Research First
As BoxTone set out to engage with the mobile IT professional community, we learned a lot by conducting focus groups and studies. We sought to find out who would be most interested in a BoxTone community, what kind of content interested them, and how they preferred to consume that content. Many people were already participating in Facebook and were more interested in joining a community within that platform, so we built our community in Facebook.

Think about where your community is going. One benefit of Facebook and other existing communities is that people are already active there. They have already chosen community groups they are interested in, so I recommend taking advantage of that opportunity and trying to work within that world.

BoxTone also developed personas. Through this exercise, we learned about the ideal and typical people that would be interested in participating in our enterprise mobile management community. As we modeled those personas, we learned more about the types of content and interaction they would be most interested in.

Encourage Participation through Openness
As your community grows, look at techniques to increase engagement such as allowing people to ‘like’ content, vote, or post comments. With greater contribution mechanisms enabled, when someone in the community asks a question, another member can answer. The members have a natural affinity for the community and want it to be a good place. Therefore, a level of self-policing will emerge. The strongest and most powerful communities allow the unregulated, free flow of information; leave just enough controls on it while leaving it open.

In an ideal world, you can also engage some of your active community members to become community managers. As the community grows and more people participate, many start out as silent-watchers, but a culture of participation begins to emerge and “newbies” learn from others.

Involve Employees
At BoxTone, we took employees and made them figureheads by incenting employees to tell their stories and make regular contributions. Employees tell stories such as what they like about mobility or working in the mobile space. This makes BoxTone employees real to our customers, humanizes them, and makes them part of the community.

Keep the Content Fresh and Relevant
Keeping the content fresh and relevant is crucial. We looked at what engages people in conversation, as well as the variety of topics that interest our members. We make frequent postings into each of those sub-interest groups that were identified in our personas. BoxTone ensures we include those content items on a frequent basis. Through use of a content calendar, we make certain that every few days each topic gets a post, resulting in a good spread of content covering key topics of interest.

Take the time to ask your community about their topics of interest and they will tell you want they want. Don’t just ask what kind of content, as in what topics, but also ask how people want to consume the content. People like video and pictures as well as text. Pictures are one of the number one things on our site.

For more information, view the webinar replay:
Guide to Creating Member Communities: Designing a structure to bring order to Chaos