• 30-10-10

• 90-9-1

• Advocate

• Abuse Reports

• Badges

• Ban

• Blog

• Community Guidelines

• Community Manager

• Community Operations

• Critical Mass

• Deflection

• Employee Guidelines

• Engagement

• Forum

• Gamification

• Groups

• Header

• Ideation

• Knowledge Base

• Labels

• Leaderboards

• Member Onboarding

• Minimum Viable Community

• Moderator

• Moderator Guidelines

• Ranks

• Responsiveness

• Roles & Permissions

• Solution Rate

• Superusers

• Tags

• Topics

• Terms of Service

• Thread Depth

• Total Registered Members

• Tribal Knowledge

30-10-10

A phenomenon first described by Joe Cothrel regarding the conversion rates of .com visitors to community visitors and contributors. It posits that in a 30-day period, 10% of .com home page visitors will click through to the community and 10% of community visitors will contribute. 

In practice, this rule can be used to make predictions about the volume of traffic and engagement a community is likely to experience, particularly in the early days. However, its real usefulness is as a benchmark to identify when tactical improvements are needed, such as in promotion of the community on the homepage, or in mechanisms and incentives for visitors to join and contribute. 

Note that your mileage will almost certainly vary, as many factors affect conversion and participation rates. This rule is also scale-sensitive, with very high-volume .coms such as media sites achieving conversion rates as low as 1% even with effective tactics.

Listen: Episode 8

90-9-1

Often referred to as “participation inequality”, 90-9-1 is an observation about the makeup of online community spaces that was observed by Will Hill and popularized by Jakob Neilson in the early 2000’s. It posits that, at any given point in time, 90% of users consume content, 9% of users contribute occasionally, and 1% of users actively contribute the majority of content.

In practical use, it can be combined with the 30-10-10 forecast to make predictions about the volume of engagement a community may experience. Note that your mileage will almost certainly vary, as communities and their audiences’ usage patterns have matured significantly since the early 2000’s.

Listen: Episode 8

Advocate

An individual that displays overwhelmingly positive sentiment for, and often speaks with authority about, a particular brand, product, or service. Common motivations include a true belief in the benefits, a desire to be seen as an expert, and career growth aspirations.

While Advocates may have some overlap with community Top Contributors (“Superusers”), they often participate in different types of activities and behaviors. It is important to understand the differences and approach them with programs tailored to their needs.

Abuse Reports

Community platforms allow users to report inappropriate content and conduct. Those reports often manifest as emails, private messages, or posts to a private space so that moderators can review, and if necessary, act on.

Listen: Episode 15

Badges

A common element of community gamification strategies is to recognize members for their contributions and drive specific behaviors. Badges often consist of an image, a title, and a description of the activity completed for which it was awarded. A common real-world analog are the Merit Badges employed by the Boy Scouts of America.

Successful badge programs incentivize participation across a number of vectors including online community participation, engagement at in-person events, product usage, and date-based milestone achievements.

Listen: Episode 5

Ban

Community platforms allow moderators to disallow access for specific members or a range of members for poor conduct or safety reasons. Executing a ban typically happens by configuring one or a combination of factors including member account ID, IP address, username(s), and duration of ban, and an external reason that the members will see if they attempt to visit the community while banned.

Bans are a last resort for dealing with challenging members and should only be applied after all other appropriate member management practices have been exhausted. Policies regarding bans should be clearly outlined in governance documents (Community Guidelines and Terms of Use) and approved by your legal team.

Listen: Episode 15

Blog

A one-to-many interaction modality commonly used to communicate announcements, thought leadership, product marketing, and other communication content. Posts to a blog are often presented in chronological order as a feed and posted by an individual or a brand account.

Community Guidelines

A public-facing governance document, sometimes referred to as a Code of Conduct or Participation Guidelines, that details the dos and don'ts of the community. It often includes other important information about the community and links to other policy documentation like Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Community Guidelines should be thought of as a living document - something that you work with your community to craft and update as the need arises. The tone and tenor should match that of your community. Flickr famously had a guideline stating, “You know that guy? Don’t be that guy.”

