A YouTube conversation (uploaded Oct 22, 2020) between Ricardo Molina and a guest about how much time is needed to run an effective online community. The guest argues that high-value activity is member Q&A rather than scheduled content, that moderation can be minimal with quality filtering, and that a well-run group may require as little as ~10 minutes per day once established. Recruiting members and content planning take more upfront work.
Now, how much time does it require to run a well run online community? And can you share some of those tips with us? How long does it take?
Yeah, it's funny someone saying that to me this morning actually. It's like, how do you find the time to do it all? Because she was saying, well, I have my day job so I haven't got time to do these other things. And I suppose part I said, well, partly, I guess it is my day job that you know, given running a community platform. So I can have that excuse partly I enjoy it, to be honest, so, you know, I can be, I want to do it partly, I suppose because I'm used to, I'm quite fast at it. So like, you know, content creation I find comes to me very easily. But I mean, interestingly you mentioned content plans and things and I sort of mixed feelings about that. Only in as much as if you're having to do sort of content plans and schedules and all sorts of stuff, editorial planning, that feels like quite a lot of work. It feels almost slightly a bit dry as well. Or at least you know, like with E consultancy and we do do a bit with guild publishing content, but that's kind of, you know, that's content, that's articles and you know, podcasts or whatever it is these days. For me that the often the essence of community is, is essentially questions and answers. So where as a member of a community that this the single most valuable thing I can get is an answer to my question. You know, your content may or may not be interesting to me today or right now, or it might stimulate a response. But to be honest, we've all got enough content in our lives as well. So the thing that I really, really want is when I have a problem or challenge, I can ask my community and I get an answer ideally quickly and it's not necessarily right, but it's probably honest. And so that's. So it doesn't mean you don't need content, but content's only a kind of a bit of a stimulus. And to be honest, to answer your question about my time, often it's not much time once you kind of get the thing up and running. Because I'm not necessarily creating content because you're just asking questions. And again you come back to a roundtable or an event format where you ask open questions and people give you their challenges or problems. And so the content is the Q and A kind of thing and that's super valuable and hard to get any other way and things, things. So I mean, I Spend. I mean if you take Creo or the couple of groups I run no more than 10 minutes a day I'd say. So it's not. I mean it takes maybe starting it a little bit of time and if you're having to recruit new members in, you know, that might involve some sort of marketing and things but even then you can get it to happen organically. I mean there's this quality filtering and things. So touchwood so far in the nature of Guild is the moderation isn't really a problem. I mean that can be, you know, quality control, moderating and very open communities can take more time. But actually there's very say most of the content comes from the members or users and say that's not just specific to Guild. That's true if you look at Reddit or GitHub or a lot of the most success. I mean Quoras Horror is kind of really interesting. Sadly, I think it's gone. It's become victim of marketing people like me. It was nothing then suddenly it was big and useful. Now it's spam to hell. But you know, and LinkedIn I think quite a lot as well. It's a marketing platform really. But yes. So I don't think it is a huge amount of time but and again comes down to quality and also I think, you know, your point. If you know, if you've got someone who is respected or senior credible in their industry, it doesn't really matter what the platform is because you'll join it because you want to, you know, and this is safe true. I mean it's true in sort of with celebrities, I guess in the kind of B2C world. But in the B2B world if the, you know, someone super influential and senior, if I don't know, Martin Sorrell invited me, I don't care what platform it is or I'm using him as an example. But the point is it isn't really the technology. Ultimately he could do that on email and it'd be still could be. Could be super valuable.
No, I think that's a valid point. I have a very quiet audience here today only is asking the questions. So it is perfectly okay if you guys don't have questions but because I've got a lot of stuff that I want to ask and I want to delve into it. So unless you guys are going to be asking questions, I suggest you submit now. Otherwise I would just kind of delve into the other element. Ashley, which was. So it's very clear the community manager or community leader probably it might be split into various roles as the. The leadership, and then there's the operational one that we always see it as the iceberg. So what we think the community manager does, but what all the work that it's entailed, and then that might be picked up by other members of the team, because you still need to recruit members, you need to stimulate that, you.
