First, what’s your goal? Why does your community exist?

Before you implement any type of platform, consider your goal in starting an online community.  Here are some possibilities:

• Increase traffic/page views on your proprietary website
• Brand recognition
• Customer support
• Promote new product or property
• Support offline sales (brick and mortar)
• Get ideas and feedback from audience/customers
• Streamline internal communications
• Initiate a two way dialogue with partners

Your answer to the “why” question should inform your decisions about which platform to use, as well as which features of the platform to enable or disable.  

For example, if you’re creating an online community for customer support, you need to consider privacy functions, so that members can share login or license information if necessary.  And you may want your questions and answers to be able to stick around as a knowledge base for future inquiries.  

Another example is promoting a new product; you might want to be able to have a live chat event to spark immediate reaction and word of mouth for your launch.  Can chat participants tweet directly from the chat interface? That will help facilitate the spread of your message.  

Are you looking to simply increase traffic?  Gather your best writers and have them write thought-provoking blogs; enticing your audience to comment and respond will build traffic. Offering content from experts will attract attention from the search engines.

Configuring your platform

Imagine you are new in town, and you are invited to a party in a huge mansion.  The mansion has dozens of rooms, and it's very very quiet.  Do you feel intimidated? Are you going to grab an appetizer and sit in one of the empty rooms waiting for someone else to arrive?

The empty mansion is a mistake some beginning community owners make; they create dozens of categories and forums, on every subject imaginable, thinking this will encourage participation.  Instead, it creates a confusing, intimidating entry for newcomers, especially if most of the forums have no content yet.  But what's a new community manager to do?

Here are five quick tips that will get any new community organized for success:

1.Don't build an "empty mansion" - limit your number of forums at first. I like to start with no more than three if it's a totally new community. You have plenty of room to add forums as the community expands. It's always great to be responsive to members' requests for new forums. Same thing with additional features like chat or blogging; start with the minimum viable community at first.

2.Leave some content public; don't lock it all down - even if you're starting a private community, it's a good idea to leave some content public, even if it's read-only.  You want to give visitors a reason to join.  If they see engaging content, they'll want to stick around.

3.Be welcoming, but don't be a "Tom" from Myspace - auto-welcomes are an OK last resort, but it's even better to have a live human notice new members and engage with them for real!

4.Don't over-seed - in many new communities, the forums are full of posts by the community manager and his/her colleagues, hoping to spark conversation.  If you have to "seed," do it sparingly and try to ask questions that will encourage other members to participate. Even better to get your core founders to start conversations before the community goes live.

5.Set the tone from the start with good guidelines - you need to consider the vibe of the community. Hopefully you already have an audience in mind, and they already have something in common that will draw them together.  Use your community guidelines to establish from the start how things will run.  Perhaps include a moderator welcome as one of the first posts, in which your mods can introduce themselves and explain their moderation style.

Promote the living daylights out of it!

So, you’ve hit the big red button and launched your community.  You will hear crickets chirping unless you tell the world about your new space.  Hopefully you have core founders who were pre-registered, and an audience of some kind before you decided to launch (viewers, readers, or customers), so the first thing to do is invite them. 

• Send a nice invitation to your email list
• For brick and mortar, put up signs in your physical locations; can use QR codes too
• Promote your community on all corporate items (business cards, stationery, email sigs, profile pages for other social networks)
• Tweet interesting content from the community; start your own hashtag
• Promote within your Facebook groups and newsfeed
• Include links to your community on your LinkedIn corporate profile (or personal profile if appropriate)
• Start participating and visiting other sites where your target audience gathers (be careful not to just jump in and promote your own thing...establish yourself first and let it happen organically)
• If you are already running traditional ads (radio, TV, online banner ads) include your community in there as well
• Make it easy to find; don’t bury your calls to participate within your own website
• Make it a priority for your entire staff to help draw people into the community
• Do you have access to celebrities?  Use them to draw interest.  Visitors love the ability to get insider information or interact with people who are normally not accessible.  

Some Specific Ideas

Be sure you make the community mostly about the members and less about your business.  Find ways to recognize new members publicly and highlight their content. People flock to places that offer them an ego boost.  Consider highlighting good audience answers from the forums, promoting them via your social updates.

Focus intensely on responding to real member questions, not so much on creating new questions.  It looks uninviting to have all of recent activity coming from one staffer.

Bring a content widget to the front page of the website, to highlight great community content and entice new members. Consider showing new member photos on the front page...people love to be “famous.”

Be sure to cross-promote. From the podcast pages, there should be a link to the forums as well (there’s already a link to Facebook and twitter feeds).  And I would call the link “comment on this podcast” not something like “TechStuff Forum.  I would also post the podcast files themselves as a post in the forum, so that then comments can be made directly to that thread, if members desire.

Please share your ideas in the comments!

Photo Credit: Flying Jenny via Compfight cc