10 Tips for Launching an Online Community
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
I have had this post by Jeremiah Owyang on “How to Kick Start a Community” bookmarked for a couple of weeks, and I thought it might be useful to do my own version. I agree with Jeremiah’s points, although I would probably order them differently.
So here goes.
1. Define your objectives for having an online community in the first place. I’ll keep banging this drum, but you know this already. Brainstorm everything you can think of, then distill it down to the most important ones.
2. Define a maximum of 3 social objects you want your users/members to concentrate on. Meaning, what they will come to your site to DO. Don’t make the mistake of thinking “networking” is a social object – it’s not. Once they log in and maybe send a couple of friend requests, then what? Define and prioritize the “then what”. Give them some obvious things to do – whether it’s work on a project, or discuss a particular topic, or share information about an upcoming event. What is your site FOR?
3. Beta test first. Soft launch to people who you know will be interested in checking it out and giving you feedback. Get those people to fill out their profiles, connect with each other, start discussions, join discussions, start groups, etc. Then once you invite more people in, there will be a decent amount of stuff going on already. And when the beta testers give you feedback – respond to it and act on it.
4. Nudge and reward people for completing their profile. Adding a photo is ESSENTIAL, in my opinion. If you have a community without faces in it, it’s literally like a ghost town. Explain that the more they fill in of their profile, the more they will enable others to find them. Those nodes, those connecting points, will create the potential for the small groups which will grown into a wider community.
5. Pay attention to alerts and emails from the site. This will be the FIRST point of contact with people new to the community – if you get it wrong, either by by overloading them with alerts or not being friendly in your messaging or clear about what this community is all about, they will ignore you and not come back.
6. Develop a solid content strategy. Find ways to repurpose content from your main website, print publications, e-newsletters, etc. to feed the site and figure out which of those social objects (topics) are good for enticing conversation. Use RSS feeds too, to show how your content relates to the world at large.
7. Take advantage of your face-to-face events for energizing people and finding awesome content for the site. Encourage informal groups or the planning of social events inside the site which can start the buzz going before your event even takes place; make it easy for people to share photos and videos, link to their own blog posts, find the Twitter stream, etc. after the event for the benefit of those who couldn’t make it there. Real life gatherings are AWESOME for phased launching of online communities – the event feeds the community, and the community feeds the event.
8. Don’t underestimate the power of the individual ask. Find people who might be interested in a particular topic, for example, and ask them individually to post and/or respond to a discussion thread. Ask existing project groups, committees, task forces, etc. to consider having an online component to their work. If people are doing stuff in the site, other people will be encouraged to do stuff in the site.
9. Promote the site in all of your traditional messaging. Let people know it’s there even if they aren’t part of the early adopter crowd. Highlight cool discussions going on, new groups formed, latest members to join, whatever. Make people want to go in who haven’t yet. Make them think they are missing out on something cool – because they are.
10. Think simple and easy. This is really the most important tip I have. If your site is complicated, hard to find, hard to log into, hard to connect with people in… you might as well forget it. No-one has that kind of time. Make it easy. Make elements easy to share. We’re going back full circle – find those main social objects that will make people know why they are going there and why they want to stay there.
Then you can celebrate! Though maybe not for too long – I’ll post something soon about how to nurture your community and keep it going. 
I bet you have more ideas on how to successfully launch a community, though. Let me know in the comments. Anyone have tips to share or lessons learned from when you launched yours?
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