With the beta steem communities live a few weeks now, many of us have enjoyed the pleasure of playing around with the options and features available from the Hive community setup.
Features and options are limited at the moment and I do believe there is much work to be done to develop this further, but that's really for a feedback post and not this one. The aim of this post is to try and gather ideas from other community owners and users on growing and running a great community.
I have a few ideas myself on things I am going to try and I would love to hear your thoughts, your suggestions, and your ideas.
When I look at other communities online, Facebook and Linkedin, there have been a few things I have noticed. Some communities have a lot of posts, however, its self-promotion with no engagement. No likes, no comments no activity. Then there are communities that do not allow link drops. These have a lot of discussions and engagement. And there are communities with a good mix of discussions, questions and answers, and link drops.
I like the last the best. A good mix. But to get this, the community must be managed well. It would be easy to have a community where people just post about the topic and then I could do a bit of curation and moderation. But that's not the type of community I want to have. Actually I already have one of these on Facebook and its a load of shit.
The audience to Excel for All is not really the current steem user and I will have to attract new members to steem for this community to be successful. I will be using my WordPress blog, email list, student lists, and other social networks to attract new users. But the community has to be appealing when they get there. There must be a good mix, a place where they know they will get a solution if they ask questions and not just a place to read people's content.
New users mean redfish, with little or no SP to begin with. So I have to try and grow these accounts as fast as possible. To do this, I plan on having some weekly community posts. The liquid funds earned on these posts will be put into a pool which I can then divvy out. If I divvy it out in vests rather than liquid, the community may grow faster. And it will encourage a mindset of ownership right from the start.
I plan on creating a leaderboard and doing something like the top 3 questions asked based on votes, or the top 3 solutions based on votes. Maybe even something more complex like calculating influence within the community using a previously shown example of entropy and information gain. This will require a little planning, access to the blockchain data and of course my magic Excel powers. But I am sure I can create something that will encourage activity within the community.
If you are running a hivemind community, I would love to hear
1. How do you plan on attracting nonsteem users to your community?
2. How will you encourage them to be active within the community?
3. How will you prevent your community from becoming a wall of content with little or no engagement? Or maybe you would like a wall of content?
4. How can we encourage new users to be powering up and have a mindset of ownership rather than using steem as a current cash flow?
5. What tips can you share for running a community?
I look forward to reading your replies
