Building online communities (that last).
Avoiding Ghost Towns, Service Stations, & Strip Malls
on your community platform.
What is a Ghost Town?
You hear about an amazing community and decide to join. Yay 🙌
You login to the community platform (Slack, LinkedIn or a paid platform like Circle or Guild) and the last post is from Christmas last year…. 👻
You’ve entered a Ghost Town.
2. What is a Service Station?
When you first arrive it looks like a functioning online community but oh wait….
It’s just the admin posting again and again, trying desperately to get people to engage.
Much like a service station, you’ll stop in when you absolutely have to but you won’t enjoy it and you won’t be sticking around.
3. What is a Strip Mall?
Essentially everyone’s selling something but none of it is anything you want to buy.
Welcome to the Strip Mall. If you’ve ever joined a community platform, only to realise that everyone is talking AT each other rather than TO each other, you’re in a strip mall.
4. What is the solution?
You might be asking yourself questions like:
Are we using the right platform?
Do we have the right onboarding process?
Can we recruit more volunteers to act as digital ambassadors?
These are all tools but ultimately they won’t get to the root cause.
Thriving communities have BELONGING + PURPOSE. There’s no magic formula for this but being intentional about creating both will go a long way.
Here are three easy ideas for both —>
Increasing BELONGING:
Channel Veronica and ask members to share their stories or recent projects
Organise a #Random_Coffee to allow members to meet each other 1-1
Take a page out of Priya Parker’s book and organise a virtual networking event that doesn’t suck (pro tip- it’s all about structure.)
Increasing PURPOSE:
Go back to your ‘WHY’ (if you need to do some brainstorming with a big note pad, that’s encouraged) and put the ‘why’ at the centre of your onboarding process.
Give members the opportunity to help each other, this could be one-off mentoring or an action learning set or even as simple as having a question channel on your platform.
Ask your members why they joined the community and how they are benefiting being a part of it. It might surprise you, give you some new direction/inspiration
🧙♀️🔮 LET’S GET RID OF GHOST TOWNS, SERVICE STATIONS AND STRIP MALLS FOREVER 🧙♀️🔮
Want to chat more about your online community, book in a free intro call.
