Steve Shu's 21Publish Blog

I happened to virtually connect up with Beth Kanter after noticing some referral traffic from her post related to blog communities and non-profits. Beth poses a very interesting question as to whether there are some principles of design or good practice for facilitating blog communities.

Of course, as a vendor of turnkey group & branded blog communities, 21Publish tries to build enabling capabilities into its products that facilitate community and group blogs. That said, technology is only one piece, and I really think that there are some things about good communities that can be segmented into organizational, technology, and sector-specific (e.g., non-profit, church, education) areas.

Note that the following lists are just off-the-top of my head. Beth asks some great questions, and I'm trying to step back from what I've seen and talked about with people from all walks of life in corporate, non-profit, fun, etc. communities.

Organizational Observations

1. Ideally, the first bloggers in a community should have a clue about blogging. I have seen a number of communities die because the first bloggers authoring in a community or group blog setting think that blogging is an editorial-grade communications channel. Consider coming down a level and communicating with people as normal human beings. On the flip side, I have seen some early bloggers come into a community with their first post along the lines of "hi everyone, just watching to see what happens. what do I do?". Nothing wrong with that, but wihtout something else there, the community has nowhere to go.
2. 90%+ of the time, the early bloggers in a community do not have a clue. No fault of their own. Despite all of the info that bloggers follow on the growth of the blogosphere doubling hand over fist, blogging is still new to the majority of folks. By having a community manager or others in the community that welcome new people as they join ... this provides positive reinforcement. New people look to others for role models and/or people they can adopt some new "blog skills from". Compare that to an individual blog on an island. When that blog starts up, who helps that person? I can hear the crickets chirping over the silence ...
3. Blogging is not rocket science, but people need feedback and tips. Despite the basic nature of blogging, there are many times that I need to explain to someone what the purpose a title portion of a blog post serves. Sometimes the conversation might get as advanced as talking about what a trackback is. Whatever the case may be, the community manager should be certain that there is a nurturing structure for new bloggers, whether that be turning to other bloggers, help text, newsletter, support community, community manager, or a moderator/facilitator (as with bulletin boards).

Technology Observations

1. Blog communities can get large, so there should be ways to optimize navigation into the community. One of the concepts we use at 21Publish is to highlight "big debates" or areas where there is either a lot of or recent commenting going on within blogs in the network. Although I don't have a lot of scientific information on the value of this yet, my post here
   seems to make a good case for having built-in community features like that because it reinforces activity. If the blog platform helps a community tailor and optimize web flow and real estate to the nature of the community, the better off the community will be.
2. Blog communities benefit when an organization has a choice between 1) open and closed enrollment and 2) public or private flavors to match the organizational need. Let's face it. Some conversations are better suited to closed groups or cases where registration is limited. Technology shouln't force things one way or the other. It should enable what an organization wants to achieve. I just finished a discussion with a couple of pastors. Say that a church wants to have a support group or a group that addresses addiction. Public blog communities provide a good support structure for conversation, but in this case a private blog community might be even better because it also protects individuals in need so that they can be helped.

Sector-Specific Observations

1. Still formulating my thoughts here, but I think I see communities that are organized around lifecycles of members work better than topic-only blog communities. For example, the BusinessWeek blog community is organized around prospective students, current students, and alumni. It seems to be working well because people from different phases of the b-school experience can help out one another (e.g., alums helping prospective students). In other communities I've seen, prospective purchasers of a product or class of products are helped by current users or addicts of a product. Alhtough it's hard for me to classify this as a sector-specific observation, I would say that some sectors are naturally aligned with continuous learning, ad-hoc and voluminous communications, helping others, and networking (e.g., nonprofits, education, churches). Regardless of sector, if one can twist the focus of the community so that things are self-reinforcing around lifecycle, I think this is one way where a community can be better off and healthier.
2. Many blog communities work better when authors can take comments head-on and when people within the community can hop into the conversation. Some sectors are better at this than others. It's no wonder that the political blogosphere becamse so prominent and well-developed. In general, communities that have commenting enabled seem to do better long run. Some platforms (like 21Publish) allow commenters to be restricted to authorized persons within an administrator-defined group. In most discussions with prospective customers I have taken the more conservative stance, i.e., if you are not ready to receive comments and/or are worried about malicious attacks, then turn comments off. That said, I just got off the phone with a prominent blogger in the church environment which is making me rethink my stance because his stance was stronger - that an organization has to (at some point) develop the fortitude to be able to take things head on. Clearly don't give up an ability to moderate or screen out comments, but put one's ideas out there if one truly has values and things that can be backed up. If such skills aren't there now in the blog community members, then it is something to work on.

Update (10/21/05): Beth summarized and consolidated here. Thanks!

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