Recently I covered 5 immutable laws of community-centric organizations. Below are four more to consider.
Make Your Community Character Count
Make good choices. Set the standard.
Coaching community members to abide by codes of conduct may be a bit more challenging than censoring your own behavior as a manager. After all, it's your job to moderate what goes on. You're the eye in the sky. Set a tone and religiously maintain it. Most participants will understand where the boundaries lay and abide by them.
Offer Your Letterman's Jacket
People want to belong. It's part of our makeup to mingle with others who share like interests or idea nuggets. We're each unique birds but enjoy some commonalities - that's why the community offers appeal. It's a place where we can relate, be understood, speak a shared language.
Reward those who want to stay close to your community. They're you're forward infantry.
Offer participants a widget they can place on their blog. Send new members a coupon in the mail. Drop handwritten postcards to randomly selected members each week just to touch base (or develop a retention strategy and use the postcards to reconnect with laggards). Send a T-shirt with a smart ass slogan to a select group of members during their birth month.
Hell, hold a monthly quiz then send a koozie to those who have the correct answer. Later in the year challenge all koozie owners to a photo contest and award a big prize. The point is to say "Hey, thanks for hanging out with us" and motivate them to continue demonstrating their community love.
Whatever you do, make sure it fits in line with the overarching objectives for the community. Then do those things consistently.
Build Experiences Worth Sharing
It's a community, not a podium. Community implies acting selflessly and giving generously - resources, perspectives, information, ideas. Myopia will not win you any friends, and it certainly won't grow your base of influencers.
Instead, think about the spectrum of topics that might interest members. Better yet, create a mind map to help push your thinking innew ways. Develop a survey to discover precisely which subjects members would like covered. Tap into the thoughts of the most active users with a deeper dive online focus group. Stay true to the objectives, just remember there's a wide margin around your brand the community can - and probably should - incorporate.
Open Your Playbook
These are your basic operating procedures, how your community rolls. Get it out there so people can read it and live it.
Internally that may mean to formalize processes like editorial guidelines, style guides or a social media policy for brand contributors. It could be your crisis response plan. Externally, that may mean making sure members know what to expect. How do they get in touch with ______ about ______? What happens when______? This becomes infinitely more complex when structured rewards programs are in place.
Remember that those who guide your community must be accessible if they're to be responsive and supportive. Institutionalize contact numbers, email addresses and social networks throughout your web site. BizSugar has a pretty good example on their FAQ page.
These two posts have covered several pieces of the community-centric pie. What pieces would you add?