Shaping + Community + Efficiency = Target Interest and Content
What purpose do you need a community for, what can you expect from your community members, what is the proposal you have to validate with them to insure the work you do with them can be owned by the company, when and how to analyse the data you’ve gathered and what to do with the results? Shaping your community is the same as shaping a surf board. Knowing where you want to go and the different steps to follow is a value added to your company. Here are some tips about how to shape you community to fit your needs.
Your community is the wave on which you can get support to generate impressive tricks and smart moves. But to do so you need to know how that community may move back and forth and according to its size and format what you can expect from it. We can see several classes of community for each of which you can generate different kind of content and feedbacks, according to the interest you’ve aimed and the content you’ve generated:
Small community : less than 400 users
You have the possibility to create a relationship with most of the users as well as determine accurate clusters of users you would then be able to leverage regarding your needs. For that size of community the core users are a clear value added for the community and would help the rest of the users be more active and may be conversation facilitator volunteers. You can expect from them high quality ideas and deep explanations of their contributions.
Medium community : from 500 to 1400 users
You have more readers than active people in the community. It’s time to use standard tools as polls and studies to make the most of the users provide feedbacks. Don’t expect a huge flow of ideas since people are waiting for content and activities more than ready to work with you. If you’re willing to create a community of that size, be sure to be ready to manage it and to have enough resource to analyse content your members would provide you with.
Large community : more than 1500 users
You’ve decided to turn your community into a company weapon to drag users and generate more and more loyalty. It means you have to “hire” community core members to collaborate with you to spread information as well as being the community representative when needed. You also need to create a specific workflow to empower then and leave them some time consuming jobs like consumer support, content redirection, and activities creation and management.
The more users you invite to join your community, the less it would help you innovate and the more it would help you spread the word and generate advocacy. Don’t expect a large community would help you define a new business model or help you uncover new expectations, they’re not in it for that. They’ve joined you because they want more from you, not to give you anything. And if you’re aiming at innovation and optimization of the service/ product, think about targeting core users and invite them to join a more specific community.
Photo Credit: Millzero.com
