Online Community Challenges & Pitfalls

What would you say are the challenges and pitfalls of online communities? And when someone's trying to build an online community and you know, we've talked about no plan B, always on. So what would you say they are?

I think, well, we talked a bit about the sort of community leader role or the, essentially the. And again, we're talking about B2B really, sometimes the brand, but more than that, usually the individual who's inviting you in or is hosting it, because that is, it is really important that that person is, you know, credible, authoritative, interesting, connected enough or whatever that people that want to join it and want and care about contributing kind of good quality. So, you know, that's one thing that kind of the sort of figurehead or the, or the person or people who are involved in it. And again, if you go back, I'll go back to events. It's pretty rare that I've gone to event because of the venue. I can think maybe one or two times in my life where I thought, I don't care who's there or who's speaking, but that's a cool venue. I almost only go because of who's going, you know, so. And, you know, and that might be the speakers, but it's often the attendees, you know, and that's often the trick as an event organizer, you play, as you say, here are all the attending companies. I mean, certainly if you're trying to sell to sponsors, you do that. But even to delegates, paying delegates, like, oh, I'm going to miss out if I don't attend that event because, look, all of my peers are going. So it's the same thing with an online community. So, so who, who is involved and who's leading it is probably the single most important thing. The other thing though is, which is critical is the purpose, as in why is this community here? And you kind of really do need to define that and you need to communicate it to the members or prospective members and you need to try and stick to it or change it and tell people you're changing it. Because too often you see things, people go, oh, we've set up a community for you and you can talk amongst yourselves maybe, or network. Yeah, but what about. Or to what ends? You know, what's, what's the purpose or point in this? And you are as part of that. Often you need kind of guidelines or, you know, a charter rules, whatever it is for your community, where you set expectations around, you know, behavior as well. So you say, this is who's running it and who. The kind of People in it, this is the point of it, this is what we expect. And terms of behavior like you, you can't headhunt or sell or you can or whatever it is. So you need to be quite strong really in those things. And it's about managing expectations and people respond to that. You know, I think they quite like it. And even. And to us, we don't do this. I don't do this as quite as much as I preach, but I think you should prune out inactive members. I mean one of the, you just, I mean you might tell them like unless you engage or, you know, you don't seem to be active, would just remove you. So you're constantly kind of culling. It's not the right word. Ideally always noise, pruning, but cleansing. No, I can't think of the right word. But you know, one of the best communities I'm in is a group called Founders, Founders without the E. And it's for entrepreneurs and it's a free, there's some paid thing, but it's free. But they, you know, they get all of this stuff. So. Right. And part of the condition of ongoing membership is that you have to fill in quite an extensive survey every year. If you don't do it, you get kicked out and you know, you know that that's the deal. So. And actually you can even do that with paying customers. I say as long as. So, you know, clear purpose, clear rules, clarity around who's in charge and who's in it, I think are all really important. You know, then obviously this sort of the technology and the experience is important. You know, I'm wearing my kilt hat, I'm sure I'd sell it more. But you know, the truth is the you can, I've seen really effective, strong communities work on all sorts of different media and platforms and I think just.

Wanted to also touch upon on that which we talked about it previously, is that there needs to be an element of commitment and seriousness of the whole thing. So there's two things that I want to highlight and probably you might want to add to it is that an online community is always on number two is that you need to really dedicate the time, the resource to make it work. And it's not a short term gain, it's probably more of a midterm gain. And then you need to have a very big clarity on that. So anything you want to add on that, Ashley?

Yeah, I mean again, because it's back to that question about the amount of time or effort and we say you know, I've seen this, that it's about sort of consistent. It's small but often. So consistency is more important than kind of big chunks. If you run a community and you turn up once every month or two weeks, dump a load of stuff and go again, that's not the way to do it. So being responsive a little and often is much more important. So the total amount of time is relatively small, but it's just spread out. And the other thing is I suppose persistency and I think you've mentioned this, Ricardo, but it takes time. You know, I mean if you think this is like, it's a bit like making friends or you know, moving to a new village or town or neighborhood and getting to know people to the point where you feel like you belong and you could genuinely say I'm part of the local community, that doesn't happen in a few days, doesn't happen in weeks even. You know, it takes time because it's a fairly fundamental human thing around kind of trust and bonds and all that kind of stuff. So you know, a successful community, you. It's even interesting the language that people start to use. They start to say, I'm not just in, but I belong to something or other or they use, they join it rather than register or whatever. You know, there's, there's, they're a member, not a subscriber, all these sorts of things. But it does take time. And again, I think people sometimes either give up too quickly or in events people are particularly guilty of this because they have maybe quarterly events or they have, they're very, you know, they've got a very linear, they've got a big build up to event, move on to the next one. And so they don't always. The kind of, the always on continual, persistent nature of running successful community isn't how an event tends to work because it's in its acute effort at a point in time and then it's the next one and then that one's forgotten. So it doesn't often marry well with sometimes say with event led business models to do community, even though a lot of them are looking at that.