How to build a strong community
At Konnektid, we’re all about our amazing community of people that share their skills and knowledge. By sharing their brainpower, our members open up doors for each other that lead to new or improved careers, new insights, new hobbies and even new friends. These great results is what we focus on and we know they only come about through building and managing our community.
Advice from inspiring community builders
As we want to share knowledge we’re passionate about, this blog is about the art of community building and
community management.
There are many great community builders out there that inspire us and we wanted to share some of their advice & ideas with you!
Jack Sheperd (@expresident), BuzzFeed
“You need to think about what the community is that you have, and not necessarily what the community is that you want it to be. If you focus on what your community is giving you, rather then have some idealized version of what you want out of community, those things get closer. And the thing they end up giving you ends up being something that is actually closer to your ultimate goals. Go with what your community is giving you and make it work.”
David Spinks (@DavidSpinks), CMX
“Every community, even the biggest, can be boiled down to individual relationships. If you focus on developing individual relationships amongst your members, you are guaranteed to eventually have a healthy community.”
Mitzi Figueroa (@mmmitzi), HelpHub Services
“Empower your community to connect with each other. Focus on less “management” and more on enabling members of the community to spark conversations and engage in real relationships. Create a welcoming and friendly space, facilitate the initial spark and then get out of the way!”
Douglas Atkin (@datkin), AirBnB
“If you want a community to take action, you have to ask them to do things. This is the first principle of movement making and grassroots organizing. The important thing in the way you build commitment and galvanize action is you must always lower the barrier to entry with low barrier asks like signing a petition, and then gradually ramp people up the commitment curve with incrementally harder asks that get incrementally more commitment and actually deliver incrementally more rewards. People are more predisposed to take the next action if they have taken the previous action.”
Cesar Castro (@cesar_o_castro), Salesforce
“A Community Manager should find different ways to celebrate and recognize their community members. And not just publicly because some people like to be quiet. Also, not just the super users, but the new members and randomly-selected members too.”
Shira Levine (@communitydrives), Yerdle
“If you segment your customers by the ROI that they are contributing to your company, whether it’s revenue, wether it’s engagement, whether it’s content creation, look at what’s working for the top 1% and then syndicate it to the other 99%. Your challenge is to inspire everybody else to be like that 1%.”
This list could easily be a lot longer as there are many inspiring community builders out there. Some of them are already sharing their skills on Konnektid, so if you want some personal advice you should definitely request their help.
CMX Series Amsterdam is here!
Want more? On Friday the 26th of June, together with a team of enthusiastic community builders, we will organize the first CMX Series Amsterdam. With great speakers from AirBnB and Schiphol and plenty of time to discuss some of the burning questions and issues you might have about community management, this will be a night you do not want to miss. Seats are limited so please register in time!
Not in Amsterdam? Check out the full list of CMX events here.