Getting to know you: managing virtual communities

Executive summary
Bringing "community" to your web site means involving visitors in an increasingly rich and personal way with your company. Visitors are not just reading more – and more attentively – they are staying longer, shaping the content and the experience of the site for other visitors.

Any site can benefit by adding community elements such as chat and discussion areas. But once the mechanics of a community are set up, it cannot run itself without management.

Community management services to fit the needs of your site might involve:

» developing the community spirit

» facilitating chat and discussion input

» helping members with problems

» establishing rules

» implementing a volunteer hosting program, including guidelines.

Community spirit
Effective community management can help develop a community spirit around the central theme of your site. Members will not just log in for a bit of information and leave again; they will linger longer, as they will have good reasons to stay.

Community management will help your site become like an old-time "general store" – where people did not just rush in for one item and out again. There were plenty of reasons to stay – they might chat with friends or the proprietor, check the notice board, even collect their post. And when they left, they did not just bring home the milk, but also a warm feeling from an extended experience; a sense of being in touch with – and a part of – their community.

Chat and discussion
Community management should be personal, not detached. Community managers who participate in the chat (and perform some of the same tasks as volunteer hosts – see below) help relationships develop among members, and also between members and the management.

Community management tasks can also include structuring, seeding and monitoring your discussion boards. Open-ended topics can be created that keep to the theme of your site, and are also timely and thought-provoking. User information extracted from these discussion topics can even be useful from a marketing perspective.

Lively discussion topics can also:

» lead to member-generated content for elsewhere on the site, for example a feature story on your home page

» bring people back to the site to see if anyone has responded to their postings

» provide useful feedback, which can help bring improvements to your site

» help the site owners get to know their members better and consequently their needs

» help the members get to know each other better by voicing their comments and opinions

Helping members
An important part of any community management solution is being available to help your members if they are having any technical problems, for example they can’t recall their password, or if they're involved in a dispute with another member. The latter situations do arise, as they do in real life, and part of managing your community is to work with those members to resolve conflicts that might have a negative impact on the community as a whole.

The above assistance might take the form of email, discussion postings, or even occur within a live chat session.

Establish rules
All communities need rules; this is no different in a virtual community. Managing a community properly requires the development of rules that are:

» fair

» easy to understand

» appropriate for the theme and audience of your site

Once rules are in place, effective community management requires a system for monitoring the site to ensure that your rules are followed. Volunteer hosting is such a system.

Volunteer hosting
A volunteer hosting program enables members to monitor themselves. As well as relieving site management of some of their tasks, this also helps instill within members a sense of ownership. Toward this end, Púca will work with you to:

» establish a volunteer hosting system

» help you select appropriate volunteers

» write guidelines for volunteer hosts.

The responsibilities of volunteer hosts might be to:

» welcome members as they enter the chat area

» encourage a friendly atmosphere and help develop bonds among members

» initiate conversations that are meaningful, fun, informative (whatever the tone/theme of your site)

» encourage quiet or new members to participate

» assist with user queries online as they arise, for example how to "whisper" to someone

» ensure that the rules are adhered to, and warn/report rule-breakers as appropriate.

Members, not users
With proper community management, the visitors to your site will:

» feel like "members", not just "users"

» want to stay longer and return more often

» feel respected

» experience a feeling of personal connection.

In short, your members will feel "at home".