The benefit of meeting your online community offline
Image by hern42 (gone for a while) via FlickrThere 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.
Chris Bailey:
In the nonprofit world, the parallel to community is the association which typically holds annual conferences. I can definitely agree that something rather magical happens when you get community members in the same place, speaking face-to-face. It’s why tweetups work so well, too.
21 May 2009, 7:42 pmAlexandra Leisse:
Looking at OpenSource communities you will find the exact same effect. Their members work on their projects nearly exclusively in virtual teams. Bringing them together in real life is crucial for the success of the teams and therefore the communities.
It always amazes me to see the increase of motivation showing in blog posts, emails and commits.
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22 May 2009, 1:17 pmSue:
Whilst I agree, and think online communities meeting offline is a great thing I wonder if this hinders or helps a volunteer moderator in their online duties. I have had a couple of instances where members have arranged meet-ups offline, and at these gatherings they have pumped the poor moderators for information, and questioned the decisions the moderators have made online, etc. This does not happen all of the time, but when it does, it certainly puts the moderators in a difficult position: especially when they have become friendly offline with a member and at some point have cause to speak to them online about their forum behavior. In some instances a member assumes they have preferential treatment because they have meet the moderator offline.
22 May 2009, 1:53 pmLawrence Liu (Telligent):
User groups, dev camps, happy hour after conferences are all essential elements in achieving self-sustainability of a community. I’ve seen/done it first hand, and I continue to see its benefits. I recently posted my thoughts about how the SharePoint community evolved into a vibrant, self-sustainable tribe on my blog at http://bit.ly/18PXNo
http://twitter.com/LLiu
22 May 2009, 7:12 pmJenni Beattie:
There are many benefits to combining offline and online interactions.
An international study I participated in two years ago called Facebook In Business – found that interactions offline helped online interactions.
On a practical level organising an event offline etc than simply uploading photos, getting members to rank the event etc all helps online engagement levels online.
Cheers
23 May 2009, 4:09 am8 idées pour (bien) démarrer la semaine | Manager une communauté:
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25 May 2009, 4:56 amhern42:
Hi
Thanks for thinking my picture was good for illustrating your article… Appreciated…
Comments are welcome…
By the way the guy on the picture (with the camera) is a photographer I know and met more or less through flickr, while living in Japan. He came to visit me in Copenhagen. He is american, I am french. Communities with common interests make good friendship. Sometimes…
Best,
25 May 2009, 8:00 pmHrn