In almost any sociology textbook, you’re sure to come across the term “social capital.” Social capital is defined as the difference between what a person can accomplish with and without their connections. When we build a community, we want the social capital of our users, as well as the overall social capital of the community as a whole, to be as high as possible. Therefore, creating connections between the users is crucial.
At the same time, especially in the early stages of a community’s growth, there is a limited number of discussions and activities. Users are unable to fully show off themselves. At this point, the community manager can (and probably should) become the main driving force that brings people together.
Please note that in developed communities the task of bringing people together is no less important. When it is the time to split a community into subgroups, many users begin to “live” within their own subgroup and have little idea what’s going on in others. In this case, you again need to run community building activities that connect people who might be interested in each other but don’t interact in everyday life due to different interests.
If I haven’t convinced you yet of the importance of bringing people together intentionally, remember that to a large extent people come to a community for other people. So the more “friends” or simply people they like they have in the community, the more often they will return to your site or app.
There are two most effective approaches to creating connections between participants:
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Collaborative activities. The idea is to invite users to do something together. People will get to know each when working on organising the event and during the event itself. Such activities are especially important if your users don’t overlap within the product or the community on a daily basis.
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Introducing people to each other. This approach involves telling users about each other. This could be anything from weekly email digests with leaderboards to arranging a personal chat between people who might be interested in each other.
Today I want to talk about one of the ways to introduce people to each other, namely, interviews.
What do I mean by interviews?
The idea behind interviews is very simple: you find interesting users in the community and ask them questions that reveal them from their best side. Questions can be about their life, their opinions or judgments on important topics, and so on. Moreover, the more human the interviewee becomes in the story you share with others, the better.
It’s important to make a note about privacy here. For some people, the internet is a space where they want to be completely anonymous. Therefore, any questions that identify a person in any way should be optional. I think it’s a good practice to inform the person you’re interviewing about this at the very beginning of the interview.
Why interviews?
Because interviews are very easy to organize, scalable, and work well alongside any other community building activities.
What kinds of interviews are there?
Interviews can be text, audio, or video. Text interviews are the easiest to organize and distribute. Meanwhile, video interviews, especially with a camera on, are the most effective, as they allow the audience to hear and see a real person.
Who can be interviewed?
There are two approaches to interviewing. You can interview community members or someone from the company. The approach is completely the same in both cases. It also doesn’t matter what role the interviewee plays (true for both, the users and employees). The only important thing is that the interviewee has an interesting story and is connected to the community somehow (as a significant portion of your questions should be community related).
What else do you need to know about interviews?
In fact, there aren’t any other special recommendations or requirements that need to be discussed. When working on an interview, the most important thing is to create an engaging story about a real person. There’s no single optimal structure. Just remember, like any story, an interview has an introduction where you introduce the interviewee, a main section consisting of questions and answers, and a conclusion with farewells.
If you need any kind of analytics to help you decide where your community is and what to do next to grow it efficiently, please let me know! We are happy to help!