As a community manager, I often find myself evaluating other communities that I visit. The most common mistake is that they do not support my needs. A possible reason for this could be that I am not within their main user group;however, by ignoring my needs they immediately close off my participation. Is this the way communities work? Does the 80/20 rule hold true for online communities?
I propose that we, as community managers, support a diverse set of customers within our community, while still ensuring that the focus remains on the critical segments. My idea is to offer support for fringe “long tail” customers to ensure that your community meets everyone's needs.
How do I do this, you ask? I’ve added a page about Market Segmentas a starting point for my community efforts. By evaluating all the various groups who could possibly visit or need support, via my online community, I am able to create a Community Project Plan that aligns the needs of these various groups with community deliverables. Of course, prioritization of work for the various groups allows the critical customers of your community to be served while still allowing time for delivery of long tail support.
As an example, when working on my latest community, I identified the following customer segments:
• Community Activists - influencers who invest significant time with the community
• Education/Research Group - people who leverage the product in university research or education
• Technical Customers - developers, users and testers
• Non-Technical Customers - marketers, industry journalists and bloggers
• Corporate Group - people who work on project as a paid employee from a corporation
• Advisory Board - "managers" of community
You can see from this list that some segments overlap, which is okay, as people come to the community at various times with different purposes. Also, I have chosen to ignore the geography of people visiting the community and will comment on that in a future blog posting.
After reading this post, I’m curious to find out if you agree with my approach on community support? Have you ever done this type of analysis on your community? Is there another method you chose to use? I look forward to reading your thoughts and gaining a better understanding of your community.
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I like your approach. The only problem I see is lack of focus. Sometimes if we try to fulfill too many needs at once, we're lose focus of what we're really good at helping people do.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if you can translate your community's value to meet all of these people's needs, you're golden!
As any community grows, segmentation is going to happen. What I've found through Brazen Careerist is that your members will naturally segment themselves. So don't try too hard to ID where everyone fits. As the community matures it will all make sense on its own.