I deal a lot with communities. It started very early. As a teenager I was promoted to a moderator function on one of the online forums – binboy.org (anyone recognizes the name?). Currently I deal with online community (dotnetomaniak.pl) as well as online/offline – http://wrocnet.org. As I wanted to learn more and more about communities I turn my attention to books as the source of new knowledge. This post is my review of the book entitled “Buzzing Communities“.

This is one of few books I want to read about communities. If you are interested this is the list for now:

View Books about communities on Hackpad.

So how good is this book? Can it help you build better online or offline community? Read on.

If I would have to sum up this book in a few words I would say those words would be: data, data, data. Collect & analyze. Always have solid data to confirm or reject if what you are doing is good for your community or not.

If you are not collecting any data about your community I think you should start now. Start slow. Just collect the number of registered/active users and check if it’s going and how fast it is growing (or declining?).

I started collecting and analyzing more data about https://www.meetup.com/wrocnet/ and I can see some patterns on how users are engaged with the group. Some are good – some need some attention. I’ve introduced new ways of running the group and I start to see some positive effects. More people are showing up, more constant activity on the meetup page.

I’ve also implemented some of the engaging tactics on http://dotnetomaniak fanpage on Facebook, and also see some positive impact there. More shares, more likes and basically content reach is bigger – still below the community size, but it’s better than it was before.

The beginning of the book was quite a nice and I thought it be very inspiring book to read but the more I finished it the more I felt like it’s too long. Some later chapters, although felt with the community topics, were really unrelated for me and didn’t gave much info on how to run my group.

My overall rate for this book: 3/5. If you are dealing with community – worth a read but maybe select the chapters that are the most relevant for you.