Along with LaunchMemphis, LunaWeb recently co-hosted TribeCamp, a day-long conference on social media, web topics and professional development. We’ll be posting notes from some TribeCamp sessions over the next couple of weeks. The posts will be on a variety of topics, from social media to production to content.

Can Your Tribe Survive – Dr. Kris Markman

In Dr. Kris Markman’s presentation, ‘Can Your Tribe Survive?’, she identified three different types of communities, or rather three different ways to define a community: communities of practice, communities of interest, communities as networks.

Communities of practice have mutual engagement, joint enterprise and a shared repertoire. Communities of interest are ‘imagined communities,’ and the idea of a community of interest is seen in online communities. And when communities are networks, a sense of belonging becomes important.

Dr. Markman talked about many reasons online communities fail, including the very fact that they are, by nature, intangible. There’s also the issue of authenticity; she used an example of an online community of lesbians who learned that three key members of their community, including one moderator, were actually men. The community imploded because the trust was gone.

There’s also the obvious answer that the object of interest of the community might no longer be all that interesting. For example, if you joined an online forum for a band that was very popular in the 90s and the band hasn’t recorded anything in 10 years, the chances are that the participation of the community members is probably waning, too, if not already dead.

But perhaps more importantly, she discussed the key steps to growing a community that will survive and thrive. A community needs moderation or facilitation. Someone should be in charge, leading the conversation or at least setting the standards. The next important step is that a community needs a pace, rules and norms – here’s where that moderation and facilitation comes in. In order for a community to thrive, there needs to be a culture specific to that community. There need to be understood rules, ways of doing things, ways of speaking, jargon, norms and accepted ways of behaving and also, unaccepted ways of behaving.

A community needs a small group of active participants, Markman said. You don’t need 100 percent of the community participating every day, but the content does have to remain fresh and there needs to be a core of people who are contributing regularly.

There needs to be a sense of identity, or “we-ness,” as Markman called it. The members of the community need to identify as part of that community and feel connected to one another. They need to feel part of the collective group identity. At the same time, there also needs to be a certain level of uniqueness of contributors. A successful community will have a diverse population.

Finally, Markman noted the idea that people tend to perform better at tasks when given a specific high goal, even if that goal is higher than they can realistically reach. They will still perform better with this set of parameters than if they are simply told to do their best. With this in mind, a successful community needs goals and co-opetition – collaborative competition. Doing something that puts members competing against each other, but for the good of the community.

Tags | Kris Markman, Social Expedition, TribeCamp, Tribes