Last week I sat in on Kent Shaffer’s session on “Communicating without Words” at the Internet Ministry Conference. And tucked deep in the session were his “7 Steps for [creating/managing] an Online Community”

After all, if Seth Godin said this is one his top new jobs of the future, it’s worth talking about.

I wanted to take a few minutes to apply those thoughts… letting them play out.

1. Define your purpose. For an existing community, I would swap the word “define” to “defend.” I’ve found that to be the hardest thing with managing YMX. There are both internal (mostly from myself) and external pressures to take the community in an unintended direction Effectively managing an online community takes overseers who are willing to guard the purpose. I think this has been one of the strengths of YMX, but it’s tough sledding too.
2. Define the user experience you want. This is actually pretty important. Because taking the time to map out both what you want the community to be and how you want to form that community are two entirely different things. The platform your community uses is tremendously important to this. For YMX, we use a forum software package that really compliments the type of community we want to be. Open source, willing to try new things, secure, and flexible. That kind of paints a picture for who we are as an online community. But YMX is so much more than just our forum community… and as that picture gets more and more clear for us… we’re able to add features and remove features based upon our user experience design.
3. Evaluate the system. We do this all the time. Better yet, our users do it for us. Every time I add a feature to the site I start a thread asking for feedback. If people try it and don’t say anything I presume that it worked. If they don’t give us feedback I take it to mean they tried it, it worked, but they didn’t like it. But if it doesn’t work, we always hear about it! Another important element of evaluating the system is noticing how people are using your online community in un-anticipated ways. When you notice that (for us, this was our recipe section) you have to decide… do I kill this? Do I allow it to be an abnormality? Or do I embrace it? For the recipe section… we decided it would be within our purpose to embrace it. And it’s taken off.
4. Tweak it. Patient users of YMX will know we constantly tweak stuff. Features, design, layout… we tweak big and small things all the time.
5. Observe it. Often times I perceive something as not working when it really is.
6. Tweak it.
7. Observe it. Getting the idea this is an ongoing process? I think this is one of the reasons why MySpace failed so hard. Once they got big they never added features, got rid of abuses of the system, or listened to customer feedback.

I’ve had loads of people tell me that online communities are just a fad that will quickly fade. Well, as someone who manages a community (rather, I’m part of a team who manages a forum) I feel as though if we just continue a process similar to the way outlined… we’ll just continue gaining steam.

YMX just crossed the 200,000 post mark. We’ve got about 1100 members. And overall I see us as “just getting ready to go public with our service.”

At the end of the day… any organization would be wise to obey this process. It isn’t a God-ordained, perfect process. But it is a process that works.