Growing Successful Communities

[#1]

Well,

we are over 30 days into full launch. Activity is ok. Not great but ok.

We've carried over our old msg boards and have a good post rate by our 'forefathers' but getting new attention and participation from newbies has been slower than hoped.

Polls:

 We've had several polls on the main page with very little hits. I had thought this would get much more attention than it did. Do members not like polls? Do they just not see them? Have any of you had a successful poll that really had high levels of participation?

Incintives:

We just started to offer points to members that post testomonials on one of our boards and it seems to be working fairly well. I'm curious about retention with this. Can we get users active by incintives at first and then assume that the participation keeps rolling? Would this be a 'spurt' only generated by the current incintive?

Any comments/ideas/stories/tales of woe/........all would be welcomed.

Many thanks

[#2]

Hi Johnny

Thanks for the question. Incentivizing users is tough. The best incentive is of course personal motivation, not fiduciary reward, but some kind of little shove in the right direction can always help.

I think I wrote up some notes on this in a previous post, and will dig that out for you, but to start things off I have seen community managers use the incentive carrot to start the initial interest in the superusers.

So examples could be:

• 'public recognition' - thanking the users for their posts/contributions and/or call out of the people who were promoted through the ranks in each month. Simply a page in the community, but that recognition means a lot to people. If you can do it in a video blog, all the better!
• monthly callout of superusers/top kudo'd users (maybe with some sort of small token gift, I have used community branded clothing to great effect in technical communities, as all the engineers want a 'Community Expert' branded polo or sweatshirt etc
• I have used the Microsoft example from Sean O'Driscoll before (founder of Ant's Eye View) who used to run the MVP program there. Each month they would send a personal thank you letter to the top participants, hand signed by Steve Ballmer, thanking them for their contribution - they found that that single act helped secure a 40% increase in that users participation in the following couple of months. Who says a thank you doesn't go a long way?!
• We have also run bios/mini profiles of superusers before, getting their photo and a bit about them in the community. We pull the candidates from the top users list - again, incentive if people are looking for personal recognition
• Of course there are always the little giveaways... big giveaways... etc

I think the main goal here is to create the culture that people want to participate, and they can clearly see the reward for that invested time and expertise.  Once other people see that activity level, they get drawn in too.

I hope that gives you some ideas. If anyone else has some, please pitch em in!

[#3]

Paul et al, I have some questions about what you've done here.  My forum just passed its 2 year birffday, and I'd say it's going pretty well, but there is definitely room for improvement and so I'm noodling how to implement some of these suggestions.

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PaulGi wrote:

So examples could be:

• 'public recognition' - thanking the users for their posts/contributions and/or call out of the people who were promoted through the ranks in each month. Simply a page in the community, but that recognition means a lot to people. If you can do it in a video blog, all the better!

Where would one do that?  My forum has a bunch of different boards, divided up by products, and the three most popular boards are product-focused.  I also have a "Welcome and News" board that displays at the top... should I make that kind of announcement there?  Float the important posts that tell people how to use various functions such as the kudos and Accepted Solutions and the search for Accepted Solutions, and then make the monthly "attaboy" posts there? 

• monthly callout of superusers/top kudo'd users (maybe with some sort of small token gift, I have used community branded clothing to great effect in technical communities, as all the engineers want a 'Community Expert' branded polo or sweatshirt etc

For our 2-year birffday celebration, we're sending our top users one of our products for free with our thanks.  I was going to do a drawing for all registered users, but our Lithium CSM and mod suggested we instead give these to top users.  Sounded like a good idea, so that's what we're doing.  Plus we won't have to run that thru Legal!

• I have used the Microsoft example from Sean O'Driscoll before (founder of Ant's Eye View) who used to run the MVP program there. Each month they would send a personal thank you letter to the top participants, hand signed by Steve Ballmer, thanking them for their contribution - they found that that single act helped secure a 40% increase in that users participation in the following couple of months. Who says a thank you doesn't go a long way?!

(googles Steve Ballmer)
Hmm, got the CEO to sign stuff, eh?  Yeah, that MVP program over at Micro$oft was big, big medicine, that's for sure.  But I guess if they could do it, even though my forum is quite a bit smaller, so's my company, so maybe my CEO will be more accessible that way.  I'll see about that.

• We have also run bios/mini profiles of superusers before, getting their photo and a bit about them in the community. We pull the candidates from the top users list - again, incentive if people are looking for personal recognition

Our superusers are still sort of new and not super super reliable... my instinct is that this is a little further in our future.

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[#4]

Hi Rho

Thanks for the Questions.

Yep you hit the nail on the head there, unless you have a specific what's going on in the community type area, the Welcome and News board is your ideal spot. We used to run all the community annoucements in there, floating the prominent ones, just like your suggestions on Kudos, policies, accepted solns etc etc When we got the blog platform, we actually switched over to using a community news/announcements blog. It just had a nicer feel to it. But either works fine.

I love rewarding the super contributors, so an anniversary giveaway sounds great.

If you're interested in running profiles but you think the users aren't right yet, you could start with some internal ones, I have seen Best Buy runs a board - meet the team type of thing with profiles/bios on each etc. or it could highlight some experts or bloggers etc. Or you could take the tack and interview some product managers etc.. There are plenty of options if you dig about a bit.

Hope that helps

PG