We've been exchanging recipes for years now, hoping that what worked in your community will be successful in mine. We've played our hunches and hoped for success, even as we had trouble defining exactly what success is. Online community managers have been behaving like alchemists, desperately seeking ways to turn lead into gold.
It's not that we haven't had successes. Indeed, we have legendary community development alchemists among us who have, indeed, turned lead in their organizations into social business gold. Many followers have gratefully learned from this vanguard and in turn have made their own contributions to our collective knowledge. Our community of community development professionals is advancing and progressing impressively.
Learning from other successful community managers how they have developed their communities is an excellent way to discover how to make your own community successful. I do it and every other community developer I admire does it, too. The willingness of our peers to share their recipes for success is remarkable and inspiring -- it's one of the most rewarding aspects of being part of the Enterprise 2.0 movement.
But it's not a particularly efficient process. It's hit-or-miss, at best.
As the number of Enterprise 2.0 communities grows ever more rapidly, and more and more creative people try out innovative approaches to developing their online communities, the number of success stories about community development is growing ever larger. Add in the churn of positive ROI stories being spun by vendors, and we're well on our way to chaos.
We need ways to evaluate what community development approaches work best in our own communities. Just because something worked elsewhere doesn't mean it will work everywhere. We community managers need to add more science to the "art" of community development.
That's why I am issuing a call for community managers to join me in deploying and refining what I call data-driven community development. I threw down the gauntlet in a recent presentation at the Jive World conference in San Francisco, and I'll provide an updated version at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara this November. Are you ready to respond to the challenge?
This is just the first in a series of posts that I'm calling the Manifesto for Data-Driven Community Development. I'm going to explain how and why we can and should use actionable analytics to understand community member behavior, in particular by establishing Community Development Feedback Loops in our communities. I define the Community Development Feedback Loop as a data-driven process for monitoring, understanding and contributing to the development of communities and community members by measuring, analyzing and acting upon individual member behavior. More on all of this to come...
If you don't want to wait for the next installment in this manifesto, you can join the community I've set up to discuss and share ideas about these concepts. And you can find the link to the video of my presentation there, as well as download the slides and view my notes on them. So I invite you to join that community and help in developing this manifesto, as it's all about community. Come join me on the frontier!
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