FreshNetworks Blog

An article on journalism.co.uk shows the importance of nurturing and growing online communities carefully and strategically.

The Sportsman newspaper, which launched and then folded shortly afterwards last year, reportedly failed to take advantage of it’s forums and community sites. Even without the print version, this community, if managed successfully, could have become a revenue source in its own right. The problem, it seems, was that the community wasn’t set up or managed effectively. The firm moderating the site reports that in the space of about three weeks, the site’s activity dropped from about 300 posts a day to just 30. A small group of members had taken over, and despite warnings from other community members nothing was done about this.

There are many examples where a small number of troublemakers are allowed to take over a community and alienate the other members. In these cases what usually happens is that first other members will complain or try to take back their community; but if nothing happens they’ll just leave. To stop this happening is really about having two very clear processes in place:

1. Set-up and seeding - it’s critical that the community is designed in a way to appeal to the audience you want to attract, and then to work with a small number of community members to seed the community. To refine the structure and content and to help to establish the house rules. Getting these people on side at the start and spending time with them refining and finalising the community is critical.
2. Ongoing community management - good and ongoing management of the community is critical - of both the members and the discussions. House rules need to be enforced and troublesome users warned or removed. Trust is critical online and you can build this trust by being firm but fair and letting the broadest group of community members possible contribute.

There were no doubt other issues with the Sportsman forums and community, but the lack of sold set-up and seeding and an apparent unwillingness to deal with troublesome members certainly didn’t help

I was in a meeting last week where somebody said that somebody they had never met counted them as one of their oldest friends. Social networking sites and online communities give us the opportunity to find and socialise with people who share the same interests as us, wherever they may be. Geographical constraints are no longer such an issue and niche interests are less niche.

Some people say that online relationships will not replace real-world relationships, and I agree with them. Rather online relationships add a new category of friendship that was not easy to get previously.

Real-world relationships tend to start with experiences, be it a school, college, university or workplace, a neighbourhood, a hobby or even a party. You meet people at an experience and the relationship starts from there, and this original experience will always remain the one thing you have always shared. Online friendships are, on the other hand, built on interests. You share an interest and meet in a forum or community, you identify people who’ve been to the same country or stayed in the same hotel as you, you have the same hobbies or the same political or social beliefs. However your relationship develops, the original interest will be the one thing you have always shared.

I think that this distinction helps to understand how people bond online, and how relationships can be built in online communities and social networks.  It is no good hoping that people will form bonds or friendships just because they are a part of the same social network. This is a shared experience and the realm of real-world relationship building. Rather you need to find interests that will unite individuals and let them share in and build on these interests together.

This weekend, I have a house guest staying for a couple of weeks. I’ve never met the person in the real-world, but we’ve been friends online for years. We bonded over shared interests and hopefully over the next week or so we’ll build on this with some shared experiences.

For me, the opportunity to build friendships online isn’t a replacement for real-world relationships, but the opportunity to build friendships for very different reasons, and of very different kinds. And it’s exciting to live in a world where both kinds of relationships can exist.