Blog Communities: Evolved, or Intelligently Designed?

At today's BlogHer in San Jose, we discussed how to establish intelligent boundaries and scope to a community. The basic takeaway? Let your users guide you. You must understand not only the purpose of the community, but also the purpose of the individual.

Any community needs to strike a careful balance - the community needs a clear purpose of its own, but it must also do a good job of meeting individual needs in order to sustain membership. It's important to talk to nascent community members to find out exactly what it is that they want. Even the most intelligent design will miss the mark, if community members are not involved in setting purpose and norms. This implies that a healthy community will bake in "continuous listening," and its purpose and norms will evolve over time. It's noteworthy that many communities develop spontaneously, rather than according to plan.

One example: From Stanford Law School, Lauren Gelman spoke of how the female students perceived that men and women were receiving unequal treatment. The community then realized that if they faced this challenge, then it was likely that women attending other law schools felt the same way. When translating this community to the web, they had to deal with some basic questions: What would the site be "about?" How many bloggers would be posting to the site? As the community evolved, it then made changes that reflected the needs of its community members.

How can you engage your community? A couple of key differentiators came up in conversation:

• Writing style and voice make a difference. Stepping outside of a customary, expository style and into a more open-ended, conversational style would provoke different levels of comment and interaction.
• Using multiple media types that can engage different types of users often has a huge impact.
• Moving to a blog from a message board will change the type of engagement that users develop within a community. Many individuals find that a message board provides the data that one needs, but it doesn't develop the sense of community that a blog can. Message boards are a one-night stand, while blogs are a relationship. (So, are women drawn more to blogs than they are to message boards? Ha.)

With time, online communities will go on to develop strong self-policing around its policies and norms. The community norm at Share Your Story, a March of Dimes-sponsored site for parents with children in the ICU, is that no story remains unresponded. Since these blogs are often the first time that users are putting content online, community norms have been tested many times. For example, if you blog more than once in one day, you are considered a "blog hog." A team of health professionals has also started reviewing posts to look for false submissions. Over time, the site's impact has become enormous, with people sharing their lives during a very difficult personal time.

Community participation is not just about how you write, or what tools you use. It's about what you want to share with others, and what you expect to get out of participating. As a blogger, are you simply looking to vent, or do you have a specific need to be heard and to connect with others? Ultimately, these preferences are just as important as subject matter when joining a shared interest community.

Tags: christine herron christine.net blogher blogher06 community best practices technology

Comments

[Camillus]

Take care of it and keep it on the road!

[Shannon]

I started a petition for congressional bill forcing publicly funded schools to teach this as an alternative to the dominant "make-it-up-as-I-go-along theory".