How to Create, Nurture and Manage Communities

How do you create such communities? You probably don’t have to. As Salim has said, “If you build communities and you do good things in public, you don’t have to find the right people – they find you.” You just need to give them an easy onramp to get involved.

Once a community begins to form around an ExO, there are three steps the company can take to aid its growth and strengthen its membership:

1.   Use a powerful MTP to attract and engage early members/early adopters.

2.   Nurture the community. Elements of this nurturing include listening, inquiring, and giving back.  

3.   Create a platform to automate peer-to-peer engagement, and to allow community members to create value for themselves in terms of reputation (GitHub), followers (Twitter) or revenue (YouTube).

Using key tools: Websites, blogs, bulletin boards, and a wide-range of social media (facebook, twitter, reddit, ) able to draw together the faithful and reinforce their faith.

Turning yourself into a Platform that allows community members to earn revenue and to support each other.

Further, as we have noted in the past, true community occurs when peer-to-peer engagement occurs. That means the ExO, to show its trust, must regularly confer with the community, solicit its advice, and recognize its contribution.

Managing Communities and Crowds, given their sheer size, is not a task that can be accomplished in a personalized manner. Rather – and this is true as well with employees and customers in ExOs – you need the assistance of powerful software programs that can respond quickly and effectively, saving human intervention for special cases. In other words, Algorithms and AI, the subject of our next chapter.

BOX:  Key Resources/Links where you can learn more

List of the top 20 digital communities in 2021: https://aelieve.com/rankings/websites/category/online-communities/best-online-communities/

Kevin Kelly’s essay, 1,000 True Fans - https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/