Community Building
Important topic, and I agree — building community is both tricky and time-consuming. But if you’ll forgive me for using lolcatspeak– if it takes 2 years, ‘ur doin it wrong’. The painful, least-effective way to “build community” is to hire a Community Manager who tries to connect users with the company. Far quicker/better to hire a “Director of Kicking Ass” whose sole job is to help users get better and better at whatever it is you can help them do, and to connect users to other users who share that passion and can help.
A look through Gary’s WineLibraryTV comments shows why he is so successful… it’s not because Gary is the guy everyone wants at their dinner party–it’s because he helps his viewers become the guy everyone wants at a dinner party.
Some community managers appear to have a strategy modeled after: “Get users to want to party with you.” More sustainable (and do-able) might be: “Give users a reason to party… without you”
Meetups and beer are awesome — especially when they’re about connecting users with other users. Our job as community builders is to not so much to connect with our users, but to give them more and more compelling reasons to connect with one another. And the best way to do that is through helping them learn and grow and ultimately–kick ass. The “at what?” doesn’t matter nearly as much.
I agree that the marketing budget could be far better spent on community–especially when community means putting the user–not the company–at the center of a passion-fueled ecosystem. Even things like openness/transparency matter only to the extent that they dramatically support (or potentially harm) our users’ ability to do whatever it is we’re helping them do.
Think about some of the things that truly make your life more interesting, engaging, productive, etc. — and most of us can find things where the product, service, support, user community is so damn useful that we really don’t even notice (let alone care) that the company isn’t “engaged”. In the end, we’re just not that into The Company. And a community manager that tries to change that is in for a long, painful, ultimately disappointing journey.
We are “into” our own journey, and any company that helps us do it–either directly through products/services that help us kick ass — or indirectly through sponsored community efforts that help us learn/grow/kick ass at something (even entirely unrelated)– will win our hearts. Excitement for a company/product is simply a wonderful side-effect of a company/product that helps us do something amazing. When a community manager makes passion for the company as a goal, two years or even ten will likely never be enough."
"I know a lot of folks who try to separate their personal life and their professional life. If you’re interested in building community, there is no difference. It’s all the same. ‘Bleasure’ is a word Lisa Pricecoined, and I think it’s a perfect description: the melding of ‘Personal’ and ‘Business’.
You need to accept every friend request on Facebook. Hate that idea? Try this: The Facebook homepage re-design makes it really easy to create groups of friends. Add all your real-life friends to a group called ‘Buds’ (or something similar) and filter the updates. When you get friend requests, just allow them to see your limited profile. This isn’t as good as sharing everything, but for you more private folks, it should work fine.
Also, if you’re serious about building a community, you better not even think about protecting your updates on Twitter. If you need a ‘personal’ account for your family, that’s fine (and you can use Mattto update multiple accounts). But for your ‘public face’ it’s got to be wide open."