Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Community Design: The Four Principles of Community Management

BY
Patrick Duparcq

Kellogg School of Management – Northwestern University

The success of a community is ultimately determined by the members of that community
(“That conference was great! Such interesting people!”). But even the most interesting group of community members will not derive sufficient value from community membership unless that community is management carefully, i.e. there are some formal rules established. These rules relate to the organization of the community and assure that community members can easily communicate with each other. Those principles define the Four Principles of Community Management: Purpose, Participants, Platforms, and Policing (Figure 1).



Both the reasons of existence of a community and the expected number of members of a
community determine what platforms should be used. A community of quantum physics
scientists is much more likely to interact on a bulletin board community than in a chat room. On the other hand, a community of fans watching a baseball or football game is much more likely to use a chat room, because of the immediacy of interaction and importance of a simultaneity with the game. Policing the community interaction will make sure that participants find in the community what brought them there in the first place: discussion on theoretical physics, not sports talk, on the quantum physics bulletin board, and sports talk, not cooking recipes, in the football game chat room. The importance of policing, in itself, may become a consideration in choosing a platform. An asynchronous community platform like a bulletin board is easy to police, while a real time platform like a chat room is a lot more difficult to control.

Purpose and Value Proposition
Appropriately, the first and foremost principle relates to a clearly defined objective or purpose. Unless a community has a clearly stated value proposition, community members will be disappointed and consider participation in that community a waste of time. Customers go to eBay (a transaction oriented community) to buy and sell, not to hold conversation; but members of the Edmunds.com forums mostly participate to exchange information and experiences, not to buy and sell. Because companies try to achieve different objectives with different website visitors, it is highly unlikely that they would be able to accomplish the task with just one community (e.g., one single bulletin board). As a matter of fact, the community activity doesn’t even have to reside on the company’s website itself. Creating awareness for a brand may work much better through participation on a 3rd party website, rather than on the (yet less familiar) company website. Some of the more common community types by objective are: exploration and discovery (creating awareness about a product), experience, learning and trying (more focused peer-driven learning), transaction based communities (buying and selling), and relationship based communities (increasing the value in use of a product through peer produced services).

Participants of the community: Identity, Trust, Reputation, History and Segmentation
Successful communities require that members of that community relate to each other,
find “soul mates” or kindred spirits, and can trust each other. For a community
organizer it means that the community should not be organized too coarsely in order
to keep the signal/noise ratio high enough. The ultimate coarse community would
have everyone in the world participate and talk about a wide variety of issues, which
would make it very uninteresting for participants with a particular interest. On the
other hand, communities that are defined too narrowly will have too limited a number
of participants, and will therefore be too difficult to sustain. Members in a community should be able to relate to a critical mass of likeminded other participants in that community. In other words, communities need to be properly segmented into groups of similar interest. Indeed, this issue of coarseness will be noted in our model of community growth pattern.

Communities that allow participants to assess the quality or reputation of other
members become more valuable. Alumni lists in business schools perform such a
function in that community. Online communities can produce reputation metrics in a
number of ways. For example, eBay signals reputation of sellers to its members by
using both reputation measurements and history of sellers. It also signals the
reputations of buyers.

Platform for Communication (Delivery Mechanisms)
The mechanisms used to create a community will be largely dependent on the
purpose and the kind of participants of that community. Chat rooms will provide a
community member with instant real time interaction but limit the number of peer
customers one has access to (they have to be online at the same time) and are less
appropriate to convey large amounts of information. Collaborative filtering will
provide access to the largest amount of peer customers, but with very limited
information. Frequently used online community platforms are: chat rooms, bulletin
boards, e-mail lists, and collaborative filtering (also called a “virtual community”)

Policing: Governance and Control

Communities need to have rules of interaction and a way to enforce those rules or
soon the level of discourse would turn into a noisy blur.Unmoderated bulletin boards
often have so many off-topic discussions going on (or worse, advertising) that soon
the value and participation rate goes down. At the same time, the need for a focused
and somewhat civilized interaction should be counter balanced with the requirements
to have an open and unbiased forum. That is especially important for brand and
product based communities where customers are expecting unbiased peer
information. If systematically all critical postings are removed, the very reason for
participating in the community will soon disappear.

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