false 81605 html_restricted <p>It depends on what the goals of your community are. I'm not sure why the technical aspect is so great in this project - I fear you're going about this the wrong way.</p> <p>Why are you building a community? Is it to provide a better marketing strategy? To increase awareness of a brand? To increase engagement, or to provide a feedback channel? Once you have your goals in mind, then you can put together a community plan. You can then decide what type of community platform you're going to use. A "me" platform, focussed on the user, like Facebook, with profiles, photos and the like. Or an "us" platform, for reviews, forums etc, like Tripadvisor.</p> <p>Building a community normally involves 3 stages:</p> <p>1) Seeding. You should identify those customers/visitors you currently have who are the most engaged and vociferous. You should then invite them personally in on the project. Create a closed community of these users, and use their feedback to develop the functionality of the site.</p> <p>2) Nurturing. You should then give "invites" to these superusers, so that they can invite their friends, or other customers, to the closed community. THis gives you the opportunity to further refine the experience for new users, check things like load testing, and to add network functionality such as friend lists.</p> <p>3) Moderating. Once you have an initial community working, you can then open it to the public at large. You can either choose to moderate it yourself, or elect superusers to moderate it for you.</p> <p>These 3 steps are 99% of the work involved, which is why I don't think the underlying technology should be such an issue. There are many open-source community platforms you could employ as a proof of concept. If you want to do it professionally, I would suggest employing a dedicated "community building" agency, such as FreshNetworks <a href="http://www.freshnetworks.com" rel="nofollow" title="FreshNetworks">http://www.freshnetworks.com/</a></p> <p>Matt</p> <p>It depends on what the goals of your community are. I'm not sure why the technical aspect is so great in this project - I fear you're going about this the wrong way.</p> <p>Why are you building a community? Is it to provide a better marketing strategy? To increase awareness of a brand? To increase engagement, or to provide a feedback channel? Once you have your goals in mind, then you can put together a community plan. You can then decide what type of community platform you're going to use. A "me" platform, focussed on the user, like Facebook, with profiles, photos and the like. Or an "us" platform, for reviews, forums etc, like Tripadvisor.</p> <p>Building a community normally involves 3 stages:</p> <p>1) Seeding. You should identify those customers/visitors you currently have who are the most engaged and vociferous. You should then invite them personally in on the project. Create a closed community of these users, and use their feedback to develop the functionality of the site.</p> <p>2) Nurturing. You should then give "invites" to these superusers, so that they can invite their friends, or other customers, to the closed community. THis gives you the opportunity to further refine the experience for new users, check things like load testing, and to add network functionality such as friend lists.</p> <p>3) Moderating. Once you have an initial community working, you can then open it to the public at large. You can either choose to moderate it yourself, or elect superusers to moderate it for you.</p> <p>These 3 steps are 99% of the work involved, which is why I don't think the underlying technology should be such an issue. There are many open-source community platforms you could employ as a proof of concept. If you want to do it professionally, I would suggest employing a dedicated "community building" agency, such as FreshNetworks <a title="FreshNetworks" href="http://www.freshnetworks.com" target="_blank">http://www.freshnetworks.com/</a></p> <p>Matt</p> 2009-10-30T07:54:30+00:00 true 3627 12380 http://econsultancy.com/forums/best-practice/social-media-and-seo-features-creating-a-community?page=1 2009-10-30T07:54:30+00:00 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/20091016 Firefox/3.5.4 212.183.134.211