When you are first getting started, it can be daunting when you open the doors to your community and the flood fails to arrive. Sometimes communities, for one reason or another, start with a trickle rather than a flood. To build that trickle over time, you may need to pitch in and help out in during a lull in the flow.

I've talked a bit in the past about the importance of seeding activity as opposed to seeding content. The main point is that members don't engage with communities because of the great content that is there, they engage because of the great people that are there - which is why we have a measure of Liveliness as one of the key factors in our Community Health Index. Quite a few may arrive because a search engine has directed them to a solution to a particular problem - but if the answer they need isn't already there, why will they post questions? Because they see evidence of other members who can and will answer - they see activity.

Promotion is still the number one way to drive traffic and members, but sometimes you need a little more to get folks posting in the beginning. So here are some strategies we've picked up on how to build that activity, broken down by two key components: Content and Frequency.

Content

You know your content best, and who your audience is and what they are interested in. But some approaches can work better than others. One good way to deliver content that promotes engagement and participation instead of just consumption is to involve the community members with each other - in other words, don't tell your audience about you, tell them about them!

Some types of content that works well, in order of general effectiveness:

• Posts by other users or users' peers (don't forget direct outreach to known users!)
• Quotes by users or interviews of users' peers
• Stories from or about other users
• Issues reported by users (and the resolutions that were provided)
• Statistics or information about users
• Stories about yourself, as a peer (if you happen to share the same interests/experiences)

Also, do not forget to respond to posts by users! A quick reply with a positive acknowledgement can go a long way to bringing the user back to post again. If your goal is support, though, be wary of answering questions in the community too quickly. An authoritative answer to users' questions can have the unintended effect of stifling conversation rather than encouraging it. In these situations it is good to have separate groups acknowledging new posts (Welcoming Team) and answering questions (Support Team). The Support Team should then refrain from responding for 12-24 hours to allow users the opportunity to answer the questions themselves, and only step in when users are really stuck.

And lastly, a reminder to be transparent and not to pretend to be someone you are not. You will almost always be found out if  you do, and if you use the methods above there really isn't any need. Ultimately, the risks just aren't worth it.

Frequency

When seeding content, what is important is frequency over time. 10 topics posted on one day or in one post are less effective that 10 topics posted across 5 days in 10 posts. The goal is to try to balance your need for content in each discussion board you have with the need for the content to appear fresh when users visit. Larger posts should be segmented into multiple smaller posts, and seeding activities should be spread out over multiple days. The ultimate goal is to ensure that each discussion board has 5-10 posts per day on average (including user posts). Build yourself a reservoir of posts you can use to fill in the gaps when user participation is lower than desired. Over time, as user participation builds you should be able to phase out this activity.

Of course, the fewer boards you have to fill, the easier it is to keep them appearing active! So remember to start with a small structure, but one that appeals to the widest audience.

Like so much about community success, keeping a community active is about planning and preparedness. Make sure you are ready to help out when activity is slow!

Photo by tillwe

We talk a lot here about the importance of finding and engaging your super users to drive community success. But it's always nice to see it in action on one of customer's communities - like our friends at Verizon, who just today issued a press release about the success of their Lithium powered online Verizon Community Forum in enhancing their overall customer experience, as well as providing an excellent resource to help Verizon improve their product offerings. From the release:

"According to Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon, the Community Forums have been well-received since rolling out last July, generating more than 10 million page views.

'The Community Forums have spurred interaction among customers because people today expect to be able to find answers to their technical questions online,' said Studness. 'The feedback we've already received shows that our customers value the personalized peer-to-peer advice and feedback they receive from fellow users.'”

