Over the past 4 years I have been thinking about how to get individuals involved with and participating within a community. It is not an easy thing to get a group of individuals comfortable with your site and each other to the point of participating and caring when they become a true community. While I will continue to learn, I wanted to share what I see as the phases to the development into a community and their participation.
Community Engagement Model
The core concept of the model is pretty simple. People need to build their trust and loyalty with a community before they will actively engage and care about it. This model proceeds through phases building on trust where interactions gradually increase in their threshold of interactivity.
The five stages of the community engagement model are:
Launch: Starting well is critical. Seeding the community with starter content that provides that social proof to incentivize participation is critically important at the beginning.
Awareness: How is your target market hearing of your community? On a daily basis, I am working on outreach programs for clients to influential bloggers, or connecting via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn to individuals in target markets to let them know about community initiatives. This can also be as simple as ensuring that it is easy to subscribe to your community – either through RSS or e-mail. These are just a few of many techniques to get your market aware of your community.
Interaction: Once members are aware of a community, you want to ease them into participation; provide many options for how they can contribute. For many, contributing a unique post that your peers will all be reading (and judging/critiquing) is a threatening thing. By providing simple and guided ways for visitors to interact with the site such as ratings, polls, or even answers to simple survey questions; participation is limited and not free-form, less threatening, and more inviting.
Participation: When participants are ready to contribute fully, provide a wide range of options while rewarding their behavior appropriately with levels or points. Ranges of participation options include ideasharing, video/photo uploads, profile building, friending and more. Acts of participation that you want to encourage in your community should be rewarded with an appropriate recognition system so that members are encouraged to repeat the behaviour (post again) and that others see their recognition and are also encouraged.
Advocates: Advocates in a community help to promote your site and can even help you to manage the community. Advocate behavior can be encouraged through providing badges that can be displayed on blogs, connections to Facebook pages and other ways for members to connect to external communities. As with Participation, these are behaviors that should be rewarded through a recognition system.
Moving a community from general awareness through to advocacy is challenging and complex – I have simplified this and in posts over the next few weeks I will review each component. I also encourage you to read Rachel Happe’s Community Maturity model to think of this in a broader perspective within the organization.
So what has helped you in engaging communities and moving from a group of individuals to true advocates? I look forward to your comments.
Special thanks to LaSandra Brill for redesigning my model for me! It looks a million times better after she got through with it.
/colin
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