Live from the Community 2.0 Conference

We’ve been sitting in on several sessions of the Community 2.0 Conference in Las Vegas hosted by Shared Insights. Having been in the business of helping companies start and run online communities for the past seven years, we’ve learned a lot and we’ve seen a lot.

Here is what we see in this conference:

• Online community is taking off again. The number of new projects and inexperienced people trying to start online communities is growing and that’s a good thing.
• Many of the speakers are providing information as industry best practices based upon a single community experience. That’s a little troubling.
• Attendees are looking to network and build up a group of folks who can share best practices. Lots of card sharing.

But here is a disturbing issue that has come up repeatedly, stated as fact, but just plain wrong:

You Must Surrender Control to Your Community

Whoa! This is such a mistake to believe in this as the gospel of online community.

Based upon our experiences with many large organizations, if you say that to a VP the project is dead on arrival. So, if you were at the conference and believe that, your project is in trouble.

So what is the truth? Again, based upon our experience:

For Best Results, SHARE Control with Your Community

Does this mean let the members run the site? No it does not.

Does this mean allow your members to dictate what the community will become? No, it does not.

What it does mean, is that your community members are important to the success of your project (no brainer, right?). That means that you need to listen to them and work with them to make the improvements that work for both your organization as well as for the members themselves.

We teach our community teams to identify the hyper-affiliates who are balanced and fair in their ideas and critiques. Not everyone’s voice is equal (online community mistake #2).

Our experience shows us through ROIs of over 100% for our clients, that if you give up control you lose your ROI. It’s that simple.

Want to learn more? Contact us or leave a comment.

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