Nomad

One of the main reasons why big organizations and companies should run communities is because they can use the communities to offer support. Paypal has a community where users get help from other users. Adsense has a community where the users get advice and tips form other users. Instead of letting these communities run on their own businesses some step forward and take charge so that community continues to offer valuable services to the users.

In democracy, the leaders are the servants of the people. The entire purpose of leadership is to serve the people. Sadly, this system of governance is not working even in the countries where there is a democratic government. Just like in the politics, the entire community exist for the people, if there are no people, the community is the ghost town. Sadly the entire leadership of the community is centralized, all power remains in one person and it is run by the whim of one person.

I was once in a community working as a moderator and the operation manager organized meeting every alternate day. There was no important agendas to discussed but the manager just wanted to talk, he did not care about what other thought. If you are trying to organize staff meetings, make sure your have the right agenda, and also make sure your agenda is something very important for your community.

I was not familiar with the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy. But after reading this short piece I think what Blue Ocean Strategy actually means. The first community I created was a community for in house writers on my multi author blogs. After running the blog for some time, found that my writers would benefit if there was a place where they could connect with other writers, shares their ideas and opinions. The most important thing to remember while creating a community is identifying the need and the second step is fulfilling that need. I was able to identify the need and then fulfilled the need by creating a community.

I like the concept of search engines, a tool that allows you to find information for free, I like the concept of social media, a free platform for communication, networking, business, and marketing. I like the concept of video platforms, free platforms where we can post videos and make money. I am for free stuff, therefore, I believe AI should also be given for free for social good or greater good. Well, the company can have ads or offer limited access for free users, after all they have done the hard work to develop it and deserves to make money out of it.

The most important thing required for a community is to have a niche. Niche means the central theme of your community. niche describes what your community is about. If you do not have a niche, you cannot attract users. You can build a thriving community only when you have a niche and then promote your community amongst the people who are interested in your niche. To manage your community effectively, you need to know how to bring more users and how to encourage people to participate in the discussion.

It is true that building a brand is very important as it not only builds your customer base but also helps you generate sales. But sad to say that small organizations, businesses, or even communities cannot build their brand. I mean can an online community built its own brand like multi billion dollars companies like Facebook and Twitter have done? But marketing, of course can help you, as marketing basically focuses on sales and traffic.

When it comes to using Generative AI tool like ChatGPT, I am still novice. I have used ChatGPT for a lot of things like topic research, generating outlines, generating content, keywords research, I am yet to look into greater things like leveraging the power of Gen AI for community management.

The only role that I can see Generative AI playing in online communities is related to content creation. I am running a couple of communities and I have also been a staff on a lot of communities and based on my experience I can say a lot of users are using Generative AI to create content. The community thrives in human interactions and if the users start using AI, the communities will lose their purpose.

Just like the real world organizations, online communities also need rules to operate. If there are no rules, your community will become a jungle and you do not want to happen that. Therefore, you need clearly written rules that guide your community. Guidelines are not just words, they are the set rules that would be followed. There are a lot of things to remember while creating guidelines but the most important one is to keep them simple so that no one has any problem following them

I was once an active user on a gaming community where the moderator started giving me a lot of headache. When it went out of hand, I left the community. This experience taught me the importance of managing anxiety in online communities. That's how I ended up with my own mental health community. Just like in the real world, virtual world can also be very stressful and you might experience a lot of mental health issues.

If you are running a community, it is very important that you curate an email list and send emails on a regular basis. It is easy to build an email list if you are running a community as you can use your registered users' email for your email list. Building an email list is not enough, you also need to send emails. However, it is very important not to spam your users. If you send a lot of emails., your users will start unsubscribing.

Just like an individual has a personality, your community also has a personality. Your community's personality is built through your mission statement. Your community's identity is based on one basic thing: why the community exist. If you can clearly explain what you are, why do you exist, what you aim to do, you will be able to built a personality. If you are able to do that you will also be able to bring in users and activities.

Fake information is quite common in communities. As long as the content are created by registered users, it is very common for fake information. That's why it is very important to have moderators who can fact check information and make sure only authentic information are allowed to appear in the community.

Some topics are controversial in there nature. For instance, if you are running a community on topics like religion, politics or ethnicity, you will see sooner or later, there will be controversies in your community. However, even in communities that are not based these controversial topics, controversies are quite common. I believe moderate level of controversies are good for the community engagement.

Online communities are created and managed by humans for humans. While some people say it is not good to depend on the numbers for success when it comes to analyze online communities, a community basically thrives on the number of active users and number of daily activities. I see some community users using bots to post replies, the communities will succeed only when there are humans interacting with humans.

I see the market section on a lot of communities, I use these marketplaces to buy and sell services. But sadly, not many people are using these marketplaces to buy and sell. I think marketplace is one of the least cared section in online communities.

"Perfection" Yes, that's the word you need to avoid. If you are trying to create a perfect community, your attempt will go futile as there is no such thing as perfect. If you make too many rules to make your community perfect, you will not have a lot of users and engagement.

Yes, I offer basic look. I do not go after elaborate design. My sites are basically content site where visitors can read and interact, so I try to make my site easy to navigate and easy to read and post.

Do you want to live in your own hose or do you want to live in a rented house. If you can answer this question, it will be a lot easier to choose between hosted forums and self hosted forms. It is all about what you want to do with your forum.

Paying for posting on your forum is not a sustainable method. But hiring paid poster and asking them to post high quality content will help you in the long run as you will be able to attract traffic based on the quality content on your site.

I think I am more successful on Facebook than any other social sites. I have multiple pages on Facebook and some of these pages have over 10k followers. I use Facebook for promoting my products, services, as well as website, I manage to get decent traffic from Facebook. After Facebook, Twitter has worked best for me.

That's very true, short form videos are better than long form if you are trying to market your products and services. However, if you want to monetize your video content you will have to start posting long form videos

Even though I have account on over a dozen social sites, I am daily active only on two social sites and weekly on a couple of sites. I am active only on sites where I have managed to build considerable amount of followers.

The most important think is to check the source. If the link is from reputed media companies like The New York Times, CNN, BBC, etc. you can trust the news. These days it is very common for media company to use social sites to distribute news.