Thanks to the Internet, blockchains, and rep systems, there has never been a better time to build best-in-class communities. Liberated from positions of prejudice and proximity, every individual now has the power to connect with others anywhere around the world and form cohorts, working towards making their own dent in the universe.

This post here today will dive into several aspects of communities and things to look out for as you navigate through the Cambrian-explosion of online communities. I hope this guide will prove to be useful for those trying to build effective communities and those who are looking into leveraging the many pools of cognitive surpluses available on the Net.

Before diving in further into the topic, please note that valuable communities revolve around authenticity and transparency. Due to the contributory nature of such communities, please note that the monetization aspect is the most difficult and can only come in at the final stages of community-building. These communities (or guilds) can be public, semi-private, private, and they generally fall into two classes:-

1. DIY / Prosumer communities
   Usually united around massive transformative purposes, these communities are occupied by those who are committed in contributing voluntarily to innovate the space. That said, there are really no better folks than those who find their work meaningful and important.

2. Exponential communities
   Pretty much like the previous one, but with a focus on exponential technologies (machine-learning, 3d-printing, microgrids, cryptocurrency, etc). Inhabitants in these communities generally sharing their datasets, techniques, and experiences.

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Eight steps to building a thriving community

This section presents a highly-summarised version a chapter found in a book written by Peter Diamandis. While this is certain useful for building communities, you may also use this as a method to identifying and evaluating great communities.

1. Identity—What Is Your MTP?
2. Designing Your Community Portal
3. Early Days of Building Your Community
4. Creating Community Content
5. Engagement and Engagement Strategies
6. Managing Your Community
7. Driving Growth
8. Monetization

Step 1: Identifying Massive Transformation Purpose (MTP)

Basically a clear and passionate mission statement to attract supporters. Storytelling should be emphasised. It's important here because people need to know about you, and why you're doing whatever you're doing.

Step 2: Designing A Community Portal

This is pretty much delivering on the best User Experience / User Interface (UX / UI) which includes:-

• Authentic-design
  Just start something, anything to get the ball rolling!

• Navigation
  Easy, intuitive categorisation and information searching.

• Simple registration
  Make it low-barrier for anyone to join, without compromising too much on security and quality membership.

• The Information
  It helps to understand why people join communities here: a sense of belonging, a support network, greater influence, and a way to sate curiosity / explore new ideas. So in my opinion, information that reinforces these deep needs of the community should be what's consumed, produced, and promoted on the platform.

• Recognition
  This is essentially some kind of reputation economics - leaderboard / rating system. This appeals to our need be recognised and celebrated for our contributions. Personally, I think the future of communities will levels on a multi-rep system instead of one kind of reputation score.

• Scalability
  This is not merely to find a way to support more and more members / interactions on the community platform. It needs to be understood that innovation thrives in bottom-up, messy configurations. However it could also quickly get out of hand, so one of the remedies is to have a system that allows community members to break down into small cohorts of their own. Nobody will be able to work effectively in a group of 1000, but 100 groups of 10 should work much better and more intimately. This is largely due to our cognitive limitations and valency.

Step 3: Early Days of Building Your Community

A quality, core-community should be the goal here before anything else.

“The bigger a community gets, the less people participate. This creates wastage and makes it impossible for the community manager to identify and work with the top members. Better to extract 1 hour a day from 100 committed members than have 50,000 mostly inactive lurkers. Stay small and extract maximum value from the few, not a little from the many.”
_{by Richard Millington (Feverbee)}

Ways to achieve this include the following:-

• Be the first-mover
  Mission statement / MTP should be unique enough even though there are communities which are generally occupying the same space. If your community is the only space to achieve a certain kind of goal / conversation, then your battle is already half-accomplished.

• Handpick early-members
  Early adopters are the best kind of supporters. Take the time to study those these members and why they're spending time on your platform. Select a few, 10 to 15 - make them ambassadors. Ask for their feedback, their advice. In general, don't go for established or big names because they wouldn't have the time. Better to focus on those who have been putting good time and effort into your community.

• Establish a newcomer ritual
  Make people feel like belong, but make them earn it. Create a ritual and identify useful, measurable milestones.

• Listen
  Your vision is nothing without supporters. Pay attention and change / adapt when necessary. Steer your community, not control it.

Step 4: Creating Community Content

Content is largely a byproduct of the activities that go around in a community - it comes with the territory. Below are the five basic content categories that should be expected and planned for:-

• The future
  Basically content regarding upcoming events to inform the community, and also predictions that invite discussion / debate.

• The news
  Spotlights, breaking news, news roundups, and reviews. Be sure to also consider internal happenings between community members as part of the news. To differentiate, give your news section an edge, some twist.

• The interview
  A powerful tool for building engagement, interviews / AMAs should be directed to both community members and individuals that are external to the platform. Just keep in mind it's also usually best to approach those who are eager to give quality insights. Their status and "brandname" is secondary.

• Advice
  Founders / emergent leaders could produce content for the community - be it in the form of plain advice, guides, and tutorials. Other than that, content that solicit advice from a diverse range of disciplines and interests may do very well in producing solutions. Problem-solving is huge and beneficial.

• The guest
  Co-writing / co-production - it goes both ways. The point is to reach different audiences in different platforms. In this case, collaborative works that span and occupy a variety of platforms should ultimately benefit your community platform. It could come with larger exposure of your platform, and even improving its reputation and presence in the game.

Step 5: Engagement and engagement strategies

It all usually starts from low-friction engagement. The next step is to draw community members in to engage more deeply with others. Forming connections and relationship with other community members generate real emotions - this is key. Come for the ideas, stay for the emotions.

