15 Tips for Intranet Community Management: Building Active Communities

Een opsomming van wat er komt kijken bij community management (ook op groepsniveau) voor een sociaal intranet. In deze blogpost wordt een beeld geschetst van het belang van community management voor een sociaal intranet en wat er bij community management komt kijken. Maar liefst 15 tactieken voor het activeren van een groep op een sociaal intranet worden beschreven:

1. Have a person who is responsible for it (i.e a “community manager”): This person sets the tone, and is like the host of a party who makes people feel comfortable and who uses her own social captial to get keep the group lively. (See tips on engaging your community managers.)
2. Reach out proactively to bring in members: Who are the people who should be involved and who do you want as members? Reach out to them actively and individually, both online and offline.
3. Foster bilateral offline relationships: Don’t think that all your interaction with community members has to take place online. Make sure to supplement those efforts with more direct one-on-one relationships. This builds tremendous social capital that will pay you back in the online community.
4. Ask members about their needs: Ask questions and listen to community members. What do they need to find? What would help them do their daily jobs?
5. Offer new members a simple first action: Ask new joiners to take a small, easy action upon entering the community. Have a “say hello” section or ask them to favorite the community’s forum section. A simple first step makes the second, third, and all future steps come more easily.
6. Provide training and active help: Offer training and help to new members to help people get comfortable with the online space and technology. People will never get involved if they are afraid to press the buttons.
7. Set the tone proactively: People often hesitate to get involved if they don’t know how formal or informal, serious or jovial, honest or reserved the community expects participants to be. The community manager and any senior group members should go out of their way to participate and demonstrate the proper tone for the group.
8. Build a mini content plan: For at least the first couple of months create a top-level plan of what content to post, why, when and by whom.
9. Be regular and consistent with posts and updates: It is better to post every Friday than post for six days on the trot and then stop. The rhythm and consistency demonstrate reliability to members.
10. Keep conversations and material up-to-date: Try going to a party that’s dead — not many people, nobody active and having fun. That’s what an out-of-date online community is like.
11. Find something interesting to catch member’s attention: Go out of your way to think up a useful or fascinating tidbit that people will want to see. Example: Every week a new statistic related to the topic of the community.
12. Highlight your members: Thank them for their involvement, promote their work and contributions, put them in the spotlight.
13. Link to other intranet content: News and information flows into your social intranet every day. Not all the content for your online group has to come from the community itself. Bring in other news to keep the group relevant and linked in to the rest of the company.
14. Include some intranet help content: Participating in an intranet community means using the intranet’s functionality. So don’t be afraid to post technical tips and tricks that aren’t directly about the community’s core topics.
15. Transform interactive content into reference material: If you have a fantastic discussion thread why not make this into an instructional page or FAQ section? Sometimes organic discussions generate rich information that you can turn into evergreen reference content.