Building, Caring For and Managing Online Communities

On Thursday, April 22, Lauren Switzer (@laurenswitzer), Marcella Lentini (@mlentini) and John Springs (@cradle186) led the conversation of over 140 tweets on creating, building and managing online communities both for clients and for personal use. With Professor Matthews en route to Hawaii, our class was lucky enough to have the insightful Katie Stansberry (@kstansberry) as a guest lecturer for the day. Having created and managed online communities in both the agency setting as well as the corporate PR setting, Stansberry had a lot of knowledge to share with students on the importance and potential of online communities.

The night before (April 21) Lauren and Marcella began tweeting out links to online articles and questions to classmates via the #J412 hashtag to spike interest in the following day’s class. Class began with minor technical difficulties, so for the first 15 minutes we had primarily a verbal discussion with Professor Stansberry. During this verbal conversation, Stansberry posed the question: “Who should own online content? Advertising? Marketing? Public Relations?” Her answer was “all of the above.” This then segued into the topic of the day: online communities. We began discussing via tweets which online communities we belong to with some still belonging to MySpace and others participating in “Cat Roulette.” With classmates belonging to such a variety of online communities, Stansberry then took a step back and asked us to define a community. Some defined it based on geographic location while others defined it as being based on interests. Going back to the topic of online communities, classmates began discussing the differences in how they portray themselves online versus in real life, with many agreeing that their online life is more censored than their real life. Communities that involve ratings systems were discussed next, including a semi-heated debate over the merits of ratemyprofessor.com.

We then began discussing the term “bricolage”. Bricolage is the use of a lot of different things to create something different and new. In the context of the discussion, bricolage was used to describe the various online communities that sprout up that may seem obscure to some, but to others are considered incredibly important. The discussion then transferred into what is needed to build an online community. This includes providing value to participants, filling a need for participants, integrating with other online communities, keeping members coming back and giving control to the members. Stansberry pointed out that the needs of the online community must come first, and thus you must keep the content of the site relevant to the community at all times. Tweets about this topic included the discussion of the example of a website made for those who go fly-fishing; the manager of this site must always keep content relevant to fly fishermen. Tweets then discussed how to create an online community, with @Courtney_Larson pointing out the need to “start by determining your opinion leaders and reaching out to contributors with established recognition.” The class then discussed what is needed to maintain an online community and further build one, citing Obama’s online communities’ role in getting him elected as an example.

Other great takeaways from the discussion:

• Student contributors shared links to several examples of online communities including Catroulette – a community for cat lovers and a spin-off of chat roulette, as well as one for coffee lovers. These two niche examples just go to show how many online communities truly can be found on the Internet. There really is something for everyone!
• Another interesting concept that came up during the discussion was how our personalities differed between our online presence and our “real life” presence. It was agreed that for the most part, the two are very similar and there is a lot of blending that makes us look more closely at how we compose ourselves online.
• A great point to consider when contributing to or creating an online community is that it must give its users some sort of value based on their particular interests and needs. A great quote from Stansberry to end on is, “Valuable content is defined by what’s valuable to the community.

Tagged twitter management