Success in the online world is not a case of “build it and they will come”. Your community building efforts need to be creative, honest and actionable.
An online community is a group of people with common interests who use the Internet (websites, email, instant messaging, etc) to communicate, work together and pursue their interests. They are communities first, and online second. This means that the common ground shared by the members is more important than where they meet.
Members of an online community benefit in many of the same ways that they would in a real-world community, except that they use the Internet to do it. Instead of travelling to a coffee shop, you meet at a website and instead of having face-to-face discussions, you post messages to one another. The advantage is that the online community is always on, and it is far easier to keep track of community events and activities.
The hardest thing to do before building an online community is to be sure about whether it is right for your business. Not all brands, products or services generate the kind of passion needed to inspire consumers to participate in an online community. That said, companies can gain a ton of valuable information about their consumers by understanding their behaviour in an online community and getting their direct feedback.
If you build a community platform, understand that its goal is to empower the participants and provide them with added benefits. Do not use it as a marketing or advertising space. Use it as a way to inform, share and give something back. If you provide others with useful information they will be more interested in what you have to say later on.
One way to do this is to build the community around a lifestyle passion that drives engagement and interaction. Sony’s Backstage 101 community (www.sony.com/learn), for example, is a home for those who are passionate about learning and sharing information on photography.
Where to start
Of the hundreds of online communities that have failed in the last three years, most can trace their biggest flaw back to the lack of one critical ingredient: strategic planning. Online communities quickly became the hip new trend among cutting-edge brands and corporations, and many companies felt that they “had to have one” even if there was no sound reasoning attached. But like any other large-scale communication tactic, online community building without proper strategic planning is simply a recipe for failure.
Here are seven questions to consider before you get started:
1. Why are we building an online community?
You need to have a strategic reason for committing the money and human resources to such a project. A better answer would be along the lines of “to give people who love our brand an opportunity to connect with one another”.
2. What are people going to do when they get to our online community?
People only have time for a limited number of social networks. If you want your online community to be one of them, your users need to have a clear reason for being there and plenty to keep them occupied once they arrive.
Their purpose could be to consume content, participate in community discussions or events, or even provide content to share with other users. But little of that happens organically. You need to plan content for your community just like you plan stories for your regular company newsletter or email communications.
3. How big could our community be?
The worst that can happen, besides no one showing up, is that everyone does. Plan for scale so that the community will succeed regardless of whether it has 100 members or 100 000.
These plans should not be limited by server size or bandwidth. For example, consider how many employees will be needed to be actively moderate content, or how much time administrators will need to spend helping users reset passwords. Think it through not only from a technology angle, but also from a staffing one.
4. Who will be our community caretakers?
Community forums and message boards that seem to run themselves, simply don’t. You need a community manager (or more than one, depending upon the community’s size) who is there to supply content, spark discussions, moderate and monitor conversations for inappropriateness, and cultivate the environment you’re aiming to create. Once you are up and running, you can recruit avid users to do some of this work for you, but know that if you don’t consistently light a spark in the community with discussion topics, activities and conversation, users will eventually drift elsewhere.
5. Who will we invite?
Unless you really want to dive into the ocean without knowing its depth or whether sharks swim nearby, you’ll want to find a group of people (typically known as “beta testers”, in geek-speak) to help you work out the bugs and kinks.
6. What are our ground rules?
Make sure that every user has access to, and is very clear on, the guidelines for what is and isn’t acceptable in your community. Think of these guidelines as basic social norms for the party you’re throwing. Spell them out in friendly, easy-to-understand language. Give users the opportunity to suggest new guidelines. If they help you to build them, they will assume more responsibility for following them. Here are some examples of what to include:
7. How are we involved?
Building an online community that your employees can’t use is like building a new corporate headquarters and then leasing all the space. Your employees should not only be allowed to participate in your online community, but they should also be given roles and responsibilities. Communicate these roles to employees upfront, and ask for their collaboration and input along the way.
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04/03/2010