Keeping a community alive and growing it

     I saved the hardest part for last. In that old Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams, the tagline/hook of the movie was a ghostly voice in the cornfields saying, "If you build it, they will come." Nothing is farther from the truth.

     People's attention spans are frayed to their very edges. Work stresses are equally ramped up. The "shiny new thing" quotient on the web is at its highest right now. So the odds of making a full, fat, rich robust community that swells into the hundreds of thousands overnight is fairly slim. For every "overnight" success like Club Penguin for kids or Facebook for everyone else, there are tons of digital ghost towns out there. I'm not about to say that I know what the secret ingredient is, because if I did, I'd make my own network, and get Microsoft and Google to bid me up to the billions and retire to Newfoundland.

     Here, instead, are some thoughts.

• Communities that have "something to do" do better. Want an example? Amazon. You can go there and review books, write comments, build wikis, and do a million other things around products you love. Another? Flickr. Go there and look at other people's photos, join groups, tag and comment and make notes. Facebook? You could get lost in all the time wasting applications, or get deeply involved in all the groups there. Make sure there's something to do.
• Go outside the borders often. New communities grow by gently encouraging new immigrants. For example, if you're active on Twitter, you can occasionally point to posts on your new community. Not always. That gets boring quick. You can comment on other blogs that are similar to your group's intent, and where you populate your URL (in most blogs, you enter your name, email, and URL). Folks click on the URL of comments that seem interesting. (Don't spam!)
• Encourage more than you stifle. You want to see a community turn on their keepers? When sites go astray of their community-minded goals, bad things happen. Look at what happened when social news site Digg changed their algorithm a bit. It wasn't pretty. So be wary of how you interact with the community.
• Make it worth it for the community. If you're going to build a place for people to collaborate and share ideas and build content, be on the lookout for ways to give something to your community for their efforts.
• Administrators are not community managers. Community managers exist out there who know all the great ways to engage people. Connie Bensen, Jake McKee, Jeremiah Owyang, and a host of other great people are community types to their very bones. They know how to energize a community. Seek out a community manager to run the environment, and make it their primary role. This is worth TONS in the long run.

    Source: Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points (Chris Brogan) e-book