Aside from Mr. Studness' super cool name, 10 million pageviews for a new community in 8 months and growing is an excellent metric. And if you read the full release (also up on the Lithium site), there was an excellent profile of one of their community's super users, Justin and what keeps him coming back. But I thought I'd take it a one step further on this blog to see what kind of content people are getting with all those pageviews:

• 19127 posts in the community since it's launch. That's about 80 posts a day for 8 months of consistent posting - in fact, today's rates of content generation are probably much higher as the community has grown.
• 1309 posts were from the top two members on the Kudos leaderboard for the community, Justin (522 posts, named in the press release) and TimSykes (787 posts) combined for an amazing 7% of the total posts in the community. It's even more amazing when you realize that TimSykes didn't even register until October.
• 318 posts marked as accepted solutions. This is one of my favorite numbers, a clear indication of value of the content being created on the community, and also a conservative metric because accepted solution rates are typically an order of magnitude lower than the number of answered questions in the community.

By finding and engaging those all-important super-users, Verizon's community is flourishing. Which helps to explain why Verizon is seeing significant operational efficiency and cost savings as a result of deflected calls and a growing knowledge base of peer content.

Do you have a super user story you'd like to share? Let me know!

photo by inju

The atmosphere or tone of your community is hard to measure. But achieving a positive tone is critically important to your community success. Like a massive black hole you can't see it directly, but a negative tone warps everything around it and pulls it down. That's why community management and moderation are so important: effective community leadership in your terms and guidelines, the welcome messages and content you create, and in every interaction online with your members influences the overall mood of your community. Each is an opportunity for you to positively engage your members to elevate your community tone.

Don't let negativity sap the energy and light from your community:

Be transparent: Establish guidelines for member behavior and cite them when taking action.

Be positive: Don't rise to the bait when a member is frustrated, and be twice as nice online as you are in person.
Be respectful: Warn your members politely and in private, not in public. There's no need to embarrass anyone.

Be consistent: Document the actions you take with members (and be sure to read the notes of others).

What are you doing to keep your community a warm and sunny place?

photo by Dana Berry of SkyWorks Digital (found posted on flickr by thebadastronomer)

It seems like a chicken and egg problem: you need more members to generate more activity, but you need more activity to attract more members. How do you get past this hurdle? If you are promoting the community well a steady influx of new members will help, but its not enough; you need to keep these folks coming back for more. A good reputation system can give members visual evidence that their efforts are appreciated and get them more and more involved in your community's success.

And as communities mature reputation becomes more important, not less. With a lot of activity going on new members want to see that their voice matters, and existing members want to continue to be appreciated for contributing. No one should ever be stuck in a rank with no hope of getting out, no matter what level they are at; keep them moving in their path as long as they are still participating. That's why you need to continually reward members both for their volume of participation as well as the different ways they contribute. Keep them involved and coming back.

Reputation is only one part of how you recognize members, but it is the most persistent and visible in the community. So it makes sense to spend time developing and fine tuning your reputation system to get it right.

How are you encouraging new and existing members to become progressively more involved in your community? Or are your members stuck in a dead-end rank?

Photo by woodleywonderworks

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of interviewing Laura, (Laura on the Future Shop Community and LauraB on the Lithosphere) who is the Social Community Specialist at Future Shop and the community manager of the Future Shop Community.

Future Shop has held a number of successful live events with their customers, which they extended into their online community for further dialog and discussion. And despite the hectic holiday retail season, Laura was kind enough to take a quick break from her busy schedule to answer a few questions about events for us here:

Scott: Hi again, Laura, thanks once more for your time today. Before we dive into events, could you tell us a bit about how you started with online communities and social media?

Laura: I've been with Future Shop managing the Community for just over a year now.  I got involved with online communities while in University - my school was the first to launch an Online Learning Community for its co-op program.  I became involved first as a regular member, then took on a more active role in member engagement, promotions and writing while working for the department.

Scott: I've seen some live chats you held on the Future Shop community in the past, like the recent Discussion on the Future of Computing. Can you tell us a little bit about how these events came about?

Laura: The first Live Chat was held in 2007 as part of the Community launch.  Since then, we've had a few more, with the most recent being the Discussion on the Future of Computing. We wanted to do a Community event around the Back to School season that would help our members and customers better understand the technology that we sell.   Our community motto is "Connect. Share. Learn.", so bringing experts into our Community to do just that made perfect sense.  We actually ran two events on this topic - one in English and one in French (we're a Canadian company and have two separate communities for each of our official languages).  Being that we are Future Shop, it made sense to hold a chat around what sort of technologies will be coming out from some of the industry's leading computer companies.  We had reps from Microsoft, HP and D-Link, a discussion panel moderator, a video crew, a whole team of Product Experts and ConnectPro support descend upon the Toronto and Montreal stores to make these events happen.  I stayed back in Vancouver and managed to set up of the online portion while everyone else made sure that the stage and location of the video was all set.

