Managing millions of members is not an easy task. While most companies deal with one-off transactions with their customers, online communities are a never-ending transaction: keeping members engaged and happy is the minimum for keeping the business afloat. Large online communities like Facebook or LinkedIn keep up with demand with thousands of team members, but these LA-based companies like deviantART, Plug.dj and even Myspace are dealing with millions of users with only tens or hundreds of employees. Here's how they do it...
[ibimage==31259==Original==none==self==null]
DeviantART
Number of members: 30 million registered
What draws in their members: DeviantART is a massive community of artists and a gallery and print shop for user-made artwork.
Team size: over 100
How they manage deviantART community: Foster respect among community members and give them the tools to interact on higher and higher levels.
DeviantART has over 300 million works of art, receives over 2.5 billion page views a month and has 1.2 million plus comments a day: “We’ve outlasted some of the earlier social networks like Myspace and Friendster, I don’t know that there has been another creative platform quite like deviantART,” said CEO Angelo Sotira, who co-founded the company in 2000.
Not to mention the site's monthly unique visits top 60 million users and is ranked No. 140 in traffic globally by Alexa. With a little over 100 employees, the company clearly has a lot to manage.
“What sets deviantART apart is the focus and purpose of the network and community as a whole," said Sotira. "DeviantART‘s philosophy is one of respect and encouragement. At the beginning, we commented positively on every single submission to deviantART because, largely, it was just that exciting. This turned out to be a cornerstone theme of the success we have in creating community."
DeviantART deepened community engagement by a constantly progressing its platform so that users could request critiques from other users, use a native HTML5 drawing tool to draw on copies of existing art and follow artists via a “watch” feature.
“Our members, or ‘deviants’ as we call them, offer one another constructive feedback and critique, which inspires them to create more – that is the main value of the community between artists,” said Sotira.
Sotira also said DeviantART has survived and prospered over its many years by creating several firsts in the world of Web 2.0.
“We were among the first to provide comments under images: seems obvious now, but it wasn’t then,” said Sotira. Also, the use of avatars to identify users started on deviantART, with the community of artists who actually create emoticons gatherering on the site.
Considering deviantART's user base these 'firsts' make a lot of sense: “Your technology has to work for the needs of the community you intend to attract and serve,” said Sotira.
[ibimage==31260==Original==none==self==null]
Plug.dj
Number of users: "Several million" (the team has declines to give a specific number)
Why users use it: Plug.dj lets users discover music socially by taking turns creating playlists for each other.
Team size: 10
Top tip on managing their community: Attract positive community members and use their enthusiasm to help moderate.
Founded in 2011, Plug.dj has several million users in over 190 countries. The average user spend 62 minutes on the site each visit while daily and weekly users spend multiple hours per visit.
Its technology is focused on helping users discover and engage each other with new music. Within a virtual room a DJ spins music for their audience (represented by unique dancing avatars) just like might be in a nightclub. The result is a community that is constantly mixing and sampling new tunes.
With only about 10 employees, the company has had to carefully manage its millions of users.
“We try to foster this positive sense of community,” said CEO Alex Reinlieb. “We can’t control everyone of course but we try to attract positive types of people."
Naturally though, “because it’s the internet, we’ve had some spammers and trolls,” said Reinlieb. In one instance, Plug.dj found a user engaging in hyperactive trolling. Though the user’s abuse was especially obnoxious to the community the Plug.dj team stuck to their principles and reached out in good faith.
“Instead of attacking him back we engaged with him really positively,” said Reinlieb. Reinlieb said what they found was that he was a heavy user who was upset because his support ticket had gone unanswered. After engaging with him and addressing the support problem the trolling went away: “We think positivity trumps negativity over time."
But the Plug.dj team doesn’t push positivity all by itself: true to its roots as a community platform, it empowers some of its users to work on the site's behalf via a voluntary Brand Ambassador position, which was launched about nine months ago due to repeated requests from users wanting to help out the site in any way that they could. Plug.dj has 45 Brand Ambassadors across 11 countries who are organically helping to promote, maintain and moderate the music community: “It gives people a sense of ownership," Reinlieb said.
“Because we can’t be involved in everything we have to have a degree of trust in the product and the people who help manage it,” said Reinlieb.
That emphasis on spurring the community on with positivity, entrusting members to police themselves and empowering members with technology to engage each other is what makes social platforms into successful and sustainable ventures.
[ibimage==31261==Original==none==self==null]
Myspace
Number of users: over 50 million
Community type: Social network
Team size: 200 to 400
Tips on managing a large community: Constantly improve the product to rekindle the relationship between users and the product.
Founded in 2003, Beverly Hills-based Myspace will forever have a place in the history of the social networks and especially in the history of LA tech. The site made its mark by building one of the first widely adopted social networks - a place where people could gather as a community despite their proximity. At the time it was revolutionary: at its peak, Myspace had over 125 million users worldwide.
Unfortunately, Myspace’s impressives stats did not last as alternate social networks like Facebook sprouted up. But even after some tumultuous years, which included the public firing of long-time CEO Chris DeWolfe in 2009 and a lawsuit with Universal Music Group in 2006, Myspace has come into its own today as a social service mainly for musicians and fans thanks to backing from Justin Timberlake and Specific Media.
The key for Myspace to manage the users it has left (and to bring on board new users) has really been keeping the brand relevant and fresh while still sticking to the widely recognized name. The newly designed site borrowed concepts from Tumblr and Pinterest and allowed for room to constantly add in extra features that the community requested. The tough part about all this is maintaining relationships with original users while launching new features and designs.
"The biggest challenge is Myspace has had a place in a lot of people's hearts during their formative years," Ben Johnston of JosephMark, the design studio behind the redesign, said in a Mashable interview. "It was sort of a relationship for people and then sort of lost its way. There are a lot of deep-seeded feelings, which is the emotional response from people. In one way you can look at this like an ex-partner coming back. We didn't want to create something that was subpar or that was on par. It had to be beyond the expectation of those interactions to really rekindle the relationship. There's been that higher expectation pressure beyond internal team and vision, but the community. How can you create a product that lives up to that and truly become a part of someone's life again? That question has been the driving force."
