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Building Online Communities

Amy Jo Kim outlines her strategies for building successful online communities.

Amy Jo Kim: Building an Online Community

Kiran Chahal reports on an NMK evening seminar in May 2001.

In today’s world of business listening to the consumers is key to success. Giving a platform for interaction, where reactions to new products and services are gauged, is essential. By being able to forge relationships with customers, users and game players a company is able to improve its services in a cheaper and efficient way. Online communities are an excellent communication forum that can allow this dialogue to take place.

Amy Jo Kim, renowned online community expert, discussed the strategies needed to implement a successful online community. Amy began by doing away with the common myths associated with online communities. The first commonly held misconception was that the virtual community was very different from the physical. Amy believed that the basic social dynamics remained the same, the main difference arose from the fact that relationships form much more quickly on the net. The second myth was based on technology and that hot graphics were the way forward. But as most of us know, simpler technology is normally quicker to access and download. In terms of online communities, user-friendly technology helps to strengthen relationships.

Another myth surrounding communities is that in order to succeed they must grow quickly and be launched broadly. Amy believes that a sustainable community had to grow in a slow and focused way. This sort of growth would empower members over time, allowing them to feel part of the community. By adopting a slower process the community builder is allowed to adopt the right strategies at different stages of the community building process. Another myth associated with communities is that they are basically conversations that are held online. This is not entirely untrue, but to enable a relationship to develop the conversation must be structured and have a purpose. Another myth is that personalisation is always a good thing. Complete personaliation mounts up in both financial and social costs. A personal page from which a member communicates must retain certain things in common with other members’ pages. The interface should remain constant to allow ease of navigation, but the content can change to allow personalisation for the members.

Another commonly held misconception is that communities are essentially egalitarian and non-competitive environments. Instead the truth is that they are a situation that can thrive on earned status and skill based rankings, allowing the members to accumulate history. The last myth to be removed is that ‘what they don’t know won’t hurt them’. Full disclosure is always good in a networked world. When information is collected the organisation must explicitly state what is done with the information.

Having done away with all the popular myths, Amy moved on to what was actually needed to make a successful online community. She put it in terms of a social ecosystem where you need a habitat, people and systems in place. To create a successful habitat a community builder first needs to define its objectives. Looking at company goals, which are normally financially motivated, is a start. The habitat has to reach its target audience and be designed so that it meets their needs without any form of constraint. In order to meet these criteria successfully, the builder definitely needs to consider whether the design meets the needs of these objectives. The community design needs to allow the forms of action that are required from the company and its members.

Once the individual objectives are defined the builder needs to ensure that they are creating an inviting habitat. There needs to be an extensible communications infrastructure, similar to the one created by Yahoo. It needs to be able to reach all of its members without being complex to use. The habitat needs to create meaningful and evolving member profiles. By capturing this information community builders are able to make members feel more involved. Ebay is a good example of where profiles evolve over time, giving the members earned status. This is also seen in the world of gaming where a player’s character builds up over time. A community member is more inclined to revisit if they feel that their contribution is being noticed. A membership lifecycle is another step towards achieving this. A community needs to create roles for its members and increase their status as their participation grows. It should have the systems in place to move the members along the life cycle.

Once having got the systems in place the community needs to consider the people who contribute to it. Amy described this stage as the food chain, allowing for the producers, consumers and decomposers. Systems need to be in place, which can turn the members into producers of content. The community should try and tap into this as it moves away from the members being purely consumers. The decomposers are the filtering systems that remove materials from the message boards. You can either get people or an automated system to play this role. Whichever method is chosen, the system will improve over time. It is essential that the community keeps some people out of its system. Filters, guidelines, tools and rules can play the role of this ‘immune system’.

The third stage of achieving a successful community is ensuring that all the systems are in place. The ecosystem needs to be a self-organising system that members can contribute to greatly. By doing this, content is created by tapping into the individual expertise of the members. Ivillage has done this by creating a feedback loop, which can source content from its members in the form of reviews. The community needs to support events that the members have in common with each other. After doing this, visiting a community becomes more like a habit for the member. Baby centre.com is a very good example of a community that hooks its members in. A member can visit the community at every stage of their pregnancy, taking on board all the handy tips given. The community definitely needs to leverage towards the times when members are able to share experiences, e.g. moving cities and having a baby. The community could also have a shared calendar where those who have earned status can contribute to it. The systems also need to identify any emergent groups and networks that are forming in the community, since groups that are created by the members themselves tend to be the most ‘sticky’ and less costly to keep.

Once having achieved the healthy ‘ecosystem’, the community builders need to catalyse on this success. A company needs to listen to its community members by creating feedback groups and message boards. It could create a directory so that people can announce themselves. This is very prevalent in gaming, since people tend to form groups and then create their own story. It is very important that the groups are given a way to identify themselves in a visual way.

Amy finished the session by giving the audience an idea of the trends that we should all look out for in the future. She foresaw an increase in specialisation, whereby communities would be geared towards a specific goal. By this she meant that the communities would be more focused because of smaller budgets and because they proved to be more effective. In future, specific genres will begin to emerge, communities will no longer be used solely as a way of keeping customers. Communities will be fulfilling an overall company objective such as a customer support, ecommerce and gaming.

In terms of the corporate sphere, knowledge sharing has normally been document based. The problem with this is that the information can outdate nearly as soon as it arrives. As more and more people work away from their desks this information can become even more outdated. With the advent of communities, knowledge sharing can become people based and therefore be 'just in time' knowledge sharing. People will be able to go straight to the source and get live data.

So in order to achieve a healthy and successful community the key factors that need to be considered are a sustainable business model, a dynamic infrastructure, earned status and privileges for the members, a healthy ‘immune system’ and a set of tools for self-organisation.

Speaker Profile

Amy Jo Kim is a well-known online community expert. As founder and creative director of Naima, she has designed online communities for clients including America Online, eBay, iVillage and Yahoo. She teaches online design at Stanford University and is the author of "Community Building on the Web", regarded by many as the essential handbook for online community builders.

Find out more about Amy's company: Naima: www.naima.com
Further details about Amy's book, "Community Building on the Web": www.naima.com/community

e-mint: http://e-mint.org.uk

 

This NMK event took place in May 2001.