How to Build an Online Community
The first step an organization should take when thinking about growing their online community is creating a purposeful vision statement. This vision statement will provide two purposes; it will articulate the importance of community-based collaboration and it will identify significant opportunities for the organization to help move towards its goals. It is important to understand when community collaboration is appropriate and where it is valued. When developing a vision statement, it’s also important to understand the goals and culture of the organization. “Developing a vision is a creative activity … and getting to a valuable, insightful, and inspiring outcome can be a challenge.”
The general goal of creating the vision statement is to capture value from a collection of people who have assembled loosely around a general interest. Such as people gather around Epsilon Nu Tau because they are interested in entrepreneurship. When an organization needs deep analysis for a bigger issue, community collaboration isn’t the best way to achieve that. Also, where there is proprietary information, is another situation that open community collaboration wouldn’t be effective but could be dangerous to sensitive information.
Knowing when community collaboration needs to be combined with other forms of collaboration is key to growing a business community. Organizations that pay attention to what is happening on social media are the ones that understand who their target audience is and that is a fantastic way to add value to social media collaboration. Targeting a specific audience that is directly interested in your organization can help with overall community collaboration.
Culture directly refers to the shared beliefs, norms, and values held by members of a group. Understanding this can help facilitate community collaboration in aiding organizational goals. Social media can be simply an inconvenient distraction when it isn’t being used effectively. This is why it is super important to develop a specific vision and purpose that keeps members and the community in check on what the overall goal of collaborating is.
Having the right attitude is the key to life for just about anything and building an online community isn’t any different. There is a model of attitudes called “Six F” and the attitudes are folly, fearful, flippant, formulating, forging and fusing. Having a folly attitude towards social media basically means you view it as simply entertaining, with no real use for it in the business side of life. Before I started taking BIS 315, that’s how I viewed social media. My personal Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/taylor.rainier is a great place to see that, I share things that I am interested in and I only use it for entertainment purposes.
When someone is fearful of social media, they fear that adding social media to the basic business model would add the potential for undesirable behavior among employees. Flippant is almost the exact opposite of fearful, but business owners who look at social media with this approach think it is pointless. Rather than running their social media pages with a strategic approach, they are tactical, and they wait for collaboration to happen instead of making it happen. The organization I picked for my semester-long project, Epsilon Nu Tau Eta Chapter, uses this approach currently. We have a social media chair, but we don’t use our pages and resources to their fullest potential.
Formulating is when the leadership within the organization recognizes the value of community collaboration and the need to be organized and strategic in its use. This outlook normally happens in the beginning stages of building a strong social organization. When an organization begins the forging phase, it starts to integrate productive online community collaboration into their daily work lives. The most advanced attitude, which is also fairly rare, is fusing. This is when an organization participates in the attitude of a truly social organization.
When crafting a vision for an organization, the involvement of members from all parts of the organization is circuital during the creation of the vision. The first task that should happen when developing a vision is to focus on the organization's original goals and strategies. When a vision is clear, gaining control and taking leadership positions becomes easier.
Strategy always begins with a purpose. A well-formed purpose addresses a recognized problem and answers frequently asked questions. A vision for Epsilon Nu Tau Eta Chapter might look something like this, “Engage entrepreneurially minded individuals by encouraging collaboration amongst one another, while reminding every member of the purpose of our organization and the benefits of joining it.”
Power and potential value of the purpose of an organization can be assessed by asking yourself a few questions. “What’s in it for me?” Magnetize people by making themselves ask this question when they read the vision statement. “What’s in it for the organization?” The answer to this question should be easy to answer, after reading the vision statement. There should be low community risk associated with the vision statement. It should be measurable, meaning the community value can be clearly assessed. The last assessment is if the vision statement facilitates evolution. Businesses and organizations should always be evolving, the vision statement should assist the organization in naturally building on as time goes on.
