What should a community manager do to find leaders among users in an online community?
To find leaders among your community users you need to look for them proactively.
There are two primary approaches to the search.
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Manual search. Look for users who are already doing what you expect your future volunteers to do. Contact each user individually, talk with them about the needs of the community, and offer them an “official position” as a volunteer. Users might consider a place in the social hierarchy of the community as an additional reward for the work they already do.
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Ask for help publicly. Reach out to the community in need of volunteer help. Describe specific tasks to be done, your expectations for the future volunteers and what those willing to apply should do to propose themself.
Volunteering is a way to become even more engaged in the community. Future volunteers need to like the community and want to help grow it in the first place.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.