Two years in. Two decades of community learnings. Uncommunity #47
Uncommunity recently crossed two years of being. We couldn’t have done this without you! We are innately grateful to you for your support in this initiative. Community is no longer a secret or a buzzword, its a widely accepted and acknowledged path for business success. To continue supporting your journey in this field, we are restarting Uncommunity with new resources every week, delivered fresh to your inbox.
A thank you to you and happy birthday to us :)
Today, we have Matt Mecham, co-founder of Invision Community, a community platform. Matt is building communities since 2000. We have had the chance to glean his knowledge to share key learnings on community management with the you, his opinion on how the community industry has changed over the past two decades and how social media are shaping habits (and more!).
Read on.
What was it like to be one of the first to build a community platform? Why did you feel the need of building one?
I built my first platform towards the end of 2000, but I wasn't the first. Forum platforms originated from the BBS (Bulletin Board System) days where you used a modem to log into another computer user's computer via a terminal window and then issued commands to read posts or to add them.
Matt Wright wrote WWWBoards (http://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html) in 1995, one of the first bulletin board systems with a GUI interface alongside Infopop's ubiquitous UBB.
This was the forum platform's "big bang" event. In just a few months, many other products popped up. The first bulletin board script I tried to launch a community on was written by a Greek dentist who was learning Perl.
The internet was still in its infancy, and most developers, like me, had full-time jobs and just enjoyed writing code in the evenings. I wrote Ikonboard as a free product because I felt that most other free products lacked functionality and the few commercial options like UBB were too expensive.
However, my primary motivation was simply "because I could". I had written a few modifications for other products and wanted to create my own platform. I had no real plan or strategy, and at that time, the internet was more of a playground than a business opportunity.
Our telephone bills were so high because of the modem calls to ISPs; we had little money for anything else!
How do you feel the community industry has transformed over the last two decades? What are some of the key changes(good/bad) that you see?
The influence and impact of communities have increased significantly.
In the early days of the web, access was slow and expensive. Communities were used more like physical bulletin boards. You'd read a few messages and perhaps post one of your own before logging off the internet (a concept that feels very alien now). It may be hours or days before you return to check for replies. The impact of these remote communities on your day-to-day life was small compared to your in-person interactions.
The advent of fast, low-cost internet changed our relationship with online communities to bring them closer to our daily lives, and the iPhone broke the barrier between online and real-world communities.
We are painfully aware of the deep division across society formed by unblinking adherence to beliefs formed by a handful of online communities driven by analytics to feed you more of what you think you want. We can now easily bypass the safety net of family and friends and seek validation online.
If we look at the industry as a whole, the most significant change is likely the professionalism of the community industry. In those early days, communities were set up by highly technical "server admins" who had the knowledge and ability to install server software and manage complex script configurations. The server admins would run the community with variable results. It often led to a hostile welcome as the server administrators saw all new members as a potential threat! However, with so few communities available, they would largely be successful despite how they were run.
Now we have community managers who focus on people skills more than server skills and help shape a positive and welcoming community. Competition for attention is high now, so you have to work hard to retain members.
How has social media shaped habits, but why are forums still popular?
Social media has shaped habits and set a level of expectation for platforms, but forums are still a powerful force.
The first forum platform was released an entire decade before Facebook, and Twitter gained significant traction. If you wanted to start a community, forums were the only viable option.
Social media is essentially a broadcast medium. We share our thoughts and curated moments from our lives. It's very focused on sharing our personalities. Forums, however, are focused on a shared goal. Members are encouraged to contribute towards that goal, whether it's a support community for a favourite product or a community that takes deep dives into the latest TV show episodes. You are there to contribute to that discussion, not showcase yourself.
Furthermore, forums are one of the only available platforms that offer robust segmentation of discussion and a permanent, searchable archive of past discussions. It is not about nostalgia but preventing repeated questions and having to repeat the same information daily.
It is not social media versus forums, but social media and forums. A community is now more than a single platform. You need to represent your community across many platforms and use them to their strength.
Why is strong moderation key to maintaining balance in a community with millions of posts?
