For many people who are involved with some type of Community Management, including myself, Richard Millington‘s blog Feverbee is a big source of inspiration.
Last week I talked to him, through Skype, about Community Management, education, Seth Godin, Feverbee and the future of Community Management.

Kirsten: Hi Richard! Which communities are you facilitating right now?
Richard: At the moment I’m involved with three projects, the first is The Global Fund’s Born HIV Free campaign. This campaign aims to save a generation of children from HIV. We began working on this in February and have so far collected over 500,000 signatures through a variety of platforms. I’ve been working to scale up our audience, develop a sense of community amongst them and ensure they’re reaching out to others to be involved.
The second is an internal employee community for Novartis, a Pharmaceutical company with approximately 90,000 employees across over 110 countries.
Finally, I’m involved with a new community for a specific group of people in the UK that involves as much offline community development as online.

Kirsten: Those are very different projects! The only thing they seem to have in common is that it’s about people.
Richard: I think it’s hard to find a project in our space that isn’t really about people these days. All the technology in the world doesn’t change the fact that people are still responding to the same things in very similar ways.

“They tend to believe they can do it better than the amateurs can. They can’t”

Kirsten: I agree. So all these online communities are subsidized by large organisations. Is this a trend?
Richard: Well it’s a trend in so much as large organizations see successful online communities and want one for themselves. The problem is they don’t try to copy the approach that made these communities successful. Instead they usually apply hybrid marketing/community approaches. They tend to believe they can do it better than the amateurs can. They can’t. So over the last few years we’ve seen increasing demand for people in our line of work that can help organizations change internally to create the environment in which successful communities thrive and give them some tactics and approaches that work.

Ultimately, however, I suspect we’re going to see community experts learning how to create communities for niche groups and become very, very, good at monetizing them. Say, create a community for marketing managers in London…there are plenty of ways to monetize that… So for now the trend is large organizations getting involved, 3 years from now I suspect it will be community entrepreneur types.

Kirsten: Most people in Holland think Community Management is mostly about facilitating forums. Not many realize that part of a Community Managers task is to support certain change in organisations internally. Also not many Community Managers themselves realize that this is an important part of their job.
Looking at the HIV Free Campaign, you have already gathered many signatures but how can you also create a feeling of community between these people?
Richard: The vast majority of this campaign, any campaign, will be influenced..sign up..then leave. You can’t do much about that.
What you need to do is have an invitiation for people that want to be more involved and give them meaningful things they can do. The Born HIV Free campaign, for example, works with people to rally their friends to be involved. We have our super-activists who respond to nearly every pieceof content we put out and share it. We’re also seeing people create their own petitions that we can merge with our own in support of the campaign. Not every community needs a registration form, for many it’s better if they don’t. What’s more important is they feel a sense that they’re part of something special and that’s what we try to encourage.

To put more simply, give people something they can be responsible for and give them recognition for their achievements. That works for almost any community, have an open invitiation for people to be more involved and then work with those that step forward. Don’t spend ages pursuing the rest.

Kirsten: Getting signatures is ‘easy’ but building a community isn’t. It’s interesting that The Global Fund really understood the importance of community. Are the valuating the succes of this initiative on the amount of signatures or on something else?
Richard: We have both internal engagement metrics and quite obvious success factors. One of the goals of the campaign is to persuade governments that they have the support of their citizens to provide the funding the global fund needs (about $20bn). The meeting where they decide how much money to pledge towards The Global Fund takes place next week. If we don’t get the money, then we would have failed.
The positive, clearly, would be that if we don’t succeed this time then we would have created an amazing platform from which to develop and grow our future community building efforts.

Kirsten: Certainly a very ambitious goal.
Richard: Not as ambitious as you might think, The Global Fund is a $19bn organization to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The increase we’re asking for isn’t huge. It’s mostly the economic conditions that make a clear show of support essential.

Kirsten: I guess people are optimistic then about next weeks meeting?
Richard: I think so, some countries have already pledged their contributions, Norway ($180m), Japan ($800m), Canada ($520m), France ($1.4bn) etc…It’s looking good so far.

Kirsten: You have a degree in Marketing and worked with Seth Godin for a period. How did you end up facilitating communities?
Richard: I used to be really into online gaming i.e. people playing games against each other online. Like Quake, Counter-strike etc. I wasn’t very good at them, so got involved in the community around here. I worked for many communities such as www.ukterrorist.com, www.iguk.org, www.gamers.nu, www.gotfrag.com. Around this time I saw a careers advisor who said there wasn’t a future in what I was doing and I should go to University instead and take marketing.

Kirsten: That’s funny

Richard: So I did, got my degree, then came out and continued developing communities. Only this time for increasingly bigger companies (aside, never take careers advice from a careers advisor).

Kirsten: Not many marketeers ‘get’ the idea of growing communties. They tend to just push their messages.

“When marketers get involved they aim for big scale, fancy websites and do just about everything wrong”

Richard: Well their first mistake is to think that growing online communities is a subset of marketing. Have you seen any marketing agencies that have developed successful online communities?

Kirsten: No, we haven’t. They keep trying though.

