Capable Networks Community Best Practices

Best Practices for Your Online Community

Planning and Executing a Successful StrategyFor Engaging Your Customers Online

v3.4 - February 2007

© Copyright 2007 Capable Networks LLC, All Rights Reserved

Keys to Good Community Planning

Keep content fresh and relevant for visitors

Acquire your audience and continuously drive traffic to the site

Identify, engage, and reward prominent community members

Gather important preferences, demographics, and buying habits from visitors

Leverage the platform to effectively drive and measure marketing promotions

Fold in new, compelling features: tag clouds, podcasts, RSS, social bookmarking

Build a runtime environment that is both scalable, reliable, and secure

Create an objective discussion forum that encourages healthy dialogue

Detect long-term consumer trends or short-term bursts of activity/interest

Fold in competitive community sites that inevitably splinter the consumer base

Compelling Content

Membership Growth

Subject Matter Experts

Visitor Data

Product Sales

Infrastructure Needs

Free Speech

Platform Evolution

Thorough planning is the key to creating

a successful online community

Trendspotting

Competitive Sites2


Planning for Compelling Content

Highlight the most relevant content from continuous flow of member contributions

Offer multiple vehicles for sharing information, especially among members

Pull in related and complementary content from external sources

Our patent-pending Scoring Engine accurately identifies most valuable content

Community Platform has built-in blogs, formal articles, discussion forums, newsletters, private messaging, and more

Support for formal and informal aggregation of web content

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Planning for Membership Growth

Create compelling reasons for becoming a registered member

Simplify registration process and ensure accuracy of credentials

Deploy a variety of vehicles to maximize return visits

Be respectful to all members at all times

Institute safeguards to protect member privacy

Membership required to post content, collaborate with others

Free registration requires roundtrip email verification

Newsletters, Email Notifications, RSS, Private Messaging, and more

All communication to members is based on opt-in preferences

Member email and personal information is never accessible


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Develop process to accurately identify prominent members

Provide channels for engaging experts in the community

Provide incentives and rewards for members to step up and take leadership roles

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Planning for Subject Matter Experts

Scoring Engine continuously measures member credibility, proficiency, and user rank

Private groups create separate discussion areas

Delegate editorial power to Moderators, Member Scoreboard creates friendly competition, invitations to Beta Tests, revenue share, free gear, and more


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Planning for Visitor Data

Capture, analyze and report on visitor habits and preferences on the site

Gather visitor demographics, product ownership, buying habits

Identify and respond to current product support issues

Analyze and adjust to leverage most effective community vehicles

Platform tracks and reports on visitor activity as they interact with content and members

Registration, user profile, and surveys used to capture key data

Active threads can be easily identified and tracked to keep abreast of customer problems

Data warehouse and analytical reports provide critical insight into community health


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Recruit product enthusiasts to build a secondary sales team

Use community influencers to create launch upgrade, up sell, and customer referral campaigns

Leverage platform vehicles to help drive marketing promotions

Planning for Product Sales

Member scoring system quickly identifies target influencers and evangelists

Community incentives used to build rewards-based programs

Boost campaigns through newsletters, announcements, contests, banner ads, and more


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Incorporate robust CMS solution to accommodate a widening variety of content types

Identify and leverage architectural hooks to plug in new features and components over time

Track industry trends, web evolution to fold in next-gen community tools

Planning for Platform Evolution

Custom-built content management platform provides flexibility for broad range of mixed content

Capable owns entire architecture stack and can completely customize community instance

Roadmap has produced blogs, RSS, podcasts, photo sharing, member projects, and moreFuture releases to bring video content, folksonomies, tag clouds, social bookmarking, web services, mashups, …


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Secure a robust hosting solution to deliver high performance and reliability

Allocate sufficient bandwidth to handle traffic growth/spikes

Protect content/data using proven backup & restore capabilities

Establish separate “mirror” environment for testing/staging

Planning for Infrastructure Needs

Partner with Rackspace, a world-class hosting facility

Service level provides network capacity to deliver superior response

Automated fulł/incremental backups by hosting provider; rapid data restore in event of failure

Capable manages a complete secondary mirror deployment for each community


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Establish objective forum where visitors feel they can speak openly

Enlist and clearly identify forum moderators as impartial actors

Find balance between heavy-handed policing and free-for-all

Planning for Free Speech

Independently owned and operated community site creates clear division from company

Capable staff recruits prominent members from community and formally recognizes them on site

Promotes social culture for healthy dialog, honesty, no spamming, no bullying, etc.


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Identify metrics that accurately report on community pulse

Reactively and proactively respond to shifts in activity/interests

Assign company resources to actively participate in community

Planning for Trendspotting

Separately track member interest in individual items, content categories, active discussions, and in other members

Analytical reports provide fine-grained data to build custom alerts

Encourage member-to-employee connections by spotlighting company personalities & contributions


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Look to assimilate other sites that have the potential to splinter your customer base

Partner with dedicated enthusiasts to create more inclusive “virtual community”

Conduct routine competitive analysis to stay abreast of peripheral activities

Planning for Competitive Sites

Established track record of reaching out to related fan-sites and folding them into dominant community

Continuously refining diplomacy skills to keep hardliners engaged in friendly competition

Capable dedicated to CE vertical, uses variety of research tools and techniques to remain current


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Capable Networks Community Best Practices

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