Type A Learning Agency

Building online communities
A few tips for beginners, courtesy of Type A
by Anna Belyaev

Build a place where people will want to hang out.

Whether it's a park, coffee shop, or bar, most people frequent their favorite hangouts because they suspect or know from experience that someone else interesting is likely to be hanging out there, too. So if you want to create a virtual space where people love to hang out, you'll need to convince them that the kind of people they are most interested in hanging with are going to be there, and then you need to deliver on that promise.

What's it take? (1) Try inviting specific, sufficiently appealing and impressive people to hang there loudly for awhile and (2) get them to commit to taking specific actions to help spread the word that they'll be hanging there.

Schedule events that people will look forward to attending.

People don't normally congregate somewhere just for the heck of it. They come to attend an event, whether it's a political gathering, concert, ballgame, or church service. And although the Internet is a 24/7, anytime, anywhere kinda thing, most people still plan their lives around the events they find interesting and valuable. If you want to build a community capable of competing with the many exciting events in people's lives, you're going to need to get some interesting and valuable events of your own on your audience's personal calendars!

What's it take? Try creating and promoting a specific calendar and program of routinely scheduled events guaranteed to be of interested to your audience, around which other activities can meaningfully revolve.

Instigate, build, and maintain momentum.

Even the most homogenous community is a pretty diverse social organization in which a number of parties contribute to keeping the community active and vibrant. Someone is always on the phone. Someone else gets everyone together. Someone else introduces ideas or instigates a frenzy of conversations by other means. If you want to build a community with enough energy and momentum to become self-sustaining, you'll need to give it a lot of spark at the start and whenever the energy wanes.

What's it take? (1) Try setting goals for the amount of time you'll let pass before something interesting needs to happen in the community to spark interaction, (2) brainstorm a long list of topics and events capable of providing that spark, and (3) make sure you've got someone or a bunch of someones who will take responsibility for making such sparks.

Involve people to help with the work.

That's right! Very little in life comes about without the efforts of movers and shakers. Someone, somewhere, cares enough to put in the effort to spread the word, to get people excited, and to get others involved. No technology, however cool or amazing, will do that on its own. If you don't plan on being the key mover and the shaker, facilitator, moderator, or other brand of magnetic personality around which your budding community revolves, you need to find someone you can trust to do this work reliably.

What's it take? (1) Try developing a strategic plan that describes in detail the tactics and tasks required to accomplish all the goals you have for your online community and the schedule according to which this work needs to be accomplished, then (2) make sure you have specific volunteers or other parties committed to performing each task.