Growing Successful Communities

[#1]

Greetings !

I just wanted to stop in and greet everyone real quick. I am a new user of Lithium and can hardly contain the excitement of utilizing this program. I see big things in the future. Any other newbie's out there with some quick pointers for me?

Many thanks and posts to come

John

[#2]

Welcome to the Lithosphere and to Lithium!

[#3]

Welcome aboard, Johnny!

Plenty of new and seasoned folks here for conversations. 

[#4]

Welcome John  - glad to meet you!

Feel free to contact me if you have questions, or post in the Feedback board if there is anything you've seen that we could improve on!

[#5]

Hello. I too am new here. We just launched our first blog within Lithium, soon will have a few forums under our belts.

I have a ton of questions as I continue to become more familiar with the application. I'm hopin to use Lithosphere to connect with experts on how to best manage the community and make it a success.

e

[#6]

Welcome emk!

[#7]

Couple quick things that I wish I knew when I started in this job....

(1) Carefully name your forum boards....what do you want their focus to be? Your company's products & services?  Or the problems that they're helping solve for your customers?  This should map to your Community's strategy and will impact what type of people come to your Community, the kinds of questions they post, etc.

(2) Don't worry about objectors. Focus on activists.  I like to joke around with the objectors that there's an adoption curve and if they want to fall at the end, that's okay....but they will just want to get on board before the train leaves town.  Then casually throw in the "look at the people who resisted email when it was first introduced" reference.  hehe.

(3) Start with fewer boards and don't give into every request for a "new board for X topic".  If people want a forum board for their topic, look for two things...first, that there's some member interest in this topic (ideally, in the form of active discussions already taking place within your community) and secondly, encourage them to get out in the community for a month or two and see what they think.  I'm amazed at how many people agree to do something and then never show up.  Past performance is the best indicator of future performance, so vet them before you add a new board, create a new role, etc.

(4) You'll get a lot farther internally (or at least I did) if you talk about business objectives and how the community maps to and can further those objectives...instead of talking about the community as a goal in and of itself. 

That's it for now.

Stepping down of my community soapbox...

[#8]

Very good points Roxy. Thank you.

Since we are still in our 'staging' period, all of these apply to us.

Especially number 4. It's hard to convey what we as a community believe in and our goals when those sometimes clash with the 'company' goals.Those goals should more often be seemless and flow together,

living in harmony

But, the company IS the business and most communities I see relate back to the $$ pretty easily.

John

[#9]

I would say that it's a good idea definitely not to focus on the detractors, if you have any.

Also, I'd suggest trying to get advertisement on the frontmost pages of your website and also to look into ways to get out into social media as well, like Facebook, Twitter, etc.  More publicity for the forum is what you want, b/c it's hard to sustain enthusiasm with 2 people on the forum.

[#10]

Rho...Totally agree.  Publicity is a good thing