FreshNetworks Blog

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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

Some online communities are specifically built and managed as insight tools: online research communities. They are designed to help support the consumer or market research needs of the organisation behind the community. They may be public or private, but they are designed to deliver against specific research objectives and involve specific research exercises alongside the organic discussions and debates in the community.

Not all communities are online research communities, but all communities can be a useful source of insight. Just watching the conversations can be invaluable and bring real insight to any organisation, but there are ways that any community can get real insight value from the insight of your members. Over the last few weeks we’ve described eight ways of getting insight from online communities.

1. Profiling data:gathering the right information and then analysing the profiles of  your community members can bring significant understanding of the people who join your community.
2. Focused discussions: focusing the discussions in your online community make it easier for people to join the debate and also let you concentrate on those issues that are of most interest to you and likely to bring greatest insights.
3. Learn their language: the language community members use is often overlooked, but provides a real insight into their lives and their perceptions on a product, market or issue.
4. Rating and voting: not everybody in an online community wants to begin or even add to discussions, but we can start to understand what they think and get insight from them by offering and than analysing their use of different ways of communicating, such as rating an idea or voting for a piece of content.
5. Photo uploads: photos offer a real insight into what people think and also allows us to gather opinions people who are not as comfortable expressing themselves in words. What people choose to upload photos of, and the reactions to them bring real insights into the community.
6. Photo activities:by targeting photo content into specific activities, we are able to maximise the benefit we get from each upload. Get community members to upload photos on a specific theme or in response to a specific question. Isolate the most interesting photos by using rating, ranking and comments to harness the opinions of community members.
7. Discussion events:as your community matures, patterns emerge in use. One of these will be that people come to the community at similar times each evening. You can take advantage of this by offering discussion events where people discuss a different issue at a certain time each week.
8. Quick polls:any community can use some simple insight tools, and quick polls are one of these. They are a great way to get instant and top-level quantitative insight from your community, but you must make sure you word the question (and potential answers) carefully if you are going ot use them for real insight.

Of course, a greater depth of insight can be gained from a community that is designed specifically to get insight from your customers and others, and that ties straight into your internal planning, research and strategic fields. For this you need an online research community.

Read our series on Insight from Online Communities

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Some more reading

• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
• Networking site cashes in on friends (Telegraph) (techmeme.com)
• How to build an online research community: a podcast (freshnetworks.com)

For the final in our series on how to get insight from online communities, we are looking at using what is very much an insight tool but that can be included in any online community: quick polls. Easy to respond to and simple on the community, getting online polls right is actually more difficult than you might think. If you want to get real insight from them, you need to know what questions to ask, and what answers to offer.

Quick polls offer a way to get high-level feedback from your community members on simple quantitative questions. You can understand what people think and can often get feedback very quickly.

There are four steps to make quick polls successful and a useful source of insight:

1. Define what you want to find out – you have only a quick poll and a limited number of words to explain what you are asking. Define a question that is actually useful to you and that is specific enough so that people understand  what they are being asked.
2. Choose your words carefully – how you ask the question is very important. You need to be clear, specific and direct. Make sure you are asking only one question otherwise it will be difficult to analyse the results.
3. Offer specific answers – in a quick poll you probably list a set of answers from which people will choose. Make sure the answers you offer are discrete and different from each other and that you offer all the combinations people will want to choose from.
4. Use the poll to spark a forum discussion – the poll itself can only tell you what people think. To find out why they think this, you should start a related forum discussion where people can discuss the poll, their answer and the issues it raises.

Quick polls can be a great opportunity to get relatively quick feedback from the community members and real insight into a question that is important to you. It’s important to make sure you make the most of this opportunity and produce data that gives you real insight.

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Some more reading

• Want to improve your community in 2009? Ask your members. (freshnetworks.com)
• A Presentation About Community, By The Community (neilperkin.typepad.com)

So far in our series on how to get insight from online communities, we’ve looked at the kind of depth of insight your can get from profile information, the discussions on the site and the language people use, ratings and voting and from photos and photo-based activities. For the penultimate post in the series we want to look at a different type of activity that you can run in your online community – discussion events.

