Great communities exist because of the amazing people involved. I don’t think anyone would dispute that. Nonetheless, as departments and companies plan communities or they make decisions related to their online spaces, they tend to forget it's about people. I think part of the problem is we replace the word people when we talk about community, and use terms like members, users, or even super users. By using this terminology, it can be easy to forget the people factor. It’s very similar how in some corners project managers talk about “a resource”, when they really mean a person.

When a community fails, more often than not, it’s because there’s no perceived value to the company. Your boss may one day ask you “what’s the value that this community brings to the organization—why do we even have a community?” Unfortunately, if you aren’t prepared and don’t have quantifiable results that clearly reflect the value of your community, you may soon end up forced to close the community or worse, without a job.

While these terms are often used interchangeably, there’s a difference between simply having an audience and having a community. There was perhaps a time before when these two terms were blurred, but over the past couple of years people have been throwing out the term “community,” at just about anything it’ll stick to—and it’s clearly wrong. In other words, people have been using the term community incorrectly by identifying a simple audience or following and deeming it to be a community, when really, it’s not. 

There’s a difference between simply being a Community Manager, and being a present Community Manager. Being present means being hyper involved. It means paying attention to new community members as well as old ones and pushing out new content to keep the community fresh and engaged. It’s also a crucial step in the development of a new online community (and less so for those that are more mature).

I was recently reading about Facebook testing downvotes on their comments. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s reacted by calling it “flattery”. Some people may not know this, but Vanilla has had a downvote feature since 2012 — it’s part of our reaction system. Even though this is an option (because we believe community owners should have choice), we don’t recommend the use of these “negative” reactions for most communities.