Practical CM Course
Reaching The Critical Mass Starting a community is a typical chicken-and-egg task: A community is successful when there are people who participate in it, but people usually want to participate only in successful communities. The magic of community management is to somehow gather a critical mass of people before the community becomes successful. Grow Your Community Any social system has only two states. It either grows or dies. If you do not work on growing your community, it will begin to stagnate and then degrade. Running initiatives aimed at growth is the only way to keep a community healthy. Community Health Metrics “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” Most of us know this perfectly and a complete lack of metrics is rarely an issue today. The main problems nowadays are which metrics to use and how to interpret them in situations where there are a lot of metrics and some of them show growth, but others show a decline, or when the metrics don’t show any change, but clearly there are enormous changes underway. Community Management Essentials To feel fluent in launching and growing online communities one needs to know a few basic definitions. This knowledge helps dispel the fog of mystery that shrouds what an online community really is so you can clearly see the way you need to go to build your online community. Community As a Product Community - people and the relationships between them - is a product in itself. The value (sense of belonging, feeling of unity, etc) that the “consumers” (the users) get from the “product” (the community) usually lies outside the physical world. The goal of a community manager is to maximize this value. To do this, the community manager needs to properly configure three key components of the system: the mission, the tools, and the rules. Conflict Management Rule violations, disrupting activities, or demonstrating disrespect towards other users by a single one can undermine a well organized collective activity and poison the environment for everyone involved. Community manager’s task is to keep the users’ faith, a feeling of safety, and mutual trust within the group. The tools they need to use are kindness, respect, and effective communication.