This document is not legally binding, but is the document that Moderators use as the basis of their community policing practices.

Community Manager

An individual responsible for fostering a healthy community environment by modeling behaviors through direct engagement with members, making important policy decisions, and serving as a liaison between the community and the governing organization.

Common tasks include:

• Create and deliver on an ongoing operational plan for the community

• Develop and maintain community guidelines and policies

• Implement programs to increase membership and engagement

• Define KPIs and oversee measurement and results communication

• Build and maintain relationships and touch points with internal stakeholders

• Guide and manage moderators and other community staff

• Coordinate with platform vendors and technical resources

• Flag and escalate potential product or service issues as they arise

Community Operations

Like any other major initiative at an organization, communities require a high level of rigor around processes and execution to ensure ongoing success. A growing number of companies are hiring individuals dedicated to the practice. Common responsibilities include:

• Implementation and maintenance of community tech stack

• Build automation, processes, and documentation

• Manage community support processes

• Report metrics and insights

• Create and manage reimbursements

• Maintain legal documents and guidelines

• Upholds and tracks data integrity

• Coordinates vendor, partner, and developer activities

• Handles all of the other stuff you probably don’t want to do

Thought leaders in this space include Tiffany Oda and Cassie Mayes. Join their quarterly Community OPServations events to learn more.

Listen: Episode 52

Critical Mass

A point at which a new community surpasses thresholds of membership, activity, and volume of content to grow at a sustained rate for a period of time. Some communities achieve this quickly, while others struggle or fail altogether to reach this point.

It is important to note that thresholds for membership, activity, and content almost never happen at the same time. Rather, they build on each other - activity begets content, content begets SEO, SEO begets more activity, and so on.

Listen: Episode 8

Deflection

A popular strategy in which a community is leveraged to provide peer-to-peer support to customers at a lower cost than traditional support mechanisms.

The general premise is that a customer that visits the community and finds a solution to their problem in lieu of creating a support case or calling the support line is considered to have been a “support case deflection.” Because the overall cost of supporting customers via the community is cheaper due to advantages of scale and the broad distribution of solutions, a deflection typically results in a cost savings for the company.

Calculating the value generated from deflections takes into account a number of factors, requires multiple data sources, and is often unique per organization. For example, combining community traffic, survey data, and financial data, we can estimate savings for a given time period:

((100,000 Visits to Community   x   50% Seeking Support   x   60% Resolution Rate   x   40% Deflection Rate   x   $35 Cost-Per-Support Case)   -   ($90,000 Community Overhead Cost))   =    $330,000 Deflection Savings

Or, without survey data:

((1,500 Answers   x   25 Avg Page Views Per Answer   x   85% Community Contributed   x   $75 Cost-Per-Support Case)   -   ($120,000 Community Overhead Cost))   =   $2,270,625 Deflection Savings

Listen: Episode 8

Employee Guidelines

An internal-facing governance document, sometimes referred to as Rules of Engagement, that details the dos and don'ts of the community for employees. It often includes important information about the community team and links to other policy documentation.

Listen: Episode 20

Engagement

Active participation, contribution, and actions including submitting posts, giving qualitative feedback on content (upvotes, kudos, likes), marking replies as solutions, sending private messages, and adding metadata to content (tags, labels). 

Engagement is also measured in terms of rates of contributions and member retention over a period of time.

Common metrics used to measure engagement include # Total Posts, # Topics/Questions, # Replies/Answers, # Posts Per Topic, Average Time to First Reply, # Ideas, # Solutions/Best Answers, Average Time to First Solution, % New Members Visiting After 90 Days, and % New Members Posting After 90 Days.

Forum

A discussion-based interaction model that is the primary basis for nearly all communities on the internet today, despite being endlessly declared “dead” by “experts” and people that don’t know what they are talking about.

