Online Community Tools, Blueprints to a Successful Foundation – Sessions 2 Recap

When it comes to your community make sure you have the good to protect your members, yourself, and the tools to further your goals.

When it comes to building an online community there are several factors that play into what system that will act as the foundation, and what rules and guidelines that should be documented to protect those involved (both members and those building it). During our second session for the online communities 101 course through the University of Reddit we discussed several different options that people commonly use as a base structure for your online community, tools that will allow you to increase your communities efforts, and wrapped things up with arguing to your superiors on adding new tools to it.

Blueprints to a Successful Foundation

To build a successful community there are several attributes that need to be found throughout. You need a unique theme that has a demand for discussion, an audience who is willing to communicate online, tools that are sufficient for your audiences demographics and tech savviness, and the people to plant seeds of interest. The first step to building the actual online community is to set a foundation that your audience will understand, more specifically having an easy to understand user interface (UI).

Community Architecture and Your Audience

Online communities are sustainable because of the tools that are utilized. Depending upon the technological structure that the community uses, a member can leave at any point and return at their leisure.

Based on Tharon Howard’s book Design to Thrive: Creating Social Networks and Online Communities that Last.

Whether you are using WordPress, Drupal, Ning, or something like Jive there are ways to customize it to improve both the user interface and ease of use for your members. If you are building from scratch make sure you pick the right tool from the start. In most cases if you are being hired on as a community manager it is because the Community Architect already feels that the engagement in the community requires someone to mange and maintain it.

Unfortunately this does mean that if the community has already been built, but you do not see a sufficient amount of engagement on there as a result of difficult navigation, poor design, or even lengthy log in processes restricting the ease of use that your job will be climbing up a mountain rather than a winding road. However, depending upon what community based tool you are working with there are plugins and addons that may make your life easier, and will improve the ease of use for members to communicate.

When it comes to adding tools or selecting the foundation of your online community you must keep in mind who your audience is. While I would consider myself to be tech savvy, a person who has grown up along side the evolution of the Web, people in older demographics may not feel the same way about the same tools. You must put them before yourself, ensure it is as easy as possible to use the communication tools available, and provide the content that will fulfill their needs.

One way to find out what members like to use and the content they enjoy is to see where your referring traffic comes from. While analyzing members for the community I manage it was easy to see that people were coming from LinkedIn, and better integrating and reaching out to members on that platform would be more beneficial than Facebook. As a result this also means you can build a better and more targeted campaign when doing an initial push for more active users.

Community Tools and Motivating Your Members

While there are plenty of tools to use that will allow you to create anything from a simple forum to complex online communities there are a few that are more commonly used than others. Drupal is an open source tool that has a library of tools and quite a few that cost money; WordPress has an even greater library of plugins and tools such as BuddyPress make it easy to host an online community, Ning is specifically designed to house a robust online community and embrace engagement, and Jive is another tool that seems to appear frequently on community management job postings.

When it comes to selecting a tool, if you have that choice, make sure it will be suitable to how much time you have for development, and how easy it is to learn for your members. Also keep in mind that when it comes to breaking that initial hurdle for your members to engage on your community they must have a certain level of motivation based on their needs. If you are able to provide that by offering seeded discussions, robust articles or blogs, and perhaps even a connection to an expert you may be off to the right path for finding long-term members.

Successful Community Tool Use and Plugin Examples

One online community that I go to on a regular basis is GovLoop, a network for government employees to discuss anything and everything that affects them. After speaking with the online communities founder he told me that they choice Ning as their base tool as it was a reliable product:

• Service as a Solution (SaaS) product right out of the box that required almost no code to get going and could quickly get set up.
• It was affordable compared to other SaaS tools.
• It was built and managed by a team with a solid background with tech products.
• Was receiving a lot of good press at the time.

Bonus – The Archivist

If you are looking for a great tool to help you analyze information on Twitter I would highly suggest using this free tool developed by Microsoft. It’s not very well known, but it has some great information, and easy to understand visuals.

[Prezi Presentation from session 2]