Making the Right Choices for Your Association Online Community

There are a lot of resources out there for starting and building successful online communities.  There are books and courses that will give you a solid foundation to start with, telling you that you need everything from executive presence to robust staff advocacy. It can be a lot to digest and those things are all important, but does it really have a place in your online community? Maybe, maybe not.When starting and building your online community, it’s important you keep in mind the purpose your community is serving, how it fits in the association’s overall strategy, and how it’s going to be used. I can tell you from experience that everything you read in books, online, or hear as part of a conference will not be a fit for your community. If you have to force it to make sense, it probably doesn’t make sense. Fundamentally, the work that you do to manage the community will not look much different from any other community. However, let’s look at a few times where it will.Executive and Staff PresenceWhen I first started out in online community management, we created strategies for internal engagement and external engagement. We tried to answer the question of how we get internal staff to participate in the community AND create the value our community members needed. So, there were two separate pieces to our overall community strategy (which made for a pretty long document). We did a lot of research on what internal participation should look like, why it was important for the C-suite to be involved in the community and spent a lot of time trying to convince people that they needed to have a presence there.After a year and a half of spinning our wheels and not getting any traction in this area, we took a step back and said “wait, let’s dig into why we are trying to get our executives and staff in the community.” Once we really thought about it, there wasn’t a real reason to have them there. Our community members didn’t seem to need it and we couldn’t really justify (based on our use case), why they needed to be there. But, what about all the research and information we read that stated that it was necessary? What about the data we gathered that said it was imperative to the success of your online community? When we took a good, hard look at who our community was meant to serve and why it existed, it was clear that it was not necessary for senior leadership or staff to be as involved in the community as we wanted them to be unless there was a need.Armed with that information, we spent less time trying to convince people internally why they needed to be active within the community and spent more time educating staff on the power of community and what it could help the organization accomplish to foster a clear understanding of how they could tap into the expertise that lived there. If there’s clarification that is needed on a topic that requires a level of knowledge that exceeds what community staff has, we reach out to our internal partners to weigh in and help clear up confusion. So before you march into your CEO’s office full steam ahead, armed with the research you’ve read about executive engagement, figure out if it’s really necessary for your community. If it is, make sure you have the data based off of your specific community use case and the strategic direction of the association that will justify his/her time.Building a Social PresenceOne of the first things we did when we launched our new community model was create a social presence. We have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, Google+ (at the time, it made sense), Instagram, and a LinkedIn page. We called attention to our content, community events, and the discussions that were taking place among community members to generate engagement. At the time, we thought it made sense. What we didn’t take into consideration was that the association had its own social channels that were vibrant, highly engaging, and that were growing by the day with a dedicated social media team to run it. Instead of tapping into what was already there, we created our own channels.We now realize that our community doesn’t need separate social channels. Most of our site traffic comes from organic search and much of what we put out on our community social channels gets shared on the association’s social channels, which has a greater reach and much more engagement. It’s time we leave social media management to the experts and integrate community into the overall association social strategy and calendar.We also realized that having a separate social channel for the community doesn’t help with creating awareness around who we are. For context, our existing community was acquired and then relaunched in 2015 as our association’s new online community. With that, we kept the separate URL and site so, at first glance, it feels like two separate entities. Having two separate social channels that serve the same organization makes it look…well…weird. It perpetuates the illusion that the community is not a part of the overall association and is noise in the channel. If we’re going to effectively communicate that we are the online community for the association, we must remove the walls that separate us.If your association has a social media team and a strong social presence, as a community manager you should work with that team to integrate your content and information into the overall social media strategy. Again, based on your use case, it may make sense to have a separate social channel, but that won’t always be the case. Assess and then use data to determine how that should go.Create ALL the ContentAs you’ve read in one of my previous posts, I’m a strong believer that community should have content, but it should not drive content. And the having of content doesn’t need to include a bunch of white papers and case studies. My belief is that your association should be driving that sort of content.Currently, our community is content heavy. We have a ton of user generated articles, white papers, templates, and webinars, all of which is good stuff and extremely valuable. All of which takes a lot of oversight and coordination on the part of the community team which takes them away from building participation and fostering engagement within the online community.Community content should be focused on how members engage there and then help connect them back to the content your association is putting out (thought leadership content, case studies, articles from publications, etc.). Community managers should be focused on content that connects members. Host a call where a member covers a case study about how they overcame a problem within their organization. If your discussion forums are a little quiet, post a question that will get your members talking to and helping one another. Enable blog capabilities (or the ability to request to blog) to your members so they can share their own content. Do not recreate the wheel when your association is already pushing out content that your community may be duplicating. Again, it creates unnecessary noise across the association and blurs the lines between where the content strategy lives and how the rest of the association should be aligning to it. That is not to say that your community should not have a content strategy, but that strategy should not take community staff away from managing the community.No community approach is one size fits all. There are tactics and strategies that will be a perfect fit for your use case and there are others that have no place in your online community. Make sure that you are being mindful about your approach to community management and letting data drive your decision about how you move forward. It may not be the most exciting approach to how you manage your community, but if it doesn’t make sense you will spend a lot of time course correcting.Have you tried approaches in your online community that didn’t work out so well? What were they and how did you realize you needed to change?