1. Stephen Dale Semantix (UK) Ltd www.semantix.co.uk
Building & Nurturing Successful On-line Communities (…….batteries not included)
Stephen Dale
Semantix (UK) Ltd

2. What makes a successful CoP?
clear purpose – what will it be used to do?
creating a safe and trusted environment
committed core group of active participants
being motivated
knowing the needs of participants
having a clear action plan with activities to meet needs
blending face-to-face and online activities
Nurturing and sustaining the CoP requires effort and energy from a skilled facilitator.
Why does a person engage with a CoP?
Attractive purpose grabs and retains attention
Perceived benefits:
Socialisation
Co-learning, knowledge sharing and co-production
Each person chooses to be a member
Volition
Joining in – and leaving!

3. Facilitator Responsibilities
Supporting sociability, relationship and trust building
Seed and feed discussion topics
Maintain and sustain the communities health
Direct knowledge nuggets for capture and reuse
Work to network community members
Provide basic help as needed with the tools
Reporting CoP activity – metrics, evaluations
Ensure the space is kept "tidy" and navigable
Monitoring success criteria and impact

4. Facilitating online - the challenges
Designing the right mix of online and off-line activities ('blended learning')
Catering for different learning styles and needs
Learning to become a 'guide' or 'facilitator'
Dealing with administrative, technical issues and support requirements, and issues of time
Avoiding the dangers of misinterpretation of text
Finding the right voice
Standing back, and allowing members to discover the power
In the beginning, you need at least one unexpected value for the members every few days.
Keep it simple: Involve your team in feeding the community with interesting content, such current news, events, training offers, key documents etc.
Rely on the fun factor: polls and fancy stuff like video, photos and audio can be motivating and reduce anxieties, especially in the beginning

5. Understanding your Community
Helping Communities
Best Practice Communities
Knowledge Stewarding Communities
Innovation Communities
Drivers
Lower cost through reuse
Social responsibility
Lower cost through standardisation
Consistency of project
Improves outcomes
Professional development
Tracks shifting marketing trends
Regulation and legislation
Activities
Connecting members
Knowledge who’s who
Collecting,
Vetting
Publishing
Enlisting leading experts
Manage content
Decipher trends
Share insights
Development of Policy
Structure and roles
Problem solving
Sub committees
Index and store Best practice
Task force
Domain experts
Sub-committees
Reward for participation
Sense of belonging
Assistance to daily work
Desire for improvement
Passion for the topic
Job responsibility to detect emerging trends
Knowledge
Tacit - high socialisation
Low tacit
Explicit to explore
Tacit to explicit
Tacit to tacit
Explicit to tacit.
Understanding your community will help you to anticipate its needs.

6. Comment with attribution
Levels of engagement
Browse
(Anon)
Comment
Register
Comment with attribution
Ask a question
with
attribution
Start a forum topic
Upload a video
Write a blog
Become a mentor
Become an expert
Level of engagement
Engaging new members
Introduction forums are great way to help people familiarise themselves with an online community, and are simple to set up.
By asking a fun question this will allow them to express their personality or interesting things about themselves, and it will help people get to know each other
better.
Type of engagement

7. Understanding the community profile
Observers
Power
Contributors
Inactive
Know who your contributors are – and look after them!
Observers (some call them ‘lurkers’) are still valuable members of the community. The fact that they accessing and reading content contributes to the overall dynamics of the community.
Inactive users (those who have registered but have not contributed or accessed any content) should be removed. It is necessary to ‘feed’ and weed’ a community in order for it to flourish and grow.
Know who your contributors are – and look after them!

8. The community will have a rhythm of activity
A facilitator needs to understand the natural rhythm of the community. It won’t be ‘full-on’ all the time and there may be periods of inactivity. Knowing when to intervene comes from understanding these cycles of activity/inactivity.
Understanding the rhythm helps you keep with the beat!

9. Community Metrics

10. Network maps provide insight and prompt questions
“I frequently or very frequently receive information from this person that I need to do my job.”
Knowledge flows along existing pathways in organizations.
To understand the knowledge flow, find out what the patterns are.
Create interventions to create, reinforce, or change the patterns to improve the knowledge flow.
Hutchinson Associates 2005

11. Engagement Strategies: Hot seats
Can be used to attract new members to the community.
Enables participants to ask the person in the hot seat (usually an expert in their field) questions, to which they can respond over a set period of time.
Normally run using the forum, but they can also be run as a phone conference, webinar or interview
Source:

12. Engagement Strategies: Newsletters
Regular newsletters signposting new and interesting content will draw members back into the CoP.

13. CoP Health Check Symptom Actions
No participation or activity.
No new documents or links posted
No new discussion threads, announcements or news
Post new content, requesting feedback and comments to elicit new conversation.
Remind people to set alerts for the site.
Talk to members to find out what people are working on and ask people what they would like to see on it.
Activity only by a few people
Call or members who haven’t participated for a while; find out why they haven’t been participating. Use those conversations to elicit new content and encourage contribution.
Be sure that the people who are not contributing understand how to use the tools. Never assume that tools are “intuitive” to everyone, or that everyone understands how to use them.
People use instead of posting questions and discussions on the CoP
The habit is a hard one to break. If the goal of the community is to capture all the relevant discussions for future use, then the community facilitator needs to take a strong stand with members.
One way to do this is to make a public statement that no questions sent by individual will be answered, but that questions posted to the community will always be answered in set time.
Another approach is to respond to all questions by asking the requestor to post the question in the forum.
Sudden drop in discussions where there was previous activity.
Review the postings for potential “flaming”. Edit the discussion threads to remove inappropriate comments (and state that you have done so). Speak with the people who have posted and clarify the norms for participation of the community.
Another community is focused on the same topic.
If the members of the other community are current or previous members of your community, talk to them about why the community isn’t meeting their needs. If they do want to take a specific focus, then be sure that you have set up cross-linkages to the other community sites, and are referring people back and forth as needed.
If the new community consists of people who are not participating in the current community, ask some of the same questions. See if there is sufficient overlap that the new community might be better managed as a Sub - CoP of the current site or a merger between the communities
A simple CoP health check will guide the facilitator on suitable interventions for various ‘symptoms’ of an unhealthy CoP.
Source:

14. Help for Facilitators http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk
Having a place to go to get help and information is essential. The on-line facilitator’s CoP is a place for ‘crowd-sourcing’ and co-creation of useful information and good practice.

15. Community Facilitator Check-List
Recognize and market achievements of the whole community in front of the company and other communities
Recognize and market community successes and their effect on:
Customer service
Innovation
Creation of new lines of business
Newsletters
Publications
Recognize and Market communities internally and externally
Sell successes up to senior management via storytelling of community achievements
Single out key players for their accomplishments in front of their peers
Create programs that recognize leaders, communities, membership and community roles
Recognizing volunteers, especially in community roles where there was no compensation, is essential
Use the community sponsor as an important spokesperson
Create community posters, newsletters, publications, tools, brochures, etc.
Create programs that recognize community contributions, participation, helping peers, sharing experiences, connecting experts, and mentoring.
Create processes for rewarding knowledge nuggets captured, created, and shared
Convey a feeling of appreciation for members through positive reinforcement

16. Summary
Build it and they won’t come…technology by itself won’t guarantee a successful community.
The facilitator (or community manager) is the key to a successful and vibrant community.
It’s hard work and requires lots of energy…
When deploying the technology, remember… batteries are not included!

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