate every contribution before it goes on the site

There is a time and a place for pre-moderation, reviewing and approving every piece of content before it goes on the community. But in most cases this isn’t needed. There is nothing more frustrating for a user than arriving on a community site, finding interesting topics and discussions, registering and then adding their own thoughts only for these not to appear on the site. Many of these users will leave, frustrated, and never return.

Pre-moderation can be deadly. It should be handled with care and used only where other means are not possible or appropriate. Trust your community members to be responsible in their discussions and they will trust you back