Photo cred: "kattebelletje"

This is a distinction that isn’t often addressed.  The responsibilities of a community manager are the same for many organizations, but can also differ based on a number of factors.  One of those factors is their stage of development. The responsibilities of a community manager for a start-up will have a lot more focus on community seeking and building.  If you’re an established company, like Pepsi, a community manager’s responsibilities have a lot more to do with tending to the current community and monitoring and less with development.

As community manager for Scribnia, engagement with our community is extremely important, but as a new website, I also have the responsibility to build the community.  That means creating value and encouraging others to join in.  That means constantly seeking people who would find our site to be valuable and engaging.

Much of the community management advice that’s usually given is focused on established brands.  Here are a few tips and points for community managers of communities that, like ours when we first started, don’t exist when you first arrive on the scene.

• Ultimately, you have to have a good product or service.  The best community manager in the world cannot create a loyal, engaged community around a product or service that sucks.  If you’re having trouble building, you may want to look at how you can make your product more valuable.
• Your community members exist, they just haven’t been gathered around your company.  The people that would potentially find your product to be valuable are out there, talking.  Find them.  Join them.
• Sometimes they’re not going to want to gather around your company.  Community management doesn’t always mean creating a community around you…it could also mean joining your potential customers’ communities that already exist, where your community members are already gathered and comfortable.    This can eventually lead to your own community being developed out of the relationships you create elsewhere.
• IT TAKES TIME.  It’s been said many times before, but building a community takes time.  There’s no short-cuts or fast tracks…you have to contribute relevant, interesting content that will resonate well.  You have to interact, respond, and stay consistently active.  Communities are built around passion, and you can’t fake passion.
• People usually won’t partake in your community unless you give them a reason to.  The fact that they checked out your site, and you have some sort of community, isn’t going to make them join.  Give them something to be interested in.

Those are just a few points, I could go on for a while.  Building a community isn’t easy, but it can still be fun.  You should enjoy interacting with your users/customers.  Building relationships is exciting and if you share a common passion, it becomes very easy.  So have fun with it, don’t stress out if you don’t see a community begin to rapidly develop right away.  It’s a very worthwhile commitment.

Here’s a good article from ReadWriteWeb on effective methods for community building for start-ups.

We had a great talk with Stuart Foster yesterday as he was kind enough to share some of his ideas and thoughts to make Scribnia a better service.  This talk, was in fact, a perfect example of the value of empowerment that inspired this post.  Stuart, as usual, had a great deal of killer advice, but one piece really stood out to me…

In a community like Scribnia, it will bring in many different users and some will be more active than others.  Some will read reviews, some will review a little bit, some will review a bit more and a select few will become extremely active and evangelize your site and community.  To me, and to Scribnia, these “evangelist” community members are invaluable.  Their passion and excitement becomes contagious and makes others curious to find out why your service is valuable.

I consider our community extremely fortunate to have members that care so much about our service and the future of Scribnia. 

It is very important to embrace your community and reward them however you can.  Empower your users to contribute to the site with their thoughts and feedback and show them that you are actually acting on that feedback.

Picture cred: "Balakov"

Yesterday was my first day working with Scribnia at the Science Center here in Philadelphia.  I’ve been very excited to get started and for good reason.  So far the Scribnia team has been fun, smart and extremely motivated.  Already after discussing our goals and doing a bit of brainstorming, we have a lot of big ideas and exciting things coming your way.

As many of you know from previous posts, I will be the Community Manager for Scribnia.  This means I am here to help you and to connect with you, the members of our community, on a regular basis.  I will be spreading the word about Scribnia and all that we are doing to provide the best possible user experience.  That’s where you come in.  I hope that as you use Scribnia more and get comfortable with the service, that you’ll share with us any issues, recommendations or just anything that we could do better for you.  We want Scribnia to house a strong and active community of bloggers and readers.

I will be actively updating and connecting on twitter using the @Scribnia account so feel free to reach out to me at ANY time about anything at all. (I don’t really stop working…and that’s fine by me).  I will also be updating the blog regularly to share with you my experiences as a Community Manager for a web start-up and about anything else that I think might be interesting to you.

Aside from twitter you can also reach out to me on the Scribnia website with the private message feature, or at DavidSpinks@scribnia.com.  I’m really looking forward to connecting with all of you and to an exciting Summer.

People often ask why Scribnia is in private alpha. The question is definitely a good one and thus far we have done a poor job addressing it. Hopefully, this blog post will help our users understand our goals for the future.

Why private alpha?
Scribnia is password protected because we want to build a strong and large community before expanding.

How do you build a community?
Obviously, step 1 of building an online community is to have a product that users will find useful and exciting. Luckily, our users have provided an overwhelmingly positive response to Scribnia and we are more confident than ever we are on the right path. But no product comes out perfect the first time. Jack and I are always scrambling to make Scribnia better and each version of Scribnia incorporates direct feedback from our users. The hard work is definitely worth it; we are always getting closer to an application that our users will rave about.

Another way of building a web 2.0 community is to make it “viral.” Some sites bank on their viral nature to capture attention on the Internet. At Scribnia, though, our product is a database of high quality author reviews and a community of bright readers eager to share their opinions. We never want to sacrifice quantity of users for quality. Ideally, we want our future users to resemble those who currently use our site: intelligent, articulate, and discerning individuals. We devised a few ways to accomplish this goal.

• Make our users feel genuinely appreciated. We never want to get too focused on user acquisition that we stop caring about the people who drive Scribnia. For example, one of our favorite users David Schneider (Scribnia username: Webber) had a week or so where he was unable to use Scribnia because he was swamped with work. Webber writes phenomenal reviews and Jack and I noticed the difference. Today, I reached out to him personally. Users don’t realize how much of an impact that they can have, and I suspect David appreciated knowing he was missed. I am thrilled to report he is back on Scribnia and throwing up signature awesome reviews.
• Allow our current users invite others. Scribnia now offers alpha invites that current users can send to friends, family members, and other contacts. Users can even import their Gmail and Yahoo contacts to make the process as streamlined as possible. If our users are great, then chances are they know great people to invite to Scribnia.
• Reach out to authors that we respect. Authors that we read regularly tend to have intelligent audiences. When bloggers write about Scribnia, these audiences get exposed to our service and join our community.

We are always open to ideas. How else should we go about building a community? Do any of our readers have other experiences participating in an “alpha” community?