How to use crowdsourcing and communities for your small business.

Community is a very powerful thing.

Sometimes the process of involving a community to work on some task is called crowdsourcing. Some think that term is too crude because it’s somehow the internet equivalent of Tom Sawyer tricking others to do his work.

The term community based design or distributed participatory design has been used with some design tasks.

No matter what you call it, when done right, a community can become an important part of your business. Do you have to be as big as Wikipedia or RedHat to take advantage of community? Definitely not. How can a small or new business harness the power of a community?  Have you thought about it yet?  If not, let’s explore it together.

As a small business do you really need a community?  I’m willing to bet that you already have one: your customers.  Yes, that’s right.  Your customers are probably your most important community.

What other communities is your business connected to?

If you use open source for your software product, you belong to a community of software developers.

Do you follow or participate in blogs or forums about your business or your product?  Yep, that’s a community.

What about non-internet based groups such as your local chamber of commerce or a local counsel that promotes or works with businesses?  Check.  Those are communities too.

Each one of these communities has its own purpose and possibilities, but they all share many of the same characteristics. They all consist of a group of people who share the same environment — whether that environment is web-based or a physical place, similar rules apply.

Here are some important key points to having a successful, useful community:

Purpose

Whether you are trying to get a group of business owners together to figure out how to attack a market or gathering a group of customers to provide tips on how to use your product, the group needs to have a purpose. You can’t just get a group of users together and hope that something magical will happen. You need to define the purpose and then work to form the group of interested members around that purpose — not the other way around.

Boundaries

This just means defining who is a member and who isn’t. Maybe it’s “users of your product” or “people who run a handmade soap business” or something as simple as “dog owners”. Whatever it is, it defines the group and helps the members understand how they will relate to the other people they will meet in your community.

Manager

Yes, you need a community manager. It’s got to be someone who can and desires to spend the time fostering the community’s development. Maybe that’s you. Maybe it’s some motivated person who you can enlist to help manage your community, but you need a person who is going to be the driving force behind the community. This person should be actively seeking members, introducing the members to each other, determining the direction of the community as it grows, encouraging participation, publicizing the community. You get the idea.

Rules

Every community needs some rules. Most of the reasons for this are probably obvious, but you need to put some thought into developing some guidelines for your community. You will have troublemakers. You need to think through how to handle them.

You will also get a lot of “noise” which needs to be somehow sorted out from the real valuable content of your community. Doing this “sorting” in a consistent way helps people understand what will add value and what won’t. Rules will help keep everyone “on task”. You are much more likely to get valuable input if you provide some guidelines about what you want people to do (or not do) and what sort of input you are looking for.

Size

How big does your community have to be to make it effective?  The answer to this question is a bit like the old joke answer to the question: How long are your legs?  ”Just long enough to reach the ground.”

A community that is too small isn’t going to be effective because you need to have a critical mass of people bringing their own ideas to the table. A community that is too large can become ineffective without the right rules as well.

There is a general rule of thumb that applies to communities called the “90-9-1″ rule. This means that in most communities, 90% of the members are passive, 9% contribute a little bit, but the majority of the content comes from 1% of the people involved.

You can make the argument that a large portion of that 90% aren’t truly part of the community if they just pass through and view some content. Looking at the members of a community that way changes the statistics somewhat, but you still end up with a small group of people who are very active and a larger group who are less actively involved.

To be effective, your community needs to have enough real “creators” of valuable content to drive participation.

Resources

There are a lot of great resources out there about communities and how to build and manage them.

Definitely get a copy of Jono Bacon’s new book “The Art of Community”. You can get it on the kindle, in bookstores or since it was just released under a creative commons license, you can download it here.

Richard Millington has a superb blog about building communities called FeverBee.

Read Amy Jo Kim’s book “Community Building on the Web“.

Or Guy Kawasaki’s book “Selling the Dream“.

What other resources have you found helpful? What sort of advice would you give to a small business owner who wants to build a community?

photo credit, haags uitburo