Keep Your Community Focused
When building an online community, it can be easy to get excited about all of the cool and unique ways you can interact with your users.
Questions, reviews, introductions, general discussion, link sharing, event calendars, idea generation – the list goes on and on
all of these are great things – but only when used in moderation
This is a lesson I learned first hand managing Agile Commons.
When we launched the community in 2007, it had many different sub-areas: Community Blog, Greening Ideas, Conference Reports, Project Management Discussions, Book Reviews, Favorite Quotes – you name it, we had it.
What resulted was long periods of inactivity in many of the sub-areas. Even though we were seeing a strong uptake in our keys sections, the inactive sub-areas gave off the appearance that the community was being underutilized.
I led a redesign in early 2009 to combat this, and one of the first orders of business was to combine posts from 8 different discussion areas into one “general discussion” zone. This made it much easier for users to find new discussions, as they now only had to keep up with one area.
The community appeared more vibrant and the lurkers who were previously tentative to put effort into a post, now felt more confident that their potential contributions would be engaged by the community.
This resulted in a significant increase in the amount of new posts we were seeing from our users.
So in my experience – having Less options creates More activity.
Ed Sauer
January 19, 2010 at 9:10 am
Great post, Mike. A very true, very astute point you make — give people less doors to enter, and oddly enough more people are more likely to enter.