How to manage online communities

There are three critical stages involved in building and nurturing online communities. The first is the ‘plan’ part, where the online community product is conceptualized on paper; the next is the ‘build’ part where these communities are coded on various content management systems like Joomla, Drupal etc; the final but most lengthy part is ‘engage’ where these communities need to be managed and nurtured.

You might think that communities have the capability of taking care of themselves through the networking effect. However that is in fact a very rosy picture. The truth is that such communities need to be promoted, handholded and inspected to get the best out of them. The way each successful party needs a host and bigger parties needs organizers and managers, similarly most of the online communities (which can be interpreted as an online avatar of a get-together) need dedicated resources like community managers to execute the above jobs. In case of larger online communities you need additional resources working with the community manager for successful scaling and nurturing of the online community.

I have generally seen that most people underestimate the role of community managers and think of them as people who are needed to put a comment here or there or at maximum start some discussion threads. However if you consider your online community as a product, then you must also see the role of community manager equivalent to the product manager. In fact while managing some online communities myself at 2020social I realized that a community manager’s role can be divided into 5 broad parts.

Content Moderation: Moderating content, seeing if all the published content is according to the community policy and sanity norms etc

Content Creation (and seeding/ copywriting): Creating critical content for the community. They can be your conversations and the community admin or content seeded by you to provoke further conversations.

Promotion: Promotion and scaling up of the community. This involves managing community outposts (Facebook/ Twitter pages) to other tactics that can lead to increase in relevant traffic on community.

Response Mechanism: Channelizing responses so that adequate responses are generated. This involves well thought response flowchart to acknowledge positive/ negative comments, handling crisis etc. This also involves setting up work flows for successful execution of ideas and providing support/ solutions to user queries.
Retention tactics: Miscellaneous tactics to increase engagement of users on the community. This can involve running micro campaigns or directing users to appropriate parts of the community so that they have more to discover and engage around on the online community

Moreover if you look at the roles, all of them can be set across to range from Scaling focussed roles, which focus on increasing the size of the community, get more relevant users, to retention focussed roles, which focus on engaging and retaining people once they have joined the community. In fact I would like to take each of these 5 roles separately in 5 different blog posts.