A recorded conversation (Ricardo Molina and another speaker) about building and running online communities. Key claims: success is not measured by raw activity volume but by quality; B2B communities benefit from a visible, senior community leader (not only an operational community manager) to signal seriousness; early community interactions are often "staged" or pre-planned via a content plan to seed discussion; community leaders should proactively draw out quiet members through direct, private prompts (DMs, emails) rather than over-posting to fill silence. The speakers emphasize parallels with in-person events (hosts drawing out quiet attendees) and warn against noisy, low-value activity.
Chapters
How do you get to the chatty people? How do you get. And how do you foster their engagement? And I think the particular question is more around, okay, the role of community manager. And how do you get to foster that communication, that engagement?
Well, I mean to say, I would just reiterate the point that I think sometimes people panic if there isn't a lot going on, that they think that success equals a lot of activity, which is. Can be true. But I'd say if it's not good quality activity, that's worse than no activity at all because. And sometimes I think you just have to be a little bit strong. It's a bit like, I don't know, sitting at a round table just to draw the event parallel and you ask a question. Actually the thing to do often is just to wait and it feels painful and then slowly someone will talk and then everyone else will feel comfortable and they'll chip in and things. If you just keep banging on to feel the silence, you're actually going to kind of put people off a bit. So I'd. Not necessarily. It's not necessarily a bad sign if there's not lots going on. In fact, it could be a bad sign if too much is going on because everyone, you know, everyone always complains, quite understanding, they're overwhelmed with stuff, they want relevancy, it's too noisy. And you know, part of this trend, as you say, which, you know, even Zuckerberg at Facebook recognizes, is that we've had a toxic overload saturated with staff communication, including, you know, community social media. And we're trying to kind of retrench back into more private spaces, more curated, more filtered and things. So, yeah, I wouldn't worry. I mean, but then, yeah, there's a whole in order to get that right kind of engagement then. And again, there are all sorts of things you can do. I mean, first is, I mean, you mentioned Ricardo, community manager. And maybe one of the things we can talk about is the role of the host or community leader. I prefer, I'm not sure what all the terminology is. I prefer the terminology community leader. My concern with community manager is it sounds a bit junior and a bit operational. And I think one of the problems in some of these B2B communities is that the person who's kind of fronting it, I think needs to be ideally quite knowledgeable about the main space, ideally quite senior and ideally, you know, well connected and respected as far as possible within that, that sphere. And the reason for that is just because it's. It shows a. It signals Kind of seriousness, it signals respect to the members. And again, if you draw an event parallel, if you had an event, invited your people along and then you said, and you know, and to welcome you to the event and stand on stage and greet you, we've got our marketing exec, you're like, what the hell is going on? I mean, surely it's the founder or the CEO that should be up there welcoming us. And I don't understand why people think that's different in an online community so often, I think, I mean, you need community managers and take these big ones who do a lot of the operational and admin and moderation and onboarding and all this sort of stuff, but the sort of leader, figurehead person, I think if the CEO or founder or someone, the editor in chief, what it isn't prepared to do it, I'd question whether you should do it in the first place, because to me that shows that they don't really care about it. You know, if you're going, let's do community, oh, we've bought some tech, there we go, there's your community people get on with it. It's like inviting people to an event and then just sort of leaving them to get on with it and hope it's all fine. And it isn't, you know. So yes, I think, you know, getting the right kind of community leader, there's all sorts of best. But, you know, welcoming people personally and calling them out, certainly when you're starting to get something going. And again, to, you know, make a parallel with a real world event, you know, you know, she was saying, how do we find the chatty ones? I would, they don't need finding because they're that, you know, often the challenge is suppressing them, not actually finding necessarily they're too chatty. That's a different problem. I think the more interesting challenge is how do you get the quiet ones to speak up? Because again, in my experience, I've run loads and loads of round tables, which is usually 10 to 12 people. As a good moderator or host, you're trying to draw out the quiet ones because often they're sitting there quiet because they're introvert or whatever. Then you finally get them to talk and they've got all the answers. I mean, they're the one, they've been sitting there all along going, why haven't you said anything? Because you know all this. So in the real world you have to like literally ask them, say, you know, oh, Ricardo, you haven't said anything yet. What do you think about this and the similar in the digital world, you know, you sometimes you have to, whether it's direct message, you email, you phone, you say, like, I know that you know a lot about this subject and you're not saying anything. Do you mind contributing or you know, so it does, you know, it takes a bit of work and a bit of kind of prodding, but then to get it going. But then hopefully say people start to go, oh, okay, this is good. And I can chip in and it makes me feel good and I can contribute and I'm getting something out and it kind of, you get that feeling where it just feels like a supportive and valuable community. Yeah.
And I think to touch on that element, Faye is, she was asking should it be staged at first. And I think from, from our perspective, from what we've seen and from what we generally do is yes to certain extent. Because then you have the community leader or the community manager that understands the audience, probably has already built certain connection with the members of that community, understands their context. So I wouldn't say necessarily staged because staged sounds like fake. But I would say it is pre planned. So the community leader and then the community owner needs to have a content plan. The community leader needs to be researching, needs to be reading and needs to be thinking in the put themselves in the picture and the shoes of the people that that community have and thinking, okay, this might be useful for Faye. So I'm going to put that more on the community later on. Oh, Genevieve, whatever it is, it's gonna be very interesting about it. So it's kind of serving that. So it's not stage is a content plan because you need to drive, need to foster that engagement. But I think there's another big important element which is doing direct communication. Sometimes you might have a discussion going live and then you might go separately. Hey, would you rather contribute to this? I mean that digital nudge as you.
Say that when you're in the digital.
Okay, listen, for instance, John, you haven't said anything. There's this discussion here. You have so much to add. Can you do it? And that's kind of the way in which you also start encouraging that.
