A piece of good advice sampled from the e-mint (online community managers) list.
Dan Dixon writes:
"Another thing to encourage is meeters and greeters.
Actively say hi to every new joiner. Posting the first message somewhere can be a scary and exposing action and just a simple affirmation of this to the person who posted is a great thing. The only problem with this is when it looks like a robot is doing it. So you need real live bodies from your community to do this. It's too big (and stupid) a job for just one person. This wont get more people taking part but will reduce your "one post and I'm outa here" churn.
And again what Ian said about designing for your community. It's easy to copy something else that works, but it's the community you need to look at not the technology. There are nearly 100 sites using slashcode, but only one slashdot."
At boo, one of the most useful jobs in the whole company was done by this young Swedish girl. She cruised around the office, smiled, and took everyone's photo for the directory. Not only was it one of the few workplaces where you could put a name to a face easily but you felt like you were part of something.
I'm still undecided about the best approach for this project, groupware-wise. Most of you are sending me direct emails which works well for me but it rules out any lurking which is kinda the point.
You shouldn't feel compelled to a) receive and b) respond to everything being churned out by the project but the more stuff that goes into sharable resources the more likely that others can pick up on it.
There is also a new addition to the headbin homepage, a list of the most recent comments so you can see which bits of the blog are active, and who's around to meet.
Posted by .M. at April 16, 2004 12:40 AM