Is your community a purpose-driven one?

Blip.fm just launched badges that I think are really going to help them grow.

Giving your users something to be proud of for using your site more is a really effective tactic.

That's how forums are too...simply showing your number of posts, and some add a ranking based on the number of posts, encourages users to post more often to build their social capital.

David
Community Manager, Scribnia.com

Blip.fm just launched badges that I think are really going to help them grow.

Giving your users something to be proud of for using your site more is a really effective tactic.

That's how forums are too...simply showing your number of posts, and some add a ranking based on the number of posts, encourages users to post more often to build their social capital.

David
Community Manager, Scribnia.com

Sometime in the first couple months of blogging it hit me. This shit is really all about building a community. Since then, I've been doing my darndest to do just that.

I like the key to a community is that it's a two-way street. It's about much more than posting useful content. It's about engaging, learning, and most importantly growing along side other members of group. That's what I love so much about blogging.

Thanks for the refreshing reminder that nothing beats community.

Sometime in the first couple months of blogging it hit me. This shit is really all about building a community. Since then, I've been doing my darndest to do just that.

I like the key to a community is that it's a two-way street. It's about much more than posting useful content. It's about engaging, learning, and most importantly growing along side other members of group. That's what I love so much about blogging.

Thanks for the refreshing reminder that nothing beats community.

Sometime in the first couple months of blogging it hit me. This shit is really all about building a community. Since then, I've been doing my darndest to do just that.

I like the key to a community is that it's a two-way street. It's about much more than posting useful content. It's about engaging, learning, and most importantly growing along side other members of group. That's what I love so much about blogging.

Thanks for the refreshing reminder that nothing beats community.

Foursquare is building a massive database of semantic/location based data to be utilized for a wide variety of purposes. In essence they are becoming a real world "Wikipedia" with different information being inputted.

The game concept encourages a specific behavior of adding information. It's fun, easy to use and incredibly simple. It also teaches/reinforces behavior.

You can't win anything besides social capital...so it also doesn't set up anyone for a let down.

I'd love to talk more about this if you are interested. Shoot me an email: Stuart@thelostjacket.com

Incorporating gaming mechanics into your application or service is a very good way to gain short term traction and engagement. This said, after the game "novelty" (the game lifecycle could easily be shorter than the product or services) wears off real value to the user must kick in and become the primary drive to engage.

Often when people cite growth of new technologies and games they look at total users but don't take into consideration how frequently and engaged those users are. User engagement metrics are necessary to get a true picture of the community (and the growth).

Please help me to understand what gives the foursquare community purpose? Is the purpose to play the game and what benefit does this purpose convey to the community? You are using purpose here to describe reason to engage; i would argue that true purpose driven community conveys benefits to its members through through the pursuit a common goal. I think that the concept that you are describing would be more accurately described as a "incentive driven community". The incentive is to win.

I do not know much about foursquare and really would like to know. I originally signed up for foursquare but never participated because I could not easily recognize the purpose behind the app nor the benefit it conveyed to me as a user.

It would be a key first step. However, foursquare.com does allow for a minimum level of interaction on their website....so technically if you carried around a laptop?

Replace it with: http://iheartcommentspam.com/

Thanks Ted.

It's an interesting time for community and business. Especially since most of Gen Y was taught that we are all a big part of a major global community (and thus need to be responsible).

"By ensuring that task completion is easily understood and rewarded, foursquare has ensured their ability to catch on with a larger audience."

A successful recipe for any community leader giving a call-to-action! Excellent stuff.

But in order to use foursquare I'd need to get a cellphone. =)

I think I'll just unlink it and laugh at the dude.

I'm horrible with adding links admittedly. Despite the fact that I fully aware of their SEO benefit.

Will do better in the future :) (Or get an intern)

It's called a keyword-driven spam comment. rel=delete :0

Us vs. them=Awesome marketing strategy.

I don't think the market could support additional platforms based on the competition that is currently ongoing. (Case in point? PC games)

Exactly. You need to put your members (or in our case: clients) first in order to effectively build something awesome. You can't do it without them. They provide the energy that fuels your ambitions.

Cars don't run on engines. They run on gas.

I'm loving your community focused articles because I think what you are describing is the future of work. Some mixture between freelancing, revenue sharing, crowdsourcing, competition-based, and idea-generating - all based around a simple talent community. There are too many benefits to both sides (business and individual) for this to not happen.

Great article.

"humble and open minded but full of swagger and slightly intimidating" Perfect combination. I like the idea of competition as inspiration to encourage individuals and communities to get better at what they do, instead of creating rivalries to knock others down.

In the social media realm, I look forward to seeing more competition because it raises the bar and legitimizes the profession. Those "Why didn't I think of that?" moments are the ones that drive me to challenge myself and my clients to think more creatively. The more success my peers earn, the more marketing dollars will be allocated to online efforts.

Great post. May I be so bold as to suggest hyperlinking to external sources? More convenient for readers and good for SEO to boot:)

I would say the console gaming community is a fairly good example... while many of the games themselves are based on competition, the fact that there have been fairly consistently 2 or 3 major competing console brands for the past 20 years (each of which has been able to secure exclusive rights to various titles) has created "fanboy" communities that vigorously defend their chosen platform in online fora. The market competition of choosing a console (assuming for the moment that most people can't afford the time or money for more than one, which isn't strictly true) leads to the community building of "us vs. them".

"A community is never better than its members. "

I love that. I think it's something a lot of communities "forget" when they get big. They start believing that the community needs *them*, that they're better than the members and that they're untouchable. And that's usually when you see that community crumble.

I have no idea what the relevance of that was???

Not sure if this is quite relevant but the Royal Enfield Club in India is a good example of an engaged community http://www.royalenfield.com/