Developing Online Communities?

Johnny asks: "I'm involved with a project that is looking to develop an online community for technology oriented business customers. Although there are various communities on the web, there is no centralized source of information for the customers. If you could develop an online community to encourage collaboration and information sharing, what features would you want included? How would you go about including features that are widely available in other places (weblogging, message boards, wiki) and generating buy-in from customers."

Comments

Selling communities.

[hitchhikerjim]

"community" and "customers"

sort of opposite concepts. In one, people are choosing to work together on something. in the other there's a central power who's trying to get a group to buy something.

The biggest failure of "online communities" in the 'net days is that most of them are corporate sponsored marketing schemes rather than actual communities.

Oblig. Answers

[DavidHOzAu]

I'm involved with a project that is looking to develop an online community for technology oriented business customers.
Sell your idea to ebay, they might like you. (and the highest bidder wins!)


  If you could develop an online community to encourage collaboration and information sharing, what features would you want included?
That's easy, BitTorrent.


  How would you go about including features that are widely available in other places (weblogging, message boards, wiki) and generating buy-in from customers.
1) Visit homepages of said OSS
2) Get the sources
3) Right-Click Ctrl-V
4) Get headache integrating code from multiple projects^W4) Discover 'magical' missing libraries^W4) Consider rewriting everything with existing code as reference^W4) Give up^W4) ????
5) Profit!

It's doomed, don't waste too much time

[Zadaz]

Sorry you got stuck with this. As a marketing effort, a "community" site is probably doomed.

It's been done before.
If your potential customers want to talk about [your product related things] they already are. Somwhere else. Getting them to migrate over to your (heavily moderated) community ain't going to happen.

The marketing effort needs to have it's own marketing effort.
Next, assuming that people want to have a community and don't, it takes a a critical mass of users congregating in the same place at the same time to get a community in motion. At least 10,000 willing participants within a very short time. This is hard to do for a compelling product. If you're just selling nuts and bolts, you're going to have to bust your ass to get enough people to the site to make a community. If the most recent message on the boards was posted two days ago, no one is going to want to hang out.

Staffing?
Even slightly active community takes several people to moderate properly. Most companies who attempt to set up a community are surprised by this maintenancecost. In the end this dooms a successful community because the company can't control it.

So...
Since you're probably doomed, I would do something very simple. PHP-Nuke with most stuff turned off, and a good forum mod. (Good = easy to moderate, good at blocking spambots).

I'd avoid a wiki, they require someone with both vision and good organization to set up properly, are a pain to maintain, and are a community Resource, not a community.

Something good from Something Awful

[cyranoVR]

Lowtax, the mastermind behind Something Awful recently gave a speech on this topic at the University of Illinois. His entire presentation is available online, and is definitely worth checking out.

forums are key

[BortQ]

I have found forums to be the key in the communities I participate in. You can build other things around them, but the forums are the bedrock. Other then that, check out what Guy Kawasaki has to say in: The Art of Creating a Community