Part 4 - Implementing Your Community

Focus

For a community to be successful, it has to be focused. Just creating a place for people to interact does not mean community. You need to evaluate your site's content and purpose to decide how community can best support what you do, and what you can do to best support it. If your site is a promotional business site, you might encourage forums about the use of your products/services, or you might prefer to have a public customer support area where customers can interact with your company about various issues.

If your site is primarily a content site, then think about how community could best complement your content. Obviously, the forum model is probably most appropriate for all content communities, but more specifically how will the forums you establish relate to your published content?

Structure

Then there's the question of how you structure your discussion area: Will you have broad categories that include many different topics, or separate threads for every specific issue? This is a particularly difficult question when you're launching a new community. You want to create specific locations for each sub-sector of the group to identify with, but you don't want to overwhelm visitors with too many choices. Plus, there's always the danger of too many inactive threads. If your posting traffic is spread too thinly, it can make your community appear dead, whereas if all of the traffic were concentrated in just a few areas, users would actually see some visible action.

You can probably tell that I favor starting small. One of the most important factors in developing community is creating the impression of a thriving area. When people come to a page with, say, five threads and see "last posting" dates stretching back weeks or even months, it creates a somewhat desolate impression. If you had a music site, instead of starting threads for blues, jazz, rock, hip hop, etc. right from the get go, you might just have one music thread. Any versatile discussion software should let you create new forums as needed, so if you find a blossoming, steady concern with blues, that would be the time to spin off a separate blues thread. This way, you know it won't sit unused.