Community Metrics

One of the biggest mistakes I see on the community strategy and design side is the number of assumptions made on what the community members will do and find value in. By that I mean, as a business looking to launch an online community starts to think about the value the community will bring (good) and the way in which people will want to use the community (also good).

The problem becomes when we start to make too many assumptions (bad) on how the users will act on the site and then start to make plans for complex, custom feature sets that are designed to automate or enable the target behavior. Too often I’ve worked with intelligent clients that are shopping vendors based on a very specific set of technical requirements that they’ve obviously spent a lot of time thinking about and working on. That approach can be successful but required you to be 100% spot-on or be willing to spend on multiple rounds of development in the event that the assumptions are off.

My recommendation is to keep it simple and grow slow. I know it seems to go against the market pressure we are all under to deliver but to build a successful community you need to spend as much time as you can creating culture, building relationships and establishing the tone for your community. In the end the people and content that those people create will provide the real value and create a framework for success and long term growth.