There is one type of community building activities that one should start working on from the very first day of a community and never stop. It is creating content about the community itself. It allows us to keep users engaged without regard to anything else.
The task is to create such stories that excite users’ imagination, make them dream about some future, and sometimes suggest concrete steps to make dreams come true. Through telling the stories about the community, we form a shared identity among the users.
Some topics to cover when writing about the community itself.
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The mission of the community and the problem being solved. The mission of a community is its core value propositions and a key pillar around which the community is built. Your job is to use stories to associate your community as the best solution to the problem at hand. The mission is not only a good topic in itself, but also a way to build all other communications Any change or initiative that is communicated from the perspective of the mission will be clear to users and do not require additional reasoning.
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Software features and social norms. Software updates and constant evolution of the community rules are indicators that give users confidence in the success of the future of the community. To get your users excited and engaged you can share with them any interesting stories about your software platform, new features, design of the social structure, etc. If the users don’t know about what you are working on, it doesn’t exist for them.
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Current community news. There are always short-term goals and ongoing small initiatives in the community. You can share some stories about everything that is happening in the community at the current moment. Users’ success stories, milestones passed, your plans for the future, etc. The goal is to make users feel that they are part of a bigger journey.
There is one topic to avoid. Don’t write about the industry itself. Stories about the industry turn your blog into a news portal. News about the industry is not bad in itself and can be very interesting, but it will not help you to build a community. If your goal is to build a community, then any information a community manager posts should be solely about the people in the community or the community itself.
Keep in mind that there are two types of communications.
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One-way communication, when you share information and the users have no opportunity to respond to it. A typical example is a blog post without the ability to comment.
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Two-way communication. The case when the users have the opportunity to respond to what you have shared with them. When users are able to discuss things with a community manager and can influence the fate of the community it creates a sense of ownership and drivers engagement.
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.