A few themes emerged which generally came down to one question:

How would you roll out a community and encourage participation to see it grow?

Here’s what I offered to the conversation.

Be clear on what the value of participation is

Why will people participate? What are the compelling reasons to join in? What are the tangible benefits? People need motivation and incentive to participate, the more clearly you can articulate what this incentive is, the more likely you’ll be able to form an internal strategy that will lead to involvement.

If you don’t know where to start, start by listening

There’s a good chance your audience is already self-organizing itself online. Seek them out and get a sense of what conversations and interactions are happening, and use this as a starting point to decide how you might (or might not) participate in those spaces.

“Seed” the site prior to launch

See if there are any active communities that have already formed (whether it’s online communities, or maybe real-life communities that are looking for or would benefit from an online space) and approach these people to see if they would be interested in being “beta” users for your site. If they decline, it would be worth figuring out why, and that might point you in a direction for re-shaping your strategy for what you are offering.

Find a community manager who is a natural “champion” for the site

There is most definitely a need for a formal role to be given to someone who can help nurture and grow a community online. The best case scenario is to find someone internally who has deep organizational/institutional knowledge, who is already active in the different social media channels that exist, and who will gladly take on a community manager role with open arms. The last thing you want to do is force it onto anyone by making it a hard line in their job description.

Be open to the possibility that whatever you build and roll-out may become obsolete by this time next year

It’s tough for large institutions or organizations to deal with on all sorts of levels (much less-so for the small and nimble web startups), but we seem to be entering a stage in the web where there are so many new tools emerging, and so many changes to the overall landscape, that investing heavily in any one platform is risky. Trends in the industry are moving so quickly that investing too much time and money into any one application opens the potential that by the time you start getting rolled out, you will have already fallen behind the pack.

Invest in people and culture

My current thinking around this is to completely avoid that investment in software and instead invest in people. Rather than spending thousands of dollars on a software license or custom-development time, spend it on finding and hiring people who can participate in the spaces that are already available online. Invest in professional development, networking and learning opportunities so that eventually you have people in-house who can provide expertise that comes from first-hand experience. And then do what you can to support this culture within your organization so that you can keep up to speed with the changes as they happen.

But that’s just me, what about you?

Have you successfully launched an online community? What were the ingredients that led to success? Or even if you haven’t, what would you think are important keys to a successful online community? Experienced a failed launch? What went wrong? I’d love to hear your ideas!