Tips for Online Customer Communities

Dion Hinchcliffe over at ZDnet recently wrote a great article on the twelve best practices for online customer communities.

He emphasized that you need to put your community’s needs first.  Open communication should be encouraged without the concern of pointing outside your site and to your competitors when relevant.  

Community is mostly not a technology problem.  Here at KickApps we seamlessly take care of the technology side of things for you so you have more time and energy to concentrate on appointing what Hinchcliffe deems almost crucial, a community manager.  In larger, communities hiring someone to engage in the community can be extremely effective especially when you choose a community manager who is already highly engaged and involved. 

Measuring success with community requires new yardsticks. The pageview model of measurement for communities just doesn’t cut it and that we need to think of new methods.  You can look at the size of your community, the number of new ideas generated and through KickApps widgets you can see how often your widgets are viewed and posted elsewhere giving a more 3D view of how successful your community is.  Knowing your goals and objectives from the outset will all lead into how you design and run the community and your ability to measure how successful it is.

Realizing that there are various types of communities out there (Consumer social networks, grassroots customer communities, and business-initiated customer communities) and you really need to understand where your community fits in in order to serve the needs of your community properly.  

It’s essential that there is a general feeling of mutual ownership and control in a community.  The balance between the two can be a delicate art form involving three parts.

1. Making a set of rules of behaviors publicly available.
2. Enable community policing where possible (flagging).
3. You as the publisher have the moderation abilities to block IP addresses, delete posts, etc.