How to Kick Start A Community – an adaptation list

I was involved in communities from the beginning of my long tenure at Microsoft, and helped launch a myriad of tech consultant and developer communities and marketing mechanisms that included the MVP program, the developer marketing program, TechEd Developer Conferences, and a slew of community and beta/co-development programs for a variety of technology and non-tech firms.  I’ve run hundreds of technical beta programs and feedback loops, and learned a few things about creation and use of electronic communities for business.  Some of the comments below came out of an internal whitepaper I wrote regarding online community development around 1996-1997 when I joined Microsoft’s web server product development team.   

Do your homework! 

If you have not had a recent online audit or competitive intelligence report done, do so BEFORE initiating any community planning.  Then check your homework at every review milestone.  Change is constant – so factor it into your plan phases.  If your core is solid, you can manage exceptions more easily and proactively.  Plus, you will be fiscally more accurate as a result. 

If you are relying on ad hoc research or basing your efforts on information that is older than 6 months, you are handicapping your own efforts.  Your audience and the mediums they prefer are fluid and extremely dynamic, so you need to use a professional resource to stay on top of recent movements and developments.  Knowing how your audience communicates and where they move is critical to designing a successful community site and outreach campaign.  

Social Media touches all functional aspects of your company. 

If you need help designing a comprehensive cross silo approach, we’re here to help.  From establishing corporate policy to coordinating functional campaigns, never lose sight of the fact that Social Media is not a standalone, rather it represents a portion of each of your companies organizations and functional budgets.
 
Conversations between companies and customers will be the name of the game going forward. One way exchanges will quickly become a thing of the past. Finally, we’ll get to an ecnomy where business becomes personal again.

1. Create compelling content on a recurring basis. Brands sometimes create videos, podcasts, or stories on a daily or weekly basis that encourages members to come back. The web is all about participation, so you will need to understand the workload and frequencies, so that you can budget or hire correctly.  

2. Reward users who fill out their profile. Folks like to see other friendly faces, so giving them access to premium features or recognition of those who have the most complete profiles should recognized.  Recognize contributions – no matter how small.  It takes time, but is worth it. 

3. Invite community influencers and advocates to the community first –giving them first right of testing the system and then inviting others. By all means engage them in helping you improve, by giving them credibility and by honestly listening to feedback.  Learn to weight opinions accurately, and act on the ones that benefit the most people the heaviest. 

4. Invite detractors. Risk being snubbed. (Bet you aren’t going to hear this very often, however a large part of our success with clients comes from advocating participation from all types of participants.)  Antagonism is healthy and can create wonderful streams of idea sharing.  One detractor turned neutral or positive in public is worth several thousand advocates.  Of course this takes finesse, so don’t leave these relationships to your rookies to handle.  Give respect, earn respect. Invite a competitors top influencer to “represent” (but never the competitor themselves unless you are confident they can be managed. Remember – shoot-outs in public tend to be messy in front of an audience. Avoid the tempatation.) 

5. Encourage interaction through conversations. Ask questions, talk about controversial topics, or host a contest that encourages participation. Don’t survey people to death or ask canned questions, just be human and get into a discussion.  One way questions NEVER work, so be prepared to reciprocate. 

6. Reward top contributors.  Notice this is different than “recognize contribution” above.  Seriously – give something to these people for fueling the community energy.  If they bail – so will others.  Those that participate the most, or perhaps, are the most helpful should be recognized on a leader board, and thanked in public.  Unexpectedly, send them something nice as a thank you, or reward them with premium services –never money. Some are motivated by challenges, others recognition.  If you don’t know why they do what they do so prolifically – ask.

7. Give participants in the community a chance to showcase their knowledge and perspective. This means ALL of them.   Great ideas come from collaboration. so encourage and nurture it.  Clip any abusive behavior instantly, and rotate the soapbox.  I’ve had absolute beginners come up with some stunning ideas – because they aren’t mired in the burden of minutea.  Kids do this to parents all the time.  Embrace it.

8. Use the community as a bi-directional information exchange, not a one way mechanism.  At Microsoft, I specialized in large community development projects built around iterative participation in product design and development. The practice of conversing became a corporate standardization, much to Bill and Steve’s chagrin.  After all, it’s one thing to claim customer listening and be able to actually deliver, yet quite another to implement enterprise processes and systems with their money to support listening and participating as a divisional initiative, and then point to the success metrics and demand it be mandated corporate wide – both internally and externally. (For those of you who remember the “Eat our own Dogfood” policy – this was the genesis.) Product quality and sales spiked.  Not bad, especially when original ROI was deemed ”schmoozing or goofing off”.

 9. Centralize your community around your real world events.  People want to find each other before events, talk about the event during the duration, and then afterwards are key.  Use the community in your physical events.  Do a build up befoire the event, and a post mortem afterwards.  Get content contributrions and ideas of what went well, what didn’t and what could be better.   People love giving opinions about “what happened”.  (just avoid the gossip please…and be kind to people, not cruel)

10. Use virtual events to integrate community.  Create engaging events and participate in others.  This is the model of the mjultiplayer online games —tackle a quest together around a core subject –communicate, interact, generate dialogue.

11. Integrate with your website –other customer touchpoints and communication mediums. If you don’t know what these associative linkages might be, hire an expert to help you find them.  Always remember, aggregations of human discussion ARE the corporate sites of the future.   Make sure your call center, email marketing, and external newsletters all integrate community.  (don’t forget email signatures)

12. Encourage employees to get active.  A party isn’t much fun if there’s no one there, so encourage the hosts (often employees) to kickstart discussions by talking, debating, and arguing about the news, updates, or even relevant YouTube videos will trigger discussion.  Represent your company well, and stay within your corporate Social Media Policy guidelines. (Don’t have any?  Have your CEO give us a call)

Of course, you have a community manager on staff, right? If not – we can supply interim managers for you until you get up to speed.