Starting An Online Community is Easier Than You Think

Perhaps you’re launching a new product and you’d like to get feedback from your users. Or maybe your non-profit has a new initiative and you want a private collaboration area. Whether you're promoting your brand by word of mouth, engaging a growing group of followers, bonding with your loyal customers, or just looking to have fun with a group of like-minded folks in your industry, there are virtually unlimited reasons to start an online community. Regardless of your goals or technical savvy, it’s easy to set up a virtual community and start a conversation about what matters most to you.

Below are five simple steps to quickly take you from initial ideas to implementation.

Name your community.

Make sure your name suits your audience and your message. Choose something unique, easy to spell, easy to remember and something participants will identify with. Make sure it matches your brand if you already own a website and engage in other marketing and media. You might even want to get your community involved in the naming process by running a contest or naming campaign, or initiating a name choice as your very first discussion thread. And don’t stress if you can’t think of something clever and catchy right off the bat. It’s easy to change once you’ve followed the other steps.

Decide whether you’ll be public or private.

To help decide about the issue of public or private, think about how members will use your forum. Questions to ask are: Who can join? Who can see members and posts? Who can find the community through searches? Will you primarily use the community to meet new folks who share your interests?

Do you want your community to be indexed by search engines? If so, a public forum is best.  Do you need an online resource for collaborating with your co-workers and clients, or homeowners association committee? A private forum would suit these goals best.

Customize your community site.

Customizing your online site allows you to match the feeling you want to evoke in your community. This is the fun part and cloud-based community platforms make it easy to personalize your forums without any technical knowledge. You can create a custom header with your logo and community name. You can add columns, icons and buttons, add links to footers, and change font colors to achieve exactly the look and usability you desire. Look for a platform with a central dashboard, where everything is easy to access and easy to change. You may want to update your look or functionality as your community matures.

Organize your forums.

The days of crude Internet message boards and chat rooms have given way to complex multi-tiered forums. As the popularity of online communities has sky-rocketed, so too have the theories on how to organize them. But you don’t need to understand lots of jargon or cultivate a complex hierarchy of forums and sub-forums. To get started, just think about the different types of conversations your community might like to engage in and organize the discussions around themes pertinent to your group’s goals. After that you can organize your topics into basic types: discussions, questions and answers, feedback, and help articles, for example.

Perhaps you are a small company that needs three separate categories of customer support to correspond to the products you sell. Within each of your product lines you might offer forums for customer feedback, Q&A and help articles.

Or perhaps your homeowners association would like a way to continue discussions among board members and residents. Topics might include Meeting Agenda, Maintenance, Budget and Financials and Social Committee.

Start a discussion.  

You are now ready to post a few topics to start the conversational ball rolling in your new community. You can seed a discussion, introduce a Q & A forum, request feedback or offer articles on topics of interest to your group.

Ready to find out what association members think of the latest legislation in your industry? Start a discussion topic in your new “Legislative News” forum.

Starting a users’ group for the new product you’ve just launched? Perhaps you want to begin by asking your online customers for feedback via informal reviews or suggestions. Maybe you’d like to query your audience regarding unique uses for your product. Or maybe you begin by linking to a poll or survey.

A third way to start is by offering to answer questions about your service, product or topic, or moderating answers submitted by your online members.

Another method is to post informative or helpful articles or short informational videos.

Soon you'll be on your way to an easy and rewarding method for enhancing your skills and knowledge, making friends and influencing people in your industry, and getting to know your clients or customers.