By Michael Torok, Director of Information Development, LogicMonitor.
@MickTorok
This is the second part of Michael Torok's post on community building. Missed part 1? Click here.
As Director of Community at SolarWinds, I managed a successful gamified community called “thwack” which led to millions in support cost savings, 150+ new customer-driven ideas and 100+ testimonials. As I explore a new venture in community building at LogicMonitor, I want to chronicle a bit of my own thought processes in digging the foundations, sinking the support beams, and ensuring a community can thrive in the ecosystem of a sponsor.
To review, here are my five ways:
- Naming that works
- Flexible platforms for the long haul
- Become a sought after destination
- Integrate with daily life
- Incent use
Read "5 Ways to Future-Proof Your New External Community" Ideas 1-3 Here
Now, let's dig into my last two ideas for future-proofing a community.
4. Integrate with Daily Life
Maybe this is an extension of being a logical destination, but it can also be missed very easily. You need to be more than an interest, unless the community you create is only your hobby. Also, If you are creating an asset (not a hobby), no matter how you plan on taking advantage of that, you need to be dedicated and integrate with your community’s daily life. Fitbit is an excellent example of this. If they didn’t provide historical stats and the ability to connect and compete with your friends, they would simply be an expensive pedometer. Because the bracelet is always on, your movements are tracked (even in sleep), and you've made the first move to stay fit. Integrating with your daily life and enhancing your daily life are a given.
So, if your focus is a to enhance the daily life of your community, make sure you integrate with that life. Another great example of this type of integration can be found in any open source software community. People are actively expanding and extending their solution to help it answer more and more of the needs they find while using the software. It becomes both an integration and a perpetuation. You become a part of their success. Ensure your community has a hand in the evolution of the community. When you do, you will become an integral part of their life.
5. Incent
If you want your community to incorporate your site into their daily lives, you have to reward them for doing so. Of course, we all know that a good community will have features and content that keep members coming back. While that is certainly true, finding that content the first time you arrive within a community is probably not the easiest thing to do. More often, people come to a community via Google or for a very specific reason and they might not even remember the site on which they found the answer.
How do you make your site sticky? One of the best ways to ensure you see return visits is to make the first visit memorable and ensure your visitors find value. How do you encourage return visits and not deal with daily bounce stats? Gamify engagement and incent your community.
Start off by answering the following questions and then make sure you have a system in place to reward members for completing the tasks that highlight the behaviors and the engagement you want.
- What is your site for?
- Where do people have to go to find that info on the site?
- Are there multiple uses for the site?
- Can you give points or track actions taken that you want taken?
The communities I have the most experience with center on customer advocacy and feature crowd sourcing, roadmap publication, and software support. That is, my communities are asked to fulfill all of these activities and more. This is my answer to "What is your site for?" The following examples provide answers to the other 3 questions above:
- Q. Where do people have to go to find that info on the site?
A. People need to navigate to numerous locations on the site, often categorized by the software product they might be interested in, other times by a product feature or even by a site function (e.g., the forum section, the idea section, the documentation). - Q. Are there multiple uses for the site?
A. Absolutely. - Q. Can you give points or track actions taken that you want taken?
A. Currently no, but it must come.
Show people the value and reward them for seeing it. There are a number of different systems for rewarding behavior you want, but Bunchball’s Nitro allows quick integration with the Jive platform (should you be lucky enough to be on it) and gives you a complete package. Even without, though, your system should definitely support points to reward actions. Why? Because we are both driven by competition and rewarded by recognition. One of the eye-opening moments I found when transferring accounts and data to a new platform was that members were not there for the break-fix knowledge; they found satisfaction in their ranking and in the ability to show others they were knowledgeable. It was both competition and altruism.
So, back to the Q&A…
With multiple places to go, give points and recognition for each location they successfully go to and make sure the value is apparent. For example, do you publish your product roadmap? Give people points for bookmarking or favoriting the page. Do you want to know what the crowd wants in your product or from your product? Consider giving points and a badge for voting on a feature request. If possible, link all these actions together and create a mission or adventure out of the completion of all the individual tasks. The culmination and completion of all the tasks needs to come with a larger reward. You want your community to know what you offer and all the good they can gather. Give them a badge to show off and/or a larger number of points. Remember to:
- Incent commenting.
- Incent the creation of content.
- Incent answering others’ questions.
- Incent reading your content.
- Incent voting.
- Incent, incent, incent.
These are my 5. As we both set out again to create destinations for our community, I will be keeping them in mind. I hope you found them helpful and encourage you to @ message @MickTorok & @Bunchball with your thoughts & ideas!