In an excellent article from 2014 titled, “Organic farming is so much harder than just getting stoned and picking tomatoes,” author Arlo Crawford explains how the most sure-fire way to kill a farm is to assume that you can just stick your hands into the dirt and let nature take its course. Farming, especially organic farming, takes a tremendous amount of time, effort, know-how and back-breaking hard work. The fact that organic farming uses naturally-occurring processes to help grow and protect crops doesn’t mean that nature, all by itself, is going to take care of the process of growing and harvesting.
Farming and online communities wouldn’t seem to have much in common, but the term “organic” is used in both, and that term is misapplied just as often. In a manner similar to first-time farmers who buy a small plot of land and expect to drop some seeds in order to become farmers, so too do companies who hope to grow online communities (customer forums, open-platform wikis, etc.) expect to place a piece of software out on the internet and let the community members build the content and create the engagement necessary to thrive.
An engaging online community requires as much nurturing and thoughtful planning as any enterprise, but the fact that it’s open-ended leads many new community managers to believe that the membership will take care of the heavy lifting. When you see quiet (or dead) forums or members who continually ask the same questions, often without receiving decent answers or follow-up, the main culprit is often that the community management and moderators expect that everything will happen “organically.”
Aaron Lee asked 25 community managers about what it takes to build a passionate online community, and while the advice varied from person to person, all of them stressed the importance of being very hands-on with the community members, offering them value for taking the time to visit the community, and planning what the conversations happening there were about.
It’s tempting to believe that the right software with the right look and feel will take care of the most difficult aspects of your forum or online community, but remember that your main goal is to encourage conversations between people. Much like a successful dinner party or first date, dropping strangers into a room together will most likely end up in awkward interactions that sputter and have very little chance of success.
Planning what the conversations will be about and hiring people who can start a good discussion, ask probing questions, and will hunt down helpful answers in a timely fashion is much more important than the bells and whistles that come with most community software packages. Think of it as preparing the soil and hiring farmers who know how to look for signs of bad weather, failing plants and when to rotate your crops.
Remember, always, that if you want something to grow, you’re going to have to understand and give it what it needs to thrive. Don’t expect “organic” growth to be automatic.
