Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities Kindle Edition

When Amy Jo Kim wrote the book, she was running Naima, a firm specialzied in the design and set up of web communities. A lot of the communities that she talks about in the book (Heat, Ultima Online, Castle Infinity) are (old) game communities, but she also worked with people from Adobe, eBay, MTV or Yahoo! And interestingly, a lot of the practices that she highlights to build and manage web communities still apply today.

"The focus is on teaching you how to grow a thriving community that will attract and sustain members, and on how to adress the design, technical and policy issues that will inevitably arise"

I know the following is a big chunk of text, but you migh want to skip some points… or you can still read the book :

- Purpose: It’s important to know why people join the community and what drives their participation. Ideally, a virtual community’s design and tools will be adapted to this purpose. Amy Jo Kim has a great adaptation of Maslow hierarchy of needs pyramid adapted to we communities (p.9), but she also highlights that it’s fundamental for a community to be profitable: “A successful community must attract and keep enough members to make it worthwile. It must also deliver a satisfactory ROI to whoever is funding and/or maintaining it. If either one of these standards is not met, the community will eventually fail“. On community websites like patientslikeme, you’ll understand a purpose rapidly, and it also managed to be sustainable.
- Places: It’s obvious that popular venues for communities to gather are websites like social networks, contest platforms or web forums. The book also talks about places that I know less of: mailing lists, message boards, virtual world, chats… Then, Kim gives some about growth management, design and community proximity on these venues, which is crucial to adapt to change.
- Profiles: Since “entering a new web community can feel like walking into a party full of strangers“, communities must include ways to get to know people. People want to present themselves, and similarly they want to discover who they’re dealing with. It’s important to note that not all members will be curiously browsing others’ profiles and communicating with them, but transparency is important anyway. “On the web, full disclosure is good business“, Kim says.
- Roles: Here, Kim introduces the particularly interesting concept of Membership Life Cycle. She argues that “you can help a community flourish by providing features and programs that support [social] roles“. Reserach has also shown that design features can activate community participation in innovation communities, but to my knowledge research on membership lifecycle is not extensively covered. Do you have any thoughts or papers to share on that?
- Leadership: Regarding how centralized a community’s management is, a web community needs people to take leadership roles in both animation and controling. “For games or contests, you’ll need support personnel who can resolve technical issues, and deal with reports of cheating and systems hacking“, Kim says about rather centralized management sites. Also, she has a great table that summarizes leaders’ possible roles in a community (p.163), including both official and unofficial leadership roles.
- Etiquette: When exchange and interaction is the fundamental purpose of a community (like learning-focused communities), it’s important to have a common understanding of the tone people will adopt. One example is the use of the formal you (vous in French, Sie in German, usted in Spanish…). In English the problem doesn’t arise since there is no formal you, but you must know how you talk to members: will they be offended if you have a familiar tone? Or do they expect everyone to show closeness?
- Events: According to Kim, the three types of events are meetings, performances and competitions. These types of events need to be planned thoroughly, but when they’re well-executed and well-attended, they will ty together the community by bringing them together. About contests, Kim says that “the most effective contests contribute to long-term community building [...] by reinforcing a community’s purpose, values, and brand identity“.
- Rituals: As you could see on the Membership Life Cycle illustration, there are rituals. These might mark transitions between stages of the Life Cycle (thus occuring only once), or they can be repeated: making a targetted recommendation, remembering special days, mark holidays… I particularly like Kim’s paragraph The Power of Goodbye (p.281), where she highlights that “leave-taking also offers an opportunity to ritualize the community experience“.
- Subgroups: Particularly if your community is big and has the possibility to organize autonomously, it might be valuable to allow members to form or join subgroups. Since “simply joining a large, general-purpose [...] community doesn’t give someone much sense of community identity“, people might want to be part of smaller, focused sub-groups. However, Kim stresses that this might only be valuable in later stages of communities’ evolution.

These principles are, as I think, very true today! If you think it’s too old to be true!

Great book to take as a foundation to bring it back up to date. The basic ideas are still valid, but their understaning and implementation have changed substantially. Definitely needs to be remastered.

an intelligent, thorough snapshot of community building in corporate and business environments in 2006. While dated in some ways, many of the principles for designing and building communities are evergreen, being rooted in the multiple realities- social, political and financial- that control the philosophy of communities.

Online communites exist in many forms. I'm particulalrly interested at the moment in the development of MOOCs - the cMOOC type in particualr - and building community is a vital part of the enteprise. In her book Amy Jo Kim demonstrates a great deal of wisdom and experience in her advice. From dealing with growth to creating presence and roles for users there is a lot of useful material here. While the recent book by Robert Kraut and company covers many of the same issues Kim's text is a better introduction for people new to community building on the web.

The best book ever written on the subject. Should be required reading for anyone creating, managing, or contributing to an online community.

This wasn't exactly focused on building a community on a blog but it had lots of great ideas and examples for anyone working on creating a virtual community.

I'm an independent consultant on interactive technologies and web community building. I've read a number of books and articles giving advice about online communities, and none comes close to matching Amy Jo Kim's. Her book is the most exceptional in integrating human and technical considerations; describing how sites can launch, expand and evolve; giving lots of first-hand examples; and being an easy, fun read. I get the sense from her Naima company site that she's on the leading edge for design and technical approaches.
I'm personally working now with communities for performing artists and software developers. This book is the only one I'm willing to carry with me on all my customer consulting visits.

I borrowed this from my local library and found it so helpful that I hunted down a used copy. It's not a technical reference, but it provides a great overview of the elements of online community, with authentic examples from existing communities (some of which, sadly, are now gone, but this was written before the bubble burst). Highly recommended if you are responsible for developing and supporting an online community, or if you are just interested in how thinking in online communities has been developing in the early days.