Heuristic tools to help community managers

One of the key challenges facing communities, especially in their early stages of development, is the need to get people engaged. Later on in a community's development this evolves into providing feedback to your top contributors, as demonstrated in recent HP Labs research. The engagement issue is faced by most if not all community managers trying to get a new community off the ground, faced particularly in the context of a member-organisation where the temptation may be to prioritise registrations, rather than contributions. One way to approach this challenge is to hire professional contributors, but for those with limited budgets this isn't an option. Faced with the challenge of generating discussions between members it is not suprising the job of the community manager is spent a great deal behind the scenes, working hard to encourage participation. But that sais what tools are there to help guide community growth based on engagement?

It's a tough job but someone has to do it

These issues came up recently on the US-based ‘Community Roundtable’ blog where the ‘iceberg effect’ of community management was addressed in stark terms:

• Community managers are under pressure to justify what they do to peers and bosses that don’t really see or understand what tasks make up their day. (Related to this, community managers are allocated registration-driven tasks which can make their job harder).
• Some community managers are dealing with the challenge of inspiring participants to author only to see them become unmotivated when they don’t receive any comments or activity on their content.
• Almost all the community managers we talk to struggle with ways to maintain or increase engagement.

Consider the complexity of it all. A lot of the background work in building engagement involves time intensive 1-2-1 encouragement, a time-intensive effort which requires real passion and attention to detail.  Following this up on a wider scale by facilitating involvement through keeping an eye on content and posting that through to your key contributors, in effect acting as a manual version of more organic feedback mechanism which ideally spring into life as the community takes off. Part of this in a practical sense is simply making sure the software works as it should (often talking with developers who come who see the 80/20 rule for communities as meaning technology first, and strategy second), so that when the urge takes a community member they can contribute without problem. Connected to this is the side-strategy of providing a graduating scale for people to contribute, starting with polls and moving on to comments, and up to starting discussions. Phew!

An experienced community manager, with enough time to consider this (which isn’t always possible) complexity, will have developed their own mini-strategies for engagement. Often engagement happens naturally; for example when a certain topic takes hold and discussion flows, it can be a perfect opportunity to start a poll of members to draw in the less active ‘readers’. And it crosses over to providing different ways to participate, making sure your community platform provides for audio and video, links through to a Facebook Group or a YouTube channel, where further feedback and engagement can take place.

As the first bullet point above neatly expresses often what makes the job challenging, is convincing senior mangers that all this qualitative ‘spadework’ is worthwhile, which is one reason we are a believer in the value of our mentoring service for community managers. It’s easy to forget that for most managers the term 'community' is still largely a buzz word. For the majority website strategy is still largely seen as a means for corporate messaging rather than as a way of publicly demonstrating it is listening and responding to feedback. Take a look at an earlier post on the perils of community manager burnout to consider this issue a little more. Despite these pressures there are some tools which point to a way for community managers to help themselves cope with the pressures and make progress. One of the best known of these is the 90-9-1 rule which helps explain to colleagues why most members of a community will never appear in the postings or comment stats; this rule of thumb dictating that for every 90 readers the remaining ten per cent will contribute to a lesser or greater extent, of that the top 1 per cent the most active. Yet despite its value it's rightly come in for criticism recently, and been described as a myth rather than reality, but I believe it still has value for community managers, especially when used as a heuristic 'rule of thumb'.

Understanding and measuring the value of readers

Taking the rule of thumb at face value then for every 90 readers your community metrics should show around ten contributions, to a lesser or greater degree. It’s a relationship between readers and posters which can be useful for community managers to reflect on, firstly as I’ve said above because of the importance of finding ways to motivate top contributors. Secondly, to ensure the needs of readers are met. This is also useful for making sure the community manager balances the needs of the vocal minority with the silent majority. But what does the importance of readers, the silent majority, mean in terms of strategy in general and metrics in particular, and how best to balance that with the value of contributors?

Vanessa DiMauro, from Boston-based Leader Networks, researched the value of communities to readers back in the 1990s and discovered some promising evidence: “What we found was a really robust usage of the information and connections that people make in professional online communities, even if they never make themselves visible. They actually have a tendency to use the information that they learn in their real life, in some cases more actively than the active posters or participants." Their methodology was pretty straightforward, to track behaviour such as printing out information or emailing it to others; using information in meetings; connecting with colleagues or people that they met in the online community via phone or at conferences or through email. "So the silent readers are very active members of the community. They just make decisions not to make themselves visible in the permanent online space." One way we’ve approached understanding the value of readers is to use the 90-9-1 rule to create a tool to understand how your community is behaving so you can plan action and communicate to the rest of the organisation accordingly.

Using the 90-9-1 rule to guide community growth

Plotted above based on 90-10 is a linear relationship between readers and posters starting st 90 readers to 10 posts, and in the top right ending with 900 readers to 100 posters' contributions. At periodic intervals the stats for readers and posters is plotted against this line, clearly showin gfor example in 'Discussions' that there is a disproportionate amount of posters. Checking the reason for this might uncover a large amount of staff contributions, and too little engagement with external contributors for example.

If for each of the main sections of your community you track as core community metrics the number of readers and posters over the last three months and plot this on a chart what you would ideally have over time is the same proportion, 90 – 10 of readers to posters, as the community scales up. The important qualifier here is that this is an idealisation, the tool functions to make it easier for the community manager to keep clear and in their planning, that the needs of both readers and posters are met. It’s also worth mentioning that this relationship, or readers to posters, may be set at a different level, say 80-20, (this adjustment a well known property of heuristic tools) and in this case the periodic use of the tool will help define where that ratio point exists, and once having established it to better to be able to see when changes occurs either positively or negatively. By this model the balance line which appears running diagonally left to right, top to bottom, represents the ideal of the 90-10 ratio. The plotting of readers to posters, using stats, means that the community manager is able to see where the expected pattern is drifting away from central ‘rule of thumb’.

It’s worth concluding by pointing out this is quite consciously a rule of thumb, a heuristic approach, not a mechanical rule. Consider the definition of a rule of thumb as a shortcut to solutions to new problems that resemble problems previously solved by experienced workers. Like all such heuristic approaches the idea is not to set the rule in stone, but to adapt it as new data comes in. In other words as your community grows, as it matures with new contributors and a better understanding of its members’ needs, the relationship between readers and posters may well shift. But what remains useful is the useful of a tool such as the one above to help guide the community manager behind the scenes in making sure the needs of both readers and active participants are met. Our approach to this dynamic is to create a set of core reader and poster community metrics for each of the main areas of the community, and to take a snapshot every 3 months of the numbers of readers and posters. Plotting that over a sustained period using the tool above is I believe a useful approach to understanding the evolving needs of different sections of the community, and a tool to communicate its needs to members of the senior management team especially in deciding where to allocate resources.