FreshNetworks Blog

A good friend of mine started a new job for the new year – working in social media for a UK charity. She asked me what reading I could recommend for somebody looking to learn more about online communities and how they can be launched and grown. There are a whole range of great books out there on how social media is used and the impact this is having on society (anything by Gladwell or Shirky would be a great starting point), but she was interested specifically in things that help managing and growing communities online.

Here’s the very short list I shared with her (and a few extra ones added in). There are many great books, articles and blogs out there and we’d love you to share your favourites in the comments below. But this is a good starting point and we would consider them essential reading for online community managers.

Books

• Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities, Amy Jo Kim (Amazon) – a great text explaining the how to grow online communities, and explaining through examples why they grow like this.
• Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards, Patrick O’Keefe (Amazon) – another great textbook of how to set-up and manage online forums and discussion boards.
• 18 Rules of Community Engagement: A Guide for Building Relationships and Connecting With Customers Online, Angela Connor (Amazon) – a pragmatic approach to planning and building online communities, you can read our review of this book here.

Blogs

• FeverBee – a great blog from practical community-builder Rich Millington.
• Community Spark – a community-building blog from Martin Reed.

Articles

• Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities (2005) – a look at how to combat under-contribution to your online community, examining how social psychology impact when and how people will contribute online.
• Understanding Community: A review of networks, ties and contacts’, Working Paper, Real Life Methods (2007) – an interesting perspective on and review of the different ways communities form and bond online

This is purposefully a short list – what would you add to it? Let us know your essential reading in the comments below.

I’ve just finished my gift shopping, have two more days at work and am halfway through the various parties in my diary. There are just five days left until Christmas, and one of the longest breaks from work I’ve taken this year. I probably won’t be posting between Christmas and New Year and so wanted to use the last five posts of 2008 to highlight Five Things to Do in 2009 (actually five lots of five things so 25 in total!)

Today I’m starting with Five blogs you should read in 2009. Blogs that I’ve enjoyed and learnt from in 2008 and that I think everybody in social media or online communities should be reading in 2009.

1. FeverBee

I’ve become a big admirer of Richard Millington’s work this year. He helps companies with their online community strategy and his blog, FeverBee, contains ideas for how to build online communities. He generated a lot of interest in early December 2008 with his Online Community Building Manifesto, which highlights his belief that the non-technical aspect of growing and building an online community is important to focus on. And this is exactly what he does in his blog.

2. Ignite Social Media

The blog from Ignite Social Media is a great source of information and examples of use of social media by brands. I love it as a source of examples and ideas to use when talking to clients and to keep up-to-date on what brands are doing with social media.

3. Social media (re)loaded

I’ve studied languages for much of my life and have lived in both France and Russia. So I have a lot of respect for anybody who blogs in a foreign language, and enjoy reading the different perspective on the market that you get from other countries. ‘ English-language blog is a good source of information, interviews and debate on social media, coming from a European perspective.

4. ThreeMinds

The blog from Organic has been a respected source of information on digital marketing for a number of years now, and is a good source of information on trends in the market. Their Weekly Digest is a particularly valuable read and a quick and easy source of information on things you might have missed each week.

5. FutureLab

The only ‘aggregator’ blog on the list, and I should admit that some of my posts contribute to this blog, but the team at FutureLab select and then publish what they consider to be the best posts in marketing and strategy from around the web on their Marketing & Strategy Innovation blog. The end result is an interesting and informative digest of what people across different industries think and know, and it serves as a good route in to discovering new blogs.

Read all of our Five Things to Do in 2009 posts

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Some more reading

• Who’s getting hired right now? Community Managers!
• Social Networking for ANY Type of Business, but there are Tricks …
• Want to improve your community in 2009? Ask your members.
• ThePort.com – Social Media Solutions

We often take it for granted that it’s important to build, grow and manage an online community carefully, that you need to put effort in to make it work and that the right people need to be involved to help your community really take off. However, too often people think about technology when they talk community. They talk about how the community will be structured, how you can use online tools to engage people and what their website will look like. I’m a strong believer that good technology is important, that the user experience should allow them to do everything they want to do, should be easy to manage efficiently and should help to deliver on our client’s objectives. But really, technology should be invisible. It’s the management, growth and building of the community that we should be focusing our efforts on. This is where we can really make a difference.

That’s why it was great this week when Rich Millington over FeverBee posted a first draft of his Online Community Manifesto. It’s an insightful piece that builds on and expands many of my own thoughts, and our endeavours in promoting community management. The need to focus on the skills and strategies needed to build, grow and manage an online community are important, yet many people focus on the technology. As Rich says:

We’ve forgotten the purpose of technology. Technology exists to make communication easier. It doesn’t exist to let us do things we wouldn’t have bothered to do anyway.

This is so very true. When we work with clients at FreshNetworks we don’t talk about technology until we’ve worked on aims and objectives, who a brand is trying to engage (and why), what they know about them, how they interact with the brand. As Rich notes, we’re talking about a social environment and it’s important to understand this first. We don’t even use the word ‘online’ for the first few sessions we have.

Technology is important, but it should be taken as a given. It is the management of the community that will really make a significant difference in how it builds and grows. Online community management is a real skill area and one that all of us who work in the industry should work together to help expand, refine and share.

If you’re interested in meeting other Community Managers then there are a couple of groups in social networks you might want to join – groups in Facebook and LinkedIn. Also keep following our series on Promoting Community Management to hear about what we’re doing and events we’re organising.

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Some more reading

• Promoting community management
• Paying people can be a bad way to motivate them
• Do we need to incentivise participation in online communities?
• Visibility gets you and your community value noticed
• Why Social Media Can Fail (And Why It Won’t)
• Social Media Marketing is Good For Business