The Modern Journalist

8 Rules: What it Takes to Build an Online Community

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At 36, I’ve spent more of my life online than I have offline. I’m not sure how that happened. I was supposed to play shortstop for the Reds.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, I threw myself into the world of journalism and technology from a very early age. Throughout the years, I’ve devoured every book I could on the subject; I’ve driven around the country, writing stories and meeting the people I’ve wanted to; I’ve talked with pioneers before they were pioneers; and I carved out a nice little corner of the Internet just for me.

Along the way, I’ve picked up — through reading and conversations — a thread of what it takes to build an online community.  There are 4 Must Haves, aspects of your community that must be built into the fabric if it’s to succeed; there are 4 Rules, compliance protocols that need to be in place to ensure the health and growth.

Much credit goes to Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs), Larry Lessig (The Future of Ideas and Code) and Dave Weinberger (the cluetrain manifesto and Small Pieces, Loosely Joined). These are largely culled from their work — with some refinements from other smart people who have helped along the way.

None of this is mine. Well, the stuff that’s wrong is. Anyway, here it goes:

The Four Must Haves

1. Good Content: This is a no brainer in theory, but in practice it is difficult to produce. Good content means: relevant to  your audience and delivered in many forms. People need a reason to return to your site. Find what you do and do it well. With Slashdot, it’s moderated story submissions; listservs are about conversation; newspapers are about data and stories. In the case of newspapers, that means hiring people who create Text, Audio, Video and turn them loose; don’t cross train. Create Good Content, not just content.
2. Simple Navigation: When I worked at Technology Review, we worshipped the book Getting Things Done, a management book that implored users to find an organization for your life and stick to it. The Web works the same way. Don’t bury information. Don’t create multi-layered, click-through mazes. Don’t use weird jargon. Put everything you have in feeds, newsletters and on the index page. Make your search work. The world is flat, according to Thomas Friedman. Your website should be as well.
3. Easily Learned Interface: Screw design. If you’re being cute, adding images that have no functional value, using words that everyone in your office uses (like slug), moving things around on the page because “it’s time”…if you do that, people won’t come. Your design should be simple, elegant and out of the way. You can shrink your site down. Way down. Get out of the convention and join the Web.
4. Decentralized Control: The larger your site, the more decentralized the control needs to be. Mistakes happen, but the flexible team enables many people to fix. If copy editors see mistakes, they shouldn’t have to find a site producer. If a function is broken, programmers should be able to fix it. Train and turn over control to your staff.

The idea of a simply designer site with multiple points of access to problem-solving seems simple, but my experience is that editors and publishers need to have some control. It’s understandable. It’s also built in this model.

The Four Rules:

1. No Free Riding: If you deliver information to people, you must take back. My rule of thumb: we write stories, those are free; everything you have to register for. And if you encourage people to submit content, you can’t let everyone just read. Otherwise, nobody will submit anything.
2. Rules Compliance: Which means you must have a way to sanction and punish people for either not participating (you can’t see this) or banning those who violate the rules. You need to have a list of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, and then have a way for dealing with that.
3. Reward Commitment: The easiest way is to reward people who contribute with moderator positions, whether it be on message boards in Slashdot’s case, or with featured spots on the news page in places where content is submitted. Game companies running community sites oftentimes give away sneak-peaks to their best members; movie studios have flown in great online advocates for premiere parties. Those who don’t contribute — or who are free-riding and violating rules, must be governed — as with the decentralized authority in the Must Have section — by the community itself. The rules must be such that the Rule Compliance in the Rules section isn’t run by the company building the site; the community must rule the community.
4. User-Built Growth: To grow, the community must be able to form ad-hoc groups, invite new members and move seamlessly from one place to the next, inviting and participating without walls or other inhibitors. Growth should come easily; compliance will grow with the communities.

I’ll be posting more on this topic in the future, but enough folks have asked for me to get off my duff and post these. Within the next week, I’ll post specifics about applying these rules to newspaper sites.