A bigger community isn't a better community. Growth alone wont increase the ROI of the community.

More members reduces the sense of community. Members feel less connection with each other. They visit less frequently. The level of activity per member drops. The ROI declines (despite growth!).

If you want to make your community bigger AND better, you need to juggle three things 1) growth, 2) activity, and 3) sense of community. 

If you have growth + activity, but...

Once a community has achieved critical mass, you enter the establishment phase. 

There are some key things you need to do here:

1) Shift the amount of time gradually from micro to macro level interactions.

2) Begin preparing for a BIG online community.

3) Introducing sense of community elements. 

Each of these deserves...

I've come across a few platforms which don't let you do two important things:

1) Set up a newsletter.

2) Mass-mail all members. 

The difference between the two is also important.

Newsletter are a regular update of what's new and popular in the community. Mass e-mails/notifications are rarer, incredibly important, announcements that can't wait until the newsletter (or dwarf the importance of a newsletter....

Back to Monday's post, what would be the benefit of growing the community?

How long does it take to get 1 extra active member? What is the benefit of getting 1 extra active member? What is the cost of getting 1 extra active member?

If you divide the total time you've spent on the community by the number of active members, you get time per active member (TPAM). This...

Paul Adams quotes the work of Robin Dunbar in Grouped:

"Women talk to form social bonds more often than men. Many of their conversations are aimed at building and maintaining their social network. Men more often talk about themselves or things they want to appear...

Do you know what most discussions are about?

People.

People mostly talk about other people. 

In the early stages of developing a community (when you're trying to get the community off the ground) initiate and feature discussions about people.

Write content about people.

Even in your initial outreach, invite members to give their opinions on people. 

It's better to cater to the most hardcore fans of the topic.

Some people worry about this. They worry that if the discussions are too technical, too geeky, too wierd, too extreme, they will lose the less committed.

This is rarely the case.

It's the most committed fans of the topic that attract the less committed. By encouraging and facilitating the geekiest, hardcore, technical and weirdest discussions, you get the people you want....

A few organizations are heading in the wrong direction. 

They believe game mechanics will encourage contributions within a community.

They use a free incentive to get people to join.

They have short-term competitions/challenges in which members can win a prize to stimulate activity.

These might achieve a short blip of success, but they hurt the community over the long term. All three are sure-fire ways to attract a lot of lurkers (information-seekers)....

Sharon recently mentioned she had a clique problem.

She had a group of highly active regulars who were preventing newcomers from participating and feeling engaged. How can she fix this?

First, you prove the assumption. What data supports this assumption? 

The conversion funnel

Look at the conversion funnel, where are newcomers dropping out?

Is it between visiting and registering? This would suggest members aren't finding a reason...

Jones et al. (2008) (don't you love academic referencing?) found empirical evidence that information overload significantly constrained interaction between members.

They discovered that 40 participants interacting within 20 minutes was the maximum number which could be sustained. 

As the volume of messages increases. Users are:

1) More likely to respond to simpler messages (...