Richard: It has more in common with the community organizers banging on doors of his local neighborhood to get people involved in something special.
When marketers get involved they aim for big scale, fancy websites and do just about everything wrong. Which is great for us, gives us lots of work, but also salts the earth for many potential organizations that deserve fantastic communities but don’t know where else to turn except their marketers.

Kirsten: Yes, that’s a real shame.

Richard: Yesterday I came across GenerationBenz, by far the worst branded online community I’ve seen for ages. It’s built entirely in flash. THere’s nothing to do there. It’s probably doing more harm for Mercedez than good.

Kirsten: When you look at the people who graduated with you, is there anybody who didn’t turn out to be a classic marketeer? Do people who graduate right now understand that this way of pushing messages won’t work anymore?Richard: The people who graduated with me are the most unfortunate bunch of people in years. They’ve been armed with the same misconceptions as everyone else and released into the worst recession in some time. Most are doing jobs below their degrees. Which is a shame. There are some brilliant minds there. It’s just university teaches you what has worked up until the moment they tell you about it. They don’t tell you about the social and technological changes that have made most of it irrelevant.

Kirsten: So education is not up to level yet? Not even in GB? That’s very dissapointing.
Richard: I speak from my narrow experience at one University. I know people like Richard Bailey and Philip Young are doing brilliant work to pus the boundaries. They just don’t seem to get much support from their establishments.

Kirsten: Especially when it’s about marketing, PR or communication.

Richard: You know what we really need? It’s a course that cuts across psychology, sociology, technology, marketing, PR and communication. Maybe an ‘engagement’ course.

Kirsten: That would certainly be an interesting course!

Richard: My PR modules at University were entirely about publicity packs and press releases… That not much use when newspapers are dropping likes flies and less people are reading them.

Kirsten: No. There’s a lot of work still to be done there. A true challenge. Very interesting.

Richard: People need to take more control over their education too. If you let people push information on you and swallow it, you’re not going to have any advantage over anyone else. If you explore what your lecturers aren’t telling you. That’s a huge advantage

Kirsten: Yes, it’s not about just knowledge anymore but more about how you apply knowledge. That means you have to look further than what is fed to you.
What was the most important thing Seth Godin taught you?
Richard: Seth has a clarity of thought that is beyond what I had encountered so far. When he starts a project, he’s thought everything through in a logical way. So for a community, you would know exactly what you were going to do. Who you were going to approach and why, how many people you want in your community, and why, what you will say to them, and why, what they will say to others, and why. There is a brilliant clarity of thinking there that saves a lot of problems later on. Or as he would say, do all your thrashing at the beginning.

Kirsten: Did he teach you a thing or two about writing? Or about how you get your message across? Like you do on Feverbee?
Richard: When I was launching FeverBee I wanted a blog that would be the sort of blog I’d read. So first thing was to make it as practical as possible. I try not to spend too long delving into theoretical or giving my opinions on the state of community management in general. There are too many social media blogs doing that. I also wanted a style that would work – and Seth’s blog is by far the best for that..short, sharp, sentences…conscise thought… I read every post Seth writes. I can’t say that about any other blog.
So, his blog has a huge influence on me because I think it’s so well written.

Kirsten: Yes, I thought so. But you also actually make it work. The posts are clear, readable and mostly passionate.

Richard: There are a lot of great community blogs coming through right now. Blaise Grimes-viort, Martin Reed, Angela Connor, Connie Benson, Dawn Foster etc… and yours, of course

Kirsten: True but it remains a challenge to really talk about the ‘hard core’ community management. Most blogs are about: the role, what department the role belongs to, trends etc. Important as well but I think Feverbee really speaks to the Community Manager. The advise and tips are very concrete.
So when you look at the role of Community Manager today. How has it evolved since you started to work in the field?

“I think social media managers are going to have to become online community managers to stay in business”

Richard: More prominence. When I got my first community manager job I didn’t even know what it was. Today everyone knows more about it, but we still have very different definitions about what it entails.
That’s ok though. I think social media managers are going to have to become online community managers to stay in business. There’s only so long before clients really that the tools are pretty simple to use and it’s more about managing a community of likeminded people than sending out messages through popular platforms.
It’s also easier now to build a community than it used to be. Back then, it was very geeky to participate in a community. Now most people on the internet are in at least one. That social acceptance is more important than any technological changes.

Kirsten: Do you think Community Managers might become leaders of internal communities, and therefor get more influence in the organisation?
Richard: I’m nervous about over-prescribing communities. Internal online communities have a fantastic benefit for increasing bonds, communications and co-operation throughout large communities. However, lets not forget that people that work in finance, HR etc aren’t idiots. The community has to make sense of each organization and for many it wont..not yet..maybe not ever.
It’s also a question about whether you want a community manager having a great deal of influence over employees. You don’t want unions forming from within. So, it really does have to make sense to each organization and I’m sure they’re very capable of deciding that.

Kirsten: And what are your own ambitions?
Richard: FeverBee sneakily became FeverBee Ltd recently. I’m hoping to turn it into a broader partnership vehicle for companies that want to develop successful online communtiies and continue to develop my own. I think there is huge potential or organizations right now to develop their own communities and build businesses around them. That’s where I would like to be.

Kirsten: The perfect way to end this interview. Thank you!

Here you can read another interview with Richard.