How To Get Your Tribe’s First Members. –The Jon Bischke Interview
on Jan 27, 2009 - 6:00 AM PST 
Once you launch your community, how do you get anyone to join and grow it?
Jon Bischke built a robust community on eduFire, the online video learning site that he founded. So I asked him to teach us. Here’s a paraphrased transcript of what he said:
I’d offer to pieces of advice:
Find your network’s seeds
The first one is that everyone has a social network, whether or not they have one on the web. Most of us know a few hundred people that can often the seeds of your community. So reaching out to them and asking them to reach out to people they know, that’s how a lot of the big social networks got their start.
Build with your diehards
The second thing is to find your passionate early adopters. People who come to your site, and identify with what you’re doing and feel strongly enough to be the champions of your site.
Within eduFire, we have 50-100 people that I would consider diehards. They’re on the site every day, posting to the forums, and welcoming new people to the site. Those are the types of people that, if you build relationships with them, really help grow the community.
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February 2nd, 2009 at 12:16 pm
There interviews on community building has effectively helped me increase our community’s participation, thanks for focusing on this subject. John makes a good point about:
#1 – health, not many people talk about this, but you have to be an effective ceo, you have to spend time maintaining your health. especially if you have a small team, the company cannot afford for the leader to take sick days.
#2 – using your own network and focusing on your diehards is a good way to scale up your community. Once you have a couple diehards, try to talk to them over the phone or meet up face to face, they will become even more vested with the community and participate even more. that is what I have noticed as I build out our tribe.