A successful community on the web

Chris Tolls (from Topix) offers the following tips for community management (via Digital Dialogues):-

1. Geotag comments
When users know their comments are associated with their location, they are less likely to be rude. I find this quite interesting and would love to do more user research on this topic.

2. Forget about registration
Registration takes incentive away from busy people with good stuff to say and it instead encourages a troll environment. Topix showed how this worked for them, so I believe it, but I am an advocate for registration. I appreciate the seed of doubt though, I will be thinking about this.

3. Find and focus on the good stuff
Yes!

4. Get rid of the bad stuff
Bad stuff means threats, calls to violence, personal details, and postings with 100 percent intent of harm. It’s important to have a policy defining this. To achieve this, you can use a number of tools, such as using meta-moderators, Captcha, heat language analysis, IP/domain moderation, and community voting systems.

5. Have a goal or purpose
Here here. While we often hear that “interest” is what ties communities together but I’d suggest that the best communities have a sense of “purpose.”

On that last point. Yes, absolutely, bang on.

Wikipedia has entries for community of purpose and community of interest although both are fairly brief.

The definition for community of interest does include this sentence:

Participation in a community of interest can be compelling, entertaining and create a ‘sticky’ community where people return frequently and remain for extended periods.

Hmm, I'm not so sure. I think participation in a community can be all of those things, but what provides the entertainment value or the 'stickiness' is often a sense of purpose, an end goal, some form of achievement.

This may be relevant to individuals within the community, with their own separate aims and purposes, rather than shared purpose across the community but nevertheless, a sense of purpose is critically important in making anything worth coming back for.

Do not assume that a community, particularly a successful web community, is easily built from the one ingredient of a shared interest - ensure there is also a goal or a purpose in the mix.

Christmas in Birmingham

Take 4 of the cheapest disposable cameras available in Sainsbury's, which happens to be a model in the Sainsbury's Basics range, cover the viewfinders with plenty of parcel tape, scratch the front of the lens on two of the cameras with a wire scrubber and on the other two use fluorescent highlighter pens to colour the lens.

Add 2 grown men who should know better, a healthy dose of magic juice (otherwise known as Diesel or Snakebite and Black, an afternoon in Birmingham that turned dark rather too quickly and a last minute trip to Boots photo centre.

What do you get?

This of course...





...and there are more.