How do you know which tools are best for your community building activities? If you don’t know, you’re in luck because, today, I’ve got a post to help get you thinking, complete with a chart and everything.
Yesterday, I published thirteen metrics to use to help measure important factors of community building tools. Today, I’ve gone ahead and ranked a few popular platforms on each of those metrics. I’d love to hear whether or not you agree with my ranking.
So, let’s get right to it.
How I did the scoring
I took ten popular platforms (such as facebook, twitter, etc) that people use to build communities around projects, products or companies. On a score of one to five (one being worst and five being best) I ranked each tool on how effectively it addressed each of the thirteen criteria we established yesterday. I totaled the score for each platform and put it in the graph you see at the end of this post. (So the maximum score is 65 and the minimum score is 13.) Below, I explain my thoughts on the strong and weak points of each platform.
Facebook – Score 61
Facebook ranked the highest of all the platforms. This actually surprised me when I first did the scoring. But when you think about it, Facebook does a great job on nearly every important community building metric. It casts a wide net. It has a global reach. It has tons of applications that allow for very rich user interaction. It is easily searchable. You can use it to share short, timely notes or longer notes that communicate more complex ideas. It’s super easy to use. And fan pages also make it easy to find groups of people who are interested in a specific topic or product.
So, for a community building platform, Facebook wins hands down, scoring four points above the next highest ranking platform which is…
Blogs – Score 57
Blogs are also a great community building platform. The biggest differentiator between blogs and Facebook is that its harder to interact in real time with people on blogs. Sure, you can leave comments or integrate other widgets into your blog that enable more interaction, but most blogs rely on comments to enable community interaction. That’s not a problem, it just scores a bit lower than the ability to tell who is online right now on platforms like Facebook.
Blogs also make it a bit harder to find groups of like-minded people than Facebook does. Sure, the people who leave comments on blogs are probably regular readers, but the best way to find whole groups of community members on blogs are on membership sites such as Problogger or OnStartups. And its just slightly harder to do that on a blog than it is on Facebook.
LinkedIn – Score 56
LinkedIn ranked just one point below blogs on my chart. One of the reasons why LinkedIn came in a little lower is that it’s slightly more difficult to find groups of like-minded people on LinkedIn. The experience of using linked in as a communication platform is also slightly less intuitive than it is when you are commenting on blogs or on Facebook.
I admit that some of this may be due to the fact that I am not as heavy a user of LinkedIn as I am of other platforms and I’d love to hear alternative points of view on this. Nonetheless, LinkedIn is definitely an important platform to use when building a community.
Twitter – Score 50
Twitter scored a bit lower than I expected. The biggest advantage of Twitter is the super rich API it has to allow for the plethora of third party tools that you can use to integrate Twitter feeds into just about any app. Twitter also tends to be a tool that is used for information that needs to be timely. It isn’t a great repository of historical data and it is difficult to convey any sort of complex idea on Twitter. But it’s still a great tool to use because of the combination of its ability to reach massive numbers of people combined with its ability to target individuals. It’s also just about the easiest to use digital platform there is. I expect that twitter will increase in importance as new third party apps are announced and as the platform itself matures.
Email – Score 48
Email’s score also surprised me. I expected it to be much lower. It’s been around for decades, but it’s still a very effective digital platform. Good old email.
The biggest advantages to email is that nearly everyone has an email address, its easy to use and its really easy to share an email with a bunch of people you know.
The biggest disadvantages are that its not easy to use email to find the specific people who might be interested in your community and that its difficult to build that large database of email addresses needed to broadcast your message to large groups.
Face-to-face meetings – Score 45
Face-t0-face meetings of small groups are really just about one of the best tools you can use to build a community. They allow for rich interaction and all of the non-verbal communication you get really helps to convey complex ideas. Face-to-face meetings are also great opportunities to create strong, lasting relationships that can help make other, less personal, platforms even more useful.
The drawbacks (and the main reasons why this platform didn’t rank higher) is that it can be difficult to organize a face-to-face meeting with the right people. It’s often difficult to coordinate the schedules of busy people and its also imperative that the people you are gathering be nearby each other or that they have the ability to travel if they aren’t nearby. Additionally, unless someone takes notes or otherwise records the interactions, the information is very ethereal. Small group meetings are great toola, but you have to plan them well and choose carefully when its appropriate to use them.
Recorded Audio and Video – Score 45
This platform tied with face-to-face meetings, but its advantages and disadvantages are very different. Recordings that you make available on the internet are readily available to a large number of people for a long period of time. With the number of options you have today, they are easy to use and easy for you and your community members to share with others. Just look at the number of viral videos out there.
The biggest drawbacks are that its very hard to have a two-way conversation using recordings unless you combine them with some other platforms that helps you get feedback. And unless you have a lot of practice and some good equipment, creating a good recording can be a little bit time consuming.
All-in-all, a recorded message is a great tool, but to really get the benefits of using it to build communities, you need to combine it with some other platform to make it effective.
Printed Media (books, magazine articles, marketing collateral) – Score 40
Print media scored rather poorly in terms of community building. It’s just not an effective tool when used alone. The biggest advantages are that you can take the time to communicate some fairly complex ideas. It also tends to stick around for a long time and its really, really easy for community members to use.
The disadvantages are that its nearly impossible to facilitate any sort of two-way conversation, it is often time consuming and expensive to get your ideas into print and widely distributed; and because of this, its difficult to print anything about timely topics unless you are a daily periodical. And even then, Twitter and blogs usually get the scoop long before your next printing.
One interesting note is that printed material scores well in almost every category where face-to-face meetings score weakly and vice-versa. This means that when you combine the two platforms, you can have a much stronger tool. (This is true of many of these platforms, but these two are particularly well-suited partners.)
Conference Keynote Address – Score 37
The fact that a keynote address came in almost last isn’t surprising. It’s not that public speeches are particularly bad at anything specific. It’s just that they aren’t very good at anything specific either. Conferences where keynote addresses are held are also time consuming to organize and often difficult for some to attend due to conflicting schedules. The best thing about a conference is that you will almost always find lots of other like-minded people in one room at the same time which provides a great opportunity to build relationships. But that has more to do with the mechanics of the conference itself and less to do with the keynote address.
Live Audio and Video – Score 36
This category came in dead last. If you have the ability to broadcast live video and audio it does give you the ability to talk about current events in near real-time, but the drawback is that it is even more of a one-way conversation than other platforms since there is virtually no way to get real-time feedback from other community members unless you combine it with other media such as Twitter.
Summary
So that’s how I rank these platforms in terms of effectiveness in community building. The point of this exercise isn’t really to say that one platform is bad and another is good. The real benefit of an exercise like this comes from understanding the the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and learning how to combine the right platforms to compliment each other and meet the needs of your particular community.
Here’s the chart.
Community Building Score Chart
So how did I do? Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think.
photo credit, Ed Yourdon
