Sean ODriscoll is the Michael Jordan, Lance Amstrong and Tiger Woods all combined in one for online technical communities. He has been working on community for approximately 4 years with a particular focus on engaging the active enthusiasts and leaders that fuel the value of communties. He has been at Microsoft, where he is the General Manager of Community Support and MVP (Most Valuable Professional). This MVP group is about 3500 people who are actively helping their communities learn more about technology and leveraging Microsoft products more effectively. They are independent from Microsoft, and leaders in their own right with their sole mission to help others be successful with technology.  They are not evangalists for Microsoft, but more the leaders at how to use and leverage their technology.

The one question I had for Sean was “What is the ONE thing you have learned that you would like to share with community practitioners, managers and designers?”

“Start with a focus on the active enthusiasts or leaders of the community and build it around them. These are the top 1% of folks who are going to make the core of your community and are the most vocal participants”.

The answer seems very obvious at the superficial level, so I dug deeper to understand his perspective.

1. Leverage active participation tracking: Currently they use the most simple tools to monitor who are the most helpful MVP in NNTP (Network News) and use Netscan. Since their MVP are people that help on other communities besides Microsoft, they have to watch, monitor several communities hosted outside Microsoft to ensure they find out who is helping the users. These people get nominated to be the MVP’s for the year.

2. Provide incentives to the active participants: Each year (similar to the Oscars), these MVP are identified, awarded and feted by Microsoft. Since they help the community which indirectly benefits Microsoft, they are all invited to fly into Redmond for a summit, they meet with their peers, product experts from Microsoft and also meet with Bill Gates. They do get incentives along the way. E.g. At the Vista launch last month many of them got the first views at the product.

3. Grow and nurture your active MVP’s: Since most MVP help the community out of their own interests, helping the benefits Microsoft. They are actively courted by Microsoft and given training, documentation etc. This helps them be more effective at their activities.

4. Request active feedback from your participants: The conversation is bi-directional with lots of MVP’s providing their perspectives which sometimes are not always aligned with Microsoft’s but they end up learning from each other and still help the larger audience of non MVP’s.

5. Build the community around your active participants as opposed to making the participants come to the community. Support your participants ways to organize instead of building a community specifically around your own needs to control the message and medium. What this implies is that if your company makes a product and there are independent communities that have sprung up outside of your direct influence, it still makes a lot of sense to support & help those extended communities.