My personal opinion is that most people make the “same variation” of mistakes multiple times, derive a different outcome each time and call it “learning from a new mistake”. Afterall we all want to think we are smart and learn from our mistakes so we dont make the “same mistake twice”.

This brings me to the point of best practices. If you dont try 3-5 new “ideas” or “concepts” with your community each week/month/year then you end up with 2 problems:

1. Waiting for someone else to try something that is a great way to engage community members or facilitate a discussion forum or foster a thriving atmosphere in a community. This gives them a heads up first mover advantage and gets their community more adoption. Before you think this does not hurt your community, remember that most individuals cannot possibly be a part of more than 3-5 communities and feel engaged in all of them. So you are competing with other communities not in your industry or area of focus.

2. Best practice implementations have nuances, which have to be tweaked over time before they become “known best practices”. That time if not on your side, will slow your community’s chances of growth.

The trouble with best practices is that a proven set of people (early adopters) have tried something and after a resonable number (lets say 30-50%) of the people have tried the same and found it works, it goes mainstream. Like Neil Patel points out in his 5 Sure fire Social Media Headline Formulas, most become “formulaic” and the new best practice becomes doing something different.

Online Communities overall are relatively new (some would venture even only 3-5 years old) so there are a few well known best things to do, but by and large, there are more unknowns and most are very confusing.