Blogger Devin Reams recently took a look at the top three lessons from online communities.
Devin is one of the founders of Yopos, a community for young entrepreneurs.
Devin highlights the three lessons in his detailed post:
Existing community must already be strong
When I say strong you need to have an extreme amount of quality or quantity. A little of each will not be sufficient.
Employee Evolution and 9rules attracted people because of the high quality–they both grew very quickly. On the other hand, yopos sought out to do the same and, I admit, consistent quality wasn’t there (and we didn’t have the numbers either).
People always talk about meeting up, rarely do
It must be how we are hard-wired as humans, but no matter what your group is–people will want to meet in person. People will try to organize and coordinate these events but they rarely happen. Even in college, where we met as a group every week, it was challenging to have people commit to anything outside of something we’ve already structured for them.
There are key participants, focus on them
No matter where you go, one will notice the “key” players. Especially in a discussion environment like a forum. Within five minutes of surfing FlyerTalk it was clear who knew what they were talking about and was respected by the group. When I started yopos there were a few guys who were very eager and I didn’t have them time to focus on them and empower them to help with the community. Lesson learned.
Author: Matt Craven
Matt Craven is the former editor & publisher of The Blog Herald.
Currently, Matt is the co-founder of Bryghtpath LLC, a consulting practice located in Woodbury, Minnesota.
Matt’s presently looking for new blogging gigs. Ping him at matt (at) bryghtpath dot com.
You can follow him on Twitter.
Thanks for the write-up, Matt. From these lessons I’ve been able to help a few new communities and I plan on re-launching yopos. :)
PS: There may be an HTML goof-up in the first sentence.
Ahh crap! Fixed.
I must drink more coffee before blogging.
Been a long time reader of your blog – hit me up when you relaunch Yopos, we’ll chat more ;)
m
Hah nice. Would you mind shooting me an e-mail with contact details? I hope to have something in the next week. :)
Good article, and a lot to think about. My problem seems to be finding specific online communities to my niche or topic. Most of the communities now, all want to be an all in one, (at least the strong ones) instread of one dedicated to something like… Student Education and Financing. Also, specific listings and details of the communities that are easy to find would be nice.
I think ning has helped facilitate many niche communities, have you looked into that yet?