Gamification

In the context of online communities, Gamification often refers to a programmatic approach of understanding users’ motivations, building an incentive structure, and rewarding them for engaging in desired behaviors. Ranks, badges, leaderboards, rewards, elevated permissions, and reputation are common elements found in gamification programs.

Listen: Episode 5

Groups

Unlike forums, knowledge bases, and blogs, which are typically meant for wide distribution among your community members, Groups are often best deployed for subsets of your membership. The focus is often topical and require a step for members to specifically join the group. Groups can be public or private and may allow community members to own and operate them, enabling a distributed governance model that can help you scale the community beyond the capabilities of your immediate resources.

Listen: Episode 26

Header

The top-most portion of a page that includes navigation, search, user controls, and key information about the community. The header is best applied consistently to all pages and serves as an anchor for users to understand where they are in the structure of the site and quickly navigate elsewhere as desired. There are several accepted design models for headers, except for the one where people put a gigantic banner image that provides little-to-no value and only serves to push content that users actually want to see further down the page.

Listen: Episode 13

Ideation

A collaborative crowdsourcing interaction model in which community members submit ideas, engage in discussion to clarify and improve ideas, and contribute to ranking the best or most-needed ideas through voting mechanisms. Top ideas are then prioritized internally at an organization, developed, and delivered back to customers.

This is a fantastic way for customers to be a part of roadmap planning and actively contribute to making the product/service they love even better.

Listen: Episode 33

Knowledge Base

A centralized repository of curated, structured knowledge content. Often owned by customer-facing teams (Customer Support, Customer Success) and technical teams (Product Management), common content includes answers to frequently answered questions, how-to guides, and troubleshooting instructions.

Labels

A type of metadata applied to content for classification purposes. In many communities, pre-defined and controlled labels are often applied to structured knowledge content as a way to make navigation and discovery easier. Basic community members typically do not have the ability to add, edit, or remove labels from content (but can be earned over time by tenured, valued members). This approach maintains a high level of quality and avoids mischaracterization of content, but is less scalable (See Tags).

Leaderboards

Modules used in communities to identify and recognize top contributors across various contribution types. Common leaderboards include qualitative measures like Top Solutions Author and Top Voted Author. Some communities do include a Top Poster leaderboard, which often incentivizes the wrong behaviors.

Constraining leaderboards to specific time ranges (30 days rolling, etc.) incentivizes ongoing quality contributions, as opposed to rewarding long-tenured members that have amassed large contribution numbers that cannot be achieved by newer members.

Listen: Episode 5

Member Onboarding

A programmatic approach to converting visitors to registered members, welcoming them to the community, and providing them with education and motivation to become regular contributors.

Minimum Viable Community

When launching a new community, it is important to understand what your capabilities are in the near-term relative to your long-term strategy and craft a phased approach to success. If your goal is to get your community live and rapidly iterate over time, then the first phase implementation may include strategy, goals, modalities, and governance that are minimally viable for success while keeping quality high. This is the opposite end of the spectrum from the “boil the ocean on day 1” approach.

Listen: Episode 17

Moderator

An individual responsible for fostering a healthy community environment by modeling behaviors through direct engagement with members, reviewing posted content for compliance with guidelines and policies, and assisting with member management practices.

Listen: Episode 15

Moderator Guidelines

An internal-facing governance document that details policies, procedures, and approaches for community moderators. It often includes important information such as technical documentation on how to use moderator tools, escalation paths, and emergency plans.

Listen: Episode 15

Ranks

A common element of a community gamification strategy that rewards a member for their total contributions by granting them a specific position on a hierarchical ladder that includes all members. Properties used in ranking schemes typically include titles, username colors, bold usernames, and rank icons.

Popular metrics to use as criteria include # posts, # solutions, # upvotes, membership time, and # ideas submitted. The naming convention should be intuitive and earning ranks should be progressively harder the higher a member goes.

