By Michael Torok, Director of Information Development, LogicMonitor.
@MickTorok
I am sure this post could and will expand well beyond the five ideas that I’ll explore, but I’ve hit at least 5 core points. As Director of Community at SolarWinds, I managed a successful gamified community called “thwack” which led to millions in support cost savings, 150+ new customer-driven ideas and 100+ testimonials for SolarWinds. As I explore the green field of a new venture in community building at LogicMonitor, I want to chronicle a bit of my own thought processes in digging the foundations, sinking the support beams, and ensuring the community I/we/you build can thrive in the ecosystem of your sponsor.
Here are my five:
- Naming that works
- Flexible platforms for the long haul
- Become a sought after destination
- Integrate with daily life
- Incent use
1. What’s in a Name?
Coming from my own experience, you need to be a bit careful with your name and think well beyond the now. If you are a community for a niche group and you name your community after some object or action within that group’s niche, fantastic. You’re starting a ceramics community and want to name it the Wobbly Pot? Go ahead.
On the other hand, if you are working in a company that requires you to think about a future of brand recognition and internationalization, you might need to spend some serious time thinking through your name. Two important things to keep in mind:
- Avoid slang and idioms… they’re cool (like the word cool), but don’t always translate well to other languages or cultures. Geek for a tech community works in the US, but not all countries have reclaimed the word the same way. Again, you might also look up how Got Milk didn’t really go over so well in Mexico.
- Plan to be huge.
- Plan to have to conquer internationalization issues.
- Plan now, because when it becomes real, there will be ever-evolving challenges that don’t leave time to second-guess your brand naming.
- Decide whether the community will be its own brand. This can be great or it can be terrible. If your brand becomes stronger than your company’s (an interesting problem to have), you may well get asked to dial it back or get strapped with renaming or appending the main brand to your brand late in the game.
- Involve others in the decision. It might be your community to run, but you don’t want to be the only one comfortable there. The more people who feel they have a stake in the formation of the community, the more people will be interested in helping later.
2. Make Sure Your Platform is a Yogi
You want your platform to meld itself to what you need and not be limited by the platform. If you want a custom header and custom navigation, the platform needs to make it easy to create. If you want a flat environment that differentiates different content types through icons next to the content object types, make sure it can do it. Don’t know what kind of structure you want? Look at what is currently in place or sit down in a quiet place and really think about it. Always build for the future. Never think your community will need separate spaces, make sure you’ll never need to keep member A from seeing member B’s information. Currently supporting only one product? Consider yourself lucky and realize that companies grow by expanding their offerings somehow… it probably won’t last.
When it comes to flexibility, I would suggest exploring the most flexible options available to you. Certainly open source provides a huge amount of flexibility, as long as you have the dev background and time to enhance and modify the platform. If you are more limited in time or resources (a reality of all the companies of which I’ve been a part), no matter what you choose, you will need to modify the out-of-the box look, feel, and functionality. You want that flexibility and a good community will also point out areas you’ve never considered, where they would like even more flexibility, control, or organization.
3. Become a Logical Destination
There are some simple steps to becoming a destination:
- Be found. Make sure you ask about SEO optimization and receive a satisfactory answer. Search for content on other people’s sites using the solution you are considering. Make sure you can find it in Google and Bing.
- Lower your barrier to entry. Unless you are looking to service an incredibly invitation-only limited group, you want your content found, and you want to make sure your unregistered people can see enough of your content to want to join. Limit the content hidden from the public. Consider barriers to engagement to limit spam, but avoid hiding your most valuable asset: the discussions and content created by your community.
- Ensure you can create and deliver digests in numerous forms (daily, weekly, monthly) and hand pick some information for digests. You have to put interesting information in front of your community if you expect them to respond and engage with you.
You want 3 things for your community more than anything else:
- Provide unique information that makes your community important to your users.
- Offer information that encourages more engagement from those currently involved.
- Generate the type of word of mouth and social interaction to build your community into the destination you want it to be.
Check back next Tuesday for Part 2 of Michael Torok’s post!