Scott: How did moderating a live event differ from how you moderate the rest of your community? Did you need to bring on any more resources to make it happen?

Laura: We sure did.  Hosting a video live chat event of this size takes weeks of planning and a whole team of people to pull it off.  In terms of moderation, we had the regular "official" coverage from our moderator team to manage the regular boards, plus we selected several Home Office Product Experts from the stores we were filming in and trained them as moderators on the live chat tool.  These PEs were responsible for screening and answering questions submitted by the online audience and filtering up some good discussion topics to the panel.  The discussion panel was able to address several questions submitted by the Community, while the Product Experts were able to provide advice and insight for all the others.

Scott: How did you determine if the event was successful? Were there both business benefits and benefits to your community?

Laura: The immediate benefits would be that it generates a buzz amongst Community Members.  It also attracts a whole new set of members who join because they hear about the event, then find out about the Community.  We're able to offer our Community access to a group of people (in this case industry experts) who they would otherwise never be able to interact with.   Long term, it's not necessarily tied to the number of computers we sold on the day of the event because someone watched this video.  These sorts of events create a connection between our customers and Future Shop.  The same with the Community, it's no longer just a static ad that they see, but they are able to interact with us and ask questions.

Scott: I also noticed you are running a board on the site for questions during the holidays, the Holiday Help Centre. How does this kind of event differ from the live chat? How is it the same?

Laura: These are two very different things.  The live chat is a one-time live event that requires a great deal of planning to pull off as it is "live" and leverages the live chat tool and a whole team of event organizers.  The Holiday Help Centre came about based on our learnings from last year's holiday season.  It's not so much an "event", but a resource that will live there temporarily.  We saw a huge spike in registration and participation during the holidays last year as thousands of people signed up to get advice on what gifts to buy, what the holiday return policies were, what time we opened for Boxing Day, etc.  These questions were scattered throughout the Community and mostly landed on the Off Topic board - but they weren't Off Topic questions, there was just no place to put them!  So this year I created a board and an FAQ based on some of the questions we received last year in the community.  It's just a better way to manage the type of questions that are coming in at this time of year.   It gives people a place to go to talk about what is most important to them.

Scott: Do you have any advice for other community managers who may be planning an event of their own?

Laura: Get feedback from your community before, during and after!  I always try to include them in every important decision to make sure that there aren't any surprises along the way.  Make sure to have a clear objective - be able to clearly communicate the goal of the event and how it will contribute to making your community a better place for your members.   And make sure you are promoting the event!

Scott: What topics would you like to hear about from others in the community?

Laura: I'm always interested to hear what others are doing around rewards and recognition and superuser engagement.

Scott: Thanks so much Laura!

Feel free to post your questions here in the comments, or if you have any ideas for other interview topics you'd like to see. Or feel free to post your questions in the forums to see what your peers have to say about events!

Microphone photo by hiddedevries

I posed a question the other day on the Lithosphere asking how many ranks communities are starting with and how many they have now. Take a look at the post if you want to see what people are saying, but the responses started me thinking about what kinds of impacts the different ranks you create have. As a member you can often choose your moniker, but there's something different about a name that is bestowed upon you by others. What turns a rank you hold into more than just a name, to becoming a measure of status and recognition of the value you contribute? And as a community manager, how do you tap into that process?

It's an vital question, because it lies at the heart of those things we try to foster in our communities: increased activity, appropriate behavior, a positive tone. As a community manager, how do you craft a system of ranks that fosters the behavior you want and that members will embrace?

I'll post my own thoughts in the comments, but what do you think? What ranks, titles and names are you known by in different settings? Which ones are you proud of?