A Primer for Building Online Community

A Primer for Building Online Community | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog

I’ve enjoyed Toby Bloomberg’s post on building online communities, clarifying the 3 distinctive elements, a place to join, a member directory and mechanisms to connect with other members.

If you’re starting up a community, you need to be willing to spend substantial time animating the community during startup. In this phase, the communication remains ‘few to many’, as with non-community websites. After a while, readers start to react - the communication shifts towards many to few. But what you’re really after is many to many communication, i.e. readers talking to each other about your project.

Such project requires a few considerations …

• communities do not run on their own; if blogging is a marathan, communities are a single or double thriatlon
• since you open up a community website to active user participation, security is a constant concern
• even without malicious attempts, user interaction tends to create unstructured sites, and you may find yourself spending lots of time organising content
• your policy to police the site - how to be fair but firm?

… as well as a few key ingredients

1. The right mix between content and interaction. At least in the beginning, content dominates. If you’ve built a highly interactive site, but have no mechanism to populate it, prepare for some rough times.
2. The right mix of builders and connectors. Not all users need/want the same privileges. Think about the types of users you want, and move users between types, depending on the role they choose to play.
3. Technology: the choice of the right CMS for the job makes a difference between heaven and hell.
4. Useability: a community website is a complex web application, that typically grows in a piecemeal fashion, but the visitor expects an integrated and intuitive user interface.
5. Role model the behaviour you wish on the site

Are community sites suitable for b2b? They may be, but first you need to question why you would want it: to listen to customers, for market intelligence, to ask questions, a service to your industry, … Note that community sites are much more demanding on users, and you may be using up customer good will. You also need to consider whether you would wish to host the community under your corporate brand - online community projects are highly risky, and can easily damage your image.

If all these considerations come out favourably, you still need to consider whether your target audience is up-to-speed on internet technology, and large enough to build a lively community.

This explains why we have relatively few online b2b communities.