Interesting Social Feature: The Yelp Elite Squad

Community Building isn’t about Features

This list of ways to build community features is interesting as much for what it leaves out as for what it leaves in

So two weeks after I called out Derek Powazek to write a 2nd edition of his book Designing for Community, his wife Heather Champ has put together a nice list of ways to build community, Flickr-style. (via Derek himself)

Businessweek: Ten Ways Flickr Builds Communities

Here’s the list…

Engage
Don’t just listen to your community. Engage
Enforce
Let the community help set standards and policies for appropriate behavior-then enforce them
Take Responsibility
Fess up immediately when you make mistakes
Step Back
Don’t be afraid to step back and let your customers take over
Give Freely
Never underestimate the allure of a free T-shirt (or sticker, or button…)
Be Patient
Take knee-jerk reactions with a grain of salt
Hire Fans
Make sure your employees are as passionate about your product as your community’s most die-hard fans
Stay Calm
Develop a thick skin
Focus
Be flexible but don’t lose sight of your priorities
Be Visible
Stay human

What’s missing from the list? Features!!!

No features to be found. Not a one. Now THAT says something about building a community. It’s not about features, it’s about human-to-human interaction and being part of a group. That, to me, is the implicit lesson here…Flickr doesn’t see community building as a feature set, they see it as interpersonal communication.

Now, a response to this might be…but so many features on Flickr and other social networking sites enable community, or make community possible. To some extent that is true, but not much. There were online communities way back before the Web in places like the Well and their features were incredibly crude…yet they still formed a very tight community. So while we need some basic level of communication means, there is no such thing as a “community feature set”.

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Comments ( 8 Responses so far )

1. pepelicious on September 19th, 2007 (Comment) #

I love this list. I recenetly worked for a social networking startup whose list would have “X Feature” for 1-8 then finally some attention to listening and engaging with the community.

Two things drove this feature frenzy. One was a very strong engineering organization that constantly had to crank out new features to justify the type of talent on the team. You don’t go after big shot developers and engineers just to have them fix bugs all day. The second was a marketing team addicted to chasing short term revenue from new members instead of better enabling power users to generate that revenue for them.

It was a shame to constantly read in the forums things like, “That feature is great, but X is still broken and I can’t create products.” or, “Great, another promotion that’s going to further mess up the economy and make me lose money”.

I still converse with a friend who works that that company. Things haven’t changed one bit since I left and they still wonder why they continue to lose their best users. Oh, and the newest revenue generator? Not making the product work better. Not getting the community more involved. They decided to throw ads up all over the site. Joy.

2. Jasper on September 20th, 2007 (Comment) #

the thing that annoys me most about Facebook is the damned features! If the people on those lists were really my friends, they’d know I don’t want to play Zombie with them - I want to know what they’re up to, and talk to them - sans-zombie.

they had such a good thing going, too

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