The bigger the community, the more chance there is of division and conflict. We are tribal by nature and find safety in numbers. Strong moderation is vital to ensure your community's health.
Moderation should not just be punitive, although this is often the first thing people think of when you mention moderation. Of course, you will need to ban members and put others in a timeout when they get too heated in a discussion. Still, most of your work should be in setting clear boundaries, taking time to explain why those boundaries exist and trying to redirect people when they sail close to them.
Without this rigour, you invite anarchy. Without clear boundaries, some members will push past societal decency and create a massive stink that needs to be taken care of eventually. It's better to be proactive and create a positive atmosphere with clear expectations of member behaviour.
If you were to share three key learnings on community management with the other community builders, what would that be?
Patience. You have to have an abundance of patience. If patience was a currency, you need to be a multi-billionaire. You see the best and worst of people when running a community. You often meet people when they are not at their best and in pain. Without patience, you won't have compassion. People are impulsive, irrational and illogical but mostly good. As the community leader, you have to face this tsunami of humanity with a smile and do your best to help, support and nurture without judgement but also know when you need to move people away from your community.
Statistics. This is often a much-discussed part of running a community. It is not easy to convert the emotion and drama of a community into cold statistics, and it's often not a good way to demonstrate community health. Still, it is very likely you will have several stakeholders with limited time to be convinced that your community is worth the investment and stats are one of the most effective ways to get this across. What you track is mainly down to what tools you have, what the performance indicators are, and what your community is based around. Get comfortable with numbers and find creative ways to not only share the cold data but also the emotional value of the community with a few stories or posts that underline how others are finding help or being supported.
Platforms. When I wrote my first community platform, there were a handful of options, and many were very much alike. Now you have an almost overwhelming number of options. You have platforms like Slack and Discord that are great for real-time conversations and platforms like forums that are better for asynchronous conversations. The platform can shape the style of the community, so it makes sense to work to that platform's strengths. However, you can switch to another platform if you feel there is something better for your community, so don't feel locked in and forced to work in a specific way if it doesn't suit your community's needs.
You can reach me via Twitter and LinkedIn.
What else are we reading/listening to?
How to Migrate Your Community to a Different Platform Successfully. With so many new community platforms and tools out there, picking one that's best for your community can be complicated — and moving your community from one platform to another can be even more challenging. Here's Jocelyn's insight on five things to do when changing community platforms and Erica's experience with migrating the Trello Community during her time at Atlassian: Keep reading.
4 Things to Consider When Launching a Community Mentorship Program. Considered mentorship programs for your community? Mentorships have always been an excellent way to share knowledge. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, loads of mentorship programs have had to shift from in-person to virtual, and that’s not always an easy feat. These four tips would help you bring mentorship programs to your Community!
The Benefits of Allowing Members to Host Community Events. You, as the community professional, don’t need to always be the one planning and executing events on behalf of the brand. That’s a benefit that can be bestowed upon specific community members to keep momentum going. Jenny Weigle outlined the benefits and crowdsourced tips to help you get started here.
[NEWS] Nas.io - a new community platform for creators. Nas Daily's host Nuseir Yassin announced the launch of Nas.io, an online community tool for Content creators, Web3 Creators, Businesses, educators and entrepreneurs. More on this.
[NEWS] WhatsApp is rolling out it’s community feature slowly but surely, check if you’re one of the front runners? Here’s everything you need to know about it.
The Beginner’s Guide To Community Management. Richard Millington published this beginner guide to Community management. In this guide you’ll learn:
What community management is
What makes it unique from other activities
Which tools and software you should use
What kind of tasks you will do on a day-to-day level and how to do them
and more.
[PODCAST] Pandemic Communities Gone Bust with Jillian. Listen here.
[PODCAST] Community Conversations – Episode #83: Anne Larsen on Community Culture. Listen.
The 3 phases.
What other examples do you have?
Playbooks anyone?
We all like a good meme.
thank you☕
for joining us in our journey. We all have full-time jobs and we have built Uncommunity in our free time as we have been exploring ways to give back and support fellow community builders in their journeys.
If you are enjoying our curation and want to express your appreciation, please feel free to spread the word, or let us know your thoughts/feedback.