Building Business Communities

1
Building Business Communities
2
(No Transcript)
3
(No Transcript)
4
(No Transcript)
5
(No Transcript)
6
(No Transcript)
7
(No Transcript)
8
(No Transcript)
9
Why?

• Build loyalty, ongoing interest, adherence.
• Have persistent contact with customers, an
  ongoing focus group.
• Enhance user experience.
• Support conversations with peers, suppliers,
  communities of practice.

What else?
10
How do you build community?

• You build the platform, the community builds
  itself.
• Dont think you own the community a heavy hand
  can destroy it.
• Consider how you plan to interact with the
  community that forms, and how open and authentic
  youre willing to be, and how tolerant you can be
  of open, real discussion.
• What if you create a community and its highly
  critical? You cant make that go away, you have
  to address it.

11
Research

• Before you set up your own community platform, do
  some research.
• Are there online conversations that are relevant
  to your company?
• Are people already discussing your company
  online?
• What kind of people are attracted to and involved
  in those discussions?

12
Goals

• Its critical to decide on your goals for
  community, what its for.
• You can influence community development through
  structure what topics do you set for
  discussion? What is the flow of discussion? Is it
  moderated or open? How will you staff the
  community?
• Will your budget handle the staffing
  requirements?

13
Governance

• How will you handle governance?
• Experience has taught us that a benevolent
  dictator model works well the community manager
  stays out of the way for the most part unless
  theres a critical need for intervention such
  as blocking a persistently disruptive user.

14
Staff

• While you have to staff a community, if robust
  community forms, you can and should share
  community management responsibility with its
  members.
• Cultivate volunteers from within the community to
  help with its management. Many online
  communities, such as the WELL, are run mostly by
  volunteers.

15
Simple

• In the Web 2.0 world, there are many technologies
  you can deploy.
• Keep it simple Twitter has proved that point.
• Build a usable environment thats standard enough
  that users dont have to think about how to use
  it.

16
Blogs as Communities

• The structure of a blog is very much like a
  linear conferencing format the blog post sets
  the topic, followed by comments that can be
  conversations.
• This is the same format you see on the seminal
  online community, the WELL, and other linear
  conferencing systems.
• You can build community with a blog, and
  Wordpresss new bbPress takes that even further
  by adding forums that are easy to set up.

17
(No Transcript)
18
SMO

• You dont necessarily have to build your own
  platform.
• Depending on your strategy, it could work to
  build a presence within an existing online
  environment or maybe a combination of
  presences, for example a Facebook group along
  with a Flickr group.

19
Jon Lebkowsky Social Web Strategies http//socialw
ebstrategies.com jonl_at_socialwebstrategies.com