Membership

Thursday Buzz: What Happens When Your Community Gets Massive?

Management helps save the day for large online communities. Plus: How to spice up panel discussions.

As a community grows in size, some challenges can arise.

To best address them, organizations must not only prioritize strong community management but also scale their communities.

StackExchange and Nextdoor both scale their communities by creating subgroups within them, the team at FeverBee highlights.

However, each has different approaches: StackExchange guides its members through four steps toward going live as a subgroup. Nextdoor, meanwhile, allows people to create a pilot site for their neighborhood if there isn’t one already. Then they have to hit certain targets within three weeks of creation.

Basically, the strategy of both is to allow members to help with community management. But doing so still requires limits.

“Don’t let everyone create a group. Make it harder to create a group and support the right people to succeed,” the FeverBee team writes.

Organizations must also take a few steps to help ensure quality subgroups. These include preventing duplicate groups, making sure group creators have motivation as well as skills and resources, and helping subgroup members successfully grow.

Tips for Your Next Panel

According to a 2014 survey, 63 percent of conference attendees say a normal panel discussion is “OK” or “poor or very poor.” Only 37 percent said the standard panel format was “good” or “great.”

With that in mind, Susan Jacobs offers 10 tips to improve the panel format at the Smart Meetings blog.

Links Of the Day

Need a new assistant and another chat app? Well, Google’s Allo comes in to save the day. The tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) to make chatting easier, along with something it calls “Google Assistant.” Check The Verge‘s’s review from Dieter Bohn.

It appears paid influencer marketing is on the rise in the event industry. But is it ethical? Adrian Segar says no in a piece published on his Conferences That Work blog.

Get some summer reading in? Or need more reading recs? Inc.’s Geoffrey James shares 10 business books that changed the world—a fall reading list that could help with your professional growth.

Patrick deHahn

By Patrick deHahn

Patrick deHahn is a contributor to Associations Now. MORE

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