By Mark Miller, founder and Editor of EndUserSharePoint.com

To celebrate the publication of the 1000^th article on EndUserSharePoint.com, I talk about how the site was created, how it has become one of the most popular SharePoint communities on the internet, and how you might use those lessons on your own SharePoint site.

I get questions every week about how EndUserSharePoint.com has grown so fast. In less than 2 years page views and unique visitors have skyrocketed. Hundreds of people a month participate in the live online workshops. Because of this, I get asked for interviews from companies like MindJet, Bamboo Nation and EventBrite to talk about the work I’ve done to create such a community.

I’m just going to ramble for a couple minutes here to give you an idea on how all this came about and hopefully give you some ideas on how you can grow the audience for your blog or SharePoint site. Sit back, relax and enjoy the tangents.

How It All Started

When I started EndUserSharePoint.com I had a core group of people in mind that I wanted to reach: SharePoint End Users. As the site has progressed, I’ve broken that into three groups: Information Workers, Site Admin/Power Users and Site Collection Admin. If I were to be completely honest, I’d say that when I first started the blog, I was confusing Information Workers with End Users. SharePoint it so broad and deep, there are several levels of End Users, thus the differentiation.

The second tier of users is the Site Admin/Power User. This is the group that has been “volunteered” to lead the charge on the use of SharePoint. In many cases, they requested access to a site for managing their projects or documents, IT told them that there was no such site available, but if they wanted one, they could have one. Sound familiar? You’re not alone because that’s the way most internal sites get started.

Let’s get down and dirty here. You’ve got a site that you didn’t want in the first place, but now that it’s setup and part of your responsibility, you want people to use it. Who are you going to try to attract and why would they come?

Power Users: That’s Your Ticket In

The leadership today is about 10 people bringing you 100 and 100 bringing you 1,000. When you have 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly talks about, then they're the people who are going to turn it into a movement. Not you. Your job is to take care of and feed and nurture those 1,000 people, and those people need to go to their network of people who know them and trust them, who eat dinner with them, and bring them in.  -- Seth Godin

That leads me to the main point of this diatribe: The Site Admin/Power User is the group you need to get to for End User buy-in of your SharePoint implementation. By virtue of proximity to the site, they become the first line of support for Information workers, not the IT help desk, which probably doesn’t know much more than an average Power User anyway.

I used to think SharePoint Information Workers were the most critical to End User buy-in because they are the widest audience at the base of the pyramid, but I have changed my mind.

Power Users are great because of their need for immediate information. This is the main audience for EndUserSharePoint.com. We’ve setup a SharePoint Q&A forum for them that is moderated by other Power Users. We provide simple solutions in our articles to help them solve the interface problems that can get in the way of finding and managing information.  The Weekly Newsletter provides free downloads for solutions that can be immediately implemented on a SharePoint site.

What we do on our site is something you might consider on your internal site: provide solutions to common problems that occur frequently enough that you’re tired of hearing about it! Where’s your list of common, reported requests? I’ve got reams of pages that I keep of ideas that are generated because the same questions keep coming up over and over. Until I discovered the power of OneNote, I was hitting Staples every couple months for a stack of yellow legal pads to keep my notes.

The questions that come at you as a Site Administrator can help you become more proficient at determining what your core audience is looking for.

Real World Story

When I started EndUserSharePoint.com, the purpose was to handle those day-to-day issues that Information Workers were running into when trying to get a handle on SharePoint; and that was the problem. My audience was extremely limited because Information Workers don’t want to get a handle on SharePoint!

SharePoint is just a tool Information Workers have to learn in order to do work they already do to their own satisfaction. “Why do I have to put this thing in this new location? We’ve already got a file server for that.” “My Excel sheets are working fine. I email them out every week and everyone is happy. Why in the world would I want to spend time putting that stuff in a new location?”

With a Site Admin/Power User, you’re not going to get that kind of push back. These people are your supporters. They want your SharePoint project to work. The problem is, there are usually no in-house resources to support them, there’s no budget to get training, there’s no line item in their job descriptions that says “Allocation of 10 hours a week towards SharePoint site management”, and a myriad of other things that make SharePoint life miserable at the company level.

Here’s a little secret for you: there’s tens of thousands of you out there! EndUserSharePoint.com started to take off when I realized that the audience who really cared about SharePoint, the hardcore evangelists, didn’t have a single point of resource to go to when trying to get information about a specific problem they were having. Once I recognized who the real audience was, it didn’t matter that the largest base of SharePoint End Users is the Information Worker. Those weren’t the people looking for help.

Let’s Do a Little Math

Another Real World Story

I had a SharePoint site manager come to me and say “I’m pretty low in the corporate food chain in the overall scheme of things. This is a 7000 person company and my team is buried about 5 levels deep in the company hierarchy. How am I going to get buy-in from all those levels above me when I build out my SharePoint site?”

My answer: You’re not! Your core audience is the set of people who will be using your site on a daily or weekly basis, not the five levels of people above you. Get your house in order and then worry about the other guys. Create a site that is easy to navigate, easy to manage information flow and simple to maintain. Work with your team to get your site in shape so they can use it.

By doing that, you will create evangelists for your project, people who talk about it and sell it for you. Once people see what you are doing with your site, then you can start working with them to help build a consistent structure.

Yes, I know, people are going to scream “But Mark, how can you say that? We’ve got to have a governance policy in place before we can do anything. We’ve got to agree at a company level on how these things are going to work. You can’t just tell a site manager to go off on their own!”

Well, I’ve got news for you: In most cases it’s too late to do that. SharePoint is already out. People are already porting over content from their existing files servers by cutting and pasting entire hierarchical structures of folders and if you’re going to wait for all that to get hashed out before you start structuring your own share of the world, you’re going to be sitting there a pretty long time.

You’ve got to start somewhere. Why not in your own backyard? Clean up and structure to the best of your current knowledge and then start helping people around you. That’s a real Power User. 

Where to Go from Here

Take a breath. Don’t be afraid to start. Someone is going to do it and it might as well be you.

About the Author

Mark Miller is founder and editor of EndUserSharePoint.com, one of the most popular sites for SharePoint End Users. He coordinates a group of a dozen contributing authors, managing the day-to-day aspects of editing and publishing content for the site.

When not teaching or writing about SharePoint, Mark can be found designing paper airplanes and studying the origami of Robert Lang. He lives in New York City with his wife, two children, one gerbil, one goldfish and one Nintendo DS that is constantly being fought over by the gerbil and the goldfish.