Building Community with Purpose

With the rise of social sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, several best practices and standards have been established which can serve as a basis when developing or improving online communities. At the core of these giants are their people, and the reason people become so emotionally attached is because these sites have mastered their purpose.

Have Purpose

Building a website and decorating it with all of today’s social necessities is pretty easy, right? But having a clear and concise purpose that solves a problem, or makes something better, easier, or valuable is challenging. In advertising guru, Roy Spence’s book, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For, he defines purpose as, “the definitive statement of the difference you’re trying to make in the world”. He believes that every extraordinary business is driven by purpose. Based on this belief, we can assume that every successful online community is built on purpose; therefore, to build a successful community you must have purpose.

If you look at sites like Youtube, whose purpose is sharing videos, or Flickr, whose purpose is sharing photos, it becomes clear that having purpose can go a long way. Having purpose allows you to create objects, and these objects are what bring people to your site.

Your purpose must offer some type of value for your community. Youtube gives me a way to share videos with my family. Facebook helps me reconnect with old friends. The Virtual Weber Bulletin Board gives me great meat smoking tips. These sites are valuable for what they help me achieve in my everyday life, and even more valuable since they are free. Free is valuable.

Focus on Your Social Objects

There is a growing misconception these days, that in order to have a successful community website it must be packed with features like blogs, polls, water coolers, activity feeds, voting, etc. Over packing your website with features does not mean a higher level of user engagement, in fact, it can have adverse effects and ultimately distract users from the primary action. Technology does not create communities, people and the relationships they form do. Communities form around “social objects”. Jyri Engestrom, founder of Jaiku originally coined the term social objects. He defines them as, “the reason people connect with each particular other and not something else.”

More on Jyri’s social object theory can be found on his Web 2.0 Expo presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/jyri/building-sites-around-social-objects-web-20-expo-sf-2009

Enable Your Members

Humans are social creatures and the web has given us places for people with shared interests to connect. In order to enable your members you must first define your activities. Think about your social objects and then ask yourself what it is you want your members to do with these objects. Identifying these activities will help when constructing your core feature set. If we look at Flickr’s activities: uploading, tagging, favoriting, commenting, sharing, etc, we can see how activities allow people to be more engaged.

Enable with simplicity. Think about Youtube, and how easy they’ve made sharing a video. Your social objects should be widgetized and able to leave your community.

Be the Best At Boiling Water

Boiling water is a snap, right? But, in order to be the best at boiling water, you must beat the best water boiler. There will always be another community for your users to leave you for; therefore it’s important to always be improving your purpose. By being focused on our social objects and continually improving your purpose by making it better, the value of your community will grow, resulting in more loyal and passionate members.

Becoming the best at boiling water doesn’t happen overnight. If we look at the evolution of Flickr, it’s easy to see how they’ve achieved such great success. Flickr was conceived from tools originally created for Game Neverending, a multiplayer online game created by Ludicorp. In early 2004, Ludicorp shelved Game Neverending and launched FlickrLive, a multiuser chat room with real-time photo sharing. Their infant service also offered image bookmarking capabilities, which allowed users to post images found on the web. Over the course of a few years their service evolved and the chat room technology was dropped and Flickr began redefining their purpose.

Photo sharing was nothing new when Flickr launched. In fact, they had some pretty big competitors, such as Photobucket, ImageShack and Zooomr. By focusing on their social objects, Flickr made sharing photos easy, fun, and rewarding. They enabled their users with object oriented features and their sustained focus helped them built one of the best photo sharing sites on the web today.

Conclusion

Communities succeed because there is a need for them to exist. They need to be cared for and managed. It’s important to have a roadmap when building a community, having one will help you achieve your vision. Your vision should be built upon your purpose, and your roadmap should be driven by your objects.

Ask these three questions when building communtiy:

1. What is the purpose?
2. What are the objects?
3. How are members enabled?

If you can answer these three questions, then you are on the right path to building community with purpose.

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