Make it easy to community and increase the chances of collaboration, all by employing the following:-

• Reputation
  A local / global reputation system with leaderboards and such will inspire a healthy mix of competition and collaboration.

• The meetup
  Meet up IRL - make real connections. It could be from conventions to casual coffee meetups.

• The challenge
  Throw challenges at the community - whether if it's a prized contest or heated debate. Use deadlines, encourage participation. Important note - this is important to reward performers. Keep the challenge high enough for progress, or else the community will become a boring, dead space.

• Visuals
  Super important to communicate ideas well enough. Personally, I find many community members don't digest writeups well enough. A strong focus on visuals - summarised eye candies are important for things to be easily shared, inviting participation.

• Be a connector
  Study your community and its members. Try to engage them and also introduce members to each other. You can encourage and steer interpersonal engagements by suggesting topics that like-minded individuals would appreciate.

Step 6: Managing your community

This is an art in itself. While it's important to keep things messy and somewhat chaotic to promote creativity and innovation, it pays to have a certain frame of mind when it comes to maintaining the goals / relevance of the community. Below are some tips:-

• Be a benign dictator (or better word: overseer / leader)
  Your vision matters, so be transparent about it. Establish parameters and reserve your right to have the final say in matters. The community is there to give suggestions, not change the entire mission of your project. However, also keep in mind that a dictator may not be right all the time. Allow for necessary pivots and changes in your project once new, useful insights flow are formed.

• Stay calm
  Do not try to control your community too much. The community will regulate itself. Only intervene when it is absolutely necessary.

• Don't hardsell stuff
  Let the marketplace emerge from conversations. Support your members, not sell stuff to them.

• Retention matters
  Bigger is not always better. A quality userbase can be far more valuable than a supermassive group of headless chickens. Find ways to avoid losing members before shooting for mainstream participation.

• Curate
  Perhaps this will only matter if the community is large and growing. You will also need others who understand your stance. Build a curation guild to sift through contents. Find the most valuable pieces of content / interaction and make it a part of the broader consensus by exposing them.

• Delegate
  Have a say in delegations. Give time for community leaders emerge out of the ethers of projects and conversations. Find your best commentators and use them for the comments section. Friendly users take part in the introduction section. Study your community and distribute leaderships accordingly. Give guidelines, training, and perks.

Step 7: Driving growth

Make sure to keep refining your mission statement and have a good progression through Steps 1 to 6 before investing substantial time and effort into growth. Below are seven guidelines to increasing the value of your community / platform.

• Evangelism
  Get community members talking about your effort (and others within the community). Bring in the stoics, and bring in the dreamers. Plant big ideas, and tell others about your thoughts and strategies. Keep a development blog on it.

• Play well with others
  Do stuff, partner up with other platforms and communities.

• Competition
  This is self-explanatory. Employ reputation systems, leaderboards, contests, etc.

• Pick a (healthy) fight
  If there's a consensus about an "enemy", go for it. Keep a level head and focus on the validity of differences. Keep it healthy and stay out of perpetual rivalries - it could be myiopic and unhealthy for growth. That said, good battles have a way of strengthening communities.

• Buzz marketing
  Make special, make it edgy, make it Instagrammable. From flash mobs to silly advertisement, there's nothing to lose trying out something simple to potential virality.

• Host events
  Bring people together. Magic happens.

• Technical optimizations
  SEO stuff. Ads, sharables, etc - plenty of guides online.

Step 8: Monetization

For communities to be sustainable, it could either have its own economy to upkeep platform costs, or it could be monetized in some ways. Here are some tips:-

• Authenticity and transparency
  Make it clear to others from the get go if you're planning on monetizing the community. Others will help you in your mission as well. It only makes sense for a community to be self-sustainable. Just don't hide the fact that you have plans to make money out of the venture.

• Sell what the community builds
  The best way to make money yourself is to help facilitate others so they can earn from your platform too. Communities generally build two kinds of stuff: products and expertise. Other than material goods, allow and promote the production of guides, ebooks, podcasts, and such.

• Cater to the core
  Give people what they want. Sell authenticity after you have established a good reputation in the community.

• The other typical stuff
  Sell memberships with real perks and such. Niche subscriptions could work too. This part is a tad tricky as it depends on community preferences and the nature of the platform.

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Steem / Steemit as a platform for communities

With communities and other updates in the roadmap, I think Steemit is definitely facilitating one of the core steps in community-formation - Step 2: Designing A Community Portal. Just note that anyone is also able to design specialised UX / UIs, depending on its importance for certain communities. It could augment Steemit's interface or replace it entirely.

Also, I think the fact that the blockchain is transparent helps with many aspects of communities including Working Out Loud. Keep your community contents and interactions on the blockchain!

Closing

Hopefully, this write-up has served its purpose in providing an overview of the important elements involved in community-building. Before ending this piece, I wish to remind that authenticity and transparency goes a long way into building the best kind of community. This seems to be the way things are, even with my limited experience building communities.

I wrote this as an easy way for me to start building (and improving) communities on the blockchain. Hope you find it interesting and more importantly, useful. Please share, bookmark, resteem, etc. Thank you for reading, and all the best!

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PDF cheatsheet download

I've condensed it into a cheat-sheet here for your perusal: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9bA1lYIwx-KRUlGUldVZXloRVk/view?usp=sharing

Extra stuff

• Here's an interesting article: TopCoder’s 5 Steps to Building a Global Workforce Community
• Here's a video on Working Out Loud:
  

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_{Disclaimer: This guide largely structured and inspired by Peter Diamandis in his book BOLD. If you think this is interesting, the book will provide more comprehensive details on the matter. All images for open use, attribution free.}

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