The nature of online communities typically lends them to asynchronous discussions, with forums often the centre of the community and the most vibrant and popular parts. In fact, this is one of the real benefits of online communities – they foster debates, discussions and support between people who are disparate temporally and geographically. However, sometimes there can be real benefit from getting members of your online community onto the site at the same time to take part in a discussion event.

As an online community matures, you will find that people start to adopt patterns of use. Some people will always talk about and comment on the same subjects, some people will talk in conversations with their friends, and many members will show clear patterns of use. They will go to the community at the same time during the week and will do similar things when they are there. This pattern of behaviour is one that should be capitalised upon from an insight perspective. If you have a group of your members coming onto the site at the same time every week, then this is a great opportunity to engage them in a new way. Rather than having them discussing things asynchronously, use your existing features to run a discussion event.

As with most things online community, it’s best to start small. Watch when people are most likely to be on your site and then advertise a discussion event to match one of these times – a Tuesday evening chat session, for example. Choose a subject that’s topical and related to the theme of the community and invite people to come onto a forum thread and discuss it for half an hour. The first time you might get a handful of people, but persist. Run them regularly and more and more people will come. Before long you’ll find that this is used as a real catalyst for discussions for the rest of the week. You can get a depth of insight from a range of your community members on a topic that you choose at a time that you choose it. You can then help to direct the community on an ongoing basis by regular, targeted weekly chat sessions.

If you want to really maximise the benefit you get from these sessions you should report back to the rest of the community what went on, what was said and what you think of it. You’ll gain a depth of insight and reinforce a sense of community that can really help to continue to grow and develop a community, even when it’s reached maturity

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Some more reading

• A Presentation About Community, By The Community (and me) (almostalwaysthinking.com)
• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
• Why Facebook really can’t be your online research community (freshnetworks.com)

We return to our series on getting insight from online communities with a look at how you can get insight from those members of your online community who may not want to begin posts or be regular commenters in public forums. We’ve looked already in the series at the information you can get from profiling data, discussions and the language people use online. Today we want to look at how you can get insights from ratings and votes.

It’s a commonly accepted fact within online communities that many of your community members and visitors will not want to initiate or publicly respond to public discussions. They are happy reading the content and are important as without all these readers, those who do contribute would have no reason to do so. This behaviour is encapsulated in the 90-9-1 rule: in any community of 100 people, 90 will be readers, 9 will edit and add to content and just 1 will initiate discussions or add new content. The best communities find ways to make the most of each of these types of people, recognising that different people behave in different ways and accommodating that.

Most online communities allow people to vote for or rate content – say that you like a certain post or rate a photo or other piece of content out of five. However, too often these tools are overlooked as sources of insight. This is a shame. For those 90 people out of every 100 who are unlikely to contribute to discussions publicly, votes and ratings are ways of letting them have their say. Making this easy to do and encouraging people to rate or vote for content will maximise the benefit you will get from it from an insight perspective.

Whilst such ratings and votings shouldn’t be thought of as representative of the community, they can capture the collective wisdom of the members. If you want to know how important a discussion is, looking at how many people voted for that thread, or at its average rating, is a way of helping you to understand the mass of opinion. If lots of people have voted for it, or rated it highly, then this is a great sign that it’s a discussion you should be reading and digesting.

In a more proactive sense, you can use voting and rating alongside comments as part of a process of co-creation. Getting people to comment on photos, articles, concepts or any piece of content will capture the opinions from a proportion of your community members. Encouraging them to vote too will allow more people to have a voice.

Voting and rating is often used as an engagement tool in online communities, but it can also be a source of valuable insight. See how people rate the different discussions, or the votes that different pieces of content get. You’ll learn something new.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Howard Rheingold: Online Social Networks
• Polling, Opinion and Q&A; Sites are Redefining Social Networking
• Solving real world problems through online social networks