Me and the K2 community

It occurred to me that i have not really told much about who i am and what i do.  I wanted to give you some insight into who i am.  For those of you who don't know me, I am the "community guy" at K2 (WWW.K2.COM) and run the community web site www.k2underground.com

I have been a techie for my entire career so I have been a member of many different communities similar to those I was trying to develop.  So I thought I should be able to help a bunch of people just like me.

I sat down to try to figure what goals I had for working with the community.  I believe that in most cases, the community is already there, people are already working and people are already talking.  So the question really is:

• What are you going to do to help them,
• What are you going to do in order to hear them?
• What are you going to do to try to get more people involved?

My goals/priorities became more obvious the more research i did

1.  Establish an online gathering place. (k2underground)
2.  Ensure that this gathering place enabled the community to network with each other, grow, become a place to do research etc.
3.  Create and grow content.  Once i really began to think about what this community needed most i found that it lacked good content.  Being that this is a primarily technical community what they are going to be seeking first is information. Information about how to do their jobs, learn, grow, be better, solve problems. Content is also going to keep people on the site, keep people coming back, and give people a reason to at least be passively involved.  Good content is/was the most difficult component of my challenge, and one to this day i have not done as well as i had hoped.

4.  Get/Grow community leaders.  I considered myself merely a helper in the community and a biased helper at that.  What this community needs are leaders.  Leaders that were self motivated, not motivated because K2 incents them.  These leaders help evangelize the community, help to get the community talking, engage them be the technical go to people if possible and when necessary. In addition we need solid people in the community that can help us know what the community needs.  We wanted bi-directional evangelists.  Not only did we want to have people go out and tell the K2 story, we wanted people to come to us and tell use the community story so that we can make it better. We have come to call these fine people K2 Insiders. I consider the Insider program a pillar of the K2 community strategy a piece that HAD to be done right and done first.  It has really been that and more.

Now i had my list of goals, to work on.  Once i established these goals, and things began to move, Focus needed to move onto the Underground, what did this site need to be and do to truly help the community?  More on that in a future blog post, as well as other blogs on my adventures building the K2 community.

What do you think, does this sound good to you? What could I do differently?

Your comments and suggestions are always welcome here. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Or you can email me directly chris dot geier at Gmail.com