Manager une communauté

Martin Reed bâtit et gère des communautés sur Internet. Il est l’auteur de l’excellent blog, Communityspark. Personnellement, j’aime beaucoup Martin parce qu’il est concret : il sait de quoi il parle. Dans cette interview qu’il m’a gentiment accordé (*), il considère la création les communautés comme un art où l’erreur et le doute permettent d’avancer.

Martin, who you are you and what do you do?
I am an accidental community builder! I started Just Chat (http://www.justchat.co.uk) in 2000 as a link list, but it soon developed into an online community in its own right. I continued to develop it and learnt my community building skills as I went along. In 2006 I took over Soap Forum (http://www.soapforum.co.uk) as a dead community and reinvigorated it – it’s now an active community dedicated to discussing television soaps. My latest project is Female Forum (http://www.femaleforum.com/) which launched in September, 2008. I am very happy with how that community is coming along – we are at around 500 members and almost 10,000 forum posts so far.

How long have you been community builder?
Just Chat launched in 2000, so I would say I have been building communities for around 9 years.

How looks like your average day?
Every day is different. As a community builder you are dealing with people – who are unpredictable. Some days will be easy and positive. Others will be complicated and negative. It still surprises me how childish some adults can be – community management sometimes feels like you are babysitting. At other times, you are truly touched by how powerful and positive online communities can be.

Generally speaking, the first thing I do is visit my communities and get a general overview of the discussions that have been taking place. I’ll get involved in some of them, and deal with any offensive or potentially abusive content. Then, I’ll work on any outstanding emails.

The rest of the day will be spent generally ‘building community’. I’ll work through my ‘to do’ list, which may mean adding or editing certain features, tweaking site design or general matchmaking.

What are the main achievements your online communities did and make you pride of?
I am proud of all my online communities, in different ways. At Just Chat, people have got married after meeting there. That just blows me away. On a smaller scale, I have logged into Soap Forum to find members have developed their own ‘member of the month’ awards. They came up with the categories, nomination and voting mechanism. All by themselves. That made me proud.

Do you know the names of your top 20 most active contributors? Do they know yours?
Yes and yes. As a community manager you simply cannot answer ‘No’ to either of those questions.

Today, one says that the community manager should be playing a key role in organizations (as Connie Bensen recently pointed out, his name is changing too, from Community manager to Chief Community Officer). What do you think about it? And how do you think our job would evolve?
The semantics don’t bother me – I think they can actually be distracting. It doesn’t matter what you are called, the role should still be the same; to be involved in your community, represent the business to your members, and represent the community to the business.

You just can’t be an effective community manager for a business if you don’t have a key role or communication channels within the business. If this is becoming more recognised, then great – but it should have been like this from the start.

When I build online communities, I like to make people meet for real. To me, it’s an important part of the process of building relationships and trust. Do you organize real life events with your communities? If so, what have you learnt from it and would you encourage community builders to do it?
I don’t, but I would like to do so in the future. Our members have met on a number of ‘unofficial’ meets and they really help strengthen relationships, and consequently the community.

We, online community builders, have a lot to learn from real-life community specialists. Why our two worlds are so « divided »?
People think that because communities are online, they are different. They aren’t. We should enjoy this perceived division while we can. As soon as offline community builders realise what they are missing out on, we are going to be in a far more competitive environment.

Group building theories, psychology, learning… What are the other fields you think a community manager shoud look at in order to improve his/her skills?
All good fields you have mentioned there and I’m not sure what I can add. Psychology and behavioural analysis is far more important that learning about technology and the ‘behind the scenes’ architecture of communities.

Today, lots of people are very (too?) focused on technology when building communities. What would you tell them?
Forget technology. Focus on people. You are building relationships – not a supercomputer. Simple as that.

What are your 3 favorite online communities?
I don’t like naming specific communities, but I will mention two that I particularly like (but don’t necessarily use).

I love the way SingSnap.com has embraced a subject that participants are passionate about (karaoke) and utilised video to build a community. Video is extremely under-utilised in online communities. It has huge value and needs to be used more.

I love the value that websites such as VisaJourney.com offer. A simple forum setup, but with content that is highly valuable. It’s great seeing people uniting to help each other out at a frustrating and often difficult time in their lives.

What are the online communities you would have dreamt to built?
I wish I had the idea for SingSnap.com – I was kicking myself for not coming up with that one! I am not jealous of any other communities, or wish I had built them. All communities are different; they have different values, different members and different cultures. I love the individual communities I have built and prefer to focus on what I am doing to strengthen my own communities rather than looking at other communities with envious eyes.

What are your favorites blogs & forums about community management?
Patrick O’Keefe is someone that should always be consulted for community management advice. He published the book, ‘Managing Online Forums’ and I challenge any community builder not to gain value from it. He blogs at ManagingCommunities.com

I enjoy reading Angela Connor’s blog at http://blog.angelaconnor.com – she also has a book about to be published titled, ‘18 Rules of Community Engagement’ and I can’t wait to read it.

Other community building resources (in no particular order): http://www.feverbee.com/, http://blog.freshnetworks.com/, http://www.spring.org.uk/ and of course, http://conniebensen.com/

What would you say to our french community managers community?
Don’t make the mistake of thinking there are right and wrong answers. Community building is an art, not a science. What works for one community may not work for another. Don’t be afraid to experiment. You will make mistakes – that’s fine, just be sure to say sorry when you do. Show you are human, and always be thinking.

Le blog de Martin Reed : http://www.communityspark.com
Son Twitter : http://twitter.com/martinreed

(*) L’interview est en anglais, et j’en suis désolé pour ceux qui ne le parle pas : je vais essayer de la traduire d’ici à la fin de semaine. Si quelqu’un veut se lancer, qu’il me le dise avant ;)

Tags: communistyspark, community management, community manager, Créer une communauté, interview, Martin Reed