Listen: Episode 5

Responsiveness

A measure of how quickly, on average, a new question posted to the community is replied to. It is typically expressed as “Average Time to First Response.”

A similar measurement, “Average Time to First Solution,” is also used to understand how quickly, on average, a new question receives a reply that is later marked as a Solution by the question author.

Taken separately or together, these measures help Community Managers understand the performance of their community in terms of the speed and/or accuracy of help offered in peer-to-peer support strategies.

Listen: Episode 8

Roles & Permissions

Community platforms allow Community Managers to grant or deny specific access and abilities, often referred to as “permissions,” to members.

Permission schemes typically consist of a default set of permissions that all members receive, and “roles,” which are pre-defined bundles of permissions that can be granted manually or automatically to members based on thresholds or triggers set by a Community Manager.

Taken together, roles and permissions form the basis of the experience members have with a community.

Solution Rate

A measure of the percentage of questions asked in a community have at least one reply marked as a Solution. This helps Community Managers understand the breadth and the overall impact of help offered in peer-to-peer support strategies.

Listen: Episode 8

Superusers

An individual that contributes at rates and volumes that far exceed averages of typical community members (alternately called “Top Contributor”). Common intrinsic motivations include a desire to help and contributing to something bigger than themself. Extrinsic motivations include a desire to appear on leaderboards, be seen as an expert, receive rewards, and career growth aspirations.

While Superusers may have some overlap with Advocates, they often participate in different types of activities and behaviors. Superusers, for example, often drive companies hard to enhance their products or improve rather than simply singing the praises of the brand. Their passion can be mistaken for or manifest itself as negativity. It is important to understand the differences and approach them with programs tailored to their needs.

Listen: Episode 7

Tags

A type of metadata applied to content for classification purposes. In many communities, tags are often a crowdsourced method of classifying content. They are undefined and available to all members to apply to content as they see fit. This approach scales well, but can suffer from quality issues and mischaracterization of content (See Labels).

Topics

Also referred to colloquially as “discussions,” “threads,” “conversations,” and “questions,” topics are the linear or threaded discussion format housed inside of a forum interaction modality. They allow members to engage in conversations about specific topical interests in contained settings. A forum commonly contains hundreds or thousands of topics dictated by the information architecture of the site.

Terms of Service

A legally-binding agreement between your organization and its users (also referred to as Terms of Use or Terms and Conditions). Unlike Community Guidelines, users must agree to the Terms of Service and are bound thereafter. It often includes information about proper use of the site, policy enforcement, and remedies in the case of a dispute.

Some companies include information about privacy and data protection in their Terms of Service, while others create a Privacy Policy for that specific purpose.

Listen: Episode 28

Thread Depth

A measure of the average number of replies to discussion threads. This helps Community Managers understand the depth of conversation taking place in the community.

The number can be interpreted differently depending on the goals and type of community. For example, a low number of replies to questions asked in a support community may indicate that the community is transactional in nature or that problems are solved efficiently. A high number of replies may indicate that the community has a large base of engaged users or that problems are not solved efficiently.

It is best to combine this number with other measures and qualitative observations to understand what it represents and how to influence it.

Listen: Episode 8

Total Registered Members

A large number, often cited as a sign of a healthy community, that, in practice, has almost no relevance to the success of a community program.

Because the number increments over time and does not take into account activity - or lack thereof - it presents a false image of the vibrancy of the community. For example, if a community has 300,000 registered members, but only 3,000 of them are active within any given month, then the community has very serious engagement and retention challenges.

Saying “We have 300,000 members!” and “Only 1% of our members are active” at the company meeting present very different pictures of the performance of the community.

Just say No to cumulative registration metrics, kids.

Listen: Episode 8

Tribal Knowledge

A crowdsourced knowledge contribution model in which community members have the ability to submit and update knowledge article content. Drafting, reviewing, approval, and publishing workflows commonly exist to ensure quality of content.