KonzeptioNerd

Community Summit Revisited

Communities are IT. Everybody wants one. Everybody’s starting one.

Community-hype and hyper-communities

The trend is already expanding and people are starting to launch meta communities. Meta communities are frameworks that give users the means to start their own branded (or at least semi-branded) niche communities, allowing providers to cache in on the long tail without having to proved fringe group ideas and community managers themselves. There were a bunch of them at Community Summit: T-Com’s Wir, the more lifestyle-y 7just7 or the sports-oriented Mannschaftskabine. (Second Life, by the way, is not a community, not even a meta community, it’s a metaverse, so that’s a whole nother story.)

New and improved

And, ok, we’ve tried this before, 6,7,8 years ago, and the attempts more or less burst with the bubble. But this time we promise: it’s different (even if new media consultants are slipping Hagel and Armstrong’s 1997 Net Gain - Amazon: Net Gain, Engl. ed.: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities - under their pillows again.)

This time around, communities will work. When Howard Rheingold talked about “Finding Connection in a Comupterized World” in 1991 (Amazon-link to the 2000-edition of The Virtual Community: The Virtual Community. Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier), he was looking a people with increased geek-affinities or specialized needs who lived in a place with low telecommunication fees. Ten years later, his observations still didn’t scale. Today, 50+ % of inhabitants of industrialized countries have broadband connections (which usually implies at flat fee to boot). And with half a dozen more years of computer literacy under theis belts than the first time around, they appear ready and eager to benefit from Metcalfe’s law (see Wikipedia-entry on the Law of Metcalfe). We’ve got critical mass.

Success

Critical mass is a concept one hears mentioned again and again around community makers. In this sociodynamic context, the term refers to the number of people who have to adopt a meme for it to take off and spread by itself without further help from the clever people in marketing.

Depending on your target group (or target niche), however, critical mass might be either a negligible number or a negligible concept. For example, Systemhelden.com caters to the rather specialized system administrator community. Through Systemhelden, Sun Microsystems Germany reaches about 300 unsung heroes of the server room and has generated around 3.000 Klicks for their Try&Buy scheme.

Another example, Silver Surfer community Feierabend.de has only just reached its critical mass of 100.000 members. Feierabend.de has been around for 8 years. It certainly takes a long wind to be able to wait 8 years for one’s business plan to come to fruitition. It looks like a successful online community or social network is not necessarily and exclusively one that’s firmly in the profit zone.

Put bluntly, a successful community is one that meets its goals. Such goals can be varied and quite independent of measurable ROI. Making the headlines may be one. (Similarly, leading German online agencies recommend engagement in Second Life primarily as a PR stunt.)

Plans are there for God to laugh about

So, how does one create a successful online community (beyond setting realistic goals)?. The success stories presented at Community Summit seem to imply that the best advice is not to plan a successful community or not to try to base your success on the community aspects of your service.

A Better Tomorrow is a site for designers of streetwear and the people who love their t-shirts with a state-of-the-art print. ABT had been conceived as a crowdsourcing and social shopping site for a clearly defined group and it’s only now growing into a social networking site as users and members start to request such features be added.

Peter Herzog’s Spotlight is a self-help site for computer users. It started about 10 years ago as a forum and has not grown into a social network. The provider (and, I assume, the users, too) still considers the service a community. And why not, after all, there is a strong core of members who take pride in rushing to the aid of anyone who arrives with a computer- (or sometimes, life-) related question. For this group, it appears that change is difficult to stomach and the newfangledness of the web 2.0 superfluous. Herzog has a thriving site that pays the ways of himself and a handful of community (or forum) managers and he feels well advised to design and work for his users (even if the end results looks like it’s 1999).

Both above examples have grown from a strong thematic and service focus. T-Com took a different approach last year when they launched the T-Community (btw. anyone know why they didn’t reserve the DE-Domain as well?) - yet another social network. The project tanked pretty quickly - the market for all-purpose general-audiences social-network-only-communities appears to be about saturated. Meanwhile, T-Com have redefined the platform into a framework from which they have so far spun a thematic community (Fussball.de) and a meta-community (wir.de, see above).

Factors of Success

Without further research, I guess we can pinpoint two major factors of success for online communities:

Thematic Grounding

Give your users something to do! A community is a group of people with something in common. This something needs to be actively present on your site, variable and extendable to assure a sustainable cadence of usage occasions. Such a usage occasion may be social networking (I have written below on Why XING works). But how many social networks can you possible use? However, social networking features can well serve to cultivate and process a theme- or activity-based community and ad a self-sustaining factor.

Community Management

The other important factor of success has featured prominently in a number of presentations. 21TORR and Metropolis held a joint presentation on the benefits of extensive community management, Peter Herzog of Spotlight spoke for it, and both Habbo Hotel and A Better Tomorrow are example of how intensive and innovation-happy community management directly contributes to the success of the service. Starting a community is clearly not a fire-and-forget campaign.

I tried to find out exactly how much community management one needs for best results (on a cm per member basis), but answers were inconclusive at best (or evasive even): “not too many”, they said, and something about outsourcing, students and 400 Euro-jobs. But why not imagine online communities two or three years from now with community managers who are popular icons the way TV hosts are today.

Leave a Reply